Common Room | Collective Intelligence

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Hi everyone. Welcome to Grey Matter, the podcast from Greylock where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Sarah Goa, a General partner at Greylock. Joining me today is Linda Lien who is the co founder and CEO of Common Room. Common Room is the intelligent community growth platform. Greylock partnered with Common Room last year when we led their series be. Since then, community has become an even bigger driver for many kinds of organizations, from open source software and developer tools companies to all kinds of SaaS, data platforms and Web3 organizations. The common Room team has been hard at work with their beta partners and is today officially launching its first GA product. Linda, thank you so much for joining us on Gray Matter.

Thank you Sarah. Happy to be here.

First of all, congratulations are in order. Exactly one year ago today, Common Room came out of stealth after working hand in hand with pioneers and community like Figma, Asana and DBT Labs. I must commend your team on just like sticking to very clear deadlines of a year at a high level. What exactly does Common Room as a product do?

Common Room is for the fastest growing private and public companies who believe that their community is a growth driver and differentiator. So we help these companies at every stage of the maturity curve from early stage companies like Temporal who are heading into hypergrowth to the fastest growing publicly traded companies like Atlassian. Common Room is an intelligent community growth platform.

Now you're releasing a product that anyone can use. Before we get into the details of the ga, talk to us a little bit about how you identified this problem in the first place.

So in 2016 I was a junior investor at an early stage VC fund called Madrona Venture Group. One of the best things about the opportunity to be a venture investor is that you get to dive deep into industries and business models that are fundamentally real, reinventing the way that software is built, distributed and adopted. I got to see firsthand the rise of user LED and developer LED adoption within plg, developer services, commercial, open source and even the next iteration, web3 and crypto. These early impressions that there was a seismic shift happening was validated by my next experience leading product marketing for serverless computing at aws. So at AWS we found that our most innovative services were experiencing gangbusters growth not through a traditional sales LED model and AWS has an incredible sales team, but rather through enabling developers to get hands on with the service, helping them feel supported, and then building and scaling champion programs that would spread education and enablement to more developers. It felt like it should be a win win for our developers and the business. But what I found was that the tooling to enable this new engagement model was frankly non existent. A lack of community management tooling meant that community members were often screaming into the void despite our best efforts to keep up. So we had a slack at one point that had 60,000 developers in it and you can imagine the kind of noise and just total impossibility to support that we were dealing with. A lack of intelligence and analytics meant that identifying signal from noise on customer feedback or quickly surfacing customers that needed help was nearly impossible. Building our champion program from scratch was incredibly manual. It was an effort of Internet stalking at the time. Don't even get me started on how we attempted to measure and report on outcomes in a data driven growth oriented organization like aws. A lack of reporting can leave an initiative dead in the water. Despite how table stakes it may be. Our developer community was the biggest growth turbine for our business, but we had no way to take action. Many of the fastest growing organizations today know that partnering with their community is critical to their ability to build a better product, have happier users and grow faster. But they're pretty much stuck in the same situation I was in and I knew that this was a problem I wanted to go solve.

You left aws in early 2020 and you spent some time thinking about how to solve this problem. You were iterating through different things that you could build to support somebody in your position. How did you land on intelligence and figure out what you wanted to build first?

