While all of the content from the class can be found in my book Community-in-a-Box, I thought it would be helpful to provide a synopsis of the session Innovation City. One of the questions I most often get is how businesses can use community for growth. I think this is a great question because I believe community will become essential for every business:

“Building a community is no longer optional for growing your business.”

The challenge is how to do that in a way that balances the need for trust in the community with the need for generating results. That is exactly the problem I tackled in my talk, so the rest of this post is a thorough overall of the key points I shared during the session. Enjoy and always feel free to reach out if you have any questions or want to learn more about the how to build, grow, scale, and measure thriving communities!

Introduction to Community Building

When I started the Enterprise Sales Forum, I expect max 25 people to show up for the first event. Three years later, we ended up building a global community that scaled across 24 cities and 30,000 members that generated real business results.

Most communities fail after just a few events. I’ve seen it happen over and over. Someone gets excited, throws an event, maybe even gets a decent turnout. Then numbers drop. By event three, they’re wondering why they even started.

Why? They were focused on events, not systems. They were chasing vanity numbers instead of building something that could sustain itself.

The communities that succeed understand they are creating something of immense value over the long-term. They’re building a flywheel, not just hosting meetups.

The Community Flywheel: Your Growth Engine

Think of your community as a machine with three moving parts. Each one feeds the others, and when they’re all working together, you get sustainable growth.

• Content is the value you create. For Stack Overflow, it’s answers to developer questions. For Enterprise Sales Forum, it was talks from top sales experts. In the beginning, you and maybe a handful of passionate members will generate most of this. The content attracts people to check out what you’re building.

• Events create anticipation. They’re time-based moments when your community gathers to experience something together. Virtual meetups, in-person talks, AMAs on Discord (these all count). What matters is that they’re scheduled and people can mark their calendars. This anticipation keeps existing members engaged and draws in new ones.

• Connections are where the real stickiness happens. You need spaces where members can have one-to-one conversations, help each other solve problems, and network in ways that turn into genuine relationship. This is where trust gets built whether through forums, Slack channels, social media, and anywhere members can actually talk to each other.

When all three work together, they build momentum. Good content leads to events. Events spark connections. Connections inspire new content. Some members get so involved they volunteer to help. They share their expertise. Eventually they become leaders.

What Gets the Flywheel Spinning

Four things put the Community Flywheel in motion, something I learned through plenty of trial and error:

1. Predictable cycle — Sales professionals told us they blocked off the third Tuesday of every month for our events. That consistency built trust. People knew when to expect us. Pick a schedule and stick to it.

2. High quality — The bar you set attracts the people you want. We spent time vetting speakers and preparing them beforehand. Members told us our events felt more professionally executed than other sales meetups they’d attended. Quality attracts quality.

3. Curated membership — We removed members who didn’t align with our community’s principles or professional interests. Members needed to trust that they’d meet peers worth their time. Curation creates safety and serendipity.

4. Intrigue & novelty — Mix things up while staying true to your vision. We brought in VCs and CEOs to talk about sales. We hosted “Rate My Pitch” events. We invited nationally known authors. These special events created buzz and attracted new groups we hadn’t reached before.

When You Know the Flywheel Works

You’ll feel it when community market fit happens. Growth happens without you pushing. Members you don’t know take on leadership roles. Volunteers are easy to recruit and highly engaged. The vast majority of new attendees cite word of mouth as why they came. People independently share content about your community without you asking them to.

The community starts owning and guiding itself. You’re still there as a leader, but others have caught the passion and vision that started you on this journey.

Trusting the Process

After two successful Boston events with 85+ attendees each, I thought I’d figured it out. Event three had only 20 signups, and twelve people actually showed up.

I drove up to Boston with a pit in my stomach that kept getting bigger. My speaker was gracious and the content was solid, but looking at all those empty chairs felt made me feel like a clown.

The next event wasn’t much better, with more people but the wrong audience. We have random folks not in sales, including one guy who kept blurting out nonsensical questions. Again, my speaker was patient, but I was thoroughly embarrassed.

Instead of blowing it up, I doubled down on the process. I found a well-connected local speaker (a CEO in the sales space), secured a better venue through a sales enablement company, and tripled the promotion. That combination worked. We got 100 signups despite an incoming snowstorm, and the next month brought 100 actual attendees.

Boston became a real community because I trusted the process. Every community organizer I’ve talked to mentions “hitting the valley” at some point. I slammed straight into that valley, but things turned around and the community came back stronger.

Systems matter more than enthusiasm. When you get punched in the face, like I have and you will experience, the process keeps you grounded in your vision.

The 11-Step Launch Checklist

You need to be systematic when launching. Here’s what matters:

Foundation (Steps 1-4)

1. Community Values — These are your decision-making filter. Values help you prioritize what’s important and exclude distractions. For Enterprise Sales Forum, we focused on education, volunteer-driven initiatives, and people helping each other. We discouraged vendor pitches, heavy sponsor reliance, and self-promotion.

2. Building Your Team — Avoid the “talkers” trap. You need doers, not people who just want to be associated with something cool. Wrong team members nearly killed a few of our chapters. The culture the wrong people bring will poison everything.

3. Platform Selection — Keep it simple and focus on engagement. Don’t overcomplicate your tech stack at the start. Pick tools that members are familiar with.

4. Venue Strategy — Virtual, in-person, or hybrid? Each has trade-offs. Virtual is easier to scale but harder to build deep connections. In-person creates stronger bonds but limits who can attend.

Content & Experience (Steps 5-8)

5. Content Planning — Quality over quantity. Plan six events ahead so you’re thinking long-term. Every event should deliver real value.

6. Speaker Sourcing — Build your roster of expert speakers before you need it. Vet speakers carefully and prepare them beforehand.

7. Event Management — Create processes and checklists that scale. Have an hour-long venue walkthrough before events. Test all AV equipment. Have a team debrief after every event.

8. Membership Curation — Balance safety with serendipity. Review who’s attending. Remove members who don’t align with your community’s principles.

Sustainability (Steps 9-11)

9. Monetization Strategy — Free communities usually fail. You need revenue to cover costs and signal value. Charge for memberships or events. Get sponsors. Just make sure you’re not compromising your community’s values for money.

10. Promotion Engine — Always be promoting. Four weeks out, send the first announcement. Three weeks out, focus on content. Two weeks out, highlight speakers. One week out, encourage members to share and invite friends.

11. Sponsor Relations — Approach this as partnerships, not money grabs. The right sponsors add value to your community. The wrong ones turn events into sales pitches. Use Step 1 to guide the decision process of adding sponsors.

When we launched Singapore, we followed this process exactly. They stuck to the system with consistency, quality, curation, and occasional novelty. They got through the inevitable valley and built something that lasted. Skipping steps or doing them without purposeful intention creates expensive do-overs.

Measuring What Actually Matters

Most people measure the wrong things. They track vanity metrics that look good on paper but don’t predict success or drive business results. Here are some examples of vanity metrics vs. pulse metrics:

Vanity metrics make you feel good but tell you nothing:

• Total members registered

• Social media followers

• Event registrations

• Number of events hosted

Pulse metrics predict success:

• Repeat attendance rate

• Member engagement depth

• Organic content creation

• Percentage of highly involved members

If your repeat attendance is declining, that’s a warning sign. If only organizers are creating conversations, you don’t have a community. If there’s no member-generated content, engagement is shallow.

The C1-C2-C3 Framework

Here’s how you tie community activity to actual business impact. Work backwards from your business goals.

• C1 Metrics (”Goals”) — Business outcomes where community has impact. Revenue, leads generated, cost savings, innovation, talent acquisition. Pick a metric someone in your company is directly responsible for as part of their objectives.

• C2 Metrics (”Bridge”) — Actions that connect community activity to business goals. Post-event actions taken, repeat member interactions, content that gets upvoted or shared. These establish correlation between what members do and things that lead to business results.

• C3 Metrics (”Pulse”) — Community health indicators such as repeat attendees, percentage creating content, GitHub pull requests, member referrals, top contributors. These are the day-to-day signals that show your community is alive.

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Revenue Attribution Example

Suppose a tech company wanted to prove ROI from their developer user groups beyond basic lead generation. Here are some things they tracked:

• C3 (Pulse): 40% repeat attendance rate at user group meetups

• C2 (Bridge): 25% of repeat attendees scanned QR codes to sign up for developer newsletter (much higher rate than non-repeat attendees)

• C1 (Goals): 8% of newsletter subscribers converted to paying customers

When they run the numbers, they can see a correlation in additional revenue generated directly attributed to community engagement depth. Deep engagement shown through repeat attendance leads to newsletter signups, which leads to conversions. This gives the community team solid ideas on experiments they can run to increase repeat attendance, knowing it would flow through to revenue.

Start with your C1 goal. Pick something the business cares about. Then work upwards from C3 metrics to find C2 metrics that correlate to the outcome you want.

Your 30-Day Action Plan

• Week 1: Define your community values. Identify 3-5 people who could be your core team.

• Week 2: Pick your platform. Plan your first event. Pick a date, find a venue, and reach out to a potential speaker. Make it 4-6 weeks out so you have time to promote.

• Week 3: Build your content calendar for the next six events. Create your promotion strategy.

• Week 4: Launch promotion for your first event. Track who’s signing up. Adjust your promotion based on what’s working.

After your first event, measure what matters. How many people showed up? How many were repeat attendees? Did anyone volunteer to help or create content? Did members connect with each other?

Then plan the next event and do it again.

What You Should Be Doing Right Now

Your customers are waiting for the community you haven’t built yet. There are people out there right now who need what you’re thinking about creating. They need a place to connect with peers. They need to learn from experts. They need to feel less alone in what they’re working on.

The tools are there. The Community Flywheel model. The 11-step launch checklist. The C1-C2-C3 metrics framework. The 30-day action plan. Everything is in Community-in-a-Box if you want the complete guide.

You don’t have to start from scratch. The process works. I’ve seen it work for Enterprise Sales Forum. I’ve seen it work for chapters across multiple cities. I’ve seen it work for clients I’ve consulted with.

The only way you’ll know if it works for you is if you try.

Systems matter more than enthusiasm. The sequence matters. Trust the process, especially when things get hard.

Now go build something that lasts!

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Want to dig deeper? Grab the complete guide “Community in a Box” or reach out if you need help figuring out your specific community strategy. You can find me on LinkedIn or at mark@triberoi.com.

The number 100 is also an important life milestone, like living to one hundred years old. As of the most recent statistics, there are nearly 750,000 centenarians globally and over 95,119 in Japan alone. Interesting fact, the United States has nearly has many centenarians, but with three times the population.

US President Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of the first politicians to place greater emphasis on the first 100 days in office. His goal was to quickly restore confidence to Americans struggling through the Great Depression and weary of a banking system that was imploding. Roosevelt managed to get 15 major bills passed, urge Congress to pass 77 laws, and signed 99 executive orders in his first 100 days.

Since Roosevelt, other US presidents have made it a goal to move swiftly during their first 100 days. This has led many leaders in the private sector to also usher in big changes and initiatives during the first 100 days in their new role. This gives leaders enough time to show results over one fiscal quarter plus a few days.

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As I closed in on the 100th edition of this newsletter, I have been thinking about the significance of this effort. Since launching in May 2023, I have been posting weekly updates for two straight years. What was merely an experiment to create an authentic AWS newsletter for startups grew to be much more.

I questioned whether to continue the newsletter after leaving AWS. It no longer had the same purpose or importance now that I am a startup founder again. I am not trying to promote AWS or be an advocate to support startup founders that are building and launching their startups in the cloud.

Four things kept me going. First, I still had ideas that I wanted to explore especially as I transitioned from working at AWS to startup founder again and exploring more startup ecosystems. Second, it was a good way to share some major life updates like leaving AWS and moving to Taiwan across the my large network. Third, the forcing function of writing regularly helps me to think deeply and clarify my thoughts. Lastly, I am a sucker for consistency, and being so close to publishing a hundred editions was too tempting.

Now that I am here (well, technically the 101^st edition if I include the launch post), it is time for some changes. When I had sent out the fiftieth edition, I was at AWS focused on helping startups worldwide. The newsletter was part of my monthly KPIs and also a convenient way to let folks know where I was heading next. I had plans to include more external contributors and dig into more AI and technical topics.

How did I do? I had two excellent contributions; one by Shannon Burch of Neo Financial on startup customer support, and one by Peter Bell on the journey of startup CTOs. I had a lot of input on my ecosystem posts for Vietnam (my most popular post) and Malaysia. I also posted a few articles digging into AI, but mostly from the AWS perspective. As for the deeper technical topics, I never did get a chance to write those given my time and travel constraints.

While I did not hit all my goals, readership and subscribers continued to grow. Compared to the first fifty editions, the LinkedIn newsletter impressions increased 49%, views by 25%, engagement by 42%, and reach by a whopping 255%. Opens, reads, and click-thru rates remained steady over the email distribution. Growth slowed as I focused less on acquisition, but still grew 30% from 5,614 to 7,281 subscribers on the LinkedIn side.

For all the positive momentum and quality content though, this newsletter no longer serves its intended purpose. More importantly, it no longer serves me and my objectives as I focus more heavily on my startup. I never intended to monetize the newsletter, nor does it work as a content channel to support my startup, which is focused on measuring the business impact of community for large organizations.

Abandoning this body of work does not make a lot of sense either. There is still plenty of potential topics to write about, especially as I pick up new insights and continue to learn more along my founder journey. One area that I am particularly interested in sharing more about is using AI in all aspects of my startup, from designing and building product to automating and streamlining my work. As a solo founder that is bootstrapping, I also think there are unique perspectives that might be worth sharing.

For the third act of Founders in the Cloud, I am making changes so the newsletter is more manageable. First, the content will focus on my journey as a founder and insights that would be useful for other founders. Second, I will not publish weekly, instead opting to post when I have something useful and timely to share. Third, I will not publish through LinkedIn and Beehiiv, but will consolidate on Substack. Beehiiv is expensive for the number of subscribers to the newsletter, and relying on LinkedIn means being limited by the whims of their algorithm. Substack is free and I would have a direct connection to my readers via email. I will still share on LinkedIn, but the full content will live on Substack.

In the transition, I am migrating both LinkedIn and Beehiiv subscribers. If you see an email from “Mark Birch at Founders in the Cloud”, that is this newsletter on Substack. The newsletter website domain will be www.foundersinthecloud.com. Note that because LinkedIn does not provide emails of subscribers, I used a tool to grab/guess emails. That means some of you may not be added as a subscriber, but I will provide reminders on LinkedIn on how to subscribe to my Substack list.

Last thing, as great as LinkedIn has been in providing visibility for the newsletter, some posts sadly got little attention. These posts were unloved, but still deserving of an audience by virtue of having practical strategies and tactics for founders. So I am reposting them below with a brief synopsis. Please check them out, and if you find them valuable, please like them and add a comment over on LinkedIn.

Leave a comment

I want to sincerely thank you for being a loyal reader and supporter of this newsletter and my work. I heard from many people sharing how they valued my writing and how it helped them better navigate challenges in their startups. If there are specific examples how this newsletter has helped you, please let me know!

Mark

Why – I explore finding your startup's purpose through four key questions: small why (initial spark), what (solution), who (target audience), and big why (broader impact). Using the Enterprise Sales Forum as an example (a global community I founded), I show how your "why" evolves through customer conversations and product experiments rather than having it sorted out from the start.

Pirates – Small teams of talented misfits always innovate much faster than large conforming teams, something seen at Lockheed's Skunk Works and Apple's Macintosh teams. I highlight five hiring traits those iconic teams practiced: breadth of experience, lateral thinking, creation history, comfort with uncertainty, and learning ability. Small "one-pizza teams" of 3-5 people maintain the communication efficiency and decision speed that larger teams lose.

3 Steps to a Better Pitch – I share three elements for compelling startup pitches: create drama through tension and contrasts, engage visually with creative design over bullet-heavy slides, and bring passion to avoid boring delivery. Drawing from personal pitching failures and successes, I emphasize that audiences remember feelings and stories more than facts and figures.

Unreasonable – Startup success requires an "unreasonable" obsession with detail, like world-class chefs pursuing perfection that others consider excessive. I explore how founders must stay deeply involved in product details while building cultures that balance autonomy with high standards through respectful conflict, honesty, and blameless innovation.

LinkedIn – I provide strategies for using LinkedIn effectively despite its current state of spam and superficial content. I offer tips for cleaning up profiles, crafting professional stories, curating valuable networks, and creating meaningful content while avoiding automated tools and focusing on authentic relationship-building over connection collecting.

The Startup Founder Test – I present 39 critical questions entrepreneurs should ask before launching, covering personal readiness, industry knowledge, financial preparation, and team-building. I emphasize that successful founders are calculated risk evaluators requiring deep self-awareness, from understanding motivations to having access to customers and handling uncertainty.

Scaling Globally – Drawing from my Stack Overflow Asia experience, I outline twelve questions for international expansion, emphasizing it's like starting another company with new complexities. I cover market entry strategies, building local credibility, understanding pull from international customers, and investing significant time on the ground in the target markets.

Every Second Counts – I explore time management for founders, comparing it to top professional kitchens where precision matters. While founders must maintain shark-like momentum, they also need to prioritize intentionally, focusing on activities aligned with the single most important objective for startup survival rather than trying to do everything.

Brevity – I advocate for concise communication in startup environments where leaders often face information overload. I share four principles: set context upfront, put important information first, establish clear next actions, and remove unnecessary words. Effective communication requires understanding the recipient's perspective and time constraints.

Your MVP Sucks and It's OK – I address how first product versions inevitably disappoint because they're built on assumptions rather than validated needs. Explaining Reid Hoffman's quote about being "embarrassed" by your first product, I emphasize the goal is speed to market and feedback loops, then continuously iterating to sand down the sharp edges.

Along with the changes in the content direction, newsletter platform, and frequency of posts, this section of the newsletter will also change. All event information (both past and upcoming) will be shared as posts on LinkedIn first, then compiled at the bottom of the newsletter as links to those posts. This will decrease the duplicative work of posting similar content in two places.

