How the Founder of General Assembly Built a Massive Community - Hustle Con 2015

So I'm gonna talk about community building in the 21st century and share a little bit about some of the early adventures in community building that we began doing with General Assembly a few years ago when we first started. So a little bit about me, first of all. Graduated from Yale in 2009. Moved to New York City. While I was at Yale, I did a couple of entrepreneurial endeavors. Freshman year, I started an antique furniture business, which we discovered that Yale was renovating all these old buildings, and so we started buying up old pieces of antique furniture for like nothing from Yale, and created an e-commerce site, an online brand, an eBay store, and sold them for like, you know, 1,000% markup. So that was sort of my first hustle. And then after that, started a more traditional tech startup called GoCross Campus, which I started junior year at Yale. And we were basically taking sports rivalries and college rivalries and putting them online and building these sort of massively multiplayer social communities and games online, allowing people to live out their school rivalries. Unfortunately, we never really figured out how to generate any revenue with that one, which apparently is important for running a business. You know, so they say. And we end up raising a couple million in venture capital. The recession hit in early 2008. We tried to raise another round, and it wasn't happening. Our bank account was just going in one direction. We also made a lot of first-time founder mistakes. And, you know, we had to shut that company down, and it failed. And as I said, I graduated in 2009, and so this startup failed right when I was graduating. And my whole plan was, "All right, I'm gonna go graduate from from school and work full-time as co-founder of my own startup. Unfortunately, that's only possible if said startup actually exists and has money, which it didn't. So moved to New York. I never really had a real job, so to speak. But I moved to New York, and I'll talk about this in a minute. About a year in after moving to New York, with a couple other friends, started General Assembly. And, you know, now fast forward a little bit to today, 2015, you know, we've raised just about $50 million in funding. We just hit over 500 employees, our HR team told us the other day. And we have campuses in 14 cities around the world. So quite a lot of growth in the last few years, and I can talk about, you know, some of the early community building strategies that we pursued to get to where we are today. I also, you know, about a year or so ago, started a very large side project. I'm still full-time at General Assembly, but Daybreaker is another thing I started, which has now expanded pretty rapidly. We're at 9 cities globally and counting, and that's for a separate talk. But we're in San Francisco if you guys are up for an early morning dance party. All right, so let's talk about sort of the problem, the situation here. So rewind to 2009, right? The recession had hit New York City. This is where I was based, you know, and I was seeing that the recession had hit, and tech was really transforming every single industry out there. Whether it was retail, or journalism, or advertising, or finance, or fashion, you know, technology was transforming these industries, and companies were changing. The kinds of talent that employers were hiring for was changing. At the same time, you know, we were seeing that the New York tech scene was really starting to blow up. It was starting to become this burgeoning real thing. And I know, you know, here in the Bay Area, you guys have been doing this for decades. In 2009, you know, it had been like a few years, you know, and it was very exciting at the time. But it was pretty ad hoc and somewhat disjointed. You know, there's a meetup here, an event there, and it didn't feel like it was as cohesive as we thought, you know, maybe it could be. At the same time, due to the recession, you had a lot of people who were seeking new career paths. They were coming out of traditional industries, Maybe they had lost their job, or corporate jobs were less secure and less available as people once thought. Employers were looking for new kinds of skills. People were realizing, you know what, you know, tech is becoming more and more of a thing. Maybe I need some tech skills. Maybe I need to make myself more marketable. You also had a lot of young people coming out of college, and with just their college degree, they weren't marketable. You know, it wasn't— it was hard for young people to find jobs with just a college degree. People are looking for new inspiration, new communities, new opportunities. So that was the situation. We were seeing all this, and, you know, we sort of had this idea, what if we could create a physical place? Not an incubator, not an investment firm, not a VC, and not just a coworking space either, but let's create a physical place, a community nucleus, if you will, for the startup ecosystem in New York City. A place where people could come together to learn from each other, to collaborate professionally, and to interact socially, right? So we really believe that, you know, there shouldn't be these walls between your educational life, your professional life, and your social life. But in today's world, and especially where we think, you know, things are going, and most obviously what we were seeing in the startup space, it was better when all those things, or all those walls, those separations, are torn down, and that your personal world and your professional pursuits and your intellectual or educational life were maybe a little bit more seamless. So we set out to create a physical home, a hub, where all of this activity could happen. And we could create that kind of— create some sort of nuclear fusion that could spark new companies, new ideas, new opportunities for people in New York City. So I want to talk about, then, how we did it, right? What we did. A couple of tactics. So I'm going to talk about 6 tactics. Activate the core. These are community-building tactics that we really pursued early on. And this is sort of the meat of, I think, what we did that really worked. Activate the core. Give karma, get karma. Establish clear norms and values. Create meaningful offline experiences. Balance curation with openness. And be authentic and live your mission. So let's dive in. Activate the core. This image is the Ace Hotel. You guys might have been there in the Flatiron District. Before General Assembly, I was hanging out here a lot. This is sort of my daytime home base. It was a place where people would go and work on their startups, code, have meetings, have coffees, get mentorships, hang out, listen to music, whatever. And it sort of was one of the inspirational places for GA early on. So when we think about activate the core, and what was some of the piece of advice there are, one, really focus your early efforts on building a powerful sort of central core of true believers. So, you know, what we did with General Assembly was a lot of one-on-one coffees, a lot of conversations. You know, I would bring people that I met to the Ace Hotel. You know, when I moved to New York, I knew maybe 10 people. I just graduated from college. You know, I didn't really have a network. But I started to go to events. I started to go to meetups. I started to meet people. I started to get introductions. And I started to tell people about this thing called General Assembly that I was working on. And a lot of that early relationship building was really useful and really