Shriya Nevatia - How to make a career in the community space!

Hello, welcome everybody. Thanks for tuning in to the undefeated underdogs. I always mess up. You know, I should have thought a shorter name for that. But thanks for tuning in. This is episode three, and I have my very good friend, well, Twitter friend Shreya with me. And I'm your host Sharad. I'm so excited to talk to you, Shreya. This is the first time I guess you and I were kind of like you know. chatting on a video. We've been going on and off on Twitter threads and whatnot. But yeah, Shreya is a good friend of mine. I often see her providing a ton of value to founders and the rest of the community on Twitter. Thanks for taking time, Shreya. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Yeah, let me do like a brief intro of Shreya before we dive into the questions. I do have like prepared some set of things for you, Shreya. Shreya is a founder, community builder. She's an angel investor and a mentor. She's currently a general manager at Silva, which is— which I want to like cover because I have a very good relationship with Tom. We'll talk about that later. And she previously led On Deck's Catalyst program, a remote program for young tech leaders. She's also a founder and CEO of this amazing community, the Violet Society, a community for ambitious female non-binary people in tech. Shreya, thanks so much again. I'm so excited to like, you know, have this conversation with you. And yeah, I do have like some topics to cover, but let's go. Like, right on top of, right off the bat, I do have the opening question is about your recent role. Congrats on joining Silva. And if you want to like, you know, walk me through about it, like tell me more about the role and tell me more about Silva.

Yeah. So, Sylva's been a little bit stealth and then we're kind of coming out of the woodwork over the past couple of months. Basically, the idea is we acquire and scale profitable online communities, help build belonging for the members across all of these different communities. So, I think the thing that got me really excited is first, like you said, Tom, Tom Guthrie, the co-founder and CEO, is just a fantastic leader. And I think his vision for this is really smart. He was working on a couple of different communities with his other co-founders. 2 years ago, and they realized that communities themselves are not really venture-scale businesses, but a company that has many communities under their domain and then brings the backend together and makes them all kind of synchronize, like their data, their HR, their finances, could build a lot of these really profitable, high-margin communities and help the members of any one individual community find a couple of others that might be a good fit. for the rest of their life and career. So we do focus on job and career-focused communities right now, but I think the vision is much larger than that. So I'm excited to be on the team.

That's amazing. You're the general manager at Siloah. What's your role about and what do you do like on a day-to-day basis? I'm just curious to learn because usually GMs have different set of roles. And for a company like Silva, which is heavily on the community end, and you know me, I'm more into communities as well. I've built communities before and, you know, thoroughly enjoy it. What's your role look like?

Yeah, so I love building communities. I've built them on the side and full-time for the past 10 years between Facebook groups and Slack communities. So the thing that really excited me about this role is Silva has all of these communities under this umbrella company of Silva. And there's many fantastic community managers who really focus on the member experience and the offerings like courses or online events or in-person events. But there weren't people who could really focus on the business side of running the community. So how to be really cost efficient, how to introduce new business lines and test if those are working well or not. So my role as general manager is to take 3 of the communities that are focused on founder founders. So Propel for kind of general software startup founders, Foodboro for food and beverage founders and partners, and No-Code Founders, exactly what it sounds like, no-code tools, and help all of those grow and thrive, expand their member base, expand their revenue lines. So I really love it because I feel like I get the control of being kind of a founder, independent business leader within the support system of a wider startup.

So you're kind of a community builder, but wearing a different hat and managing like 3 different communities in a way. That's so interesting. And I feel like it's not new for you. Community is always in your arena, even at On Deck and even the Violet Society community you've built from scratch. I was just— just want to dive deeper into that, the whole space of community. Where did you get introduced to the Word community first, and how did you like see the power and turn it into mostly like a career for yourself?

Yeah, so I think I saw the potential when I was an undergrad. So I went to Tufts for college, and Tufts is outside Boston, liberal arts college. We have an engineering school, but it's a university. We have a very popular comp sci department and major, But it's not really a tech school. It's not a tech school. So, when I decided to study computer science, because I was intrigued by startups in the tech industry, which was my sophomore year, I didn't go in knowing about it. I looked around and realized that Tufts didn't have a lot of resources for startups specifically. A lot of the people studying comp sci were looking to more kind of like work at Google or Facebook or Amazon after graduation or do research. So I had to kind of turn to taking the train to downtown Boston and going to events at Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, BU, and then like General Assembly Boston and other organizations to actually get that professional and industry exposure. So I was going to events whenever I could, like I was getting off campus on the weekends, went to, found out that hackathons existed, got really excited and went to a few. And I was really trying to figure out like, Okay. If my university, the professors are professors, they're researchers, they're not necessarily industry experts. My peers are just as clueless as me. Even if I ask older peers, they know some things, they don't know everything. I want to talk to actual industry practitioners and understand what are all the jobs in the industry? What does it mean to be a startup founder? What does it mean to be a VC? What does a product manager's day-to-day look like versus what does a UX designer's day-to-day look like? So all of that off-campus stuff is what started to get those kind of gears turning in the back of my mind of, um, there were a lot of pieces that came together over time. First, I was like, let me attend these to get to know the industry. Then I was like, it seems like the host of the events gets a lot of the value. They get to know the speaker and the members, and everyone turns to them and goes, oh, thanks for hosting this event. Um, and that started to kind of get the gears turning, and I thought, why don't I build something that solves my own problem? Because I was going to these events and a lot of the people who were attending were older than me and they were in the industry. And as much as I was learning about the industry through the talks, it was a little inefficient and I couldn't really be friends with 30-year-olds when I was 20. So the very first idea for the Violet Society was to build this like cross-university sorority type of thing for startups. And so I wanted to get founders, engineers, designers, PMs, all the different jobs and roles and skill sets.