A more important reason why this section is changing is that I plan to attend fewer events, travel less frequently, and participate in other’s content channels. Over time that may change depending on the progress I make with my startup, the importance of a particular event in furthering my goals, or value of a content platform for spreading the word about my startup and book. For the time being though, I will be focused on two things: building and selling. Those are really the only things that move the needle for any early-stage startup.

When I launched this newsletter, the idea was to provide real perspectives and insights into what startups are doing to build thriving, scalable businesses. Going behind the glossy success stories, I wanted to share what is really working (and not working) for startups in the hopes that these insights can help founders avoid the pitfalls that many startups face.

Now I am a startup founder again, so this newsletter is even more personal now. What I write here will be the things I am experiencing, both the struggles and the successes. I will share what I think can be broadly useful for startup founders and others that are in startups. Maybe even some the corporate and government folks can pick up a few useful tactics and strategies.

While I may not publish new entries as frequently as I had in the past, I also do not plan to be a stranger. I also want to hear from you, the things you like that I write about as well as requests you have for content. Even though a newsletter a broadcast out to an audience, I hope this can be more of a community where we can share the best ideas, insights, and stories so that we can learn together.

Thanks for being part of this journey and look forward to seeing where this takes us!

Mark Birch

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While studying was not my thing, I did find a job that lined up with how I operated. It was commodities trading. Being on the floor energized me and got my mind locked in. The ringing phone banks, streams of financial data and news flowing over TV screens, and shouting of orders across open pits was like pure adrenaline.

Later, I saw the bigger opportunity in software engineering and building startups. I did a career turnaround, joined a small tech firm in downtown NYC, and started my new life as a software developer. I was excited to dive into coding!

Then I found myself doing anything else other than writing code. I was given a project with little oversight to build an app for the sales team. I thought sales was lame and writing code for hours on end beyond boring. After two months, I was directionless and made zero progress in my goal of being a real developer.

Then my boss asked to see a demo. I cobbled together bits and pieces of barely working code together in an attempt to show some effort. He was not impressed and he gave me an ultimatum: build a working demo in four weeks or I was fired.

Lighting a fire under my ass solved the boredom problem. I worked like a maniac and didn’t slept for that entire month. All that consumed me day and night was the desire to build a working product. I forgot to eat most days, a definitely could have used a shower, and family and friends were an afterthought.

I pulled out a win when I showed my boss the new demo. Lots of stuff still did not work, the app was buggy as hell, and the user experience was awful I had created a real production application though that did enough to demonstrate I could do the work. I had finally managed to become a legitimate developer.

I have learned a lot about myself and how I work over the years. I have a strong work ethic and can push through almost anything. I can pull multiple all-nighters when the pressure is on to ship something or solve a critical problem. I can go all-in for days on one project, much like what I did recently to get the second edition of my book out in five weeks.

Then there are days when I get nothing done. Absolutely zero productive work is accomplished. This mostly happens when all of my travel finally catches up with me. I try to start, but cannot pull it together to give my attention to the work piling up.

I use to think there was something wrong with me. Then I read a post called “Fire and Motion” on the Joel on Software. I have read plenty of Joel’s posts, but this one hit differently. Instead of thinking that I was a lazy sack of shit, I realized a lot of successful people are like me. They work hard, but there are plenty of times when they just stare out a window doing nothing.

This poses a challenge as a startup founder. You have limited time before you run out of money, either your own or that of your investors. You absolutely need to make progress and build traction because you are in survival mode. If you are solo founder, this is even more important as you have no one else to rely on when you are stuck or feeling lethargic.

You would think the pressure of not having a regular paycheck would be enough of a fire under one’s ass. The fear and stress can sometimes have the opposite effect. Instead of pushing through, you get overwhelmed. It is like in the movies where an actors is facing an oncoming car or train and freezes. They know death is imminent, their mind is screaming to move, but the body is stuck in place.

You will experience unproductive days as a founder. You will hate yourself for wasting precious time. You will promise to be more focused going forward, only to lapse and beat yourself up for being undisciplined. Then the cycle will repeat.

It is time to stop the madness! You are not a terrible founder for not being some productivity junkie and crushing your work 24x7. There are no rewards for pulling consecutive all night coding sessions. It is time to stop hating yourself and realizing that not every second of every day can be or even should be productive.

At the same time, you probably could be more intentional about being focused and efficient in your work. Ideally, you want to align the hours you work to when you are in your flow state. You can think of flow state as a period of time when you are immersed and focused to the point that your work seem effortless.

The challenge is in getting into and keeping your flow state. In a world overflowing with distractions, every device, colleague and open office environment is an enemy waiting to kill your productivity. The slightest interruption can easily wreck your well-crafted plans for the day. An article in the Harvard Business Review highlighted a study that found there was an average of 87 interruptions per day (22 external interruptions and 65 self-triggered) which had huge impact to productivity:

To help you achieve flow state, here are 10 things I have started to implement to trigger my flow state. Some of these are still a work in progress, but it seems to be sticking. Feel free to pick and choose the tips that work for you!

1. Breakdown big projects – If the task at hand is too big and complex, I break it up into smaller chunks of work that are more manageable to accomplish. Just keep creating smaller chunks till you can better scope your effort.

2. Define one must thing to do today  – Tasks and to-do lists can feel soul crushing. Instead, focus on just the one, most critical thing to finish that day. Once complete, you get that small dopamine hit that propels you along.

3. Kill phone notifications – My phone is permanently on silent mode. I also started the habit of putting my phone in my bag so I am not tempted to reach for it as I work.

4. Cut out the social media – I have reduced my addiction by deleting accounts and removing apps. I still use LinkedIn, but removed most notifications and switched the feed to “most recent” instead of “recommended”, so it is less appealing.

5. Time block critical work – I aim to get three 90-minute sessions per day with zero calls, meetings, and  interruptions. In between, I can catch up on lower priority tasks and messages.

6. Create a work ritual – My ritual is making a pot of tea in the morning. You can set yours using music, cleaning your desk, exercise, or anything else that puts your mind at ease.

7. Give yourself “5-minutes” – Sometimes just getting started on a task can be the biggest hurdle. Commit to working on the task for 5 minutes, and often you can get yourself motivated to continue.

8. Work during peak energy zone – My best work happens early in the morning. Your time zone might be mid-day or late at night. Whenever it is, do your best to arrange your deep work for those times.

9. Get good noise cancelling headphones – I work in a lot of cafes, so the noise can be a huge distraction. My Bose QuietComfort 35 headphones have been awesome for eliminating noise, especially when listening to what Spotify thinks is my favorite song, “White Noise 3 Hours Long”.

10. Reduce the social agenda – This is something I still need to improve on, but it is hard to focus if your days (and nights) are filled with activities not related to your startup. That includes travel, attending events, grabbing coffee with friends, sports clubs, etc. You do not have to eliminate all things, just the more frivolous stuff.

Lastly, one of the most fundamental principles of achieving flow work is to enjoy what you are doing. I procrastinate when I have work that I absolutely do not love. Sometimes I still have to get it done, but often it is better handled by a contractor. That is fine. The danger zone is when you stop loving the most critical work required of your startup. If you are reaching that stage, then you may want to do some deep reflection on what you are seeking in your life and work.

What are your tips for helping you avoid procrastination and find your flow? I would like to share the best suggestions in the next newsletter!

Mark

After a whirlwind tour of Northeast Europe, I am now back in Taipei working away on my startup and trying my best to avoid distractions. I did make some time this week to attend the last GenieFriends dinner focused on bringing a diverse group together to build global connections.

I also had the honor of participating as a mentor to prepare a group of 31 top Taiwanese startups for VivaTech in Paris next month. VivaTech is one of the largest tech conferences in the world, bringing together over 165,000 tech firms, startups, corporates, government agencies & investors. France and Europe are also quite different culturally, so National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) worked with Mosaic Venture Lab to host a workshop to help Taiwanese startup adapt and adjust to European business culture. I led the Marketing track and had the great pleasure to work with my fellow mentors Nai-Hsin Chen and Emilia Wu to review the startups’ marketing materials.

Thanks to Volker Heistermann, Johnny Yu, and Mosaic Venture Lab for the kind invitation to join this program as a mentor, the excellent keynote on French and Taiwanese culture by François Cotier of Business France, all the excellent mentors that shared their time and expertise to assist the startups, and to Hsing-Fei Wu, Senior Executive Officer of the NSTC, for his continued efforts to elevate Taiwanese startups onto the global stage.

That show was Cheers. It was the exception to the generic family sitcom. Instead, it was a bunch of oddballs that had nothing in common other than this random bar. It was a family of sorts, one where they bonded over nothing more than beers, one-liners, and gathering in the same drinking establishment.

Place can be a powerful driver for building human bonds. When I arrived at college as a freshman, the first thing I noticed walking through the halls of my dorm was how different everyone was. I was not sure if I could make friends from that chaotic mix of personalities and backgrounds. Eventually though, I found my tribe that included an evangelical Christan from Northwest Washington, a guy with a massive collection of music that I thoroughly disliked, and a dude that mumbled so much that I never understood half of what he said.

The same can be said for startup ecosystems. Some of the most dynamic and fast growing hubs started by builders gathering together and making connections. When I launched my startup in NYC, the startup scene was still quite small. Eventually, pockets of founders and developers found each other at places like New Work City, General Assembly, WeWork, Alley, Projective Space, Spark Labs, and many others.

The last two weeks, I have been traveling through Northeast Europe with the 42Geeks to explore the various startup ecosystems and communities in the region. My journey started in Warsaw, Poland to speak at a couple of event before making my way over to Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia. While I only spent a few days in each city, it gave me a good lens to understand the economy, innovation environment, people, and culture.

I found all three countries to be impressive. Poland and Estonia in particular emerged from communism and the post-Soviet collapse to become vibrant nations. The transition to democracy and a market-based economy have enabled both countries to experience rapid economic growth and wealth creation over the past 30 years. Poland's GDP has increased seven-fold since 1990 while Estonia has seen a six-fold increase.

Finland has also seen significant growth in the past three decades. Since joining the European Union in 1995, per capita GDP tripled to $54,00. The economy also became more export-driven with the rise of Nokia and strength of the forestry industry. The 2008 financial crisis and the 2020 global pandemic caused a dip in the economy. Unlike other Nordic countries though, the shock of Nokia losing its dominance (once contributed 4% to Finland’s GDP) and loss of Russia as a key trading partner due to the war with Ukraine led to a deeper slowdown.

To counter slow growth, Finland has leaned heavily into the tech industry and fostering more startup creation. The results have been dramatic, with Finland creating ten unicorns like games developer Supercell (creator of Clash of Clans), consumer delivery service  Wolt, open source data provider Aiven, and smart ring maker ŌURA. Overall, Finland has over 4,000 startups, of which 67% are funded, one of the highest per capita globally.

Estonia has also become a powerhouse startup hub. With 1,530 startups, they have nearly one startup per 1,000 people, most per capita in Europe. Built upon the success of Skype, Estonia has produced ten unicorns, the most per capita in Europe. These are globally recognized companies like ride hailing and delivery app Bolt, sales management and CRM tool Pipedrive, money transfer app Wise, and identity verification solution Veriff.

What is the secret ingredient that has enabled Finland and Estonia to punch above their weight as startup ecosystems?

Much of the foundation for successful startup creation is built into the fabric of these two nations. It was one thing in particular that stood out when speaking with startups and investors about why they thought they were successful. They did not mention government support, funding, or talent. The one consistent theme they shared was community.

Community is a hard to objectively measure. There is no number that can easily express the level of contribution community has on startup creation, unlike VC funding or size of exits or number of startup programs. When people here talk about community though, what they mean is accessibility and connectedness of people within the ecosystem.

“In Estonia, if you know 5 people, you probably know everyone you need to succeed.”

Aleksi Partanen of Icebreaker.vc

These are countries where everyone knows your name. Unlike the famous bar from the sitcom though, the high level of community engagement has unlocked enormous human potential. By building a society based on trust, equality, and transparency, they fostered a strong sense of security and belonging among its people. This has enabled people to take the raw ingredients that already existed in each country and amplify it to create a flywheel for curiosity, idea generation, collaboration, and business creation.

Anyone that steps into Estonia or Finland to launch a startup can easily tap into the network. Whether you attend an event, join a program, or visit a co-working space, you will find familiar faces. More importantly, people are willing to help. Even if you are a complete startup noob, you can still get on a call or meet with an exited unicorn founder.

"Finland is not a country, it's a country club."

Riku Asikainen of Evli Growth Partners

Across all of the places I have visited, the most impressive startup ecosystems have been in smaller nations. It would be reasonable to assume the opposite since small countries have fewer resources. Large, developed nations like the US, United Kingdom, and China have dominated the list of most startups and unicorns produced. They have a large talent base, leading universities, strong economies, and massive pools of capital to invest.

Talent, education, economy, and capital would be barrier to most small nations. However, there is a subset of countries that have managed to use their small size to their advantage to create vibrant economies that enable startup ecosystems to thrive. These are called microemergents.

There are a few criteria to designate a country as a microemergent:

• Under 10 million in population

• Capable of creating multiple unicorns

• Supportive startup ecosystem

• Stable economy and government

• Highly skilled and educated talent base

There are 13 countries that identify as microemergents. These include Austria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Ireland, Israel, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Singapore, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, and Uruguay. All of these nations have produced more than one unicorn other than Latvia and Uruguay, though these two nations have the potential to create significantly regionally and globally important companies and massive exits.

Each of these nations has managed to create outsized outcomes by leaning into their natural strengths. Finland and Singapore are well-known for their educational systems. Switzerland has top universities and research centers. UAE, and in particular Dubai, provides favorable tax benefits. Israel has strong ties to US markets. Uruguay has the most stable economy and government in South America, attracting founders and investors.

The other thing that ties microemergents together is that startups are building for global market on day one. This is a necessity since the size of market does not allow for building a venture scale business locally. During one of the 42Geeks talks in Finland, a speaker mentioned that they pilot the startup ideas locally, then they just kick them out. That has been the key for Israel to their success as the “Startup Nation”, which has produced 90 unicorns by catering to US and European markets.

This is an important distinction between microemergents and larger countries. Countries like Brazil or Indonesia or Poland do not have startups that necessarily have the same global ambition. They can build a sizable company by serving the local needs because they have a large enough market. Microemergents do not have the same luxury; to survive they need to shoot for the moon.

The last point to note is that with size comes complexity. Larger nations may have more people and money and resources, but they also have bigger problems. This can lead to greater bureaucracy, unstable governments, uneven policy directives, and rocky economic outcomes. Building a startup in these conditions is not impossible as countries like Argentina and Nigeria have shown, but it is just adds more friction to the challenges faced by startup founders. It is hard to foster entrepreneurship in an unpredictable country.

What are your thoughts on microemergents? If you are building a startup in one of these countries, what do you think is their key ingredient for startup success?

Mark

As mentioned, I have been on the road the past two weeks, so I skipped last week’s edition of the newsletter. Therefore, instead of the normal community update, I will share the LinkedIn posts that documented my travels and what I learned about the startup ecosystems along the way.

Poland and Taiwan Similarities: A comparative analysis discovering striking parallels between Poland and Taiwan's startup ecosystems, from similar economic structures and developer talent pools to shared histories of democratic transformation and growth as regional technology hubs.

42Geeks Landing in Finland: The opening day in Helsinki featuring presentations from local VCs, government officials, and panels on Finland's investment landscape, plus a keynote from former Prime Minister Esko Aho on Finland's success through prioritizing free education.

Finland Startup Ecosystem Overview: An analysis of Finland as a startup ecosystem where 4,000 startups thrive through strong R&D culture (4% of GDP), government support, dense Helsinki hub concentration, and Finnish values of community, trust, and work-life balance.

Finland Deep Tech Overview: Site visits to cutting-edge Finnish startups including quantum computing company IQM and satellite imaging unicorn ICEYE, showcasing Finland's competitive advantage in deep tech across quantum, space, gaming, and cleantech sectors.

Estonia Economy Overview: A meeting with Estonia's Economic Adviser to the Prime Minister revealing the country's remarkable economic transformation from Soviet dependence to EU integration, with current GDP of $40 billion and projected growth despite recent inflation challenges.

Estonia Startup Ecosystem Overview: An exploration of how Estonia's tiny population of 1.3 million has produced 10 unicorns through tight-knit community support, post-Soviet grit, and a nation that operates like a startup, generating impressive economic impact with €326.6M invested across 57 deals in 2024.

42Geeks Unconference: A recap of the final day where 42Geeks hosted an unconference in Estonia to share diverse expertise ranging from financial bubbles to cybersecurity to building communities (my talk) in an intimate, supportive community setting that exemplifies what makes this community special.

It was one of the all-time worst product flops in the history of tech and a rare miss by Jeff Bezos. By some estimates, Amazon sold fewer than 100,000 units. For context, Apple sold 10 million iPhone 6 phones in its opening weekend the same year that the Fire Phone was released. Amazon quietly killed their phone less than a year later.

For Amazon, it was a temporary blip in a string of uninterrupted successes. They can afford the occasional miss given that it is a two trillion dollar market cap company and the fourth largest company in the world. They even celebrate the failures with a display board in one of their Seattle offices called the  “Hall of Failure”.

Then there is the story of the Rabbit R1. It was one of the most buzz worthy launches at CES 2024, ushering in the trend of AI wearable pins. The video of the launch went viral, selling 10,000 units in the first 24 hours and 130,000 units soon after that. The buzz soured pretty quickly though as reviews trashed the product and users eventually stopped using it. While the company is still operating, its reputation and credibility will take a long time to repair.

While some overhyped startups can survive like Rabbit or get acquired like Humane AI, many never recover. The expectations are so high that it is easy to stumble even if you do all the right things leading up to and during the launch. Once customers use the product and the experience does not match up to the value that was sold, they lose trust, abandon the product, and never return.

Big launches setup startups for failure right out the gate. The focus goes into creating the best launch instead of building the best product and speaking to the right customers. The launch becomes the product and even if the launch itself is successful, the product suffers because the launch rarely generates the type of customers that will stick around.

