a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: You Just Thought You Were Building a Software Company. It's a Community.

Episode Date: May 30, 2014

For Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, community is everything. When he needed a double lung transplant, Gilliam turned to the Internet and to his online community to make it happen. He's organized political campaigns, made documentary films, and built his company NationBuilder by tapping into the power that large scale communities on the internet provide. Community at internet scale is a deep reservoir of people, ideas and yes, money, that Gilliam believes changes how we do almost everything - and makes almost anything possible.

Welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Michael Copeland. I'm here today with Jim Gilliam, who is the founder of NationBuilder, all the way from Los Angeles. Downtown Los Angeles. All right, representing. Jim, you guys, we just spent a day, and in particular you spent a day, talking about community. And you said one thing, you made this statement that community is everything. It's the whole thing. What did you mean by that?

And, like, how did you get to that conclusion? Yeah. So Nation Builder is, you know, helps people build community, helps people organize communities, and it's the, it's, you know, it's software to do that. And so, but, you know, we've spent a fair amount of time understanding kind of what that really is, and including how that applies to our company itself. So, like, I go back, you know, years and sort of, you know, why we started the company. And there's sort of a lot of elements of community. I, we made documentary films and we organized people around. the films because we couldn't like sell them to a studio or anything we did that 10 years ago and that was community organizing right and I you know I needed the double lung transplant we organized a community to kind of help me do that um political campaigns the Obama campaign all this was community organizing and and so for you I mean community was a sort of tools the wrong world but it was a mechanism to help you get things done and they a wide variety of things from you know lungs to politics to you name it right yeah and so the

genesis and the idea of nationhood was that you know that should be that power should be available to everybody right there was this sort of widening gap this widening digital divide that was happening where the folks who had a lot of resources could organize because they could hack together all these different tools you know everything from donation processing to email marketing and stuff like that but that really should be available to everybody it should be affordable it should be accessible all that so here's something that I find fascinating like you know on the one hand there's people who would say that you know what

what technologists build kind of has destroyed some of the fabric of community. And on the other hand, a community is stronger and more diverse and more kind of extensible than ever. So what is it and how has community changed? Because ever since there's been people, there's been community, right? Yeah. So it used to be that community was very sort of physical, it had to be in physical proximity to folks. And that was the only way the community could really exist. And with Internet does, it makes it so that that community can exist across. despite any boundaries and and that's just extremely powerful but what it means is is that

instead of having what would be called sort of strong ties where you know everybody really well like you know what they ate for breakfast right you like you like you like you know know that they snore at night right you know like beside you know you made them breakfast maybe yeah right yeah like you know all of those things um when on the internet right you can have like much you can have everything from really strong ties to really weak ties people that you sort of barely even know but still have some kind of connection with them and that's all the also really powerful, but they're just, they're different things. So, you know, as an entrepreneur and as somebody's building a company, and we had a lot of

these discussions today, and it ranged from, you know, folks from Lyft, where there's a community around getting people from point A to point B or Airbnb, where there's a community around staying in people's homes. How has community sort of insinuated itself into building companies, especially ones that are sort of internet-based and software-based? We sort of kind of backdoored our way into it. All of our business models are sort of largely based around large groups of people coming together to do things. And sometimes we conceptualize that as crowdsourcing.

Sometimes we conceptualize it as like a marketplace. Like Airbnb would think of themselves as a marketplace in some sense. But really at the core, what's going on is it is communities creating things at a scale that was just never possible before. And that's, you know, so all the sharing economy stuff. Like really at the core, it's a community is accomplishing things. And the technology world didn't approach it that way. It was users, right? Well, like it wasn't.

And so I think that's what's an interesting shift happening now is that you in particular and your sort of peer group understand that it's not just more and more and more users, it's something else. Yeah. So it's interesting to see a lot of the political background from some of the folks that are kind of on the front lines of this. Douglas Atkin, who's now at Airbnb, figuring out how to turn their sort of massive user base into a community. And they've had some great early success with that. But like he comes from from a political world.