In true community led fashion, we built a community of community leaders at companies that we respected before we ever wrote a line of code. We knew that partnering with these top community leaders was the key to building the right solution in a space where nothing existed and finding that product market fit. Most successful new companies today probably share this mindset, right? When you invest in a seed company, you're probably looking for them to have an existing user base already. And so when I left Amazon, I spent 2/4 just talking to our community. I showed them iterations upon iterations of FIGMA designs. I don't even think we had an engineer. Every founder on the product market Fit Journey has had moments where what they thought they wanted to build was fundamentally not what their customers needed. So I have some fun stories. A little known. Fact is we actually started Common Room to build a place. I had these grand visions of the Slack forum baby that would rule them all because Slack wasn't built for customer engagement and forums felt antiquated and old school folks were excited but I'll never forget the day when Claire, who is the director of community at Figma said, hey, this whole Slack forum to rule them all thing sounds great conceptually and I've spent hours with you looking at your Figma designs. But I don't need another place. I have too many. I have slacks, discords, forums, social, in person digital events and meetups, swag stores. What I really need is something that ties it all together so that I have a place and my team has a place to get actionable insights to better service our community. And we've been on that path ever since. But it was definitely a cold splash of water on the product market Fit Journey A second story is as a founder, asking for money can be scary. Another moment that stands out to me is when I asked the head of global community at a leading productivity company to pay for our product. We, we had been partnering for a while and things felt good. I was shaking and sweating and he said no, he was very kind and he said hey, we're excited about the vision. In fact, my team has never been more excited about a tool. But you have these critical gaps in your product reporting workflows and until we can get that value, I can't pay you. It wasn't a great feeling, but it turned out to be one of the most valuable experiences on this journey. So we hustled and we're proud to call that customer one of our best and closest ones ones today. I think what I'm most proud of throughout this journey are the customers who started as our design partners within our design partner community. They've seen the first product designs in Figma to now doing 100 plus seat deployments of common room to cross functional stakeholders that partner closely with community and DA teams like customer success, product revenue teams. Our community has pushed us every step of the way in how we build our product and the problems they want to solve for. We're now in production with some of the fastest growing industry leading community led companies out there and we're just getting started. We're kind of a poster child for how having your entire organization focused on the needs of your community results in a better product.

I know that's going to resonate with a lot of people who listen to gray matter in these types of community driven companies. Maybe a 60,000 person Slack or Discord or smaller or larger, but the lone community manager or lean team trying to figure out like how do we engage this amazing huge ecosystem with very few resources and no tools? Sounds tough. You've described the mission of Common Room as helping organizations serve and harness community. It's a very loaded word. We keep saying it. Can you define what community means to you?

Yeah. In the previous iteration, community 2.0, I guess you could call it Community was a word that was associated with a support forum or even owned social networks. If you you remember Yammer, community was a place, right? Today, community is a much more broadly defined term. We actually define your community as your users and champions anywhere where they want to engage with you. That could be chat, forum, digital in person. The reason why community led growth is taking the center stage now is because for the fastest growing companies today, your users are the best, biggest growth turbine of your business. On the technology consumer side, the big change in how people are interacting and evaluating technology is that they're going to go where they want to interact with you. The example I always like to use is if I go out to dinner and I don't have a great experience, I'm not going to email the restaurant, I'm going to Yelp about it. And that's exactly what we see happening with technology buyers today. If they have product feedback, they won't necessarily send you a ticket in Zendesk. They they're more likely to tweet about it or to compare notes with their peers. These disparate engagement channels create a massive problem for CXOs and CEOs and leaders because you're no longer able to direct that traffic and understanding of your users. You have to meet them where they are. And if you want any visibility, you have to correlate all of this yourself. So many of our customers, before they use Common Room, built whole teams to read through these channels, acting as a human data pipe. We which is fundamentally error prone and not a good use of people's time. So we say that Common Room is the intelligent community growth platform that lets you take these conversations and activities happening in your community, marry it with your business data, and so you finally have this visibility and the actionable insights you need to compete and perform within this shift in how technology is being evaluated and adopted and what we found with working with some of the fastest growing community led companies out there, is that community is a real lever for the business.

What does that mean? Take that example that you described, the bad Yelp review or the tweet, either as a fan or even as a detractor for a new technology product. It could be good or bad, right?

Yeah. So communities have often been associated with this softer, fuzzier, more vague way to think about impact. But what we have done, which is super exciting and interesting, is we tie all of this data with your CRM or your data warehouse, which houses your product usage information, for example. And we've been able to show across all of our customers that community engagement leads to larger deal sizes, better adoption, faster time to close, more user activation, all the things that you would expect. But to see it proven out in numbers is I think really validating. And so in today's hyper competitive world, community is the key flywheel and differentiator. And a thriving community where users feel heard, supported and connected becomes one of the top evaluation criteria for technology decisions. I know that for the tooling that we choose to use at Common Room, we really focus on whether or not there's a supportive community because we need to adopt those tools quickly and we can't wait around for is a dust.