A big launch says to the world you have a product that is ready to go big time. You invest in the Product Hunt debut, ping all your network about upvoting the launch, setup the social media posts to go generate interest, tease something on Hacker News, and do all the PR for the announcement. Then when you do go live, you generate lots of interest, your posts get shared, your launch gets to number one on PH, and you see the sign-ups rolling in. After a few days though, the hype wears off and most of those sign-ups go dormant.

Why? Because your product was not ready for prime time. You promised one thing, but the experience offered something much less useful or memorable. In a world awash with apps and software, if you do not hit the mark right off the bat with initial users, they will turn their attention elsewhere.

Most initial products are simply ideas loosely cobbled together into the shape of something that is barely useable. For all the talk about creating a “lovable” first iteration and putting lots of care into the first release, most products at launch suck. The feature set is limited, things break often, the onboarding is convoluted, the design is amateurish, along with a million other things that simply do not meet user expectations. MVPs (minimally viable product) work not because they are perfect, but because the viable part solves enough of a pain point now to get early customers hooked on the future promise of the product.

Now my focus and experience is with B2B software. There may be situations and markets where big launches make sense like gaming and consumer tech. In the world of business software though, the big launch is rarely the most optimal strategy to advance your goals as a startup.

What exactly is the purpose of a launch and why the huge emphasis on the need to have an official launch? Because a launch can quickly generate lots of brand awareness that brings in leads or users. For B2B startups though, most of the leads or sign-ups generated in the typical launch do not fit that their ideal customer profile. Unless you are specifically selling to other startups, most buyers do not religiously read TechCrunch or hang out on Product Hunt or obsessively searching for new tech launched on Twitter.

If the purpose of a launch is to get leads, the better strategy is to reach out to customers where they hang out. If your market is developers, you are on GitHub and Hacker News. If your market is dentists, there are dental associations. If you are selling to general business personas like HR or accounting or marketers, many of them are on LinkedIn. Once you find your ideal customers, you can then reach out directly to them.

Cold outreach scares most startup founders. It shouldn’t though because you are doing the hardest thing of all, starting a business from the ground up. Also if you are actively solving a real problem for businesses, people will listen to your pitch if you do so in a manner that is respectful and collaborative. This means as a founder, you got to learn to sell.

I am going through the process of launching my startup which I announced over LinkedIn this week. It is not a product launch, but moving from stealth mode to my new company branding, website, and name, TribeROI. Thanks for everyone that liked the post and sent me a note congratulating me. One question I have received is whether the product is ready and why there are no screenshots or demos available? The product is not something that will be ready for at least several months, so why announce something now?

I believe strongly in the idea of shipping small, iterative launches continuously. This week I launched the first iteration of the TribeROI website, which will be a key asset when I reach out to potential customers for my community consulting services and to be design partners for developing the product. However, the website in its current form is very basic, very wordy, and quite honestly not very informative. It is simply the starting point to get critical feedback from my trusted network on whether the value proposition and messaging is clear. I now have nearly 20 pages of comments that will help me refine the messaging and launch a more robust version 2 of the website in the next few weeks.

The process of shipping iteratively is also helping me to learn at a faster pace and open up more opportunities. There were some basic things that I simply neglected to include in the pre-released website like pages for the Privacy Statement and Terms and Conditions. I had many excellent questions that challenged key assumptions about my buyer and their level of understanding for the need to measure community. Then there were some people that saw some useful introduction they could make on my behalf to customers and partners.

Some things are harder to ship iteratively, like when I publishing my book Community-in-a-Box in March. I still took time to seek feedback on the book cover and invite a small number of trusted connections to read and comment on the book before I released it. That ensured that the book that was released was a much stronger and higher quality product.

For TribeROI, this is the first of many future mini-launches. This is a more viable strategy that leverages my existing network and mechanisms that builds awareness and helps me collect vital feedback without adding too much extra work. Ultimately this is where you want to be as a founder, having a method in place that helps increase your bandwidth for additive tasks like building the product and engaging with customers.

How do you go about launching new products or businesses? What are some of the key strategies and tactics that have been successful for you when launching?

Mark

I am in Poland this week for the first stop in my Europe tour and had the awesome experience of attending and participating in the regular Thursday Gathering at the Venture Café Warsaw. The event is hosted by the CIC Warsaw, one of a global network of startup and innovation spaces established by Cambridge Innovation Centre.

What made the event extra special for me was seeing that Startup Terrace Taiwan was also at the event this week with about fifteen Taiwanese startups on a tour of Poland. They are here to network, seeking market expansion opportunities, and collaborate with local partners. Last night, they had the opportunity to give three-minute pitches to an audience of Polish entrepreneurs and investors, and it was great to see the positive reception from the judges and the audience.

I was super excited for my talk as well. I was planning to have a fireside chat with my friend Piotr Boulange on building and scaling your startup. Instead, it ended up being an interactive talk about building communities and answering questions from the audience. Thanks Piotr for reading the room and adjusting things to make it a valuable session for all. I ended up being one of the last people out the door of the CIC still taking questions from folks!

I have another talk at the CIC Warsaw tonight, then preparing for Finland from May 11-14 and Estonia from May 14-17. If you are in either place next week (Helsinki or Tallinn), please reach out. I would love to meet up in person and we may have some open 42Geeks events I can invite you to!

While being stubborn can be a useful trait in founders, it nearly destroyed my first startup. As I was building my MVP, I would meet other developers to get some help on how to code certain functionality. It was clear that my coding chops were good enough to build out a scalable enterprise platform, so I floated the idea of hiring an outsourced dev shop.

Among my small circle of developer friends, the idea was universally panned. They said that what I would gain in time to market I would lose in flexibility and control later on. I pushed back that they did not understand enterprise software and how getting the product out sooner was more important to get revenue and build traction.

I was very mistaken. Turns out that relying completely on an outsourced provider that also happened to be our cloud provider gave away all of our leverage. We ended up becoming hostage to our supposed partner as every functionality request piled on more bills while slowing revenue while customers held out for requested features.

Just as my developer friends warned, we lost control. Eventually we sold prematurely when we could not get our financial ship in order. If I had been more open to their sound advice about owning our own tech and avoiding outside consultants, we might have had a much more lucrative exit.

We like to think that we are open to advice. The reality is that most of us dismiss feedback unless it is positive. First, we all have egos and find criticism hard to listen to. Second, our minds are wired to avoid any perceived threats like negative feedback. Third, we often overestimate our capabilities, known as overconfidence bias. Lastly, even if we accept the truth of the critiques, we simply attribute them to factors beyond our control.

I have gotten much better over the years at not just accepting feedback, but also actively soliciting it. I brushed off most criticism earlier in my career as others simply not understanding me and my situation. I had to recognize my own wiring and mental roadblocks that prevented me from realizing the power of feedback, which is an opportunity for learning and growing.

Even if we do manage to change our mindset on receiving feedback, much of it ends up not being actionable. Great feedback is direct, specific, and easily testable. Softball comments that bury critiques in polite language is as unhelpful as blanket statements that your effort is a dumpster fire. Take for example the saying “startups are a marathon, not a sprint”, which came up in a recent conversation with a founder. Maybe that’s true, but the whole advantage of startups is the ability to move faster so you learn, iterate, and get to product-market fit sooner. This is the type of flimsy, high-level advice that wastes time.

“Huh, you know it’s funny, I thought you had higher standards than that? You couldn’t find a single thing I could improve on?”

Adam Grant

The last hurdle to overcome is that our approach to gathering feedback lacks structure and focus. Most people we ask for feedback from are too close to us personally, so they are reluctant to be overly critical. This results in advice delivered as a nicely wrapped “shit” sandwich, lukewarm generalities divorced from context, or a sledgehammer that is so blunt it gets ignored.

Bridgewater Associates is a good example of a company that embedded the soliciting and giving of feedback a core part of the culture. When Ray Dalio nearly tanked his firm early on because of bad investments, he realized the need for people willing to challenge decisions. No one, not even executives, are shielded from critical feedback, enabling Bridgewater to become the largest hedge fund in the world.

Adam Grant, well-known author and professor of organizational behavior, took this concept from Bridgewater and adapted it for this approach called a “Challenge Network”. Instead of a company, he has his own network from which he solicits feedback in two ways:

• Structured Feedback — Used for projects where iterative feedback is needed. He  schedules time with his network, then gives them some work to review and asks for candid criticisms, even if they fundamentally agree with the point he is making.

• Unstructured Feedback — Used for spontaneous feedback, like after a talk or a meeting. He will ask people that approach him, “what’s the one thing I could have done better?”. If the person is reticent to give feedback, Adam will suggest some areas he thinks he could have improved in order to prompt feedback.

The exact methods for collecting feedback may vary with situation and environment. The intention though is to proactively seek out opportunities to gather candid feedback. Then you can thoughtfully consider the feedback and act on valid suggestions as a mechanism for continuous improvement.

The other key to making a challenge network successful is to not focus on outcomes. The temptation is to drive towards a successful outcome. When something does not work as expected, we feel disappointment. Success and failure is not binary however, there are a range of results, each of which expands our knowledge. The value then is not to guarantee a result, but to accelerate learning during the creation process.

Can you build your own challenge network? It is easy for Adam as he has people willing to help because of his popularity and his university teaching. For the rest of us, we usually rely on our social networks, but these are noisy, public, and becoming increasingly toxic.

A better approach is to create a smaller and more focused network. This includes people having the relevant experience to offer useful feedback and advice on the things you care about. These are people that also have been directly involved and supportive of your work in the past and want you to succeed.

“Somebody who pushes you because they believe in you and they are not willing to settle for half-baked ideas or for something that is not your very best work.”

Adam Grant

For me, my challenge network is something I created earlier this year called “The Fifty”, a subset of my broader network that helped with a specific need over the past year. This group has relevant experience, knows my work, and has been incredibly supportive. Over time, I will add more people that lend their support and show active interest in my work.

The bigger vision though is to not just build a network. All of these extraordinary humans that I am connected to could also help each other. This network of people with varying skills, experiences, and credentials has the brain power to allow all of us to make better decisions and create exponential impact. Then we can go beyond a “challenge network” and create a genuine, trust-building “opportunity community”!

What was some ways you proactively collect feedback today? Could building your own challenge network be helpful for yourself or for your startup?

Mark

This week I attended the opening ceremony for Plug and Play Taiwan in Taoyuan (near Taipei) and meet the founders of the inaugural batch. This event marks two really interesting trends for the Taiwan startup ecosystem. One is that well-known, established, global accelerator programs like Plug and Play are considering Taiwan for launching new programs. Second is that cities in Taiwan other than Taipei are becoming more active in supporting local startup hubs as a way of attracting talent and investment. Congrats on the awesome launch and looking forward to more accelerators landing in Taiwan!

I had some time this week to explore and hike in the mountains surrounding Taipei, including Elephant Mountain which climbs up above Taipei to provide amazing views of Taipei 101 and the entire city. If you have a chance to visit Taiwan, I highly recommend spending some time to explore the various parks and hiking trails surrounding Taipei. Also, if yo uhave not done so yet, you should totally get a copy of my book, Community-in-a-Box!

Most of us have never had to deal with such isolation. Then a global pandemic shut off physical contact with others and forced us to hunker down in our homes. If you lived by yourself without family or roommates, then your only human interaction was over video calls. Instead of talking to a volleyball, we were talking to pixels on screens.

The pandemic gave us a taste of isolation. We experienced the lack of human contact as a loss of our own sanity and humanity. There were many stories of extroverts and introverts alike giving up habits and routines as despair set in. Most of us were simply going through the motions of life without experiencing the joy of living.

Coming out of COVID though, another trend emerged. At least in the US, people were experiencing greater rates of loneliness. The Surgeon General Advisory report published in 2023 declared loneliness was an epidemic experienced by 58% of Americans. Even though we had emerged from physical isolation and could once again connect with anyone at any time in person, we were lonelier than at any point in modern history.

The loneliness epidemic has significant consequences. That same report stated that the mortality impact of loneliness is like smoking 15 cigarettes a day. Studies have shown that loneliness increases the risk of heart disease by 29%, stroke by 32%, and dementia by 50%. Loneliness also does not discriminate: the risks are evenly distributed across age, gender, economic, and racial groups.

What exactly is loneliness, though? It is a state of mental distress from perceived isolation or inadequate meaningful connections. Isolation can happen even when surrounded by people or being highly connected across social media. Loneliness comes from feeling an acute lack of connectedness to others, leading to a sense of not being valued or worthy.

Fifteen years ago, this was exactly what I was facing. I had been working on my startup for a couple of years and had become increasingly short-tempered, impatient, and angry. What I did not realize at the time was that the overwhelmingly negative feelings clouding my mind were due to a crushing sense of loneliness.

When I jumped into startup life as a founder, I never thought I would be lonely. I had a big professional network, plenty of friends, and family nearby. The difference however is when you are a founder, you're surrounded by people who can no longer relate to what you're doing or why.

My emotional isolation emerged gradually. Former colleagues would invite me for drinks, but stopped because I often canceled. Friends stopped calling because all I seemed interested in talking about was my startup. Family would ask when I'd get a real job. I found this annoying, so I stopped visiting or answering their calls.

Of the hundreds of founders I have spoken with as a mentor, advisor, and advocate during my time at AWS, they all experienced bouts of loneliness at some point. Research from UCSF and UC Berkeley found that 72% of entrepreneurs reported mental health struggles, with loneliness and isolation being major contributing factors. Founders were 30% more likely to suffer from depression and 11% more likely to experience bipolar disorder than the general population.

Solo founders have it especially rough. Without co-founders to share the burden, every decision becomes an internal monologue. There is no one else to share the workload, bounce ideas off of, be inspired by, or get support from. You glory in all the wins, but you also shoulder 100% of the mistakes and losses. Running a startup as a solo founder was the top reason Paul Graham shared as to why startups fail.

“The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone.”

Paul Graham

Even when you have a co-founding team that is tight-knit and supportive, you can still feel isolated. Loneliness isn't a bug in the founder experience, it's a feature. Building something from nothing requires an obsessive level of dedication. You become deeply entwined with your product, market, and customers in a way that few others understand. Your challenges, priorities, and schedule seem insane to outsiders.

You do not have to tackle these feelings of loneliness alone! In fact, at the first sign you may be experiencing loneliness and depression, you absolutely need to reach to those that care about you for support and advice. Below are some strategies and resources you may want to explore to tackle founder loneliness:

• Join founder-specific communities – Avoid generic tech groups filled with people that do not share the founder experience. Find communities curated for founders. These can be online like Indie Hackers or in-person groups. When I launched my first startup, I would organize small gatherings at different bars every month with a dozen other founders that we called Third Thursdays, to talk through our struggles and celebrate our wins.

• Create accountability partners – Find another founder at a similar stage and schedule regular in-person or virtual check-ins. It can even be two or three others, but keep the group small so you can build up trust and more openly share ideas, bounce ideas off of, and provide help on specific challenges and questions.

• Use structured social time – Block calendar time for human connection like you would for investor meetings. This is something I admire about Basecamp founder Jason Fried who maintains strict boundaries with no work talk at family meals and scheduling time to meet with friends on weekends. Create habits that force you to escape work.

• Get professional support – There is not enough talk about the importance therapy can play in helping founders. That is something well-known VC Brad Feld has discussed in the past as a way to handle his own struggles. There are also executive coaches who specialize in working with founders and understand their unique pressures. Online services like BetterUp or Sondermind can also be helpful in finding the right help.

• Build in public (to a point) – Sharing your journey can be part catharsis and part generating goodwill. Many founders have been public about their journey like Gumroad's Sahil Lavingia who candidly shares his experiences over Twitter. Whether through blogs, podcasts, or social media, vulnerability fosters connections. In a way, I am doing that with my newsletter Founders in a Cloud. Just be careful about how open you are so that what you share does not negatively impact your business potential or exposes confidential (or sensitive) information.

• Join peer groups – Being part of a structured group environment can help if you are not able to find other accountability partners. Groups like EO (Entrepreneurs' Organization), YPO (Young Presidents Organization), or Endeavor organize small groups of founders to meet regularly and provide programming and opportunities, but these groups are usually for more established companies. For early stage founders, seek out organizations like South Park Commons that are more geared for the founders from the idea stage to MVP.

• Schedule regular off-sites – Founders can benefit with a mental reset every so often. Travel out of your city, rent a house, bring a journal, and reflect. Spend some time on fun non-work activities with your founding team. This helps release much of the pent up emotional baggage that can lead to exhaustion, arguments, and burnout.

• Build your own support network – Use your own network and identify people that are most supportive of your work. These are the people that cheer your successes, support you during your struggles, and have done something tangible to help you. I did this recently with a group that I call The Fifty. Already the group has been incredibly helpful and I plan to build this out as a community so we can all meet and help each other.

In the process of building something that connects people and solves problems for many, it is the founders that often become the most disconnected from people. We sacrifice our social lives and mental well-being to pour everything into building our vision so that we can change the world. We downplay that sustainable success requires sustainable humans.

I have definitely experienced many periods of loneliness as a founder, both during my first startup and now with my current startup. At the moment, I am building by myself, but that is not the end goal. I am seeking a technical co-founder to join me, one who is a passionate problem solver that deeply cares about the craft of coding, appreciates the details, and loves communities as an active community builder. If you are interested, email me or message me on LinkedIn.

Have you wrestled with founder loneliness? What have you found to help you fight through the isolation and stay connected with other people?

Mark

Last week, I landed back in Taiwan and attended the All-Chambers Taipei Connect, an event that brings all the major Chambers of Commerce in Taipei together. It was great to meet old friends and make many new connections among the diverse group of attendees from all over the world in Taipei to expand their businesses or launch new ones. If you are just getting started in a new country, local Chambers of Commerce can be a good starting point for building out your network with local business and government agencies.

Thanks to my friend Elias Ek, whose company Enspyre was hosting the event, for sharing the event with me. Kudos to the Swedish Chamber of Commerce Taipei and Pojanath Bhatanacharoen for leading the effort to organize an excellent event!

I am in Taiwan the rest of the week before doing a quick pitstop in NYC and heading over to Europe to give a talk in Poland at the Venture Café Warsaw (with a delegation from Startup Terrace Taiwan also attending) and then joining the 42Geeks Northeast Europe tour in Finland and Estonia. If you happen to be in any of these places while I am in town, let’s meet up!