We have a few other folks from a political world. And it turns out that politics kind of has the secret to this because for a very long time, they've had to figure out how do I get a very specific person to the polls on election day? Right. And the best way to do that with a lot of volunteers, right, is with a lot of volunteers organizing people on the ground. And so the concepts and the principles behind that now can apply to, you know, organizing

hosts for meetups, right? They can sort of organize hosts for screenings, can organize hosts for actually like places for people to stay. Right, right. And are there things that you've learned along the way about how to build a community, the sort of boundaries of like these kinds of communities and also sort of kind of building a business around it? One of the big lessons for us has been really baking community into our company culture. It started, we had this whole, you know, we got funding from Andreas and Horowitz, you know, our head count was like ramping up really quickly. We were at 30 employees before we knew it. And we had this whole, some situation, I don't remember what it was, but we were all talking about it.

And someone suggested that we go around a circle and just explain why it was that we were there. And sort of one sort of employee after another, you know, spent like a couple of minutes just describing how they got the nation building and sort of why it was that it mattered to them, the thing that they wanted to change. And by the time it got to me, I was just totally speechless. I actually couldn't talk. I was so overwhelmed with the connections that we had already created amongst the staff and the community. And since then, we've worked on helping employees understand their story and telling it. We actually have a storytelling director who sits down with folks for several hours to help them craft their own narrative.

And what we're finding is that being able to, to powerfully communicate your story and how it connects to our company just radiates out from the staff. And so it radiates to our customers, to our designers, and when they talk to folks, right? So, yeah, I mean, who hears those stories, both internally and externally? It's everybody we talk to. And how? So instead of a sales team, we have an organizing team. Right. Right. So they're very much designed to, you know, as folks sign up on the website for the free trial, or they go to a conference to sort of meet folks. They go and they share. their stories, right? They talk to people. One time when we train people sort of pretty

aggressively in how to do that. It's fairly common in political organizing world to do this. Like an Obama campaign trained hundreds of thousands of volunteers, right, in their story and how it connected to the campaign. Right. We were in a room filled with people who are sort of understand the community is important. Do you see it kind of percolating out into different kinds of industries and in different ways? Do more and more people understand sort of the power and the importance? People are definitely starting to have a glimpse into it. The core markets for us are politics and nonprofits.

They've known that they've needed this stuff for a long time. But we're starting to see folks, you know, inspired by Kickstarter crowd tilt, a lot of the stuff that where they're, they don't quite realize that what that is is it's organized in the community, but they're seeing the power of it. And so there's a lot of our efforts now are helping folks understand that, you know, this has actually been going on for a really long time. Here's how it works. It's really amazing. And it's not just about that one project. It's about the next one and the next one and the next one. Building relationships with people over time give you the opportunity to create and do things that you could never have done otherwise. You don't have to ask for permission. You basically just need to have a community that cares.

I mean, so you must have a lens on this daily, if not hourly, right? I mean, what kinds of things you see happening as a result of disability to sort of bring people together and get things done? Part of what excites me so much is that there's all of this untapped potential sitting in corporate offices with people at jobs that they hate, right? Because they've been told this story that, like, you have to, like, make as much money as possible, and, like, that is what's going to make you happy. So you go through school and college, you do you make all this money, and then they're sitting around, they're like, they're miserable, right? and what community provides with the internet provides a community at scale is the potential to create the thing that you were always meant to create and you may not actually even know what that is yet right but if you can figure it out right and you can tell a story about why it matters to people right you can get funding for it right you can get people to host the screening of your

movie right you can do pretty much anything and so um we are only beginning to understand right the possibilities of this. And so what really excites me is, is not some sort of vision of what the world is going to look like. It's because I have absolutely no idea what it's going to look like. And it's going to be awesome. Well, I am with you and I will meet you in the awesome. Jim, thanks so much for coming by and coming up and talking through community. Thank you. Thanks.