Operators.

Yeah, all the operators in a room together so that we could all learn together about startups. Because I also saw that if you wanna get interested in startups, at the time there was no, like Contrary started after I graduated. So there was really just Dorm Room Fund and Rough Draft Ventures, very few other student startup resources from 2012. 2010 to '15. And they all said that like, they're looking for co-founder teams and you need a technical co-founder. And even though I was studying computer science, I knew I wouldn't be a great technical co-founder. And so, I was really trying to solve my own, and that's how I got into communities.

I love that story for many reasons, because I think you and I kind of share a similar I think wavelength, I would say, because even I did my graduation in something and I'm doing something else completely. Like, I have, like, I've never implemented or applied what I've learned the 4 or plus. I did master's too, like 2 plus years as well. That's one thing. The other thing is you kind of went after your curiosity.

Yeah.

Which I think is the most important thing in a founder DNA, right? Like, Kind of like find your curiosity and do things and take actions towards it. I think the third thing is from that curiosity, you build this very personal thing called the Violet Society, which is so personal to yourself. It's kind of like your baby. And those 3 apply to a lot many founders, you know, I know personally, right? Like they did something, they started something else, and they're doing something else now. They find their own curiosity and they take action towards it. Take me to the behind the scenes. Like, what were the first few days of the Violet Society? You know, I've been to very many communities, I've built many communities from ground up, and it's always, you know, the initial days are very tough, right? As you know, as a community builder, you have to be very patient and you have to play the long game. I want to understand and maybe the listeners find it very compelling of the initial first days of the Violet Society, how it started. You kind of touched upon a little bit, but want to get deeper into that.

Yeah, I really like sharing this story. I mean, I'm an oversharer in general. I feel like everyone on Twitter has to have some kind of oversharing tendencies, otherwise they don't get active on Twitter. So true. So I've shared this pretty freely, but now I feel even more comfortable because I think I've been around the block in my career, like 7 years in full-time. So I took a semester off in what would've been my senior fall, and then I graduated a year late. And it was really because I was just burnt out and overwhelmed. I was trying to— I made it sound like I did all this startup research and it was very obvious that I wanted to be at a startup, but simultaneously I was researching like 40 other potential career paths. I wanted to really understand any career I was even remotely interested in. So like, I was thinking of being an edtech researcher. I was still interested in like publishing and magazines. I threw that out kind of quickly. So there were a lot of different career paths that I, uh, that I thought of while I was more interested in the startup one, and that kind of won out. Right. But because I was overwhelming myself in, um, it was fall 2013, and I just like called up my parents. I'm an only child, and I was like, I think if I try and keep doing undergrad, I'm gonna just like burst and explode and I need to come home. So I actually stayed home for a semester and I told them the thing that kind of convinced them was that first of all, they were like, we only have one kid. Like if she's telling the truth and if she really has like a mental breakdown at school, right? What's the point? Right. Like let's just have her, let her stay home. Let her kind of recover and then go back and finish her degree after. And I also told them, I said, I'm having a really hard time balancing all the things I want to learn about in these different career paths with all these clubs and organizations with my schoolwork. So, can I come home and just focus on the career skills? Because I explained to them what I had figured out in undergrad, which many people now have said about computer science, which is you don't actually learn. the web development or mobile development skills that are going to get you a job in a comp sci degree. A comp sci degree is computer science research. So, data structures, algorithms, which you use in interviews and never again.

Right.

And like the theory.

Right.

And I didn't mind that because I initially was going to be a math major, but I also knew like, wow, I better learn this other stuff. Otherwise, I'm not gonna get a job as a software engineer. So, that semester at home, I told my parents, I was like, I'm gonna do Codecademy courses. I'm gonna learn to build a website. I'm going to do everything that will actually get me jobs and internships. And I did. I didn't do it quickly, but I did it. And that space away from campus, I think, and just working independently with the support of my parents, I think is what allowed me to actually think like, Shreya, what could you do that would make your resume and experience look really great when you get a job a year and a half from now? When you're applying to jobs, And I was graduating 2015 instead of '14, and I knew it at the time that my pushing off would do that. I asked myself, what can I do that can make my resume stand out amongst all my other peers? And not just peers at the school, but people have to remember when they're in undergrad, you're not competing with your school anymore. You're competing with everybody. You're competing with either America or the world for all of these jobs. Right. So you have to have some kind of interesting edge. And what I had figured out after going to all these events was like, I have to create something myself. I need to create a startup, a community, an event series, a podcast, a newsletter, something. Podcasts and newsletters, I think, weren't even as popular for students.