We met in person at a Midtown café to get to know each other better and dive deeper into my startup. Everything seemed to be going well. They were engaged and asked smart questions. Then I made the ask, “How much would you be able to commit to our seed round?”

They looked at each other and then me. Then they smiled as the former banker responded, “We can certainly help you find some really great investors for your startup, it’s really promising!”

I was confused, “So, are you saying it is promising, but you are not investing? Did I hear that right?”

She replied, “Well, we work with startup founders like youself to help you tap into pools of capital that you would normally not have easy access to.”

They then go into a long-winded explanation of what services they provide, their deep network of wealth individuals and family offices, and why working with them is the best way for me to succeed.

“Just to be clear, you do not invest in startups?” I knew the answer, but had no idea where to even take this conversation.

“Not exactly,” she was still smiling. “We work on a retainer basis to prepare you for investor meetings, refine your pitch, and introduce you to investors in our trusted network. If they invest, we will contribute out of our fund.”

I stared blankly at them, containing the growing rage inside for knowingly falling into this trap. “Uhm, so what is your retainer rate?”

The attorney piped in, “We start at $10,000 depending on the amount to be raised.”

“Is that it or are there other fees besides the retainer?”

“There is a 5% fee of funds raised. That is a success fee, but is only paid upon a successful fund raise.” They were still smiling.

I was wearing a pretty obvious frown at this point. I knew they could sense I was seething inside

After a very long pause, the banker says, “It seems like maybe we are not aligned. I truly apologize if you did not fully understand the services we provided when we met at the event.”

Like a wrestling match, the attorney tags in to take her turn, “I think your startup is doing incredibly innovative things in the HR space right now, this is why we are excited to work with you as you continue building your startup.”

She continued, “As you know, the funding environment is really challenging right now with the market in turmoil. It would be a shame if you had to pause your significant progress because of a lack the capital.”

“Yeah, I know. Look, I get what you do. I understand how your fees work. I am sure you have a great network of investors,” I replied, then stopped momentarily.

Then I finished my thought, “But if you are so convinced in my startup, you would invest upfront. I don’t need fund raising consultants, I need actual investors and customers today.”

Now that I am a startup founder again, one interesting observation is the flood of LinkedIn requests from people eager to help. There are software development shops, website builders, virtual assistants, digital marketing gurus, copywriters, fractional CXO’s, pitch coaches, fund raising advisors, growth bros, lead gen wizards, B2B sales specialists, SEO experts, and the generic pool of consultants that have been “hands-on” assisting X number of unicorns to startup success.

I appreciate the attention. As a founder, you quickly realize how lonely things can be and how hard it is to get anyone’s attention, even from your former colleagues. However, if you are in any of the above categories and we have not interacted before, I am not accepting your LinkedIn connection request.

I am not trying to be a jerk. I do not think of myself as too good for help or better than others. LinkedIn just does not happen to be the ideal place for these interactions. First, I am already overwhelmed by the number of connections I have on LinkedIn. Second, my time is extremely limited and dedicating focus to processing inbound cold outreach is unproductive.

Some of these people are probably quite knowledgeable and accomplished. Their LinkedIn headlines and profiles seem to be legitimate. At least for me though, I only want to connect with current startup founders, startup investors actively deploying capital, potential customers, and relevant people I meet at events. That is a better use of my time.

There are not a lot of things founders need when they are just starting. Early on, all you really need is validation that you have an idea worth building. That means having an idea, an audience or potential customers to test the idea with, and a tangible way to validate the idea. You are not hiring, fund raising, marketing, selling, managing people, building infrastructure, or anything related to scaling. Among many things startups do not need at this stage, engaging outsiders is a huge distraction.

Sometimes I get pushback on this advice. Maybe you need some help to develop your minimally viable product (MVP) to get initial customers or you are deathly afraid of sales or you have too many things on your plate and need to offload work. However, none of these requires the help of consultants. Depending on your target market and solution, your MVP can be built with no-code AI tools, or might not even need software at all. If sales is scary for you, maybe entrepreneurship is not for you because selling is definitely a requirement. And while I understand how busy startup life can be, you are better off prioritizing and cutting tasks than trying to do all the things.

This does not mean you should not use outside help when necessary. I am not a graphic designer, so I hired someone on Upwork for $100 to develop my logo and a basic brand kit with colors and fonts. For help on my website, I found a resource to design a template and layout for me to use. Before I released the second edition of Community-in-a-Box, I brought on one person for editing, another for typesetting, and a third to develop the book cover. This makes sense because for tightly scoped, short-term projects, someone else can do the work in a shorter amount of time with better results.

Can consultants be helpful later on? Absolutely when you have done the initial work to show your idea has market potential. The money spent on hiring outside help might be a worthwhile investment if it can smooth out some sticking points with your product or distribution. You can more easily define the scope of work to farm out and measure the success of the outputs a consultant is delivering. That work could range from marketing to design to pitch preparation to accounting to tech skills that your startup lacks. Consultants can also be a stop gap for recruiting so that you can conserve time and capital hiring full-time employees. If a consultant can deliver something significantly faster and with higher quality than you can accomplish, then it is worth it.

For the consultants reading this and thinking I am full-on dissing you: I am not. There are a lot of frauds out there in the startup world, but I have met many genuinely helpful advisors that have the credentials, credibility, and commitment to help founders. If that is you, you might want to consider the following tactics to have a better success rate connecting with founders:

• Do not pitch over LinkedIn. If you send a connection request, realize that founders have dozens of similar requests. You can stand out by mentioning what you specifically like about their work. Then leave your email address in case they prefer email over connecting on LinkedIn.

• Startups, before they close a seed round, are a dead end for opportunities. No startup needs what you offer that early on. Instead, just focus on connecting, tracking the founders through their social posts, and engaging when signals indicate an inflection point that they are making progress.

• However, reaching out to founders early can be a good way to initiate a relationship before they build traction. Earn trust beforehand by delivering something of value such as providing useful content, giving some insightful recommendations, or offering free consultation time.

• Never add founders to your newsletter by default. You have not earned the trust to simply spam them with your content. I only added people to my newsletter after we had a conversation and asking if I can add them to the newsletter.

• Rather than reaching out to founders, consider becoming a mentor for accelerator / incubator programs, teaching at college entrepreneurship programs, or working with VC firms. Through the association, you gain social proof that you are a credible expert in your field.

• Publish content that a founder can easily review to verify your credentials and understand how you work and present ideas. This should be more than testimonials. Be willing to give away some of your knowledge freely through a blog, videos, podcasts, book, or downloadable resources from your website. That is going to go a lot farther than simply saying you are an expert.

• Stop using LinkedIn InMail to reach founders. It is a waste of time and everyone knows to ignore those messages. Just use connection requests or any number of email finder tools to find the direct email address for the founders.

To be clear, I am not hating on startup consultants. They are business owners doing their best to build their businesses. If you decide to engage a consultant, determine how they can accelerate progress in some specific way that you would not otherwise be able to within your own means. If you get this balance right, you will experience faster and better results.

Mark

Last week was a whirlwind of podcasts and travel. One podcast that just got released is with my friend Bill Kenney who has an awesome show called Belly2Belly. It’s a short but sweet podcast lasting fifteen minutes on a topic a guest is passionate about. Of course, I chose to chat about community building with Bill and dropped this gem, “Community is like a startup—with no revenue model (at first), but lots of passion.” Check out the episode on LinkedIn.

I also spent the week out in California catching up with some friends, meeting with founders, and attending a few events. One of the highlights was Llama Lounge, one of the biggest AI meetups (if not the biggest) in the Bay Area. What makes it so special is the collection of talent in one place for over three hours and longer. Everyone is there to meet other builders, learn about cool startups and projects, and maybe find opportunities to collaborate. This session was extra amazing as it was hosted at Stanford and half the attendees were students in the business and engineering schools looking for internships and exploring opportunities. Thanks to all the folks I met and big shout out to Jeremiah Owyang and Chris Yeh on another stellar event!

This week I am back in Taipei before I head over to Poland, Finland, and Estonia for the 42Geeks Northern Europe tour. If you want to catch up while I am in Taiwan, please ping me. I will also be at the All-Chambers event on Thursday if you happen to be attending that!

The concept of coworking was still brand new then. The professional options were to sublease office space (expensive in NYC), or rent space from serviced office providers like Regus. As an early startup with no funding or revenue, neither were options.

I was left with working from my cramped Brooklyn apartment. Many of us had to do the same during COVID. When working continuously in a tight space with no human contact, you eventually go stir-crazy. To escape the monotony, I ventured out in my neighborhood to find places to work.

This is when I discovered the joy of working out of cafes. There were a few in my part of town that were not too busy during the day, had free Wi-Fi, and seemed OK with me hanging out for hours at a time. Not all places were cool with this, though, and I may have been thrown out of a few places when I overstayed my welcome.

As I started traveling more, I would seek the café scene to find places to work on the road. Some places were relatively chill, like in Argentina or Vietnam, where cafes are a way of life. Other places like Hong Kong want you to order and get out as fast as possible. But wherever I went, few cafes were ever truly setup to be spaces to do serious work.

When I started spending time in Taiwan, I assumed cafes would be like Hong Kong. I found complete opposite. Cafes are ubiquitous, from global brands like Starbucks to local chains like Louisa and Peter Better to mom and pop operations. They are setup to be social venues and work spaces. And as long as you buy something, you can stay from open to close and not be chased out.

Having been in Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, for the past several months, I have started to get the hang of life here. Life is a lot more chill that I expected. Maybe it is because I am used to the pace and intensity of places like NYC and Hong Kong, but I get the sense that people are less stressed out and anxious in Taiwan.

Quality of life was one consideration when I moved to Taiwan. In the 2023 Expat Insider survey, Taiwan came in second place behind Spain for quality of life. In the 2025 World Happiness Report, Taiwan was ranked as the happiest country in Asia, ahead of Singapore, Japan, and the land of smiles, Thailand. The report noted that kindness was a factor in Taiwan’s ranking, and I have found people to be far more helpful and pleasant here than most countries I have visited or lived.

As you settle down in a new city, you start to notice little things that speak to the distinctive features of a place, like the café culture and the kindness of strangers. I have been to other cities such as Kaohsiung in the south and Hualien in the east, but most of what I have seen and experienced in Taiwan is from the lens of living in Taipei.

With that, here are some other things about life in Taipei I have observed so far, from my perspective of being a new arrival and a foreigner:

• There is food literally everywhere and at all hours. There are breakfast joints open at 6 AM, random outdoor food stalls behind side streets, vendors selling sandwiches and buns on the street for office workers, big and small night markets, and tons of restaurants from takeaway joints to Michelin star food meccas. Even train stations are awash in food options, but just don’t eat or drink anything on the MTR.

• You can get any cuisine, but it will have a Taiwanese twist. This means things will tend to be sweeter or have more stuff added, like the local pizza. That is changing though, with more authentic cuisine coming here like Mexican or Italian.

• The most common non-Taiwanese cuisine in Taiwan is Japanese. There are sushi restaurants, ramen joints, tonkatsu places, chains like Kura or Sukiya, izakayas, and Japanese stalls in the night markets. Given the history of Taiwan, it is not surprising and the quality of the food is quite close to what you would get in Japan.

• Almost no one cooks. As I was looking at apartments, I noticed many that had no kitchen or just a small stovetop. When I asked the agent why, she said there is too much delicious and cheap food outside. Good point.

• The number of bubble tea places is mind blowing. They are everywhere. I counted ten on one block right outside one of the MTR stations. Taiwan is both the birthplace of bubble, or boba, tea and also is the biggest consumer in the world per capita with over a billion cups consumed annually.

• The cocktail scene is quite legit and affordable. Most locals drink beer, whisky, or Kaoliang, which is a local Taiwanese liquor. There are more cocktail places, craft beer halls, and wine bars opening up though throughout the city. By the way, I am not a fan of Kaoliang, so please do not make me drink that.

• Everything is connected to the MRT (Taipei Metro). Though Taipei is not a large city, having the MRT makes things so much closer to get to. The trains are always on time, super clean, and very inexpensive, with most trips costing between $1 to $2 USD.

• While eating, drinking, or chewing gum on the MRT is not allowed, you can do these on the other trains systems such as the High-Speed Rail (HSR) and Taiwan Railway (TRA). It is common to see inexpensive bento boxes (便當) for sale in train stations to take on the train.

• Cash is still king. Many places like restaurants, hotels, and major stores will take credit card, but smaller vendors still rely on cash. However, there are EasyCard and iPASS stored-value cards that you can use for mass transit like the MRT and for many supermarkets and convenience stores.

• No one jaywalks. Major roads are super wide, something I have never seen in most cities. Traffic lights are super long. As a New Yorker, this drives me insane, but no one ever walks against the light.

• Neighborhoods away from the main roads have no sidewalks. Not sure why, but there are green lanes painted on the roads to indicate walking lanes.

• YouBike is a commuting miracle. These are bikes you can rent at stations setup all across the city through an app. In Taipei, the first 30 minutes is free, but after that, the cost is minimal. A four-hour trip would be $80 NT or $2.50 USD. There are also many biking lanes and trails set up in the city. My favorite trail is along the Keelung River, along both sides of the river.

• Mopeds are a way of life here, much like you would see in Vietnam or Thailand. While the moped traffic is less chaotic in Taipei, the moped are everywhere on the streets, parked along buildings, and delivering food and packages across the city.

• The buildings are not super high. Taipei has a few tall skyscrapers like the famous Taipei 101, but they are mostly in newer parts of the city in Xinyi to the east or in Banqiao to the west in New Taipei City. With all the trees that line the major streets, it feels less oppressive here than many other cities covered with high-rises.

• Access to nature from the city is convenient and quick. Some neighborhoods have mountains right beside them, like in Neihu or Shilin. One of the best hikes though is to Elephant Mountain in Xinyi which provides amazing views of Taipei 101. Further out, there is Yangshan National Park that has amazing nature scenery.

• There are many parks throughout the city. Most are small squares embedded in the neighborhoods, but there are also larger parks like Da’an Park, Xinsheng Park with its wonderful Rose Garden, Yuanshan Park next to the Expo Dome, and Youth Park.

• Convenience stores in Taiwan have everything you need. You can buy food and beverages, pay bills, get money, mail packages any time day or night. It is estimated that Taiwan has one convenience store per 1,703 people with the biggest chains being  7-11, Family Mart, and Hi-Life.

• When you shop at malls, convenience stores, and most restaurants & retail shops, you receive two receipts, one which has an 8-digit number called “fapiao” (發票). Most visitors and foreigners throw these away, but they are a special tax receipt that is part of a national lottery system where you can win cash (I have not yet).

• Trash cans are impossible to find. You can find some near MRT stations or parks, but mostly they do not exist. I have gotten used to carrying small plastic bags with me to dispose of garbage until I find a trash receptacle either on the street or in a convenience store.

• Taiwanese are quite eco-conscious. Many bring their own bags for shopping and mugs for cafes to reduce waste and save money (5 NTD discount when using your own mug). Recycling is also a big deal and you have to properly separate garbage into recyclables, general trash, kitchen waste (compostable waste), otherwise you get fined.

• The garbage trucks and subway trains play music as they arrive. It is actually quite pleasant. Maybe not as pleasant if you were expecting an ice cream truck, though.

• Publicly available toilets are plentiful and clean. They can be found in MTR stations, parks, sightseeing areas, and any café. Some places even have the Japanese toilets, which are incredibly awesome.

• The city is covered with cute displays. It is a culture of “ke’ai” (可爱) that is widely embraced in Taiwan. This includes cartoon character displays from kids' shows, cutesy advertising signs, and animals statues and art exhibits in parks and public spaces like pandas, bears, and ducks.

• Many people take their pets out in baby strollers. Taipei is pet-friendly and you see lots of cats and dogs in parks and cafes. Not everyone rides their pets in strollers, but it is common enough to notice that this is a normal part of pet culture here.

If you are in Taiwan or have been in here in the past, what are some uniquely interesting things you have noticed about the life here? I would love to hear your impressions of this amazing city and country!

Mark

Taipei has no lack of friendly cafes that are convenient for doing working. The café culture is quite strong here. I have yet to find a country that has adopted the concept of “third places” between home and the office as well. So instead of the regular community update below is a list of recommendations for cafes in Taipei that are good for working out of. If you want to know what I have been up to lately, check out my LinkedIn posts about the next 42Geeks to Finland and Estonia in May (let me know if you want to join), my experience co-hosting the last GenieFriends dinner in Taipei, and my trip to California next week (LA April 14-16, SF April 17-18). If you want to meet up while I am in California, ping me!

The following are cafes that I have worked out of in Taipei and would recommend. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list however and there are plenty of cafes, especially independently owned cafes, not listed here that are probably amazing places to work out of as well. If you have other cafés you would like added to this list, please message me and I will include them.

Note this is not a list the best places for artisan coffee in Taipei. Some of the cafes listed below do have excellent coffee, but there are many specialty coffee shops that just focus on serving the highest quality coffee and are not cafes for working in.

This is also not a list for coworking locations that are specifically designed as workspaces for individuals as well as companies. At a later date, I will create a dedicated list just for coworking facilities in Taipei.

There is a full list of cafee in this document that contains the cafes below as well as other places that have been recommended.

CHAIN CAFES

Starbucks – There are over 100 Starbucks locations in Taipei City. Most stores do not have a time limit and have decent WiFi. They are also English friendly and the layout is similar to other Starbucks around the world. Prices are on the expensive side and some locations can get very crowded.

Louisa Coffee – A local Taiwanese chain with even more locations than Starbucks. They do not have a time limit and have reliable WiFi. They are English friendly, prices are reasonable, and menu selection is good. Some locations can be very cramped though whereas others are more spacious with multiple floors like the Kunming Store.

Petter Better Cafe – Another Taiwanese chain with 15 locations in Taipei. They do not have a time limit, have decent WiFi, and plenty of power outlets across small and shared tables. The prices are very reasonable and quality of drinks and food are  good. The cafes can get very busy though turnover of tables is quick. The Taipei Arena and Da’an stores are pretty safe bets to get seats.

