650k Online Community to an intimate one of 100 - Penny Power & Thomas Power

Welcome. So, yes, everybody, very, very, very excited. This has been a series that I've been running over the last two, three months called the Online Community Stories. And I have brought entrepreneurs within B2B media and events on how they're building sustainable and recognizable communities. Every single entrepreneur, every single organization that I have invited to these conversations are doing something that I think and the audiences that they work for, that they serve, think that they're doing something remarkable today. It's a very special day for me because as a community's leader, as a strategist in the, in the events industry and for the media publishers, communities is the thing now. And it's so important. And these two amazing individuals that I have with me today, here with me today are basically the people that invented, I would say invented, or the people that were talking about communities even before this was the thing, right? And let's think about 1998, when Penny and Thomas founded E Academy and that was an online community. This is before Facebook and before LinkedIn. Right? And this is a community that grew to 650,000 members. And it was amazing. I was a member of it and I know that many members of the ones that are like probably watching this session today were members of was networking. It was everything that, that you really wanted to do. It was everything that we're now Talking about probably 20 odd past years about it. Online communities, people interaction, love networking, everything. So to give you some context and I would like you guys kind of introduce yourselves, but the two individuals that we have here today, that's why I'm so excited, because I've always been intrigued about this story. I've always been intrigued about the why, why something of the people that have been running communities for a long time, for more than 20 years, one of the biggest communities in the world have now decided to launch a business called BIP100, which is an amazing community of only 100 people. And the story is amazing. I am a member of 100. I'm a proud member of BIP 100, excited to be part of it, but just to give you guys a taster of what we've got of the two people that we've got here, in 1998, they funded E Academy, 650,000 members. Between the two of them, they've sold three businesses, they've published nine books between the two of them. In 2013, Penny was awarded the OBE for services provided through E Academy and the contribution to entrepreneurship and social digital economy. Penny wrote the Business the Digital Business Britain Manifesto. So when I'm saying to you guys that these guys have wrote the book, wrote the playbook, it's for real. Welcome Penny. Welcome, Thomas, how are you?

Thank you. Beautiful introduction, Ricardo, thank you very, very much indeed.

Penny, how are you? Do you want to give us a little bit of. I mean, I can't really, I have not met anyone that in the UK that has not ever met you, but do you want to give us a brief introduction of who you guys are? You guys are prolific on LinkedIn, you guys are prolific everywhere, so. But if there's anyone in the audience that doesn't know you, do you want to give a little brief intro before we get into it?

Well, I think you introduced us brilliantly and very lovely for our self esteem because as we will probably get into, you know, we've had some bumps and bruises along the way and might be one of the reasons why we really believe in what we're creating now. Because the world has changed a lot in the last 23 years and I think it's fascinating going on this journey with you today because we're going to go on a journey from, you know, really. When we started academy in 98, the term social networking had not been created. We called it an online business. What was it? We called it a social business.

Social business community.

Social business community we called it. That's right. And then the terms got created and competitors came in, though we didn't see them as competitors at the time. And all the way through to now, 23 years on, none of us can really imagine experiencing business without these tools. So, going to be a good journey with you today.

Amazing, amazing. And thank you. So I guess to start with 1998, the community thing you guys started pioneered that element. 2021, the word community is on every business leader, any B2B organization, any B2C organization that has a very solid, serious digital mindset on how to engage the customers. They're thinking about online communities from that point to now. What do you see has been the evolution? How has this online communities thing evolved from how it was now and how it is right now? What's your take on that?

So my answer to that would be, Penny and I have always believed in paid communities. We never believed in free. So looking at the 650,000 members, members either pay £2amonth or £10amonth or £100amonth for sort of a bronze silver gold level. When Free arrived with LinkedIn in 2003 and then 2004 with Facebook and then 2006 with Twitter, free was the New thing. Everything was free. Everything should be free. All things should be free. And the world would be fantastic. And we all live off advertising. If we look at the 20 years performance of LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, it's been fantastic for their shareholders, it's been fantastic for their founders. But have those platforms really delivered for their users? No, because they're free. And where it's free, it's very hard to find intimacy, trust, belonging and self esteem. I'll let Penny give her view on that.