Right. That's true. Yeah.

Yeah. Back in 2014, '15. So, that fall, I found out about the Facebook group Lady Storm Hackathons and joined it. Got super into it. And basically what I was doing was just learning through all of the other people. I was asking all of these questions about how to get internships, how to get jobs, what skills to get. Couple months later, Dave Fontenot started Hackathon Hackers, which was for everyone, not just women. And then that exploded. That group became huge, popular, made a bunch of friends through the initial group before it got too big and noisy.

Mm-hmm.

And I started to get really excited. Okay, the kids who are interested in the hackathon scene, we're all gonna go into the industry. And then we would've been like, oh, remember way back when, when we met through that little group? Which is true now. It's like fantastic. I've been working with a bunch of people I met back in 2013. And it also inspired me and gave me that push of like, this is what I can start. I'm gonna start a smaller hands-on in-person community. Because I love these online remote global communities and what they've given to me. And what could I uniquely do that I think I could figure out and succeed? And so that's when I created the very first website for the Violet Society, coded it from scratch. It looked terrible. It was not responsive. It was not anything. Right. And it was just a landing page with these little sections, HTML and CSS, no JavaScript. And I was so proud. I remember showing it to my parents. My mom drove me to the bank and we opened up a business bank account. And she was like, I'm gonna start it with $100 and put $100 in the business bank account. And then I was like, oh my God, why don't I try and get— I'm gonna reach out to all these tech companies I really like. I think they're cool. And I'll say, do you wanna sponsor my organization? Also, are you hiring interns for next summer? And I sent a bunch of those out and I got Google and GitHub were the only 2 that responded. And they said, sure, thanks for reaching out. And we love that you're starting up a new student organization. Here's $250. And so I got $500 total. And I was like, I'm rich. Anything to do with the money. The only thing I thought to do with it was like, I'll buy— so obviously on a college campus, your venues are free for like meetings and clubs. Right. And so, I was like, we'll just, we'll have space. I'll have people. All I need is like bags of potato chips for the meetings. I was like, $500 is so many potato chips.

Right.

This is amazing. The second I get back on campus, let's go. This is going to be awesome.

Yeah. A kid with $500 on a campus with that energy, nobody would've beaten you. And it's so fascinating to hear that story from you because I think A lot of people, even though I think 2 things. One is you are very scrappy. You were held, you were given kind of like you dealt with some cards and you dealt with that. So you played your way, number one. Number 2 is you were a doer. You just did it. You didn't question yourself, like what was the perfect website at that time? Or how to do things and then learn and then do things, which a lot of people get lost. That's why it's so fascinating to see. And number 3, shout out to your parents for giving you that break. A lot many people, at least you and I, we can relate because my parents are Indians too, and they just sometimes they just are in their own box and they just don't listen. So shout out to them for giving you that space and allowing you to be yourself, to figure out what you are really like and whatnot. I love that so much.

I want to commend them because my mom mostly grew up in the US, even though she was born in India. But my dad grew up in India. And I think that the two of them together, I feel like they didn't really fall into a lot of the typical immigrant parent kind of mishaps or things that are struggles because they listened, like they treated me like a full person. And they asked ourselves like, what's best for Shreya? Like, mom was terrified to let me stay home that semester. And I think it was my dad who calmed her down. And he was like, think about the long term. Long term, who cares about this semester?

Yeah.

Long term, we want Shreya to graduate and be happy and healthy. and have a career that she thrives in. Right. What does it matter graduating 2014 versus '15? And he was right. And it really didn't matter. And she was really relieved once I went back and things started picking up. But I will say, like, I also want to acknowledge whenever I tell other people about my Violet story or my undergrad story, there were a lot of privileges I had and I knew exactly which privileges I didn't have. I had the privilege of supportive parents. We were comfortable financially, which meant they could send me to a nice private school like Tufts. And that helped me more with options. I had a home to go back to that was safe and supportive for that semester off.

Right.

But what I didn't have, which I knew was my key privilege that I was lacking, was I really did not know about tech at all. My parents are professionals. They're an accountant and a doctor, but they're not techie people. At all. So I ended up choosing a path where I didn't have any contacts, connections, people I could ask help from. So I had to give that network to myself.

And you know what, I think it's, you know, everybody kind of, uh, they just caught up in the, in the notion of privileges, which you mentioned. You know, life is not that easy, even though, you know, take, take Elon Musk. I'm not going to create a controversy here, but He's world's richest man and he still have some problems, right? So

everybody has problems.

Everybody has problems. I feel nobody's privileged and nobody has given something to them. Everybody should earn something, right? Like, nothing's given, everything should be earned. And we have to make that more vocal on Twitter because a lot many people, they just slam down, say, hey, you have something, you have something. No, you know, everybody has their own problems. You have to like empathize with them, right? I love that. And you also like, you also really touched on one thing which is very interesting. Instead of you being a computer science grad, instead of like you going to do some research, you went through building a community. That's, I think that's a clear sign for you as a passion. Right. That's what I feel a lot of people should do, which is don't get caught in the rat race, which everybody else is doing. Find your own path and find things on your own interest. And in order to do that, I think you have to give it a try, which you did. That's why you've created Violet Society, the hackathon you've founded, and then you went eventually work at one of the big companies like On Deck. So given we're talking about On Deck, I want to touch on one thing, which is you're employee number 3 at On Deck, if I'm not wrong. And you kind of literally experienced the hypergrowth machine they've built in the past 2 years. What were some of the observations, good and bad, like, you know, you took from the experience which you can pass along to the listeners?