Ueshima Coffee Lounge – This is a well-known high-quality coffee purveyor from Japan with 4 stores in Taipei. They do not have a time limit and have reliable WiFi.

Komeda's Coffee – This is another Japanese chain. Every seat has its own power outlet and USB power outlet, their coffee is decent and their locations are usually nice. Prices are higher than other cafes and come with an added service charge and a 2 hour time limit.

Dreamers Coffee Roasters – A Taiwanese café with 11 locations in Taipei. They have a bilingual menu, power sockets on each desk, and no time limit.  Locations are nicer than Starbucks and Louisa. The Dreamers on Xinyi St by Dongmen MRT #5 stop is the nicest of their locations.

Cama Café – Similar to Peter Better, the Taiwanese chain as  47 locations around Taipei. The prices are quite reasonable with a plenty of good food and drinks. The have ok Wi-Fi and no time limit, but many locations are quite small and may not have power outlets to use. The flagships stores near the Taipei Dome and in Shilin are the best ones for space and atmosphere.

7-11 / Family Mart / McDonald’s – While not the most convenient of locations, it is not unusual to see people sitting in one of these 24-hour venues working on their laptops in the middle of the night. They have seating, food and beverages of varying quality, and free (but spotty) Wi-Fi.

INDEPENDENT CAFES

Cozy Cowork Café – Café located in Songshan not far from Taipei Arena is a combination of café and coworking space. There is plenty of comfortable seating in different configurations, strong Wi-Fi, and plenty of power outlets in an airy and friendly environment. There is no time limit, and they have a decent menu of drinks and food, including healthy rice bowls. There is also a coworking element with a phone booth, communal working table, screens and a whiteboard you can use, and a community that people can join for events and to meet other professionals. This is my go-to café for working in Taipei.

Fika Fika Café – Located in Zhongshan off the Songjiang Nanjing MRT Station is a very friendly café that gives off bright and airy Scandinavian vibes. It is a pricier café, but the beverage and food quality are excellent. The seating is good, power outlets are available, and Wi-Fi is decent. There is no time-limit, but when it gets crowded, they may ask you to purchase something or depart (in a very friendly way).

TWATUTIAN Coffee & Co. – There are two locations, the original in Datong, and one in Zhongshan around the corner from Fika Fika. The Zhongshan location is bi-level where you order downstairs and seating is upstairs. The drink and food selection is limited and expensive, but high quality (they have an excellent cinnamon roll). The seating is plentiful,  Wi-Fi is decent, and there is no time limit. One issue  is that power outlets are limited along the walls.

Journey Kaffe – A smaller chain with 4 branches in Taipei. They have free Wi-Fi, plenty of power outlets and no time limitation. The food and drink selection are extensive with many good quality healthy options, but tends to be more expensive. The best of the locations is in Songshan, and the Neihu branches are also quite solid.

Homey’s café – Located in Da’an near the Zhongxiao Fuxing MRT Station is a very comfortable place with inexpensive coffee and food. There is no time limit, free Wi-Fi, and power outlets around. This is also one of the few cafes that stays open late till 11 PM, but also does not open till 12 PM. This place gets very busy though, so you may have to wait for seating to open up.

We had an audacious vision. We had passion for solving this massive problem. We knew our market intimately having worked in the recruitment and HR industries. I thought that was good enough for building the right team to execute on our vision. I was very wrong.

Soon after launching, I could see how different we approached work. I worked quickly and just tried things. My co-founders were much more deliberate. They wanted to debate and analyze everything. I felt over-communication and collaboration was slowing us down.

I thought the problem was that we were all remote. I worked in NYC, one co-founder was in Kansas, and the other was traveling all the time for his still full-time consulting job. When we did meet in person, however, we would get into epic arguments about the dumbest things, and then avoid coming to consensus on the big matters.

Of all the issues I could point to with my startup, I think the lack of alignment we had on how to work together was our biggest failure. We lost precious time battling each other and getting consumed by ill-will towards each other rather than solving problems and helping customers. We never spoke to each other after exiting our startup, and I fell into a deep depression knowing that the outcome could have been so much better.

The reality is most co-founding teams never work out. From the “The Founder's Dilemmas”, Professor Noam Wasserman found that 65% of startup failures are due to toxic co-founder relationships. Around 10% of co-founders end their relationship within the first year of the startup and 45% breakup within four years.

One of the major issues that leads to co-founder divorce has little to do with lack of vision or passion. They split up because they simply cannot figure out how to work together. Then they come to resent each other. This was confirmed in research by Yael Daniely showing 20% of breakups were due to CEO tension, 20% due to decision making, and 10% due to differences in values and motivation.

In big organizations, you rarely experience this tension. Sure, there are people you probably will not get along with and teams that can be outright toxic. For the most part, though, most people tend to get along even when there may be differences in working styles. You gloss over the negatives for the greater goal of working together as a team to get work done.

Early stage startups do not have that luxury. Especially with co-founding teams that are in constant communication, working in high stress situations, and doing many things for the first time. You work in a haze of uncertainty where there are no right answers, just more questions to resolve. Differences in opinion are bound to surface.

What I did not understand in my first startup was just how critical it was to understand how a team works together. Even more important though is how you work. We all have our own approaches to getting stuff done, but we rarely take the time to dig deep into what makes us tick. Before you can work as a team, you need to know how you work as individuals.

How do you begin to figure out your working habits? It starts with knowing what you care about most. This includes the things that you appreciate, that bring you joy, that help you get into your flow state. You should also consider the things that annoy you as things you would like to avoid in your working environment. These are your values.

Company values are the core guiding principles that define how an organization operates, makes decisions, and interacts with stakeholders. Values serve as the cultural foundation for employees. When values are set, they provide strategic focus, framework for working with customers, a means to attract talent, and a path to better quality decision making.

Earlier in my career, I never appreciated why establishing values was important. The places I worked at always had a set of values, but rarely put then into action. It felt like one of those things companies did because they were supposed to do but never really believed in. They were meaningless, like those Successories posters companies hang on the office walls (I do love the sarcastic versions the skewer these posters).

When I joined Amazon, I finally saw the power that having a set of values could be. Every aspect of Amazon was guided by sixteen Leadership Principles (LPs). During the interview process, I was evaluated for my alignment to various LPs. All performance reviews and promotions are assessed based on LPs. Every narrative, project, and product launch was littered with references back to LPs. Then when we would discuss a narrative after a silent doc read to start the meeting, much of the conversation would revolve around alignment to the LPs and whether the item under discussion was “customer obsessed”.

That is the incredible influence a strong set of values has over an organization. It aligns everyone, from the most junior intern to the CEO, to a way of doing things that are uniquely part of that company and make it easier to work together. When values are put into action and connect employees to the culture, a company can achieve unstoppable growth.

While many founders I speak with think of values and culture as an afterthought, I consider establishing values as the first step. For my current startup, I have started the process of value setting with these set of ten values:

• We excel as owners of this company, propelled by passion, ambition, and enthusiasm.

• We prioritize honesty and transparency in all of our communications.

• We trust in ourselves, our colleagues, and our partners to drive extraordinary outcomes.

• We earn respect by doing what we say we will do on time and with attention to detail.

• We listen intently to our customers and seek to understand their implicit needs.

• We foster creativity and innovation through a diverse, resourceful, and globally minded team.

• We work with urgency, collaborate, learn fast, and iterate constantly to deliver results.

• We value experiments and taking big bets as the best way to invent and compete.

• We accept failure happens, never blaming, but always seeking to understand and improve.

• We achieve goals, celebrate wins, and award excellence together as a team.

These are still a work in progress. I may add, remove some, or edit theses. While these are values I would like for the startup, as I bring on co-founders and employees, these values will change and evolve over time at the startup grows.

When establishing your values, here are some things to keep in mind:

• Define your vision and mission – It is important to know the why and what of your startup before you set the how.

• Dedicate time think & discuss – This is a collaborative effort and should involve open discussion with the early team.

• Share and record thoughts on culture – Setting values needs to be a transparent process that involves the entire team.

• Block out time for a culture discussion – Once the initial set of values are created, have a time for a conversation to gather feedback.

• Whiteboard the culture & values discussion – I find it is helpful having feedback on the whiteboard for everyone to see.

• Incorporate feedback into founder views – Once you grow beyond the co-founder team, you need to also add employee feedback to process.

• Announce values and integrate into work – Once you have set your values, they have to be actively used in the company. Some ways to do that include:

  • Add culture training into employee onboarding

  • Use values and language in documents

  • Build values into how you conduct meetings

  • Make values public, share openly with customers

  • Integrate values into review & promotion process

  • Incorporate values into recruiting & interview process

  • Review & revise every 6 to 12 months

When you establish a strong set of values that everyone agrees with, you have a solid foundation for your startup. Everyone feels a sense of belonging to the team and work can be executed with more clarity, purpose, and quality. When conflicts arise, you will have a basis for resolving them faster. The best way to bring joy and well-being into your startup begins with a well-crafted values put into action.

Mark

My book Community-in-a-Box has been out for over two weeks now and I am thrilled with how it has been received! I recently got a shout out in the latest Singapore Global Network newsletter (a community of over 150,000 around the globe), and many people have been buying the book. I now need a BIG favor from my awesome followers. If you have purchased the book, please take a moment to give leave a review on Amazon. Having reviews enables the book to be discovered by more people and gives it legitimacy for people that do not know me.

I also had an amazing evening last Friday co-hosting the GenieFriends dinner in Taipei! We have nearly fifty people attending with many attending for the first time. While the events are not meant to be spaces for promotion, I was thankful to the team for allowing me a minute to share the book launch.

And thank you for everyone that I had a chance to meet with over the past week in Taipei. In particular, I had the most amazing conversation with Miranda Meng who helps companies with leadership coaching and organizational change. I also enjoyed chatting about community with Perng Aw from Singapore who is helping organizations implement communities and Aletha Alfarania with GitLab to discuss the challenges of balancing community and corporate interests. I also got to catch up with my dear friends Bruce Bateman and Anita Chen who both helped out with the book (Anita wrote an amazing One Thing contribution). Thanks again!

On my most recent flight back to Taiwan, I found a pretty decent spy show. In one particular lighter moment, one of the main actors describes the lead CIA agent as a grown toddler, because he is incessantly asking why like a two-year old. If you have ever spent time around young children that non-stop ask why, you will understand how annoying it gets.

Of course, there is value in probing deeper. When investigating a bug in your code, a server outage, or flaw in a process, it is important to do a proper root cause analysis. This is the basis behind Toyota’s Five Whys principle. When you dig deep enough, you can eventually find the culprit causing all the issues.

We applied this often at Amazon in a leadership principle called dive deep. For example, in Amazon interviews, we were trained to inquire deeper into the details of a candidate’s resume or response to a question. We were trying to understand if they did the work they claimed, why they made certain decisions, and the impact their effort had on the business.

Understanding why is foundational to everything that is important in our lives. When we ponder what led us to make certain decisions or act in a particular way, the underlying cause is always some deeper, implicit motivation. When someone says they don’t know why they did something, that is never true. There is absolutely a deep-seated reason that is driving their behavior.

The problem is that most people do not take even a moment to find out what motivates them. They stumble blindly along from job to job, relationship to relationship, and decision to decision without ever contemplating the embedded programming in their brains. They may verbally ask why when they experience a painful outcome, but they avoid the effort to uncover the actual reasons. This leads to the inevitable cycle of people repeating the same mistakes repeatedly without any hope of changing their situation.

There are plenty of books and resources to help people to understand their personal why. Probably the most famous of them is Start With Why by Simon Sinek. Many other books also touch on this topic, like the Seven Habits of Successful People or almost any self-help publication. The entire field of psychiatry is based on helping people clear out the head trash in their brains so they can figure themselves out.

I wish more entrepreneurs would read some of these books or seek professional advice before launching their businesses. One of my typical questions when I am judging pitch events is to ask founders what motivated them to tackle the problem behind their startup. About half the time, the answer is a hot mess of confused reasons that have nothing to do with the founder’s expertise, experience, or interests. There is zero fit between the founder and the market they propose to serve with their solution.

That does not mean that the why behind the startup is clear in the beginning. When you are just starting, things may seem obvious. The reality, though, is that where you end up can be radically different from what you envisioned at the start.

When I started the Enterprise Sales Forum, I simply viewed it as an easy way to get salespeople and founders together. The spark was way too many one-on-one coffee meetings with startup founders to explain the basics of sales. Besides the caffeine migraines, I was annoyed by the lack of reliable information about B2B sales relevant to entrepreneurs.

As any good entrepreneur would do, I did some research into the problem. I searched around for relevant online communities, asked friends doing B2B sales if they knew of any groups, and attended various meetups focused on sales to see if any of these meet my expectations. I was hoping to land on some useful resources for anyone seeking advice on the basics of B2B sales.

As I dug deeper, nothing really hit the mark. A lot of events seemed more networking-oriented rather than built around quality content. There were also many non-salespeople in attendance, like recruiters and consultants looking to drum up business. Much of that existed seemed more self-serving for the organizers and sponsors than geared toward helping people.

I launched the community with the initial purpose of helping founders to learn about how to sell and get connected to talented salespeople to potentially recruit. As the community grew, it was not just founders attending. There were salespeople joining the events, then sales managers, and then entire sales teams. Over time, the community developed to become the place for B2B sales professionals to network with peers, learn from each other, and collaborate.

None of this was very obvious at the onset. I was not trying to solve some globally important problem or save the planet. There were observations and iterations along the way as we kept tweaking the idea and seeing where it led. Eventually, I had a clear vision of why exactly the Enterprise Sales Forum needed to exist in the world and why it mattered.

When you are trying to figure out the vision for your startup or any other life endeavor, you need to answer four questions: small why, what, who, and big why. From endless one-on-one meetings with founders to explain sales came the initial spark of an idea. It is an eureka moment where you experience or see something that needs to change because it is broken or could be improved. This is the pain point that you believe you can solve and are passionately motivated to create a solution for.

This "small why" is enough of a spark that nudges you to find the “what.” This is the product or service that you think can help solve this pain point. This immediately leads to asking "who" this solution would be for and how it would benefit them. This is both at the individual and broader market level. With the Enterprise Sales Forum, the what ended up becoming an events-driven community focused on a niche topic and the who was a well-defined audience of salespeople, sales leaders, and founders of B2B startups selling to companies.

When you discuss your idea with others, you quickly find yourself addressing the “why” question. People want to know “why” they should care about your solution. Just responding with, “This thing did not exist before and people will love it,” is not a convincing argument. Just because you are motivated and see the problem does not mean others immediately get it.

There are two questions to that can help you figure out the “big why”: why do you think your solution is needed and what impact will your solution make? From the many conversations I had before and after launching the Enterprise Sales Forum, it was clear that sales was not a well-respected profession. Training was often rudimentary and outdated. Strategy usually consisted of “ground and pound” tactics. There was little data-driven decision-making or innovation in the industry. The path to become successful in sales often felt murky and mysterious.

As I built out the Enterprise Sales Forum, I did not just want to create yet another meetup group. I wanted to establish a community that was members first, delivered high-quality and practical content, fostered a collaborative and helpful culture, and introduced innovative ideas for improving sales strategies and tactics. Offering this space for authentic connections and learning, sales professionals would feel they had a place where they could become much better and more confident in their roles. That is when I landed on the big why: to elevate sales as a noble profession and help sales professionals grow professionally in their careers.

As you begin your own startup journey, it is okay to not have the most well-defined and clear why. You have that initial spark and a direction to take, which is enough to get started. But as you dive deeper into the problem and explore solutions, do a gut check and ask yourself the four questions: small why, what, who, and big why. Along the way, you will see either validation or warning signs, so you can continue to build or pivot. Eventually the big why will become apparent with the more customers you talk to and experiments you run to prove the viability of your idea.

Mark

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind with the release of the book, my birthday, and hopping between Taiwan and NYC! There was an impromptu 42Geeks happy hour in NYC, then a few community events at Cozy Cowork Café in Taipei this week with content creators and engineers. Tonight, I am co-hosting a dinner with GenieFriends to gather folks together across the Taiwan startup, creative, and technology communities.

It feels good to finally be out meeting people again! So far this year, I have been mostly heads down to finish the book and to get my startup going. It is easy to become a hermit when you are in building mode. You cut off everyone and everything because you want to prioritize. The focus is good though, as it is easy to be pulled in so many non-productive directions.

It's also important, though, to have outlets, whether friends, mentors, advisors, family, or peers, that you can lean on for help, support, and to be a sounding board. The good news is that the reaction to my book Community-in-a-Box has been very positive. There has also been lots of great advice and connections made to help with my still stealth startup (will share more soon). Thanks to everyone that met up recently for making time to listen to me, to provide insight, and to give me some much needed encouragement!

The total number of books being published each year in the US across self-published and published books is now about  3 million. The average book sells less than 300 print copies over its lifetime in the US. Those numbers are skewed by best-sellers though because the typical self-published author rarely sells more than five books total.

So why bother writing a book at all? I can’t speak for fiction writers, but in the non-fiction world, many people want to establish their professional credibility and having a book can be a useful conversation starter and door opener. Just the fact that one has published a book can be enough to establish their domain authority.

In the realm of business and self-help books, most books are simply lead generation tools for more profitable and higher margin offerings. The book itself is simply a loss leader and the starting point of the customer acquisition funnel. From that perspective, whether the book is good or not, published through a known publishing house or self-published, does not matter.

That was not how I approached my book, Community-in-a-Box. In fact, the book was an accident. It started as an 18-page operations guide for launching new local chapters of the Enterprise Sales Forum, a community I had founded over a decade ago. My manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS) asked whether anyone on the team had a “user manual” to help our user groups struggling with engagement during COVID-19. That sounded vaguely like a community, so I shared my operations guide in an attempt to be helpful.

Nothing came of sending along the guide, but it occurred to me that I had not included anything about virtual events. The Enterprise Sales Forum had switched to fully virtual when the pandemic shutdown in-person events, so there was a whole body of knowledge to share that was more relevant to the current environment.

After a furious week of writing, I had over 50 pages and felt I had a potentially useful eBook for anyone to download as a free resource. All I had to do was proofread and clean up the awkward parts. I reached out to my network and shared the first full draft with about forty people to get their candid feedback.