Yeah, I mean, Thomas, he and I are very different. I see gray and Thomas sees black and white, which is, which is fantastic. So anybody listening watching will see that I see the world a little bit in a more. I don't mean gray as in a dull color. I just see more of a blended thing. I think Thomas is right in that, you know, I do believe in free. Okay. But I want us to make sure people understand that that isn't purely for commercial reasons. It is actually for the user experience. Because what we experienced, we started off a little bit free, then we went into paid membership and we had these different levels that Thomas talks about. We saw that the experience people were having that were only paying $10 or €10 or £10 was having was far richer. And it wasn't purely because we were giving them more tools. It was because when you paid for something, you committed to it. And they looked out for other people in the network that were also a paid user. And literally you could connect with a free member. But people wanted to silo themselves into where are the other people that truly believe in this community and are here and they've got some skin in the game. And so we could observe that. And it was an experiment in a way, but we could observe that. The other thing is that community is becoming huge. There's 10 million Facebook groups now and probably more than that stat that I heard, plus all the other places, LinkedIn groups, people having communities on Disciple and Peer Board, etc. But actually they might call them communities, but I don't think many people know how to run them as a community. Many people run them as networks, not as a community. And I think it's really important to understand the difference. Now, I always come from an emotional place. You know, I am an emotional person. And if you did psychometric tests with people, some people come purely from I want results, I want results. Other people say, I want an experience, I want feelings. What we believe community has is a feeling, a sense of belonging to it, as Thomas said. And what's very Interesting to us is that we've been running for the last 17 months a survey that people could take a business health check. There's a question on it. Are you lonely in business? And it's growing and you wonder why, when we're the more connected as a society than ever before, why are people feeling lonelier? And it really is down to the fact that they haven't got a sense of community anymore. And community, as Thomas says, it gives you a sense that you matter, that people are listening to you, that you can be yourself, that you can close the gap between this is my identity and this is my truth. But not many people know how to run communities very similarly to. You could have loads of pubs across the country and you can walk into some pubs and absolutely love the atmosphere in it, and the landlord greets you with a smile and he remembers your name the next time and he then starts to remember what drink you like. Or you can walk into a pub and no matter how many times you walk into it, nobody recognizes you. To me, one is a utility and one is a community.

Yeah, you're totally, you're totally right. And I love the analogy of the pubs with communities. One thing that I wanted to tap into Penny and for the context of the people listening in. So Thomas, you said you always believe in paid, right? So for everyone's Reference Academy had 25,000 paid members at the time. So it's the free and the massive growth to 650 of those that were free came after before. How was that make up then? Just predominantly for the content Because I know that many people will be interested to hear more about that.

It's interesting because I'm a historian now, a sort of digital historian, because I've been online for 30 years, but I remember the very first day, December 7, 2002, when we got our first paid member. So we had about 10,000 members by then. We started in 98. We mainly did physical events around the UK and then they spread into Belgium and the Netherlands and gradually spread across Europe and then around the world. But that very first paying member, Leon Benjamin, I even remember his name because he sent us our first 10 pounds on PayPal that month. In December 2002, we had 36 paying members out of about 10,000 total on the list or on the community. By 2006 that had reached 30,000 subscribers across those levels. The 2 pounds, the 10 pounds, the 100 pounds, depending on the level, bronze, silver or gold. So really the paying members grew as a tiny percentage, which you can see 30,000 out of 650,000 is less than half of 1%. Yeah. So it's a tiny. So you've got like 1 in 200 people who want to contribute and get more by making a payment. And those people get a lot more because the moment you make that payment, the moment you give that piece of exchange, like you with bit 100, you give commitment of time. And communities only work if you invest time. I think the trouble with free is there is no commitment of time. And the trouble with free, I think, is you're rewarded with tokens now called likes and shares. And the more angry you are and aggressive you are and rude you are and annoying you are, the more likes and shares you receive. So you get awarded for being an idiot or rewarded for being angry or rewarded for shouting. And that's not really how to behave in a community. And so I think free actually drives the wrong behavior and paid drives the right behavior, which is one of commitment, trust, intimacy. Let me consider that. Who can I connect you with? Well, that's a good idea. Let me. Let me try that. You're more invested in the conversation with free. You're more involved in the game of collecting these points or tokens or likes or shares, which arguably are futile.