Absolutely. Yeah. So I say number 3 because there were a lot of other people who were on the team for less than a year. So I was the 3rd person to hit the 1-year mark after the co-founders. So I wanted to clarify that so that people aren't like, I was number 3.

Got it.

But yeah, I was the 3rd to hit a 1-year mark, which I feel like in the grand scheme of things is really— yeah. So, so many things I learned. I joined May 2020, a few months into the pandemic, and was on the team for about 2 years until April of this this year, 2022. And I left because I was frustrated and I didn't see a good future path for myself at the company. Yeah. But I think that there were some really, really amazing things I learned from that. And I've kept in touch with many of my coworkers and there's some things that we're immensely grateful for. So, a couple of things I think were absolutely fantastic. The founding team, so Eric Torenberg, Julia Weisser, David Booth, They painted an amazing big picture vision that inspired thousands and thousands of people, the employees, the fellows, and just the followers and fans on like Twitter, LinkedIn, elsewhere. That big vision, I still believe in it to this day. And I, it's the big vision that I'm dedicating my career to in general, which is creating these interlocking communities and networks of highly ambitious people from all over the globe. who build startups together, join startups, and invest in startups as a way to kind of push humanity forward. Right. So I really believe in that. That's like my life mission. That's why I joined. I was, it was a few months in the pandemic. I was like, what do I do with Violet Society now that we're not in person? And I heard Eric talk on a Clubhouse conversation really late at night, joined the conversation, and was so excited to join that I was like, This is so aligned, I have to join. So that inspiring vision was amazing. They put together a really, really, really wow team. Like, I've never worked on a team that was this highly skilled. My former coworkers and I are all like, our minds are blown. Like, we're joining other companies, we're joining other communities, and we're talking about how like, they, that was the highest competence team that we've ever been on. It was like, we all pushed each other so hard that if you were just an above average skill level, it felt like it was low because everyone was like A++. Right. Everybody's a

rock star.

Yeah. And I mean, it's like, it's a joke now to write like, we're all rock stars on our job descriptions, but it felt like that. It felt like we were all pushing each other forward. And then I think the third thing that was amazing is like the product worked. It was amazing. Like 2021 in particular, when we were rolling out many different fellowships and launching them, the energy around just having communities with very high net promoter scores and very high member engagement was so motivating for all of us. That just pushed us to like try harder, experiment, A couple of things that I'm comfortable sharing that I think that could have been improved that I've learned for both my current job at Silva and like the next time that I'm a founder is make sure that when you're building a company, you're building the company and not just the product. So, I think that everything related to like company, so like HR, finances, operations, like the boring stuff, we were really behind. By March, we had about 275 full-time employees, but we had the infrastructure of maybe like a 50-person company. And that stuff is necessary even though it's not as fun or interesting for most people.

Or sexy, right?

Yeah, it's not as cool. Like, it's just not as exciting. But you need it because then anytime any kind of issue comes up, you just don't have a support system around it. And it's very hard to handle it because leadership needs to be focusing on everything else. So that's really crucial. And I'm taking that with me for the future. And then a second thing is just like being decisive and sticking with your decisions as a leader is very, very important. I think that I, at the beginning, we were doing this kind of like throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks methodology. I think that's awesome for the exploring phase of a startup. At the very early days, you're like, What do we launch and why? Let's be experimental. Let's be open-minded. Right. At a certain point, you have to stop being so open-minded. You have to know what's your north star and not do anything that distracts you from the north star. And I think unfortunately we did a lot of stuff that distracted us from the north star and that divided resources, that took up people's time. It made us expand way too fast. So a lot of things that came from that lack of decisiveness and focus. And I think that we still could have had the business model with multiple communities, with more focus about how those communities all fit together into a grander vision.

No, that's amazing. And I have to acknowledge, I've worked briefly at On Deck. The energy is—