I would not say the feedback was brutal, as these are all wonderful people. The comments were very candid and direct, though. The critiques drove home the fact that the book was a hot mess. The order of topics made no sense, there were huge assumptions built in, and there were gaps in the content on topics I neglected to include. On top of it, my grammar was atrocious.

With that information, I went back to the drawing board to rearrange everything. I rewrote entire chapters, added more content to fill in the gaps, and spent more time connecting different concepts so that everything flowed logically. What emerged was a solid 70 pages of content, but there was still a problem. I filled the pages with information about starting a community but there was nothing that captured what I had learned about sustaining and growing communities!

This time, I hit the whiteboard to sketch out what a long-standing community resembles and the path a community takes to get there. My experiences, data points, recollections, and catastrophic failures were laid bare across two whiteboards. Following the arrows got difficult, but most of what I poured out of my head made it into the book: a dense 180 pages of content, tips, and practical how-to’s on building and scaling a community.

What possessed me to go down the path of doing a full-on book though? I could have just punted when no one took me up on the offer to use my old operations guide. What nudged me to continue down the book path was seeing the frustration of people struggling to keep communities together in a world turned upside down by social distancing, lockdowns, and bans on in-person gatherings. Ultimately I just wanted to do something to help.

Four years later, the world has gone through another significant shift. Businesses were investing heavily into communities and building teams to support community efforts. Now the tide has shifted and many of those companies have backtracked.

What changed? The lack of credible metrics and frameworks to tie community activity  to business results. This was especially true in the technology sector where a reeling market post-COVID left both startups and enterprises top heavy with employees and too many initiatives. When the budget cuts came, community teams were an easy one to eliminate.

The recent release of the second edition of Community-in-a-Box is also driven by the desire to help. I view community as the next lever for massive value creation for both businesses and governments over the next ten years. The updated book is a playbook for community builders in organizations to give them a tangible path to prove to their stakeholders of the impact communities have on the bottom line.

Any successful book project needs to be driven by a strong internal vision. When you think you want to write a non-fiction book, you need to ask yourself two questions: what change do you want to see in the world because of your book and who will be changed because they read your book?

A lot of book failures could be avoided if would be authors just took a moment to assess the answers to those questions. By failures, I mean books that end up being paperweights or get tossed into the recycling bin rather than being read. People reading the book is the only useful metric of a book’s success. Most would be authors though get too caught up in non-significant issues like whether to self-publish or use a traditional publisher, what type of editor to hire, how to acquire reviews, and if someone is going to steal their book idea.

The biggest challenge of putting a book together once you know why it needs to exist and who the book is for is the actual writing. If you have not done a lot of writing, this can feel excruciating. While I have some tips that I have used to develop my writing chops, writing styles are quite personal. Some can write non-stop for hours, others write more piece-meal. Some write in a stream of consciousness, and others edit and think along the way.

The actual process of getting a book out in the world once you have written your first draft is not complicated. Here is the process I took with the first edition of my book and repeated for the second edition:

1. Do not write the whole book first – I started with a smaller 50 page manuscript that was a mess, but allowed me to gather early feedback to guide me in writing the complete book that people would actually find valuable. You canthink of this as your Minimally Viable Book, just enough to get useful feedback that can save you later on from writing a completely irrelevant book. And by the way, no one is going to steal your idea! Be willing to share with people you know and trust.

2. You do not need a publisher – You can certainly get one, but you first need an agent, and then even if you convince a publisher to publish your book, you have to do all the marketing and the publisher gets the majority of your royalties. Plus, it can take over a year before your book is released.

3. Self-publishing gives you control – Once I explored the traditional publishing route, I realized doing the work myself would be easier, faster, and more lucrative. I went with KDP, Kindle Direct Publishing, for distribution. There are numerous options like Draft2Digital and IngramSpark, but Amazon is where most of your audience is likely to be, and the tooling is super simple to use.

4. Wrote my manuscript in Word – There are various tools writers will use for books from Scrivener to Atticus to Google Docs. I found Google to be unreliable, the others were expensive, and required learning a whole new toolset. Word was more than adequate, tracking changes is easy, and is what most people use anyway.

5. Bought some ISBNs – These are the universal identifiers for books and you purchase a package of ten on Bowker for $295. This is better than buying one ISBN for $100 because you will most likely have both paperback and electronic. Since I now have a 2^nd edition, that requires its own ISBNs and I added a hardback option, so the package is a better deal for me. If you only plan to distribute your book on Amazon Kindle, then you do not need to buy ISBN’s as Amazon provides their own identifier called ASIN.

6. Hire a copy editor – I went to Upwork and hired a contractor for $500 to read my 180 page manuscript. There are different types of editors from developmental editors all the way to proofreaders that also go from most expensive to least. Copy editors are a mid-way choice focusing on consistency in style, grammar, punctuation, and spelling and perhaps doing some light line editing for flow. I asked the editor to go through the manuscript twice and it took less than four days to complete.

7. Hire a typesetter – My original copy editor put my manuscript into the proper format in Word for uploading to KDP. I hired a typesetter for the 2^nd edition to give the book more stylistic polish. The end deliverable was a PDF manuscript for Kindle, paperback and hardback, and it only cost $100 on Upwork for two day turnaround.

8. Hire a book cover designer – I hired a professional on Upwork (the 1^st edition I used Fiverr) for $100 to create a unique and well-designed book cover. We went through three iterations before settling on design, colors, formatting, and fonts. I provided the copy for the front cover (Title, Subtitle, Author, other text) and back cover (About Book, About Author, Testimonials, and Author Headshot). The final covers for paperback and hardback were finished in three days.

9. Invite beta readers to read book before launch – I asked a few friends if they would be open to reading the book to provide feedback and spot any issues not caught during editing. Things always bubble up and my beta readers spotted a few errors that I went back to my typesetter to incorporate.

10. Setup book on KDP – I set a date about week ahead of when I wanted to launch to upload the book and prepare it for distribution. KDP needs at least 72 hours to go through their internal checks to ensure quality control for your manuscript. Adding a bit more time gave me wiggle room in case I messed something up. You set up each distribution option separately (Kindle, paperback, hardback, audio), but the same meta data carries over once you have set up one book. You have to add details for the book page on Amazon, upload the book content (manuscript and cover), then set pricing. The KDP documentation is really thorough, but if you are stuck, the support channel is pretty helpful and I found the self-publish sub-Reddit to be a decent source of guidance on how to best use KDP and other distributors.

11. Market the hell out of the book – I set pre-orders for Kindle and promoted to my LinkedIn audience, which brought in some revenue. But I saved the big push for the launch day where I had an announcement video teed up and directly messaged over 300 people to support the post and share it with their networks. This had a big impact on drawing in buyers for the book.

12. Order author copies and promote – Most distributors, include Amazon, allow you to order copies of your book at cost. Copies for my 2^nd edition paperback come to $4 USD. I recommend getting a few dozen copies so that you can take selfies with folks holding the book and use as a giveaway during events and such. The book won’t sell itself (especially if it is a niche topic or highly crowded), so always be on the lookout for opportunities to spread the word about your book.

If you decide you have a book in you waiting to get out, feel free to reach out to be if you want some guidance or have questions. As for me, I think I am done with books for a long while!

Mark

Three big news items in my world. First, I had my first article published in Tech in Asia this week on the topic of counter-intuitive insights I learned from my experiences building and scaling communities. You can check out the article here, and please let me know what you think!

The second thing is I am co-hosting a dinner party in Taipei organized by this awesome community-first startup called GenieFriends. They have been hosting dinners, gathering entrepreneurs, investors, creatives, and influencers together to meet, collaborate, and help each other. I went to my first dinner in December and loved the people and vibe. If you want to join, the date is March 28 and you join the waitlist using this link. But it is better to let me know first so I can alert the team of your interest in attending.

The much bigger news though is that the 2^nd edition of Community-in-a-Box is now live to order on Amazon! You can order it for Kindle, Paperback, and Hardback (next week). If you have a Kindle Unlimited subscription, you can read it for free. If you already have a copy of the 1^st edition, please consider ordering this updated and much improved edition. I would also greatly appreciate positive REVIEWS on Amazon which help boost the book on the site to other potential readers interested in community building. Thanks again for all of your awesome support and that of the 54 people that contributed insights for the book and the wonderful folks that beta read the book and supplied recommendations for the back cover!

“Hello, may I help with you something?”

Silence. We stood there staring at each other for a minute before I got weirded out and closed the door, making sure to also lock the deadbolt.

About twenty minutes later, I got another buzz at the door, so I go to the door and cautiously crack it open to see who was there.

I see a tall woman, well-dressed, with her arm outstretched before me.

“Uh, hi, what’s up?” I wearily utter.

“Greetings! I noticed we have a lot of the same friends. Let’s also be friends!”

“Ok, but have we ever met before?”

She does not respond. She just continues to stand there with her arm outstretched. I’m not taking the bait, so I shut the door and get back to work.

Then, an hour later, there was another doorbell ring. I hesitate for a moment to open the door, but figured what the hell.

It is a short guy in a shabby suit. Saying nothing, he stretches out his arm to shake my hand.

This day had gotten super weird. I am in a perky mood though, so I shake his hand to see what his deal is.

“Thank you for meeting! I lead a sales agency and I would love to schedule 12 minutes of your time to talk about how we can 10x your pipeline!”

I look to my left and right to see if I am being punked on some sketch comedy show, then slam the door in his face.

This is kind of like what using LinkedIn feels like these days. You get a notification, you open the app, and it is just an ongoing string of connection requests from people you have never met and have no common interests with.

Do not get me wrong, I am a big power user of LinkedIn myself. When I first started learning about it back in 2005, I saw the promise of a platform that could do a better job of connecting professionals all around the world. By connecting, we could learn from each other, collaborate, and find opportunities to make money and build cool things.

What we have twenty years later is a chaotic mess. It is not the cesspool that X/Twitter has become, but it feels gross in the opposite direction. Beside the endless notifications of irrelevant connection requests, the content clogging up the feed leans heavily toward the preening, self-absorbed, overly-deferential, congratulatory posts that add little value, but merely feel good (just look at all the flowery job resignation posts). In a way, it is like Instagram, but with more words and fewer AI enhanced photos.

For most professionals, however, it is all that we got as a network. As of January 2025, LinkedIn had over 1 billion users across 200 countries and 67 million companies registered. About 134.5 million users actively use LinkedIn daily and almost 50% are active monthly. While not all countries are on LinkedIn as much as the US, India, and Brazil, almost every white-collar professional on the planet has a profile on the platform.

Instead of bashing the thing that we all acknowledge could be much better, the better approach is to figure out more effective ways to use this vast network of humans. As someone that has used LinkedIn extensively for business development, community building, recruiting, and content marketing, there are some strategies and tactics I have refined to help me get the most from this social media channel.

Clean up your LinkedIn profile

Most people spend little time on their LinkedIn profile. They post a profile photo, add some experience and education, create a headline, and maybe include a bio. It is the “set it and forget it” mode of LinkedIn. However, if people are checking out your profile, whether people you meet at a network event, hiring managers, or folks looking for expert advice, you do not leave an impression that highlights your authority and experience.

Here are some quick fixes you can make to elevate your profile:

• Use a professional profile photo where you look friendly – Would you put an ugly photo of yourself on a dating app? Of course not! You want to appear approachable and put together. This does not mean a stiff, corporate looking photo, but one that looks like you have an actual job. That means full face shot, no busy backgrounds, good color and contrast, and appears like your current self.

• Create a relevant, but concise, headline – People do one of two ways here, either they just list title and company, or they pack the headline with all the buzzwords. Instead, write a one sentence bio that highlights what you can offer to people visiting your profile. If you look at my headline, it reads “Stealth Startup Founder | Global Community Builder | Author”, which gets to the core of what I do.

• Add a profile banner – This is free digital real estate, so use this banner to promote your work or that of your employer. There are 1584 x 396 pixels of space, which I am using to promote my book. You can use it to promote your business, announcement an upcoming event, or direct people to your website with a QR code.

• Only list your career greatest hits – Most people mistake LinkedIn for an online resume. Huge mistake! Remove irrelevant stuff from LinkedIn and only list the work experiences that are recent, relevant, and show your talent. This is especially relevant for older professionals to tackle ageism. The stuff you did twenty years ago (and the dates you went to college) are not important, so delete from your profile.

• Optimize your work experience to show impact – Most people share what they did in their job. A better approach is to share how your work generated business results or resulting in professional recognition. Include metrics or success stories to stand out and more active language like action verbs to show personal initiative.

• Include your certifications, top skills and industry – Adding these helps people searching for your particular skills and industry focus to find you. You can also receive endorsements on your skills from your network.

• Ask for recommendations from people that know you – These appear towards the bottom, but can provide more color into your work experience and provide social proof that bolsters your profile. Aim for recommendations from peers or people more senior in their careers to maximize the effectiveness of the recommendations.

Craft your professional story

I did not yet mention the About section of the LinkedIn profile because what you write here can be valuable in many contexts such as a resume, an elevator pitch, and intros at network events. Sadly, this space is often wasted on bland work history or is blank. This is your opportunity to tell your story by weaving your work experience into a narrative that shows why you are someone with authority worth knowing. When I say “authority”, I mean the knowledge and experience that makes you one of the best in your professional field. For example, I mention community building experience in my About section because I am an expert in that field. When crafting your story, you must consider the following:

• Connecting the dots – You need to tie together your work experience and explain clearly what you can offer others in terms of your authority. Ask yourself what is the big vision of your life’s work that gives you meaning and enables you to help others?

• Focus on clarity and conciseness – Many people write a novel for their About section, but people do not have time to sift through that. Focus on highlights, not details, and be a ruthless editor in cutting out weak words and meaningless phrases.

• Have a strong opening line – Your first one or two sentences should stand out as to why you are unique, like a personal unique value proposition. Also note thatthe LinkedIn web and mobile apps only show the top four lines of your About section.

Curate your professional network

There was this affliction years ago with people that would connect with everyone else on LinkedIn. They were known at “LIONS”, or LinkedIn Open Networkers, and would have LION as part of their headline or even in their name. I deleted all of their connection requests.

The value in any network is having people you know, trust, and can be helpful. I get between 20 to 100 connection requests per week depending on my activity, like attending an event. Most of these are unsolicited from people I have not met or have heard about before. In 99% of the cases, they do not provide a personalized note why they want to connect. Another 0.5% of the time, they send a personalized note, but it is a pitch for whatever they are selling.

This approach to using LinkedIn to spam people is not effective. Here are some suggestions on building a more valuable, curated network:

• Do not connect with everyone – I mostly connect with people on LinkedIn that I have met in person or have been introduced by a trusted source. This is because I use LinkedIn as a way of helping others through my network and to help me when I need some advice or expertise. When you connect with everyone and anyone, it defeats the purpose of building a useful network.

• Have a process for handling cold outreach – I may connect with people on LinkedIn from a cold connection request if they are 1) not trying to sell me stuff immediately, and 2) respond to my question asking why they want to connect. I have a simple template asking more about them and sharing who I am. If they do not respond in a few days, I delete the request to connect.

• Never use tools to automate connections – I get a lot of requests and messages where it is obvious that the person used an automation tool. It feels inauthentic and I delete these messages immediately. Never use this approach because people don't like being spammed and it defeats the purpose of building a trusted network.

• Avoid sending connection requests without a note – It is common sense to give the person you wish to connect with a reason why you are reaching out. In fact, I even add a note when I connect with someone I met in person to remind me of how we first connected. Here is a template for writing a personalized note when connecting to someone I do not know on LinkedIn that can fit within the 300 character limit for messages (and an example below of a more authentic message that is concise, provides context, and has a clear ask for the recipient):

Hello [FIRST_NAME],

[INTERESTING THING ABOUT THEM]. [MY REACTION TO INTERESTING THING]. [WHO I AM]. [WHY I AM REACHING OUT]. [NEXT STEP].

Thanks, [MY NAME]

Hello Mark,

I enjoyed your post “Why Startups Suck”. I also think startups are painful. I am a newbie founder struggling with launching my startup and you share great advice. Can I connect and ask you a few questions about startup marketing?

Thanks, Lisa

Create or share content regularly

Sharing content is one of the toughest things to do consistently. Even as someone skilled at content creation, I struggle to do this when I get busy. The upside, though, is posting content can bolster your authority and get you noticed by people that can be useful down the road. Instead of getting stuck trying to come up with stuff to create from scratch, here are some easy ways to get started:

• Share what you are already using – Take the useful content you are reading or researching in your work and post those on your profile with a few sentences as you why you are sharing and one interesting insight from the content piece. Do  this consistently on a weekly basis, and you will attract more views to your profile from people within your field.

• Use AI chatbots to reduce the effort – I often use AI chatbots to summarize key points of an article or podcast, then have it write a short post. While the content AI produces can be amazing, people can pick up that it was not human-generated. Instead, use chatbots for ideas, then edit the output to reflect your unique voice.

• Regularly engage others’ content – If you are busy, you can simply like, comment, and share content from other people on LinkedIn. While sharing articles does not get the wide reach of originally posted content, it can help complete your profile and add to your authority. It also helps you establish connections with people you admire and may want to work with later.

Use these four tactics to elevate your LinkedIn game and make it a more valuable business tool for whatever you are doing, whether launching a startup, building your career, or expanding your business opportunities!

Mark

So I finally did it! I completed the second edition of my book Community-in-a-Box!

This book was a hell of a journey. My plan was to release a small update in November, but I got super busy with events. As things slowed down in December, I began to write but just stalled. I had more ideas to share, but was totally drained after leaving AWS.

I went back to the drawing board in January. I finished a draft by month's end and realized I had an irredeemable hot mess of a manuscript. I threw it out and started again.

The big idea that dawned on me was the growing challenge for businesses wanting to tap into the power of community but frustrated by the inability to measure and direct that potential into impact.