And I think Thomas, moving on to the learnings back in the day from, from the Academy. So what would you say or what have you taken as a result of.

Of.

Of. Of when you. When you. When you sold the business at the time. So what are the learnings around community around it that led you and then I guess the journey of thereafter, what's happened which has now led you to be 100 and. But yeah, for everyone's reference, you have been running masterminds networking group separately, not as publicly as you have been or probably I haven't been like that, exposed to that. But what will be those learnings in that sense, which I would love the audience to learn from your experience?

The one really big learning for me is those 650,000 members were actually 5,000 clubs of about 130 people.

Okay.

And when I had time, we sold the business in 2012. We were running it for 14 years. The big learning for me was 650,000 members sounds like a huge number, which it was. But when you think about 5,000 clubs of 130 people, that's what it actually was. The Sydney Academy, the Farnham Academy, the Brussels Academy, the New York Academy, the San Francisco Academy. Lots of these little groups, these small intimate groups around the world of between 100 to 150 people, which is Dunbar's number. Dunbar's Law. Robin Dunbar from Oxford University, professor of anthropology. And I looked at that, and as Penny will say, we went through a long period of grieving or bereavement after we said goodbye to Academy. And it took us a long time to recover from that. And so when we came back, we wanted to come back small. And then Penny said, well, let's start very small with just Mastermind groups of 12. And we built three groups of 12. And then when Covid came along, we said, it's time to build one of those small, intimate groups again. But let's just keep it down, just like Academy, keep it down to a nice small number that's manageable. And as Penny says, that we could get our arms round and thus 100 people. And then it just started to settle with me. Oh, goodness me. This is much more significant than we realize. We're actually at the beginning of what I call a big small strategy. And it sounds like an oxymoron and it sounds very confusing, but we see it with SUVs. We see giant SUVs 10 years ago. Now we see little copies of them which are tiny, but they look like big ones. They're big small. And big small is coming to wall products. You notice it in all devices, phones, cars. And so big small strategy is actually a label I've given to community building. Lots and lots of small groups of 100.

And I think that's kind of very, very well. Penny, do you have anything to add on that front? And I guess on the. On the. Before we move on to the kind of. The important elements of the small is the new big thing. I know that many, many people, as I always have, the question is like, okay, so you guys were like the LinkedIn of the day. What happened? Why are you not. Basically, you know, why. You know, what. What happened? And why did these other dudes took that. That space? But I just wanted to kind of touch on that, and I wanted. So, Penny, do you have anything?