Ticket that really resonates. I know one thing that's really entered the conversation, even in how Greylock looks at a lot of software businesses, is what community adoption looks like. Right. Because we know that that turns into better products, better word of mouth, more efficient go to market, and better adoption of those products once people buy. I'm biased, but I think it's a huge business driver now. Okay, so there's the story of the problem and then what community means to businesses. How does it help? Who is it for?

It's the only tool out there that brings together community engagement, product usage and customer data into a single place. And uses intelligence to surface actionable insights to help companies figure out what's most important, nurture key Personas, measure program impact, and collaborate across the entire organization.

So the last piece is really interesting and the idea of collaborating across an entire organization, take one segment, open source for example. Like it's not traditionally like the entire organization collaborating with the open source community. Commercial open source has been around for a while. But how do you think about the relationship of commercial open source companies to their communities and developer relations in particular, and how that might be changing?

Yeah, it's a super fascinating topic and we see it every single day. So commercial open source is not a new paradigm. It's been around since the 70s. Historically, open source was in many ways a backlash to the proprietary software movement, which at the time was highly protective, often sold top down with predatory pricing practices and vendors that like quite literally designed around lock in. That top down selling motion and lock in meant that companies built and successfully sold products that end users weren't actually happy and successful with. We think that time is over and I think everyone would agree. And whether you're running a cloud software service or selling commercial OSS companies need to be much more user friendly and community centric. Technology consumers today demand that commercial open source and developer facing companies need to design themselves fundamentally differently. Where they're really co building and growing their OSS community because that's their distribution and even their shared R and D, but also figuring out how to make customers even more successful on their commercial offering because that's their business and that's what they're raising big valuation rounds off of. We see in some companies that developer advocates or open source maintainers end up being kind of siloed away from the commercial product and the commercial arm of the company. But we think that doesn't make sense and there's just a lot of value lost in that setup. The community and devrel teams at the fastest growing commercial OSS companies, like our great customers DBT and Grafana, to name a few, they understand that they're serving users and customers on this continuous customer developer journey, where some developers will never have a need to pay for the commercial product, but many will. And it's about identifying those moments and being proactively helpful that really moves the needle. So. So developer advocacy teams are starting to realize that their strategic value is not only to be responsible for both the health and growth of their community or to contribute to the technical ecosystem, but to also help users and developers be successful along their company's continuous customer journey, which in most cases will begin in the community. And to do this, it really requires collaboration with many more teams within the their company. Right. They need to surface support issues to the support team. They need to be able to aggregate product insights and feedback and bugs to the development team. They need to be able to loop in, you know, even sales when someone is raising their hand and saying they're interested in adopting the product. And so this is what Common Room helps to bridge. Now we're also seeing, in many ways this is fun and exciting, the next iteration of that OSS Philosophy in Web3 and crypto. These companies are what I like to call community. Native community managers are often the first hire or effectively the founders. It's a really exciting space and we're definitely looking forward to seeing it evolve on the front lines.

Yep. And Greylock, it's something we're watching closely and investing in as well. It's been super exciting seeing companies in our portfolio both in the. I don't know if I love the term web2space, but let's say in developer ecosystems and technical products and SaaS products. Products. Say like Clint at Kribble would, you know, first slide of his investor presentation, like we're a community driven company and then have every company in crypto claim that. So I think it's definitely a movement.

Yeah. And we're very thrilled to call Kribble one of our customers.