Now that I had a vision and a plan, I wrote furiously for a month. The new content covers:

• Defining useful metrics to assess community activity

• How to tie community activity to business impact

• Defining viable business models for communities

• Ways of monetizing community and pricing offerings

• Succession planning and exiting a community

• Choosing digital platforms for hosting community

• What the future looks like for the community domain

• Understanding how communities evolve over time

• Insights from over fifty experienced community builders

You can pre-order the Kindle edition on Amazon and the book goes live for Kindle and Paperback on March 18th, my birthday!

If you been wanting to get the book, buy this edition. If you already have the first book, consider getting the upgraded version. And if you have read the first edition, please consider leaving a positive review🙏

I have been thinking about this issue deeply for the past four years. This is why I have been heads down working on the second edition of my book Community-in-a-Box. Having dedicated a significant portion of my career on building communities, I feel many companies have missed out on the opportunity to properly tap into the power of community.

The hardest part for companies though is the question of how to connect community work to business results. It has been the missing link to take community from a mere toy in the corporate toolbox to a key pillar for corporate innovation and growth.  This is where most of my time has been spent in putting together the second edition; creating the bridge between community activity and business goals that can lead to better, more data-driven community management.

So, enjoy this excerpt from the updated book that covers what exactly is entailed in creating that data-driven bridge. And if you have thoughts on this topic, please do share!

Mark

Many organizations view community with both interest and skepticism. They understand the benefits of communities and appreciate the goodwill a strong community can provide. They recognize that community can be a significant contributor to the business. At the same time, they question whether community truly has measurable business impact.

Is it so important to measure business impact? As Peter Drucker, the famous management guru, once said, “You can’t manage what you don’t measure.” Regardless of the type of community, your goal as a leader should be to continuously improve the quality and impact of the community for its members, something that I discussed in the Measuring Impact chapter.

Demonstrating impact is even more important for organization-aligned communities. The teams supporting communities are fighting for company resources with every other corporate department. There are competing business interests, corporate politics, and annual budget wrangling. Deciding what to prioritize and fund often comes down to which departments and teams can prove their impact. Teams that can present their case in a clear, data-supported way that aligns with quantifiable business goals and KPIs often get the most funding and support.

Whenever the economy hits a downturn, the first thing companies do is cut costs. In determining which teams and projects get cut, those who have not done the work to prove their contribution to business impact are the first to get the axe. This has been a recurring theme for community teams that grow in size and scope during the good years and get decimated in the lean years. The five years from 2020 to 2025 were a particularly vicious boom-bust cycle where community was one of the hottest business trends, only to see entire teams gutted when the economy softened. If they had shown quantifiable business impact, they might have been able to justify their existence and avoid getting downsized. The problem they face is trying to determine how to collect the data to show business impact.

The question of how to measure community comes up regularly. It is one of the most discussed and debated topics in community management forums. Even organizations like Amazon, which is very data-driven, struggle to make sense of what and how to measure. Taking the next step in figuring out how community activities create business value with specific data points is even more daunting. When CFOs and corporate executives are looking at annual budget requests and determining what to keep and cut, this is the information they are seeking to justify their decisions.

Speaking of Amazon, one of the most fundamental lessons I learned while there was the concept of “Working Backwards.” It is a simple framework for serving customer needs and developing products. Instead of building a product and finding customers who need the product, working backward encourages entrepreneurs to start by understanding the customer's problem first and then creating a solution based on that knowledge.

This concept can also be useful for mapping the business value of community to community-based initiatives. For example, an organization may want to know the ROI of a community program. The mistake most community teams make is that they start with basic community-specific metrics like the number of members or attendees at events and then make this magical leap to ROI. There is no direct correlation between the two, so the argument supporting community is not convincing.

Having worked for several enterprise technology providers, I can confidently state that pinning down ROI is rarely a straightforward process. The way we would do this is to “back into the number.” That means we would start with some key business metrics that a company needs to improve, then tie that back to benefits and features in our product that could deliver a measurable improvement.

Knowing the end goal makes it easier to tie the community to business objectives. It is usually not a straight path, though. We often need “bridge metrics” to form connections that logically tie the upstream effects of community activity to goals. The framework used to build this bridge and establish correlation is the Three Levels of Community Metrics:

• Level 1 (”C1”) – Metrics tying community output to relevant business goals, OKRs (objectives & key results), or other critical business metrics,

• Level 2 (”C2”) – Metrics derived from community activity that establish the “bridge” between measurable actions and goals,

• Level 3 (”C3”) – Metrics directly related to the health of the community, in other words, the Community Pulse Metrics.

To understand how to use this framework, let’s review a few examples of how to understand how capturing C1, C2 & C3 metrics can help a technology company define the value it receives from its developer community.

• Revenue Example – The company’s developer community hosts a lot of user group meetups around the globe. They see the user groups as a source of high-quality leads. Still, they want to know specifically the potential of the user groups to generate additional revenue beyond pure marketing and sales. They have been tracking the number of attendees and noticed when examining the level of engagement that there was an uptick in repeat attendees (C3). A certain percentage of these repeat attendees have scanned a QR code to sign up for their developer newsletter (C2). Over time, some of those QR code scans, tied to a member of the community, convert into paying users (C1).

• Cost Example – The company wanted to ease the burden placed on its support team to answer the high volume of customer issues. They set up an online community forum to enable users to post questions and other users to provide answers. They track the number and percentage of questions answered by forum members (C3). Through web tracking, they can see users finding answers to questions they search for and upvoting those answers (C2). When they examine the number of support tickets per topic area, they see a drop in tickets being opened for topics that have answered questions discovered through search (C1).

• Recruitment Example – The company needs to increase hiring for open solution architect roles. The pipeline of qualified candidates, however, could not meet the recruiting quota. The recruiting team pulls data on the developer community on who has been the most active in sharing the company’s content (C3). When they review the shared content, a small percentage are creating original content like blogs and videos, thus being tagged as high-value contributors (C2). Through various outreach efforts, they have been able to initiate hiring cycles for some of these high-value contributors (C3).

Why only define three levels? Because there is a bridge that is often required to connect community activity or engagement with business value. However, adding more levels makes the connection between business and community value more tenuous. The result is a more convoluted story, and it dilutes the impact you want to convey why the investment in community is valuable from a business perspective.

The value of this approach is that it shows a logical correlation between what happens in the community and how that results in business impact. It provides community teams tangible levers to experiment and adjust certain behaviors and actions in the community to drive business goals and KPIs. You begin to “connect the dots” for stakeholders in a way that is much clearer and more direct.

Using the Three Levels of Community Metrics avoids two common errors when determining business impact. First, it does not start at some high-level and ambiguous business metric like revenue, cost, or productivity. It begins with a more attainable and practical business objective that a stakeholder would be directly responsible for as part of their objectives. Any C1 metric must have an internal owner and be a priority in order to be useful for this exercise. Second, it does not include vanity metrics that have no value for the business and do nothing to help understand business impact. We can spend our energy on actionable metrics.

There is a valid argument that some of the metrics in the above example are not strictly correlated. Many factors could influence the C1 metrics beyond the examples outside of the metrics cited. Sometimes, correlations are assumed rather than direct. Assumptions are okay as long as you can back up your assumptions with logic and show a range of effects. Just like any experiment, you need to create baselines and control groups when implementing the framework in order to figure out the correlative effects and whether your assumptions are valid.

Another common objection is that C1 and C2 could be the same depending on the type of community initiative. This is especially true if the impact made by the community is more immediate and direct. Here, it may be better not to include bridge metrics at all in order to show a correlation, as it is fairly straightforward and obvious.

The framework presented here will go a long way in supporting the case for continued investment in community efforts. Moving from vanity metrics, sporadic anecdotes, and cheerleading towards a more quantitative and data-driven approach gives community teams a more powerful tool to build the support they need to show business impact. Perhaps the most exciting benefit of the Three Levels of Community Metrics approach is that it can give community teams a seat at the table with an organization’s leadership as a domain that is as important as sales, product, or support!

It is the final stretch on finalizing the book and it has been a slog to wrap up! This is why I skipped sending a newsletter last week as I was drowning in edits to the book. The good thing is that the book is much stronger this time around!

Though I have been super busy on the book, I did have some time to get around town and do some content related activities. I had a chance to attend a few events, including on for the Taiwan Gold Card holders, as well as a pitch event for wellness startups.

I also was a guest on not just one, but two, podcasts! I started the week off as a guest on the Eddy LIVE 艾迪直播. It is hosted out of a Mexican Restaurant in Taipei and is the longest running English podcast in Taiwan. It is I had a blast talking about what brought me to Taiwan and my observations on the startup culture over tacos and margaritas!

Then I wrapped up the week as a guest on the TechSoda podcast by seasoned journalist Judy Lin covering the latest technology news from Taiwan. It was an awesome, hour-long conversation about building communities and busting up misconceptions such as why community is not just marketing. The episode should be out next week and I will share it in the next newsletter. Cheers!

Lockheed assigned 33-year-old chief engineer Kelly Johnson to the task. Rather than assembling a massive team with layers of management, Johnson took a different approach. He set up shop with just 30 engineers and 30 mechanics in a bomber production area in Burbank, California.

To maintain secrecy, they worked under a circus tent. The location had one major downside; it was next to a noxious plastics factory. The stench constantly wafted into their space. When project engineer Irv Culver answered a phone call one day with "Skunk Works," the name stuck.

Despite the conditions, this small team accomplished the impossible. The XP-80 was completed seven days ahead of schedule in January 1944. This team, officially known as Lockheed Martin's Advanced Development Program, went on to build many other innovative aircraft including the U-2 spy plane and the SR-71 Blackbird.

What made Skunk Works so successful wasn't just technical brilliance. The team was composed of talented but quirky engineers that didn't fit the ideal of model employees in the 1940’s. The team included pioneers like Mary Golda Ross, first female Native American flight engineer.

Kelly Johnson's genius was understanding how to mold a team of misfits into a high-functioning unit. He recognized that breakthrough innovation required individuals who thought differently, questioned assumptions, and weren't afraid to propose unconventional solutions.

Forty years later, Steve Jobs followed Johnson's playbook when creating the original Macintosh team. He took twenty hand-picked people out of Apple's main campus and sequestered them away from corporate bureaucracy. Like Johnson, Jobs actively recruited rebels. During a team offsite in 1983, he famously declared: "It's better to be a pirate than join the navy."

When building your startup team, traditional hiring practices fall short. You need to identify your own pirates and cannot rely on standard job descriptions that focus on static skills. Instead, hire for these five characteristics that identify high-performing team members:

1. Breadth of experience – Cross-disciplinary perspectives fuel innovation. Instead of seeing people with "non-traditional" backgrounds as misfits like candidates that hopped a few jobs or changed industries, recognize the fresh perspectives they bring.

2. Lateral thinking – Groundbreaking innovations emerge when concepts from one domain are applied to problems in another. Borrowing ideas from different fields often unlocks solutions to seemingly impossible business and engineering challenges.

3. History of creation – People who have built something from scratch demonstrate the focus and problem-solving abilities needed in startups. They have grit and perseverance, traits that define true builders who derive a deep sense of purpose in building things.

4. Comfort with uncertainty – Innovation thrives in uncertainty where success isn't binary. Startups operate with limited resources and impossible deadlines yet thrive in those conditions. Look for people who aren't paralyzed by ambiguity but energized by it.

5. Ability to learn – Learning agility is a critical. It's less important that team members check every box on a list of skills and more important that they've shown initiative to tackle new challenges and quickly acquire knowledge.

Once you start building the team, it is important to keep it small for as long as possible. When startup founders talk about the early days of launching, they often mention the simplicity of communication. You could swivel in your chair to ask a question or take a walk for a quick chat. The team worked in perfect flow state, shipping features rapidly without barriers.

The physics of team size explains why small teams work so effectively. Communication pathways multiply exponentially as teams grow. A four-person team has just six unique communication paths. Double that to eight people, and you're dealing with 28 pathways. With ten people, it jumps to 45 pathways. This communication overhead creates friction that slows everything.

Early-stage startups lean on this advantage. Despite limited resources, they accomplish a lot because communication is direct, the vision is clear, and everyone understands exactly how their work contributes to the whole. This allows for lightning fast decision-making because fewer people need to be informed and included in the decision process.

The optimal size for the initial startup team is what I call the "one-pizza team”, or small enough to be fed with a single pizza (typically 3-5 people). This size eliminates communication overhead and reduces the tendency toward consensus thinking that leads to analysis paralysis. This is why teams that begin with more than 2 or 3 founders are not ideal as it increases decision friction.

Contrast this with the “two-pizza team” (a team of 4-8 people) format popularized by Amazon. The natural inclination is to reduce friction and conflict, even with just a few more people. I saw this firsthand while at AWS; the bigger the team got, the slower we became. The team dynamic would shift toward more consensus-based decisions, reducing risk tolerance and stifling the willingness to pursue bold and radically different ideas.

Startups have a natural advantage in this regard. Unlike established companies with hierarchies and processes, startups can build their teams and culture from scratch, optimizing for speed and innovation. They can deliberately keep teams small, communication direct, and decision-making streamlined.

As Kelly Johnson proved with Skunk Works and as countless successful startups continue to demonstrate today, small teams of exceptional people can achieve amazing results. When given clear objectives and the freedom to execute, they can run circles around larger organizations with far more resources. The XP-80 jet fighter, the Macintosh computer, and the leading-edge products from today's most disruptive startups all share the same origin story. They were built by small teams of passionate geeks who refused to believe something couldn't be done.

When I think about building my own tribe of geeks for my startup, I remember this quote from one of my favorite authors, Jack Kerouac. He wrote this in On the Road:

When building your startup, think about the circus tent in Burbank and the band of engineers who changed the course of aviation history. Remember Apple’s team of renegade pirates revolutionizing computing. The talent you bring to the team and the discipline in keeping that team as small for as long as possible will actually be one of your greatest strengths.

What are the traits you find most important when hiring talent for your startup? How do you ensure that they are able to move fast and work in their flow state?

Mark

As I have been working out of Taipei, I have been looking into various options for low-cost workspaces. One recent find is Cozy Cowork Café (link to map), a coffee shop and coworking space with a collaborative atmosphere and lots of seating options. They have fast Wi-Fi, plugs at every seat, phone booths, laptop stands, and external screens. The café hosts regular networking & learning events for their community.  They also serve really good coffee & tea, breakfast, lunch, and pastries. All you are required to do is spend NT$200 ($6.10 USD) per visit.

I will have more to share in the next post on places to work. Suffice it to say though, Taiwan has tons of places to get work done as a founder or digital nomad!

Early in my career, I thought providing that level of detail was helpful. Then one day at the end of a team meeting, one of the team leads commented, “Maybe Mark can send a fifty-page email summarizing the discussion.”

I was mortified. After the meeting, I approached him to ask what he meant. He pulled me aside and said, “Bro, no one reads your emails. You want my advice? Be brief; just give us the facts.”

Years later, I have come to appreciate that less is more when writing. There is more power and clarity in using fewer words. I can still get wordy on occasion, but that early lesson continues to guide me to this day.

It was not until I became a manager and leader that I grasped why brevity matters. The more senior you are in an organization, the more your time and attention get pulled in multiple directions. Especially as a startup founder, you get added to all the meetings, asked for input on every decision, and run around doing multiple jobs. You just don’t have the time to absorb dense, overly pedantic emails.

Communications overload is a common challenge for companies of all sizes. As a leader in various enterprise tech companies over my career, I would often get added to email chains not because my input was needed, but because of my title. My inbox was a disaster, so much so that I got into the habit of deleting all emails that were not directly addressed to me.

Controlling the email flood still did not help with the overload. The emails I was obligated to read were often tedious. It took too long to get to the point and even longer to figure out what I was supposed to act on. With my packed schedule, I did not have the luxury to thoroughly digest multipage emails chock full of details and paragraphs of text.

The best messages were clear enough to prompt immediate action. Most decisions do not require long deliberation or debate. They can be made quickly and rolled back without consequence if they turn out to be the wrong choice. All that is required is getting the right amount of information in the proper context so that decisions can be made quickly and decisively.

A while back, I was following a lively discussion on the subject of communicating to managers and leaders. This is known as “managing up”. Most people struggle at managing up and providing the right type and amount of information. The reason is that most people often do not consider the perspective of the person receiving the information they are sending. This is called lacking situational empathy.

When you communicate with others, you do so either to inform or to influence. Your objective then is to ensure that the recipient of your information is either better informed or makes a decision you support. If you view the world from the eyes of the person you are communicating with, then that person will be more receptive to responding positively to your messages.

Here are four tips I have used that can help you communicate more effectively with situational empathy:

• Set the appropriate context – We live in a distracted world where people are doing multiple things in addition to reading messages. Most people that open up an email, memo, or report will only skim the information. This might be ok if the recipient is someone you are familiar with and is already aware of the subject matter. You cannot always rely on that familiarity for people you do not know well. Therefore, provide an opening sentence that sets the stage for what the person will read and why it matters.

• Put important information upfront – There is a saying in journalism called “burying the lede” when a reporter obscures the main point of the story. If you are just providing a minor status update, then there is little to hide. If there is a sizable update to share or a critical decision to make however, you want to summarize the key points upfront. Sometimes it is helpful to create a TL:DR (too long, didn’t read) section that places the summary upfront in the message. If the recipient wants to, they can find the details below.

• Establish next actions – It is surprising how often this critical element of a message is ignored. The recipient should never have to guess what action needs to be taken. A simple status update or check-in probably does not require any action. However, if you need the recipient to respond or act on something, make sure it is clear what action or decision needs to be taken and when said action should occur.

• Be concise – We often add extra verbiage and fancier words in our writing to appear smarter or more serious. Trust me, no one thinks you are smarter just because you use college-level words. People will just assume you used ChatGPT to write your message. You are always better off using fewer words and simpler language to convey your message. It is less taxing for readers, it removes ambiguity, and you appear more professional.

Being concise is something I am still learning. Working at Amazon for four years though absolutely helped me elevate my writing skills. As a writing-centric culture, any new program or initiative starts as a document. We then have to read these documents before engaging in any discussion in a meeting. Because of the amount of reading that is required, we highly value clarity and conciseness. You learn to be a ruthless editor, removing all unnecessary words and phrases that do not add meaningful value to a document. Becoming an excellent writer is as much about what you remove as it is about what you write. I would even say there is an art to editing and beauty in brevity.