Yeah, I do. I see if Thomas has the same take on this, though. You know, Thomas and I, when we started this, it was really deeply ingrained in our values as people. And both Thomas and I deeply care about people. You know, we. Our family is very important to us. And when we have a client, we think of them as family. And. And that's genuine. It really is genuine. And so when we started Academy, you know, when we started in 98, we had no idea what we were creating. It was an idea. I said, To Thomas in a Pizza Express, and MySpace and friends reunited were around. I said, there's nothing for business people. And Thomas was the most phenomenal connector of people, and he was always being used as the gateway. And I said, wouldn't it be lovely if we just put all these people that, you know, into a community and let's. Let's love them, let's care for them, let's help them. We didn't know what it would become. So it started very well. Didn't start with, you know, let's become multimillionaires, let's dominate the world, let's get to, you know, it didn't come from that place. And so when I remember there was a moment. Sorry, can I just ask. Thomas, could you mute while I'm talking? Because I'm getting an echo back. Sorry. Thank you. So when I. So when I. I remember a point in 2005 when I was on a stage and Facebook and LinkedIn were both there, and they were quite new, you know, relatively new. And LinkedIn said, We'll never go into. Never go social. And Facebook said, we'll never go into business. And we sat in the middle of, well, we believe friendship in business. And they didn't. Okay. And I thought, we're safe, because we do. We've all got our space. And LinkedIn was very much more corporate. And, you know, and then Facebook was very much the student and the young person, so we felt quite safe. However, what we didn't realize is the world, enough of the world, wasn't ready for what we believed in culturally, because people wanted to. In business, people didn't want to be friendly. They wanted to cut corners. They wanted to, you know, just stay. You could see it in the way they presented themselves on LinkedIn. They had their suit and tie on, and on Facebook, they'd be carrying their surfboard, and they didn't want to merge their two Personas. And we were asking people to do that, which meant it took effort. And so we would see some people come in, and they would be absolutely amazing. And it's something I think is worth us exploring later about, you know, what. Who is a fantastic citizen of a community. What do they look like? But we would see some people come in. They were brilliant. Other people would come in with that corporate identity feeling, and they would burn their reputation very quickly because they weren't willing to be friendly. But, you know, you have to have a massive shift in the world, which we now are seeing, not just because the pandemic, just because of the world. Where a lot of people realize that actually having friends around you in business is phenomenal and actually is the best way to grow your business. Back in our day, we were evangelizing that and there wasn't enough people believing in it.

Yeah, and I think that's right. And I just really wanted to highlight Penny. Penny wrote this amazing book which is Business is personal, which kind of I want to take then, now this into leading into the journey of like, of course, we talked about a little bit of the learnings. And let's think about now as a. What you are, in my opinion, fathers of community. What do you guys see as the key pillars of a community, whether it is in business? By the way, most of my audience are individuals in the events industry. You started that way. The academy was a lot of events, a lot of smaller events and everything, bigger events. But so for them, they want to just give, I'm giving you the context so that basically the explanation is kind of, they can understand that from that point of view. So what would be the key pillars of a community in B2B as you see it coming from the words of wisdom?

Do you want to start with that? Thomas, you have to unmute. Sorry.

For me, Ricardo, it all comes down to the word intimacy.

Okay?

And I don't think you can achieve intimacy on LinkedIn or Twitter or Facebook or Instagram. I see those as systems machines, platforms, advertising buckets. And we believe that business is personal, as you've just held up the book. And to achieve business is personal, you have to be intimate. But I think being intimate with people in business, just like being intimate with people who are your family and friends, is actually good for your health. Your physical health, your mental health, your well being, your self esteem, your confidence, your gut health. I think your. Your physical being is based on the quality of relationships you have in business and at home with your family and with your friends. And therefore, why not have intimacy in business as well? Because it keeps you healthier and happier and makes you feel good. And so to me, my first pillar would be the one of intimacy. I guess Penny always has a longer list than me, so she'll have a much longer list. But for me, number one is intimacy.

No, I think I agree 100%. 100% on paper, I agree. I agree with you, Thomas. What I would also say, and I think a lot of communities are built by people with a guru style of attitude. You know, join my community and listen to me. I'm incredible. We, Thomas and I turn that completely on its heads. Our members are the incredible ones. We're there to build a culture and to build a place for them to care for one another. And in doing that, that means we have to. I think a community manager or community person has to put aside their desire for their reputation, their ego to matter in this and realize that there's a servant leadership style of leadership within it. And a lot of that is also about transparency. We are very, very transparent with our members. You know, I had a mentoring session with one of our members yesterday. We were talking about their business and how they grow it. I talked to them about a cash flow forecast, and I showed them our cash flow forecast with all our numbers in it. I haven't. We don't have anything to hide about it because I truly believe that if you are skilled and confident in your skills, your credibility is not damaged at all by the different experiences you go through. And we are, you know, so I think intimacy and transparency and, you know, we are one of you. We care for you. We're a family with you. We're not autocratic parents. We are in it, pulling up our sleeves and serving you. And I think that's very important.

I guess. Sorry.