Experienced it. Yeah,

experienced it. The energy is impeccable. I mean, you, you, it also has its good, good, good things, pros and cons, which is the pro is you'll get more motivated. You'll get like, you know, that energy, you know, indulge in yourself and do more things. The con for me at least is I felt very lonely and I felt like, you know, I'm underqualified for this role, whatever role I hired, because it was like so much that's going on. And to your point, it's true as well, which is, which founders who are listening, it's not about like growing fast or doing multiple things. It's about doing the right thing and sticking to it. Like you said, right? It's the explore and exploit situations. come in every startup's life. When you are in the initial days and when you get like a— it can be a product-market fit or it can be the growth that you wanted. That's more of like a graduation from explore to exploit. Now, when you move to the exploit state, you have to like very keen to key metrics and tied up to like one north star, you know, instead of hitting moonshots, which which can be done if you are like a Google or an Apple. That's very interesting. And you've also touched an amazing point, which is you have to do the non-sexy things very— Yeah. You have to give the same priority the way you give priority to sexy things, which are like hype, social, and yada, yada, yada. And team is really important. That's another thing I learned as well. I've worked at Product Hunt, I've worked at On Deck. Your peers are your family in a way, and you have to really, really pick people who have the same vision and mission. And that's one reason I really wanted to join On Deck is because same way I hopped on one of the Clubhouse chats with Eric, and he kind of painted the picture of every Every person will never end their learning curve. You know, they will learn, they will join, they will pursue new career paths. A designer can be an investor, an investor can be a founder, so on and so forth. That, that, that, uh, uh, what do you call the chain things of reaction that happens in everybody? I think that I, I still do believe what you said, which is people, people, uh, you know, when, when they make careers, it's not like a one career and one shot. They can explore and exploit multiple careers. And I feel Aande kind of made it, proved the concept of, you know, one identity can dive into multiple. Yeah, love that, love that. So moving on, I do have like a couple of questions before I dive into like, you know, questions from audience which we, which we got from Twitter, which One of the questions I have is, what are some mistakes founders make these days? You're an investor by yourself, right? And this also ties back to the previous question of hypergrowth, you know, the way On Deck scaled. Usually when you get venture funding, you make terrible mistakes and you see, you know, since you're an investor, what are some things that you observed in your career that founders should not do?

Yeah. So, I think a lot of my experience is at the very, very earliest days. So, like angel, pre-seed, seed. That's the people I'm talking to now and the people I've invested in starting only this year. And I'm just writing small angel checks. And so, the 2 things that I think come to mind first are people building vitamins, not painkillers. So, really, really make sure that your target audience has a pain point. and would buy your product even if they were running out of money or it's a big recession. It has to be a high priority. It has to be pain. Mm-hmm. I've talked to a few founders recently who are building things that are like nice to have. They're cool. They're a nice extra. And it's just very hard to build a huge business with that as the core. It's probably not possible. So build especially venture scale, build something that people need, not something they want. And then maybe add in things that they on top of the thing they need. But you have to frame things around a pain. People have to not have another option for solving this problem or another good option, or they have to be really reluctant to use those other options. So I think that's a big one. It's hard for founders to be honest with themselves about this. So you have to look at your metrics and people not signing up and people not biting and be honest with yourself or get some outside opinions on, is this a vitamin or a painkiller? And then, oh man, the other one just escaped my brain immediately. Oh, timing your fundraise. So I've talked to some founders recently who were like, we're going to do a big launch in 2 months and we wanna fundraise now. And I was like, well, you don't have any data from how that launch went and you don't have any customers from that launch. Right. So why are you trying to raise now at a way lower valuation versus 2 months from now or 3 months from now after you have 1 month of data? at probably a much better valuation. So there's 2 timelines to line up. There's your product timeline and your traction timeline. And then there's also the VC's timeline of like people are on holiday in August and December. Right. And I think people now, because it's October, are getting a little bit like, oh no, they'll be out during Thanksgiving and Christmas. And they will. But if you don't have any really strong numbers to show them about traction for right now, it's still not going to be a good time. You're going to spend all of this time as a founder raising rather than doubling down on your product growth and traction, and you might not fill the round. Um, so that's a second big mistake that I'm seeing a lot of really early founders make.

That's so, uh, that's so valuable. Uh, so what you're saying is more about— is it, is it— do you suggest people should— founders should launch first, gather the data, gather traction, and then fundraise? It's about that, or is it truly about like, is it Q3, Q4 versus Q1, Q2 type of thing?

It depends on your product and if you're B2B or B2C and the dynamics of your product. So look at other comparable things in your space. If you're building consumer social, if you're building a consumer product, if you're building an edtech, if you're building enterprise, look at kind of the timelines at which, like, when did they raise their pre-seed and seed? How much traction did they have at that point? Right. Whereas B2B SaaS, you might have an MVP and 20 beta users. So for all these different categories, you have to know your category and about how much traction it takes to raise a pre-seed or seed. Another mistake I see a lot of early-stage founders make is they're like, oh well, this person raised pre-product, pre-revenue, so I can too. If you're coming to me, a random small check angel that just started this year for intros, you can't raise pre-product, pre-revenue. Like, that's my harsh reality. The people who are doing that are people who have long-term relationships with investors who have already been a very skilled operator or a second founder. Right.

Correct.

And it's easy to look at it as a, for example, non-white woman like myself and say like, oh, they're sexist. They're not sexist. This is about networks. Right. I mean, some people are, some people are, but the majority are not intentionally trying to do that. This is about over time, We need to build more inclusive networks of people who have a strong reputation in the industry with investors. So if they go out tomorrow and they raise, the investors are like, yes, I've heard of you for 10 years. You're very good at X. You're building a company in X. Of course I will take a bet on that because you have already been building this expertise for 10 years. So if you look at those companies and you say, but they did it, you're not them. Like, I think you have to be honest with yourself about how much founder market fit do you have? And then how much industry reputation do you have? If you have not built the reputation, you're going to need to show with more traction that this is— you're a person worth taking a bet on to the investors that you reach out to.

