Thesis

Happy new year {{first_name|dear reader}}!

This week we’re publicly launching the Community Builder Group.

(We’re also live at BuildersBriefing.com which will be the sender of these emails!)

For the first time in over ten years, I have a new employer. I’m still doing sales for OpenTent - I love that role - but with Casey in place as our Managing Director there, Sara (our amazing COO, also shifting from OpenTent to CBG) and I are embarking on a new chapter.

Community Builder Group is a venture studio and operating company. We’re currently operating one established business: OpenTent, which provides technology services (primarily, at this point, Salesforce consulting) to nonprofits. This year we plan to launch two businesses:

For the past couple of years, Sara and I have been setting up a structure to explore other business ideas and keep supporting OpenTent. We drew inspiration from Zingerman’s Community of Businesses and similar models.

Now that the brand is live, The Builder’s Briefing is our official weekly newsletter. My intention is to “build in public,” sharing early and often in a transparent way what we learn and do next.

I’m SO excited about all of this. It’s hard to describe the energy I feel like I am unlocking from getting back into startup mode, ten years after starting OpenTent.

And part of that energy comes from how fired up I feel about the core purpose that threads everything we’re about to do with this new setup.

Here’s our thesis:

We live amid an epidemic of loneliness. Even if you are lucky enough to not feel clinically lonely, I would bet that you - like me - feel a sense of individual isolation more often than you’d like, a feeling of being adrift, being fundamentally alone.

This feeling persists and pervades each of us despite the fact that we theoretically live in the most connected era ever: through a device in our pocket we can reach anyone in the world and all the information and media ever created. When we pick up our phones, they ought to hum with a robust social fabric ready to hold us. Yet most of the time instead of a warm hum we feel the cold whine of apps seeking to keep us in algorithmic bubbles rather than the messy web of true relationships.

In Trending we talked about the importance of situating your work in the context of a significant trend - and this loneliness/isolation/disconnection dynamic appears to be one of the biggest trends of our time. It seems to be the negative mirror of the other huge trend: increasing technology use. Everything we are seeing from early studies about the impacts of AI at work and online indicates that increased AI use seems to amplify feelings of disconnection.

Community - the true, deep, committed kind - is the antidote. We all know this! But the people who set out to build those communities often get slowed down by Stuff That Should Be Better (STSBB):

What could those earnest hardworking community builders achieve if they weren’t held back by STSBB every day?

That’s the question CBG is setting out to answer. We’re doing that through creating a set of businesses that work on those issues - and that work together themselves, creating a community of businesses that is stronger in relationship with each other.

AND there’s one more piece. We also have a core belief that workplaces themselves are an undervalued setting for building community. We spend most of our waking hours at work - why not try to respond to the loneliness epidemic by creating more of a real community experience at work? We have endeavored to do this at OpenTent for the past ten years and we have seen incredible employee energy and retention because of it. We want to help leaders make their workplaces more like communities, drawing from tools and practices our species has developed for thousands of years that bring people together and create meaning in their lives.

I can’t think of a better way for us to respond to the loneliness epidemic than helping businesses feel more like healthy communities, and communities run more like healthy businesses.

So here we go! I’d love your feedback on this idea - what does it bring up for you? What would you love to see us work on? Who should we be talking with now?

And whatever you are up to this week: I hope it is rooted in a big thesis that gives you big energy. You and your work and this new year deserve it!!

We wanted to put a simple website up this week for CommunityBuilder.com - so I went to Lovable, described what I wanted for the site, uploaded our logo and brand style guide from Amalyah, and in 60 seconds I had a draft. I used their Visual Edits mode to click into text elements and edit the copy directly. I went into the HTML code itself a couple times to tweak things I knew how to edit myself, and I asked the bot to fix a couple other things. I asked it to prompt me to fill out the site’s meta tag information correctly and it walked me through a cool interface to select which text I wanted in which meta section. Then I clicked Publish, connected my domain by authenticating directly with GoDaddy, and BOOM we were live. The whole thing took 30 minutes while I was watching the new Taylor Swift documentary on TV.

What have you been wanting to publish online that might actually be surprisingly quick to get out the door this week?

The aforementioned Taylor Swift documentary, The End of an Era, is fantastic. An intimate and well-edited look at an artist pulling off the biggest concert tour of all time, all with an unceasing obsession on overdelivering for her fans as the number one goal. We don’t all need to be global pop stars but we should all aspire to have that kind of relationship with our customers!