Adopting the mindset of brevity in your communications goes a long way toward earning trust with others and getting results. Learning to communicate with more precision and purpose removes unnecessary communication overhead. This helps people to get more time back that can be shifted to other critical tasks and frees up mental capacity for deeper thinking.

What is your communication style? How can you encourage more effective communication and writing in your startup?

Mark

Week two in Taipei and I have been using this time to finish up my book and to catch up with founders and investors in Taiwan. I do not have an office yet, so I have been working out of a lot of cafes. Something I did not know before coming here is just how amazing and convenient working out of cafes can be. I just have to be careful about the caffeine consumption!

I was featured in an awesome article in Business Next Media, the company that hosts the Meet Taipei conference and is the key media player sharing content about the Taiwanese startups. I have been a speaker at the Meet Taipei conference twice, and I feel they have been an incredibly supportive contributor to the Taiwan startup community.

Science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke called it “the most expensive hyphen in history.” He was right, but it was more subtle than that. The actual typo was a missing overbar in a smoothing function used by the guidance system to adjust for minor variations of velocity.

Typos are just one of many problems in writing. There have been many times I have added extra semicolons in code, mistyped simple words, or butchered entire sentences. Especially in English, where rules come with many exceptions, it’s easy to make mistakes. Just look at the use of the comma.

Grammar and typos are only a small part of a bigger problem. The state of writing quality has become abysmally low. Bad writing costs America nearly $400 billion every year. People are noticing the depressing reality of today’s writing skills. In a recent survey, 81% agreed with the following statement, “Poorly written material wastes a lot of my time.”

Poor writing has infected every nook of the corporate world. The copy in most of the sales prospecting emails and proposals I receive is stunningly bad. Forget about engineering and product management writing in documentation and blogs, which might be technically correct, but filled with leaps in logic and flow. Marketing is perhaps the worst perpetrator of terrible writing. The rise of content marketing has produced a constant stream of thought leadership pushed via whitepapers, blogs, and social media. Yet all they are producing is content filled with buzzwords and business speak, and AI is making it worse.

What we write matters. If we cannot clearly and concisely convey our ideas, effective communication and collaboration are impossible. All we create is confusion and chaos. Good writing saves us from lost time, angry confrontations, unnecessary work, and avoidable mistakes.

How do you begin to improve your writing skills? This framework from Harvard Business Review is a good starting point:

Do:

· Plan what you will write before you write so your words logically flow.

· Keep sentences short and concise to convey one idea or point.

· Strive for clarity by avoiding jargon and “fancy” words.

Don’t:

· Resign yourself to the belief you can’t write. Anyone can improve their writing.

· Pretend that your first draft is acceptable. All writing requires editing.

· Bury your ideas. Lead with your main points as soon as possible.

There are also many rules around spelling and grammar in English that are easy to confuse. For example, subject-verb agreement errors are common. Another mistake is mixing up the use of words like “that” and “which” or “affect” and “effect.” Don’t rely on your brain to catch these mistakes, use tools like Grammarly to help catch these gotchas. The now retired Amazon’s Fact of the Day One blog also has some great pointers you can review (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3).

While all these tips are helping, the most important lesson in writing is finding your unique voice. As Ernest Hemingway said:

"Good writing is good conversation, only more so."

Good writing feels natural like you are speaking with someone. When you bring your authentic self and weave personality into your writing, your words have the power to influence others. The opposite is to sound like a brochure or pretend you are some very important or educated person. That leads to writing that is robotic and uninspired.

How do you find your inner voice? You write more often and make it a habit. Daily journaling helps, which can unlock ideas in your head. Many people carve out either early mornings or before bedtime to write for a set amount of time. Others are more spontaneous and jot down ideas throughout the day. For example, I use a note-taking app to record and noodle on thoughts as they come.

Once you are regularly writing, the next step in leveling up your writing is to share your thoughts in public. Over a decade ago, I took inspiration from Fred Wilson (Union Square Ventures) and Dharmesh Shah (HubSpot) to a start blog to build up my credibility as an investor in the NYC tech community. I wrote every day and a lot of it makes me cringe today. However, it succeeded in raising my profile in the startup community and vastly improving my writing.

I still write regularly. I post this newsletter weekly . Before that, I wrote two newsletters for engineering leaders and B2B sales professionals that were also on a weekly cadence. I published a book back in 2020 called Community-in-a-Box. Taken together, I have written over one million words in the past several years, all of which are available to anyone on the Internet.

Writing in public is a forcing function. It forces you to think more, edit more, and question more. I have even reversed my views sometimes because of the clarity I gained from writing down my ideas. Being public also keeps you accountable. The comments and feedback I have received have helped to further refine my ideas and fine-tune my wording.

My time at Amazon Web Services further pushed the quality of my writing higher. Writing is core to the culture of Amazon. Meetings do not start with discussion but with silently reading a prepared document from 2 to 6 pages in length. Only once everyone has read the document and left comments does the discussion begin. When any new idea is proposed, the first step is not a presentation with bullet points but with a document called a PRFAQ (press release and frequently asked questions). Why insist on using long-form, narrative style? Because writing full sentences and paragraphs paints a complete picture of the ideas being communicated, nuances that are missed in the presentation format.

Every major initiative at Amazon, whether a new service, program, or mechanism, got its start with a well-composed written narrative. Then it would go through several iterations of document reads and comments from peers, managers, and senior leadership. Sometimes the feedback would be brutal, especially for those who were new to Amazon. However, it also ensured that all narratives met the high bar for quality so that the ideas being proposed were clearly understood in terms of what was being proposed, what the value to the customer and Amazon would be, and the results expected.

Good writing is a superpower at Amazon for getting things done. Elevating your writing can open doors, build influence, inspire others, change minds, and launch movements. It shows you are a problem solver and thinker, a distinction that is critical when you engage with decision-makers, whether investors, customers, or executives. Writing well speaks volumes about your credibility and competence when key decisions are being made.

Do you believe writing could be a hidden superpower for you? How would you use writing in making better decisions for your startup?

Mark

So I landed in Taiwan and here for a couple of weeks. If you want to meet up, let me know! I will be around doing startup building stuff and finishing up the book.

Two minor changes regarding this newsletter is that the external website where I host the archive of this newsletter has a new home. It is still hosted on Beehiiv, but now with a custom domain. Also the email reply has been changed to go to my main email address so I actually see the replies in a timely fashion.

Outside of that, not much news but will share more of my various meetups here in the next week’s edition. Hope to catch up with many of you soon!

Over four years ago, I had the brilliant idea to write a book, so I am familiar with the experience. Much of the process was painless despite several very late night and early morning sessions to push out chapters, do rewrites, and edit down my manuscript to a reasonable length. When I finally wrapped up that last paragraph, I had assembled 50,000 words in a little over two months, all without consuming any glass.

I am now returning to my book, Community-in-a-Box, to fix all the things I initially screwed up. In the process of fixing, tweaking, and updating the entire book front to back, I realized there was a whole lot more stuff that I never touched or considered. What was meant to be a one month, bang it out, and ship a simple second edition, has now become a glass munching four month slog.

Someone mentioned to me that I should use AI to write the book. That would certainly be easier, but it would also have as much soul as a John Tesh album. Instead, I put some actual thought into the updated edition to reflect what I have learned and unlearned over the course of four years speaking about and living the topic.

And what topic is that? Hopefully you said community because I just shared the title of the book two paragraphs ago. Anyway, it is a subject near and dear to my heart as I have been involved in community work for over a decade. That includes not just founding my own communities, but also my time at Stack Overflow and AWS where I actively built and supported communities of developers and startup founders.

The book is nearing completion, I promise. There are a bunch of people that have been waiting, including the fifty wonderful contributors who graciously shared a snippet of their community wisdom for inclusion in the book. And to those folks that keep bugging me for the Audiobook version or a translated copy in X language, I will absolutely maybe have something ready sometime between not now and later.

In my excitement of (almost) reaching the end, I wanted to share an excerpt from the book below. AI comes up in literally every conversation I have about technology, and it is clear AI is upending the status quo across industries and domains. Community is not immune to this trend, but it has lagged behind in adoption and integration. I am firmly in the camp that Community AI is on the cusp of happening, so enjoy this brief segment from the chapter on future trends focused on how AI will impact the work of communities. Thanks!

Mark

One of the most groundbreaking technology trends over the past three years has been the rise of Generative AI. In fact, it might be an innovation that is bigger than the Web, social media, or smartphones. When you look at the pace of major inflection points in technology, big platform shifts occur every twenty years. The first jump was from mainframes to PC’s in the 80’s. Then the industry shifted from PC’s to cloud platforms in the early 2000’s, things like cloud infrastructure, SaaS applications, and consumer mobile apps. We are now entering the age of the AI platform.

As you can guess from the term, AI platform means more than just a chatbot. Those were simply tools that helped to introduce and popularize the new advances in AI driven by large language models (“LLM’s”) trained by powerful infrastructure using AI optimized chips called GPU’s. This entire platform stack allowed anyone with an Internet connection to create text, images, and even movies as well as tap into API’s to build AI enabled applications without being a machine learning expert or data scientist.

AI is already having a significant impact in how we use technology and how it shapes our experience. AI is making product and content recommendations, entering our support interactions, and automating mundane tasks. Through the power of Agentic AI, tasks can be chained together into multi-step workflows fully orchestrated by AI to perform decision making and solve problems. While there is still often a human in the loop for safety and control reasons, AI is able to handle the bulk of the work at scale and much faster than with previous generations of technology.

These new capabilities of AI have the potential to radically transform entire industries from biotech to farming to shipping. AI is also changing how we think about work inside companies from sales and marketing to product and engineering. There are now AI sales agents, AI coding assistant tools, and AI content generators. From an operations standpoint, domains like HR and finance stand to see enormous productivity gains by removing a lot of repetitive, manual, and time consuming undifferentiated work. Even meetings are being reinvented with tools to create agendas, summarize meeting points, provide follow up recommendation, and monitor progress on action items.

One of first things I noticed when I started getting involved in community work was just how much of the work was complete drudgery. Creating event materials, connecting members, moderating content, managing sponsors, and organizing all of the videos and photos from events. When I was running the Enterprise Sales Forum, even hiring a full-time admin and streamlining tasks did not fully address all of the tedious and redundant tasks needed to run the community. There is a huge opportunity for AI to eliminate a lot of the work involved with communities.

The even bigger and bolder opportunity however is to use AI to enhance the community experience for members. Take for example how you meet people at events. Most of the time you only get to meet the people that you are nearest to, not necessarily the people that would be most helpful to you. AI can determine the best matches before the event and create pre-introductions for you to meet each other. For members just joining the community, AI can customize the onboarding experience by suggesting ideas for getting involved based on their background and interests. Another idea is to monitor community engagement to identify potential ambassadors and use an AI agent to launch a series of tasks to incentivize the member to join the ambassador program. These are the type of tasks that would normally be time consuming and require a lot of data wrangling, all of which are easily handled with the help of AI.

The possibilities for AI in shaping the community management and member experience are limitless. In a time where cost is still an important consideration, deploying AI can reduce the resources dedicated to ongoing management for both independent and organization aligned communities*. On the revenue side, AI opens up possibilities by helping to surface business opportunities, recruit new members, and entice sponsors. We are just at the beginning stages of this AI revolution and communities stand to be one of the biggest beneficiaries!

*Organization aligned communities are communities built around a company and its products.

Yes, the book I have been mentioning over the past few months will soon be a reality! I am excited about the second edition and all of the new ground that it covers including future trends, community business models, community metrics, and exiting a community. At the risk of falling on my face publicly if I do not actually get this done, I will be releasing the book on my birthday, March 18.

Because I have been furiously writing, I have not done much in the way of socializing. I will be returning to Taiwan though, landing on the evening of February 6^th. I am looking forward to connecting with my Taipei friends after the Lunar New Year! If you will be in town, let’s make plans to have tea.

In the film, the villains of the movie, the two owners of a commodities brokerage firm, make a wager to test whose views on nature vs. nurture were true. They setup one of their employees for theft and drugs, fire him from his job, and freeze his bank accounts. Meanwhile, the owners took in a conman from the streets, installed him in the old job of the employee they setup, and provided him access to housing and wealth. It did not take long for the main characters to adjust into their newfound life situations.

Of course, this was work of fiction and to keep the story going, they had to have the characters settle into their new lifestyles. We have seen plenty of real life situations though of people making radical shifts in a short period of time. Take for example all the crypto bros that all of a sudden became AI gurus. One day it was blockchain everything and the next day it was LLM’s everywhere.

I have gone through plenty of my own large shifts in my life and career over the years. My career started in commodities trading, but I then jumped to software engineering. Years later, I did another huge shift from developer to salesperson. Then I launched a startup as a founder, became a community builder, and jumped to developer relations.

All of these changes were challenging. While I had some programming experience growing up and had graduated with an Electrical Engineering degree, I did not know anything about writing production level code. For the first six months, I walked into the office every day thinking I was going to be fired for not learning fast enough. Fortunately, I managed to learn enough to launch an app and not drop any production databases in the process.

I definitely thought I would be out of the job when I got transferred to sales. I knew next to nothing about sales and got zero training or mentorship from my manager. Luckily we sold a technical product to engineering teams, so I muddled through as a sales rep that actually knew the product and could explain things to engineers. Eventually I switched to a company that excelled at enterprise B2B sales and provided me incredible experience to learn the ropes from experienced professionals at the top of their careers.

Each of these stages in my career were hard. I often felt I was an imposter stepping into these roles and had intense doubts about my abilities. Nothing prepared me however for how jarring of a transition it would be from working at a big company to jumping into startup life.

There are two directions you can go between corporates and startups. The easier transition is going to corporates. This is not because it is easier from a cultural adjustment standpoint. That is often the most jarring experience. It is easier because you have more time to onboard and adjust into your role and new company. There are resources, teams, and processes to support you with whatever you need to succeed. Even if the work becomes overwhelming, the company is big enough to provide help, such as peer and mentorship programs to talk through the stress and management processes to mitigate and adjust workloads.

When I arrived at AWS, I joined the startups team that was staffed with formed startup founders and operators. A lot of the folks I talked to in my first few months of onboarding joked that they joined AWS as a vacation from startups. Even though working at Amazon is absolutely not like a vacation, I could understand what they were saying. As crazed and stressful as things might get at a massive company like Amazon, it is nothing compared to the stress of startups.

The much harder transition is from corporate to startup. I recently spoke with another former Amazonian who made the transition to launch a startup three years ago. Though he prepared himself financially and had already started work on his startup, he shared that nothing could truly prepare him for the shock once he left. He spent the first year of his startup just trying to unlearn all of the habits he had picked up while at Amazon.

Though big companies will talk a lot about ownership, you do not truly understand what that means until you are in a startup. As a founder, you quickly realize that there is no one else to do the work. If a problem comes up with a customer, if an operational snafu stalls momentum, if a bug takes down the software, you just got to roll up your sleeves and fix it. And if something does not get done, that’s how it will remain until it is forgotten or blows up into a bigger issue you simply cannot ignore. Even as an employee, the startup does not have the resources or staff to cover you if you cannot do the work.

The other thing you realize is the difference in speed. Corporation life moves, but it can feel like slow motion video when you have been in startups. Building, iterating, testing, experimenting, deploying, learning, and pivoting happen at breakneck speed. Decisions do not wait for the status meeting next week. There are no meetings to coordinate the next meeting. You are not writing a 6-page narrative to propose a new feature. No one cares about the new cover letter on the TPS reports.

Startups are pure execution machines. This is by design as a startup is a hypothesis by founders to find a repeatable and scalable business model. Until they land on that business model, they are essentially on life support. A corporation has a business model that is working and generates profit. Corporations are pure optimization machines, taking what already works and figuring out ways to further expand the business and increase profitability. While speed is not irrelevant, big companies care more about capital utilization.

Returning to my ex-Amazonian startup friend, that is what he meant by unlearning. You have this weening off period where you realize the things that made you successful in your role at a big company are simply not helpful as a founder. There is no time to be right about something or wait for the perfect situation, you just have to continuously iterate and ship.

I am now going into my second corporate to startup transition. The first time was leaving Oracle to launch a startup over fifteen years ago. My biggest mistake then was pretending our little startup was some big company, leading us to waste a lot of time and money. I also assumed that everyone on the team had the same bias for action and level of personal ownership that I did, which ended up not being the case. This is why choosing your co-founders well is so important!

I did not think this second transition would be as hard leaving AWS. It is actually hard in another way that I did not expect. After four and a half years of pouring myself into a role that I loved, I have found it hard to stop being the Global Startup Advocate. Though I had some obligations to finish up towards the end of last year, I still miss that side of who I was.

The other challenge has been getting mentally focused. The reality is that it was an exhausting few years that was compounded by the travel. When I came back from Taiwan for the holidays back in mid-December, there were days when I could do nothing but alternate staring out the window and at my laptop without accomplishing anything. It felt massively unproductive, but I did not have the energy or desire to snap myself out of my zombie state.

Now that I am out of my post-AWS funk, I am shifting into startup focus with renewed energy and excitement. It simply took me some time to realize I needed to clear my mind first. This is something a lot of founders jumping from corporate to startups neglect. Once you get on the startup train, there are precious few moments to stop for a mental and emotional cleansing. If you can afford to, take that time upfront to prepare yourself for the long journey ahead.

Did you make the transition from big corporate to startup founder? What was the most difficult adjustment for you?

Mark

I am back in NYC for a couple of weeks before I head back to Taiwan on February 5 after the Lunar New Year. It has been great to catch up with folks from other startup founders to fellow Amazonians. I even attended an impromptu happy hour last night with some of the 42Geeks based in NYC.

Speaking of 42Geeks, the former Chief Geek and startup founder Chok Ooi joined me for an interview on TaiwanPlus, and English-language live streaming and an international television channel based in Taiwan.

The show is called Connected featuring stories of startups and entrepreneurship that are relevant to Taiwan. Over thirty minutes, we discussed Taiwan's startup ecosystem, building startups overseas, and how programs like the Taiwan Gold Card attract international talent.

Check out the interview here on their YouTube and please give it a thumb up!