Yeah, it's all about social capital and usually second-time founders. And like you said, solid operators have that by default because they've done this before, they've failed or they've succeeded, and they have that rapport with with fellow, you know, they have like massive networks, right? And I think underlyingly what I'm hearing from you is founders should be self-aware of their situations. Yeah. They should not compare. Everybody has their own path. You have to compare with yourself how you're better from yesterday to today. And especially with fundraising, one thing I learned, again, I'd never fundraised, but kind of like learned from being an advisor at multiple startups is that you don't necessarily fundraise for money, you know, it's more about signaling too, right? Like you have to show the product is being used by X people and you're backed by— it's all about social signaling at the same time, you know, kind of have to be in that position.

Well, you can't always tell which founders have had an amazing reputation with investors for 5 to 10 years because

Right.

Actual internal social, like DM reputation is not reflective of Twitter and LinkedIn reputation. So you and I are public about what we build and do. Many, many operators who are super respected are not. There's also people who are public and are not super respected. And so you can't actually double-check this other comparable founder in my industry and space raised blah. You don't really know what their relationships were like with those investors before. beforehand. It might have been really strong or it might have been weak. And you can go, ah, like if I reach out cold or with just like a lukewarm intro, um, maybe they would look at mine too. So that kind of backchannel-y stuff is very hard to predict from the outside. I'm gonna push back on one thing you said. Experienced operators do not have that network by default. You have to work at it. Mm-hmm. And that's something that I saw at On Deck too. I asked other people, in the early On Deck Founder Fellowships, there were people who were like ex-Uber, ex-Airbnb, whatever. They had like a cool unicorn on their resume. And I found a pattern that like a lot of VCs respected them. They knew VCs. And I was like, oh, interesting. How did you have these relationships? Like you haven't even been a founder yet. And they kind of gave me a playbook for reaching out, sharing deals, becoming an angel investor, reaching out to mentors, kind of getting on the radar of those people. And now, as I'm helping other On Deck peers who have been laid off or who have left search for their next gig, not everyone has that. Some people build it and were very member-facing and were very intentional. Some people were internally facing, did— were not member-facing. And they were like, Shreya, I worked at On Deck. I know that there is this big network available of founders, investors, and operators. But I'm not really connected to it or tapped into it. Like, people know the name On Deck, but they don't really know me. And so none of this happens by default. Like, everything is very intentional, I think, in this industry.

Oh yeah, yeah. I think, you know, I take it back. I think what you said is absolutely true. Everything is intentional. And number 2 also is you have to do like how you did Not just the software degree will help you get a job. You have to show additional things on your resume type of a thing, right? Not just— I think I completely agree with you. I think I have to take it back and maybe clarify a little bit, which is not every operator will have massive networks, but those who actually go one extra mile helping others or do things in public or side projects or launch a podcast, they have massive networks because they are actually building relationship with these folks. Not just like, you know, making it transactional, right? Like there's a lot of, I think, I don't know who called this on Twitter, but there is a debt that gets maintained between people in tech. You owe someone something because you did something for them, right? And it's a good debt. It's not like a bad debt. Like, you know, that is what I think, which is really important for operators. So one last question from mine before we dive into a couple of things from the audience, which is you've done— going back to community building, you've done in-person events, in-person community building with Violet Society, and you've kind of saw with On Deck the power of online communities. Since we're going back, I went recently to a community conference and I felt really awkward because all I know is being an extrovert online and I'm an introvert by nature. It was very, very, you know, weird. What advice do you give for people who are basically transitioning from the other way, which is they've built online communities and now they're going to meet people in person? What do you suggest?

Yeah, I probably need to just make playbooks for this stuff. I definitely found for myself last year when we started doing face-to- It was so weird. I was meeting people who I talked to on Zoom and I'd only seen the top of their head. I didn't know how tall anyone was. And I felt, I realized, I was reading about it actually on Zoom. Many of us have exaggerated mannerisms on purpose and we smile more and laugh more so we can give people signals over video. Right. In person, if you do the same body language, you look like kind of nuts. Like it looks overwhelming. So everyone has more toned down body language face to face with people.

Right.

So my recommendation would be like, get out there, do a few things, like 2, 3 before you start feeling like yourself pre-pandemic. But my biggest recommendation is from another tweet. Twitter's definitely my main information source now. There's a difference between digital extrovert and in-person extrovert. I'm a huge digital extrovert, not an in-person extrovert at all. I host events, I do one-on-ones, and I attend barely any events. So sometimes people are like, Shree is a community person. community person. She'll go to my big happy hour with 300 people. Sorry, I will not. Absolutely not. I am not there. Right. I went when I was earlier in my career, but no longer. So my biggest recommendation would be get to know yourself. And if you're a digital or in-person introvert or extrovert and lean into that thing accordingly. So for example, I do a lot of chats and Zooms digitally. And then I only do a coffee in person after I've talked to them on Zoom and I really like the person and we get along and they're in person and they're in my city. If you're a community leader who's transitioning from online to in person, first, of course, get the locations of all your community members.