Go ahead, go ahead.

It's interesting. Penny talks of the guru leaders who are sort of, I'm rich, you're poor. Be like me, follow my system. Here's my recipe. Follow my system. I think we've seen a lot of those guru leaders that Penny describes on Twitter, on LinkedIn, on Instagram, on Facebook. And what they actually are is they're master gamers of a system. They've learned how to game a system almost like a computer game or a gambling game, to play the game, to get the followers, to get the likes, to get the shares, to get the right video, to get the right. And to me, it's a giant computer game for them. And they sit at the top of this multimillion stack and say, be like me. Have this house, this car, this lifestyle. Be like me. And we think that's utter nonsense, total and utter nonsense. What people are seeking is, as Penny says, transparency. People are seeking intimacy. They're seeking trust. They're seeking support. Of course, they're seeking recommendations and referrals to the right people. Everybody wants to be in a group of the right people. But defining the right people, for you and me, what we're trying to do is make sure that when you come into a place that we build, just like at Academy, everybody used to walk into Academy events, and I went to 2000 Academy events all over the world. And they always used to say to me, they used to walk in and say, thomas, nice to meet you. Heard great things about Academy. There's loads of people here in this room. Could you just introduce me, Thomas, to the right people? And I used to look across the room and I would say, well, how do you define the right people? And they say, oh, well, you know, because, you know, all the right people, all the quality people. And I used to look back at the room and say to them, well, okay, so there's 100 people in the room here. You want me to walk into the room and pick out the quality people for you? And what kind of criteria do you want me to use? And I think we've always focused on building community around the right people with the right value, similar values to our own. I think we attract people with similar values to our own. And I think in terms of organizations that you're serving who are building events and conferences, they're attracting a profile of people like that, them, they're delivering content and information through those various conferences and events. They perhaps haven't made the leap yet to start building these small, intimate groups of those people, connecting them, supporting them, developing them, so that they get much deeper relationships with them and do more business with them as a result, because they have that intimate relationship with them where they share everything and say, oh, I didn't know, I didn't know you were working on that. I didn't know you were working on that. If I'd known that, I'd introduce you to Ricardo. If I'd known that, I'd introduce you to Claire. And so to me, you can't, you, you can't do intimacy at scale. But what you can do is you can do lots of small. Thus, why I refer to this as a big, small strategy.

You, You've got.

We're moving to a world where people want small, big, and delivering that they want intimacy at scale, which sounds like an oxymoron. And what LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram are delivering is a profile and lots of noise and lots of unsafe environments. People want safety. You have to. People have to feel safe, and they only feel safe. And I think if you look at the output of social media around the world, perhaps in politics, we've created an environment which is very unsafe with free. Free has created instability. Free has created unsafe. Free has created. Created an environment of disinformation. Free has created distrust. So is free a great thing? Well, it's great for advertisers and it's great for shareholders, but it's not great for people.

That is a very interesting element, Thomas, that you highlight, because let's say most of the people that I've worked with, they operate under one vertical, say a vertical that has potentially an audience of 5,000, 10,000 people, depending on what is. I also see that we have people in the audience that operate for organizations that hold audiences of hundreds of thousands in all various different verticals. Basically in the event industry, you have like these big incumbent companies that operate on large scale. And they all are saying, and it's very interesting that you say that they all have, we all have all these eventrepreneurs, have the sponsor that comes here, I say, hi, Mr. Event Organizer, I'm here, I'm paying you X amount of money. Introduce the right people to the right quality people. And that's what event organizers sell. We'll introduce you to the right people. Who is the right people. So the question that. And I'm just trying to put myself in the shoes of an event leader or an event CEO of a multi business. Okay, can you get me here? How do I build lots of small that are intimate and transparent and everything? And that's kind of where the big gap, where they're like, how the hell do we get to scale in that sort of environment? And if anyone, probably from the audience, has any question, please, please put it forward. But I'm just kind of think I'm directing this in the way that is probably from more from your perspective. So how does that work then, Thomas? Okay, with small.