Excellent. When we invest in companies, we have some intuition as investors at Greylock, especially for Personas that we might know well, like let's say leaders of product and community led growth companies as to what the problems are and what sort of solutions people would be interested in. But what we're really looking for is, as you said, people who are really customer centric. Right. And who have that intuition, but then are going to listen to their users and then try to respond to that in a strategic way. And my sad sob story is, for our listeners at least, is that Linda and I have known each other for a really long time and I've always loved and respected her and we actually knew each other when she was a venture investor and through her time at aws. And at some point she was like, hey, I like want to work on this community thing. And I think like we should work on a slack replacement or Discord replacement because it doesn't do all these things that we really need it to. And sad story of all sad stories, I was like, I love you, Linda, but like we're investors in Discord and I think these things, like, they really have a place in the world and they're going to be hard to replace even for this use case and we didn't invest. But as, as Linda describes, you know, I caught her for this like brief moment in time where she was thinking through her initial intuition around the problem. And it's just been, even if I'm a later investor than I'd like to be, amazing to see how the company has really reacted to the richness of feedback we've gotten from our community to give people something they actually really want and need. So I'm very excited about that despite my sob story.

Hey, you're still very early.

Yes, yes, very early. But we like to be first. So trying to take a different view of the product as well. From a technical standpoint. What are the primary parts of Common Room?

Yeah, Common Room is a really interesting, exciting and frankly fun platform to build. So because we started by aggregating activity and engagement across all these disparate channels, social forums, GitHub, support, meetups, the list goes on in order to show you who your members are we ended up with this data platform that combines structured but also unstructured conversational data into this user360. So we can tell you who is tweeting at you. Are they a product manager at Nike, how they're using your product, Are they a power user and your latest and greatest feature? And then finally about the account. How much is Nike spending with your business? This community context data store is a real technical challenge because CDPs and customer data warehouses don't really have this concept of conversational context. But we believe it's critical for doing business in the modern age. On top of that, we wrap this data platform with AI and analytics so we can parse through all of the 24. 7 streaming data to surface the signal from the noise. What this does is this enables us to power a robust and configurable set of workflows in an action layer. For example, for many of our customers that are open source, we see that they might have one to two members engaging in the community, maybe across GitHub, Twitter and Slack, and seemingly overnight that goes from 1 to 2 to 20 or 30. That's a massive indicator that you should reach out to that company and the specific individuals because something is going on there and that can lead to paid engagement or revenue or just a better experience for the community. As the community leader, you want to alert the appropriate teams, but more importantly, you just want to make sure that these community members are getting the human support and help that they need and that they aren't stuck. And so before Common Room, all of this was just completely invisible and not actionable. We can also see across your entire community and all the conversations happening there and layer on top of it sentiment and categorization. Is this a bug? Is this a question? Is this a feature request and make sure that community teams can triage all of this and then systematically help product teams build the right roadmap faster. We hear from community teams all the time that they're one of the closest to the voice of the community, but they're not necessarily always taken seriously by product because everything they say is largely anecdotal today.

Great. Let's talk about some of the different Personas you just mentioned. Like, what are the patterns you see of how, like, community teams or developer relations, like, use Common Room with other Personas.

So community is very much a team sport at every single leading community first company. But the mandate of community and DA teams is they need to be on the front. They're engaging with these users on platforms where the users want to engage. And they have to act as a quarterback and pass these insights, feedback, actionable customer activity back into internal teams like product marketing, customer success and sales. They also need to build these champion programs which enable their biggest fans to evangelize and spread education on their behalf. And these champion programs turn into customer programs, right? Why would you not want a champion at every single major customer account? And so it's all very interrelated and it's an exciting new engagement model that frankly community managers and dev advocates are driving and evolving and figuring out in real time. And so while these community teams are tasked with frankly this herculean effort, right? These, these teams which are classically and today very small, maybe two people, we have two people on our community team. They have no software to support them. Traditional CRMs not built for this new engagement model, right? This is real time, this is user based, this is omnichannel. Salesforce isn't going to save you. And CDPs don't plug into these new channels where they need to engage. So they have no sort of data visibility, so they spend all their days fighting fires on the front using spreadsheets or worse nothing as their system of record. It's impossible for them to collaborate with the cross functional teams that all need to service their community. Their insights into their users and what they need are mostly anecdotal and reactive and they can't measure the impact of their work so it makes it impossible to ask for more resources. It's almost like a constant flywheel of discontent. And so this kind of results in a lose lose for organizations and their community users feel like they're screaming into the void and community teams can't be freed from the tactical execution so that they can really think about how to better nurture and grow their community. Just as an example, an anecdote, a publicly traded systems monitoring company staffed their slack around the clock with sales engineers. But questions are still not being answered due to the challenging nature of real time chat on a platform that was never meant to be a customer engagement channel. The community team at a fast growing productivity company spends all day fielding questions from semi anonymous users across their forums, social media and support channels with little knowledge of the users they're surfacing, much less the accounts that these users belong to or an ability to bring up and bubble up the most pressing product issues back to the development teams. These are really important problems and they're really tricky to solve because you need the scale and the automation without losing the authentic human interaction that makes community community.