Mm-hmm.

Do the meetups in the top cities that the most people live in first. If you don't have a community manager living in that city, get members who are really engaged and understand your ethos. And then my biggest tip for the event is is give people specific structures to talk to others one-on-one or in small groups. Don't just make it a big open thing. Give them, at some point you get on the stage and you say in the mic, hey everyone, like we're all here because we're seeking new engineering jobs. So everyone get in a little group of 4 and share 1 or 2 jobs you saw recently or companies that you would love to work at. Right. Give them that space to build those actual relationships. Don't just make it a free-for-all and be like, figure it out. Because then people walk away kind of disappointed with no real strong connections.

No, you're absolutely right. I think just like how we do breakout rooms online, you have to lead people into something or else people get lost. I also tweeted about this same identity topic after I went to SF for this conference, which is I've realized for fundamentally, I'm an introvert by nature that can be changed when I meet in person. But I also realized in the last 2 years, there is this other side of me, which is what you're seeing, which is a lot more extroverted stuff, which can hold a conversation, can build a conversation, can bring people together, can host events with hundreds of people, can give talks. I've never imagined myself giving a talk to more than I don't know, like 2, 3 people. But in the last 2 years, I gave so many talks. And I think what you're saying is really important. I've realized that as well. You have to accept the fact that you have to be true to yourself, that the personality you developed online is very different from the personality you are in general in real life. So a lot many people, I think, should do that self-awareness exercise with themselves when they go like in-person events. But love, love all. I think you have a lot, lot of command on it, Shreya. You should definitely write a couple of playbooks, you know, with handling in-person versus online events.

I'm thinking of making a startup TikTok, so stay tuned.

Yes, definitely. I'm going to make

one. One interesting thing about what you just said for the your digital personality versus in-person personality: when I felt like my digital personality was different than my in-person, I actively tried to change it so they would be. more aligned. So if you don't feel like you're being authentically yourself online, or if people in person often say to you like, oh, I thought you were really X, and you kind of don't want that to be your brand, I think you can change it. I think it should, it's just about focus and intention and asking yourself whatever platform you're on the most, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, like ask yourself, what do I wanna get out of this? Like just do a short exercise. It doesn't have to be a whole personal— there's a lot of personal branding workbooks that are very elaborate. Right. I asked myself with my Twitter over the past couple of years, because On Deck really, we use Twitter a lot. Like, that's what helped me pass 10K followers. Otherwise, if I wasn't on Deck, I absolutely wouldn't have. I asked myself, like, what do I want to use this for? I want to reach my target audience of ODF, OD50, and Catalyst. I want to build up a network of tech founders, investors, operators. I wanna meet young founders I might wanna invest in. And I wanna share things I have learned through legitimate experience, not just like random speculation about the startup world. Right. And so that's what I focus on doing. And if something, and then I also like retweet pop culture stuff for fun, but I make sure that's not too much of it so that if like other tech people are following for tech stuff, it's not like drowning out the feed.

Nice. Nice. All right, let's dive into the couple of questions we got from Twitter. Shout out to KP for asking this. What's your advice playbook for young and ambitious founders who aren't in top tech hubs, which are like, you know, like, I think yourself, you know, who went back to like 2014? How can they set themselves for success?

Yeah. I mean, Boston was pretty good, but it was definitely no Bay Area. And when I went to the Bay Area, I was like, wow, I didn't know this existed on earth. I mean, it's, it's gonna be a very predictable answer, but it's really lean into online communities of the same people as you. So find the people who have a similar tech career to the one you wanna build and reach out to them cold over LinkedIn or Twitter. Get warm intros to them, have phone calls and do a lot of basically become a digital extrovert so that you can build a network and knowledge and mentors, peer mentors, and more experienced mentors, because it's not easy for you to meet in person. I think sometimes people think they have to like fly around and spend all this money and time and energy for hackathons and conferences. You really don't.

Yeah.

I went to some hackathons, but I didn't go to a lot because like travel drains me. I don't love like hopping around. And I don't really feel like it's worth it to spend these huge chunks of money on plane tickets all the time. I do it sometimes, but I also don't have the patience for travel hacking with credit card rewards. So like, don't peer pressure yourself into being like, I have to be at ETHDenver. Like, I have to go to South by Southwest. Like, no, you don't.

Yeah.

Like, that's gonna give you this big random collection of people and then it'll be really hard to find the person you want. Versus if you say, I wanna break into self-driving cars, you go on LinkedIn, And you find a bunch of people doing that, and then you cold connection request with them, not in mail, don't pay for it, um, with a little blurb about yourself and why you're awesome. Right. Um, and then get on short calls with them. And then at the end of the calls, ask them, who are 2 other people I should talk to? Right. And that is how I built my own network from zero. Um, and I had to kiss a lot of frogs. Like, there were a lot of just like bad calls, bad coffee meetings, led to nothing, felt like a waste of time for both of us. us. But there was kind of no other way to do it because I just didn't really know.