Okay, I've thought about this a lot, as you can imagine, and I've had 23 years to think about it. And if you look at economics of investors, if you look at the way Peter Thiel funded Facebook and the investors went into Instagram and LinkedIn and Twitter, the obsession was with scale and monopoly. Scale from free and monopoly, from unlimited capital to get to a billion users or 2 billion users. Everything was about scale. For that IPO, for that shareholder hit.

Big, big, big, big, big.

But I actually believe you can make more money from fewer people in small, intimate groups if you serve them properly. So I, I think you can make more money from 100 people than a thousand people. I think you can make more money from, from a hundred people than ten thousand people, provided you give them the value that they want. And I think whether you're, whether your clients have 5,000 conference members or 100,000 conference members, they've got to break those organ up those lists or communities or audiences down into lots and lots of small groups, lots and lots of small ingredients and give more at a higher price for more value, rather than having a big list that the sponsor comes in and says, can I tap into your hundred thousand? Can I tap into your 5,000? Because you can't get the right people, you can't identify the right people until you create some kind of exchange for them to invest in some kind of value for them to invest in. And they won't invest in big, they will invest in small, they won't invest in big noise because they're overwhelmed with messages and emails and notifications. People are swamped with messages. They don't even know which app to, to open now in the morning to check their messages because there are so many notifications. People want to go to safe places that they trust. And in the same way with the pub analogy that Penny gave earlier, there's a big difference between a Wetherspoons and your local village pub. And we believe more in the local village pub than the Wetherspoons. But there's no reason why you can't have 10,000 village pubs, no reason at all. So you can't. Your clients have got to build lots of small intimate groups and then they've got to have a strategy working with you to achieve that and an exchange of value that people will pay for.

And Thomas, which means if I am another entrepreneur, I run my community of 5,000. And again using the same analogy of the publisher. So the landlord is the landlord, right? The landlord cannot split himself or clone himself into the variety of, you know, of obviously he must have a bigger family, which he can kind of do that. How does that do that? And again, being in the mind of the leader of the CEO or the leader says, okay, that means an extra investment of time. I know I cannot put a two year old experienced individual running this smaller communities. I might need to pay or we need to get better expertise around it. How, how do you start building? How do you start doing that? Because that's kind of time, effort, love and money.

Well, that's a question that Penny can answer beautifully.

How do you start building the community culture? Are you asking Ricardo?

It's, it's more around in the lab. Like using, using the same analogy, lots of small of the landlord. But if you, exactly you, you guys are the essence of your community, right? And if, if you want to do scale, you need to do small micro communities. This is kind of the, the word is micro communities, going from big to micro communities. But when you're running a business of events, you Know you're you, you, you doing the idea. How do I get 5 micro communities led by who? By me, the owner or the event producer. How do you achieve that scale? Because again, money, effort and I guess, love to give.

Yeah, I mean there's a. Has to be. We have to look at almost reverse engineering this. So what is the outcome that somebody's wanting from why they're going to do a community in the first place. And so let's look at what are the benefits of an organization doing community. So we're talking about, we're running a community. It's a commercial decision to run a community and that's different. If it's an organization that says that we're running events and this is need, we feel we need to create a sense of belonging to our organisation or to this event, then that, that might be a different strategy. And I think all communities have to be run by someone who's really committed to actually caring for a community. I don't think enough thought goes into the psychometrics and the attitude of the person that's being chosen to run a community. So if we look at, you know, people might do Myers Briggs, they might do disc, they might do what we do. I'm an identify, modify adept one the communication style and the attitude of this servant leader who's going to lead a community is really important. Training them and making sure that they're the right person in the first place to run a number. So if I was an event manager and I thought, well, I'm going to run a number of them. Any event must have segmentation in it. There must be natural market segmentation in the event from, from the type of people that are exhibiting at the events, whatever it is they will. And so it's not going to be difficult to find what are the commonalities of people and group them into those clusters and say you can join a number of them as someone, but these are the individual communities that were running around an event. I mean, it's quite interesting. You can see the events spark up instantly with a hashtag on an event. As soon as you're part of a hashtag on Twitter, you're part of that community, aren't you, for that day where you're, you're, you know, so communities can pop up really quickly and people immediately get that sense and they make connections through those hashtags. So I don't know whether that's particularly answering your question, but I think that, you know, the point that Thomas is making is that we truly believe through experience that small is what matters to people. And so you've got to look at, we can't do a whole strategy session here, a generic hatstick strategy session. You've got to look at why am I creating community? It has to come from the customer perspective and customers want to know they matter. And they don't feel they matter inside a community of a thousand. They don't feel they matter inside a community of 10,000. If you have a small community, they feel they matter. They've been selected into it, for example. And you might put in a policy like we have with BIP 100. You know, we've, we've got 62 members now. We've done nearly 700 interviews for that. Therefore, when somebody like yourself gets accepted into the community, it's a win for you because you know how hard we've worked to find somebody with your expertise and your attitude to life. So you can, if you make it that, you know, we've got these communities and we like to select you, to bring you in and you pre interview people. And it's now, you might say that's a huge amount of work for someone, but if you're caring for the customer and it's the customer experience you're talking about here, then that is the right thing to do.