Those stories Definitely resonate. Even in my own portfolio. We have companies that are growing freemium businesses. They'll have tens of thousands of active free users, will have one community manager, and then there will be this like, issue where leadership actually says, oh, like, you know, we believe in like community. Right. At the highest level. Then the one community manager will have no tools and then they'll basically be unable to keep up with the volume of people that are interacting with. And then because it doesn't actually connect back to the business, even if the CEO says like, we believe in community and there's a community manager, when it comes down to like thinking about headcount, they tend not to staff that team because they still look at it as a cost center. Right. And then they're like, the cost center is not being like developer relations or whatever is not being as impactful as I'd like them to be. And like, I need to focus on like revenue or product. And I think this visibility that you guys are offering people will really unlock, I think, much more investment in community.

Absolutely. And visibility is the first step.

Right.

We were talking to the CRO of a fast growing developer OSS company and he said, you know, my community is the biggest growth turbine to my business. The chart just goes up into the right. But I have no visibility into it, which means I have no predictability into it and it means I can't actually affect this growth. So I feel really anxious and helpless because I'm just riding this train and, you know, I'm raising these rounds and I'm wondering, like, when is it all going to stop? Because I have no idea what any of this like, it's like black magic. And I think trying to really map that funnel over time and stop making, you know, one of the probably most dominant go to market motions of today and in the future not feel like black magic anymore would be really awesome. Yeah.

So it's a big product vision. You have three all star co founders. Tell me about how you thought about bringing them on and what they brought to the table and how you found them.

Yeah, so I have three co founders. Francis Lu, who is my design co founder, spent over 10 years at Facebook, led design for groups and communities. Raj Mahdi on, who is my cto, and Tom Kleinpeter, who is our chief software architect. Architect. And I met these very important collaborators in my life on tinder for enterprise LinkedIn. And I'm so lucky for the economic opportunity that Reid and Jeff and folks at LinkedIn have provided for people like me who may never have had access to it otherwise. But when I was looking for my co founders after my seed round, I was looking for individuals who could have superpowers that I didn't have, which at the time was product design and engineering. Turns out you need those things when you're trying to build a product. I cold message Francis and Viraj on LinkedIn. They both ignored my first message, not out of malice. Francis and his wife Lisa just had their first child and Baraj was in the throes of a very busy and important role as the TA to the CEO of Convoy, another great greylock company. So is Facebook. That's right. Oh, wow. Yeah. You're bringing the dream team together.

Keep it in the family.

Yeah, exactly. I think we're all from the family. The Greylock fam, which is kind of fun. I persisted and continued to send them messages until I got a meeting. And from there on it was simply a match on values, working styles and thought partnership. Viraj is the one who brought our other engineering co founder Tom on board because they have had a long partnership going back decades. And then we all spent a lot of time aligning on our core values, why we would embark on the startup journey, speaking about the different scenarios that would happen, including what would happen if things didn't go well or sometimes what's scarier to imagine what would happen if things went well. And that strong foundation has let us kind of weather all the slings and arrows and changes of startup building and it's also enabled us to have this incredibly transparent communication which I think is still core to our culture today.