I think I want to add one thing on top of it, which I did personally experience it. You know, I was from India, from a really small town, and I have like no access to whatsoever tech hubs. The thing I did when I came to the US is a lot of signaling, broadcasting that what I'm into, which is no-code, Product building, community building. And the beauty about that versus what you said, which is going to a South by, is you have only 24 hours and you have a limited amount of energy to broadcast what you are really into. Unlike on Twitter, you have infinite amount of kind of energy. You can really write threads, you can write, produce content, videos, podcasts, like newsletter, and that signals in the right way. And people who are attracted to that signal, that's where you build these tight-knit networks for yourself. And you can convert that into much more stronger, which is highly, highly impossible. Take me as an example. I would've never connected with someone like Ryan Hoover if I'm going to South by, for sure. No way. Or even with— A

lot of talented founders and VCs are not even going to these anymore. Or they're speakers and they hang out in the speaker room talking to other speakers. So don't think that you're gonna meet some dream person that'll change your life at these. Like, you can change your life. The other thing that I think, like, do a combination of both. Like, my thing is not scalable at all. And then yours is super scalable. And I think that the ideal out— like, I built a lot of these relationships through one-on-one.

Mm-hmm.

And it was very time-consuming and manual. And it would, I would've probably been better off if I had picked a more public forum forum rather than Facebook groups to display more of my learnings and questions from the start. Because I only really leaned into Twitter 2, 3 years ago. If I had leaned into it when I first signed up, yeah, 2011, '12, or '13, then, um, I'm probably—

That would be massive. Yeah, of course.

Yeah, exactly.

And I think there's never, uh, a late— or, you know, you're never late. You're— you can just literally start yesterday or today, right? So Awesome. One question from Vikram. What are some top actual metrics to watch when you grow a community? And how do you actually measure them or track them?

Yes. So member engagement, member satisfaction, and wow outcomes are my 3 buckets. So member engagement, let's say you have a Slack community. If you have people on a monthly or annual membership for your community, or if they're in a cohort-based something for 3 months, they should absolutely be active every week, the majority of people. And you should even have a high percentage who are active daily. So it's a high bar, but really I have not seen any community thrive without this. You have to know your audience. So let's say you're running a community of CEOs. They're not gonna be active daily, but they might be active weekly. Right. You want them to be able to drop in, get exactly what they need, pop out. And anybody who's really busy, You want the community to be really effective and for that transactional relationship, but still feel like generous and welcoming versus something really educational and chatty. Like, if you have a community of undergrads breaking into startups, that should have really high DAUs because those college students have— they're all trying to figure out the same stuff and they're like, what the heck do I do? Right. So engagement really depends on your community. I should do a quick poll.

You do. You should definitely.

It's different. It's different for each community. So you have to know your audience and know how engaged you think they could be and then figure it out based on that capacity. Member satisfaction. I really like using Net Promoter Score. We use Net Promoter Score, NPS, at On Deck, and it's not perfect. It's easy to look at it and get sad if it's a low score and make excuses for it. But really, if you have an NPS over 60, you're good. Like your member engagement is solid. It's amazing. And you don't really have to worry about it after that. Like, you know, that there's going to be word of mouth growth. So I think that that is really useful to know at what level you need to just like not worry about members being happy anymore. Correct. And then the third thing is wow outcomes. And so I actually used this in Silva when I joined, which I would say is like, What's the focus of your community? What's the goal? And did this community help people achieve it? How often and how many of the members? So for like an early stage founder community, like Propel, how often did Propel help a member get introduced to an investor who then invested? Does that happen for 10% of members who are seeking fundraising support? Does it happen for 70%? Does it happen for 2%? And how can we make that higher? So figure out who's your audience, what do they want to get out of this? And then how frequently does that actual ideal outcome happen? Get a job, like get 100 new users of the product, get X or Y.

I love the third thing. I've heard the first 2 before, but that's really fascinating. The wow factors, which are, which are, you should definitely write these playbooks, Rhea. Come on, you should do—

It's easier to just tweet as they come up.

I know, right? Yeah. Listen, this has been great. You know, I really love jamming with you about all things community and, you know, the founder mindset. You have a kind of like that underdog personality in yourself. And thanks for being open and sharing your, you know, personal stories, the behind the scenes of Violet Society. how you found community and whatnot. Last thing, where can people find you? You have like any closing note? You can, you can like, you know, drop it here.

Yeah, absolutely. So follow me on Twitter @ShreyaNavadia. That's the main place that I post every event and thing that I'm doing. But I also accept quite a few LinkedIn requests. So if you put a little blurb about yourself, I will probably accept it. Love, love adding people on LinkedIn. And then check out the communities that I run at Silva. So running Propel, propel.run, foodborough.com, and nocodefounders.com right now. So there are other community leaders leading them and they're all doing a fantastic job and I'm kind of just overseeing. And I would love to see more people join all of those.

Awesome. That's amazing. Yeah, people do follow Shreya. She's amazing. As you can hear, she has a lot to unpack. We should probably do like a second returning episode. But yeah, thank you, Shreya. Thanks for coming in. And yeah, that's a wrap. Thanks, guys, for listening. Thanks for your time. Cheers.

Thank you so much.

Bye.