Can I add something to this, Ricardo?

Yes, please, always.

Because Penny and I have spoken at, we've literally spoken at hundreds of conferences around the world, in hundreds of conference centers, in cities all over the world. New York, Las Vegas, Singapore, Sydney, all over the world. And we all know you go into the big hall and you have the 500 people or a thousand people or sometimes 10,000 people, and you have the big keynote speech and you have the guest speaker who's being paid $100,000 or whatever it is to be the big, the big woman or the big guy. And you have the keynote speech and you have the introduction from the chair or the conference owner, the publisher, whoever is the publisher of that conference. And then they say, what we're going to do now, ladies and gentlemen, is we're going to put you into streams, we're going to put you into groups. And over in that room over there we're going to have the AI room, and over there we're going to have the climate change room, and over there we're going to have the blockchain room, and over there we're going to have the mental health room, and over there we're going to have the wellbeing room. And then we're Going to have coffee over there and we can have lunch over there, afternoon tea there and dinner there. And then we've got the black tie awards in the hotel later on to give out all the awards for all of these different categories. And this great big room, this mass of 10,000 people, then segments down into the things that they like most and they break down and go off into those different rooms, the coffee room, the AI room, the mental health room, the well being room, the blockchain room. And at that point the big becomes small because the big audience, the big event, the big conference, becomes lots of small intimate groups. They're called streams or breakout rooms at these conferences. And they all have their little chair and their little panel and little speakers and the sort of little, the little speakers are then in the little rooms. That is the opportunity that is never taken advantage of by any conference company in my experience, in my whole life. And I have literally spoken at more than a thousand conferences because once they break into those small groups, they're identifying themselves. I'm interested in mental health, I'm interested in AI, I'm interested in climate change, I'm interested in blockchain. That's the moment where the conference company in the streams creates those little groups of 100. Now that physical event is now moving online and you can join. As Penny said earlier, there are 10 million groups on Facebook. There's probably a million groups on LinkedIn. Are we actively participating in those as business people? No, we don't trust them, we doubt them, we don't pay for them. Imagine Facebook Launcher, a premium membership, $100 a month and you can be a premium member of Facebook or a premium member of LinkedIn or a premium member of Twitter. Business people would flock to it because they know by paying they would take away all the rubbish. And so people want small from big, but they still love going to that big conference, they still love hearing that big keynote. They, they want to see the big room, they want to join in on the hashtag on Twitter, they want to tweet, but really they want to segment off into the streams. And the moment they segment off into those small intimate groups, that's the moment big becomes small. And that small has to be converted into lots and lots of small, lots and lots of little communities. And that's the strategy challenge that all of these conference companies are facing all over the world. Particularly when they suddenly see the young 27 year old who's running hopin.com suddenly worth $3 billion and the company is worth $8 billion and he only started the company in 2019, and they're thinking.