Yes, I think it is definitely a defining attribute of like transparency and directness and killing the ego. So, you know, we've talked about how you launch with some like, high profile, very well respected customers as beta testers. That also sounds scary because a lot of companies, they, you know, they kind of want to get their products to a certain place or they're to a certain like level of thesis clarity before they really start working with users. What were some of the most important things you learned from these partners that informed you know what you're building today?

Yeah, One of our four company values is we're customer centric. We work backwards from the needs of our customers. The crisp articulation of customer value guides our decisions. And so that's always been our North Star. And so when we were talking to all of these great community leaders, what we found was a much bigger story. It was that the fundamental way in which companies were doing what traditionally you consider marketing or support or how they build products was fundamentally shifting because of the rise of community led growth. So we found that modern marketing is now tied really closely with enablement, education and activation. The CMO of a top open source company has resourced a technical SDR team that has no quota and whose sole mission is to assist developers who sign up for their self serve cloud product to learn and adopt the software. We found that modern support means being responsive anywhere your users choose to engage. It doesn't have to be in a support ticketing queue. The community team at a leading collaboration tool spends all day fielding questions from users across their forum, social media and support channels. And so they have to do this. It's table stakes, right? They can't afford not to be where the conversations are. We also found that building a better product faster means having a constant pulse on the feedback of of your community. The CEO of a top product management tool tasked his team with creating thousands of product tags on feedback coming in through social platforms like Twitter, support channels, forums, even Reddit, all sorts of places in order to help him prioritize the product roadmap. This was all manually done and because their user engagement is so omnichannel and community based, this becomes incredibly inefficient and not scalable. They just have no system. And so when we heard about these use cases, we internalized that feedback and we started out with a platform where we could see the beginnings of how we could tackle each and every one of these pain points over time. For example Asana. They have an award winning community. They drive business impact today by connecting Asana ambassadors to to accounts. Ambassadors often lead the charge for evangelizing Asana at their organizations. And Common Room enables the community team and customer success teams to find and engage with potential ambassadors for healthier accounts and better business outcomes. Another example is DBT Labs, the creator and maintainers of the Data Transformation Tool DBT. They use Common Room to support their community of 24,030 growing everyday data practitioners. Common Room helps DBT track community growth, identify top advocates and understand what topics are most important to the DBT community at any given time. We also enable the community team to partner cross functionally. Right? Remembering community as a team sport to do things like improve product experience through direct access to community feedback, streamlining event management by managing speaker information and driving attendee engagement all in one place. We also have a awesome customer that is growing incredibly quickly. Temporal. They have a super robust community from leading tech companies like Snap and Netflix and Descript, Datadog and Instacart. And the Temporal customer team uses Common Room to quickly find and nurture relationships with these top organizations who may be interested in their hosted offering. So it's identifying again those intent signals to adopt the product and making sure that you as a brand are there to help your developers through that customer journey.

You guys are GA today. It's been a ride. What's next for Common Room? What stood out in the last couple months? Coming up to ga?

Yes, we're generally available today. Teams of all sizes can spin up Common Room in just a few minutes for free. I often joke with Sarah. We have a 10 year roadmap already, but it's not really a joke. We're just excited to get out there and keep building with our community. I think one of the really awesome things we did was we brought in our community pre GA and gave them a special couple of days to onboard into Common Room and we had our community war room going where all of our product folks and engineers were there, you know, helping everybody onboard and test out our self serve motion. And so that was a great example of just community and us coming together to kind of figure this out before the curtains lifted. Additionally, we have a great community of founders, leaders, developer advocates in our own community, which we call uncommon. One of the most fun and rewarding aspects of building Common Room is that we're building not just the product, but best practices, playbooks and learnings with all the people who are trying to figure out this space with us. I fundamentally believe that software companies can't just be a product anymore. They need to provide a platform of economic opportunity through community which enables their users to grow and learn and expand their career based on all the expertise. And I think that's a future that we can all get behind and one that we're excited to build at Common Room.

Awesome. Thanks so much Linda for being with us on Gray Matter and try out the free product from Common Room today.