necessary. I would organize group dinners where I'd bring together different people who I had met who were interested and excited about this idea of General Assembly, wanted to share, wanted to give ideas, give advice. They wanted to be a part of it. They wanted to, you know, help. And I was really encouraging those people to give that to us and see, you know, how can we help you, how can you help us. Let's think about this as a community gathering. And so small group dinners were useful. Space tours. Before we actually took a lease on our first campus, I brought in maybe 100 different individuals— VCs, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, et cetera— brought them into the space, in the raw, empty space, and said, what would you have here? What would you want to see in this campus? What do you think about this classroom setup? What do you think about this open desk plan? What do you think about having a lounge and a big communal table here, getting people's advice and insights, getting their feedback. That way, they became more invested in what we were doing, as opposed to us just trying to sell them. It was really asking them, what would you want here? What would be useful for you? I was also manually building our email list. So our first 1,000 people on our email list were individuals that I had either met and talked to about General Assembly at an event, or at a coffee, or what have you. Also, people who I had emailed back and forth. So I would keep a tab open in my browser, Every time that I emailed with someone, or I met someone at an event, any interaction that I'd had with an individual about General Assembly, I would take their email address, throw it into a tab, put it into our MailChimp list. And then a few months later, once we started to really get the word out and start to spread the news about this thing, I had 1,000 people who were already familiar with General Assembly. And that was really how we were able to build that core audience. We also— we didn't actually raise money until about 9 months into launching General Assembly. And how we were able to do that was we were able to get a grant from the City of New York to help get started. We sold some corporate sponsorships, or got some corporate sponsors to give us some cash. And then we pre-sold coworking memberships before we launched. So activating this really core community of true believers, we got startups before we even opened to say, "Yes, I want to be a part of this thing. I want to join General Assembly, and I'm willing to give you some money to hold my spot and to guarantee membership in this space." And that's how we funded the build-out of the campus and the signing of the lease. And so immediately when we opened up, we were totally full, and we were already generating revenue. And so, you know, those early adopters that you cultivate will become your evangelists. If you do well by them, they'll do well by you. Which brings me to my second tactic: give karma, get karma. So, you know, one of the things I really encourage in community building is try to be as useful as possible. Give. Connect, inspire people, support them, do whatever you can to help them in their mission. You know, when I— as I said, early on when we were first getting started, you know, we— before we even launched, right? We thought, "Well, we don't have anything to give you yet. We're not offering classes. We're not offering space. You know, we're not teaching workshops yet." However, we started making introductions. Probably every day for the first year, I would make maybe 5 to 10 introductions a day. And those well-placed intros add value to the ecosystem. Everyone benefits. And by that, I mean, if you find two people who don't know each other, right, but probably should— I came across a lot of people in our early networking, community-building days. Let's say someone's working on a fashion startup, and then there's an investor over here I met a few days later interested in fashion startup opportunities. If they didn't know each other, I would get in touch and say, hey, do you guys know each other? Because you should probably connect. And I would make that introduction, and both of them would benefit from having known each other. And I would look good for doing it. Right? And I wouldn't lose anything. You know, it wasn't a zero-sum game. You would just add value to the ecosystem. So the more that you just send out karma and add value to the ecosystem, making introductions, offering advice, being as useful as you possibly can, you never know exactly how that's going to come back to you, you know, serendipitously. And I was never really asking for anything in return. I never, you know, said, well, I'm making all these introductions for you. How about you give something back to me? I just tried to be as useful as I possibly could to anyone in my network. And then, a year or so later, when we were launching General Assembly, we needed instructors, or we were looking for sponsors, or corporate partners, or investors. And we sort of put those asks out into the universe. People just sent back support in droves, because they knew that we were such an additive, positive part of the community. So there's that karma piece that's very, very real, even if it's hard to point to tangibly. Number 3, establish clear norms and values. So I think this is really, really important when you're first starting and building your community. Really codify the founding principles of your brand. Think about what those are, even maybe even before you launch. What are the core community values and principles that you want to drive the brand? Everything else should flow out of that. Start with those values. Start with those principles. Figure out what matters to you and what values you want the community to believe in as well. And so how we did that is we actually encouraged a culture of reciprocity through a physical— we call it search engine. And it was these two huge bulletin boards. And on the bulletin board, we had pieces of paper. And you could say, I'm offering— I'm a blank, and I'm offering blank. And you say, I'm a developer, and I'm offering free mentoring for people interested in learning how to code. Or, you know, "I need a UX designer to help me with my mobile app." And people could post this stuff physically. And, you know, we weren't asking— we weren't taking a cut of any deals that happened. We just encouraged people to put what you're offering and what you need, and then encourage people to connect in real life, to share and give back to each other. So that culture of reciprocity was one of our core community values. And we really encourage that physically in the community space. A couple of the other values that we chose to really inspire and drive our community, these are the 6 that we chose at General Assembly. Obviously, you know, when you guys are building your communities and growing your audiences, choose your own. People before the machine, you know, that's sort of a key one. You know, as we realized, General Assembly is about the people. It's about the individuals. It's not so much about You know, the technology is much about transforming people's lives. Passion and purpose, really encouraging people to think about where they want to go, what matters to them, not just making a lot of money in their careers. Own your own path, that was another important one. This idea of choosing, you know, taking an entrepreneurial approach to your career, essentially. Even if you don't necessarily want to be an entrepreneur right now and start your own company, In this day and age, you know, people are changing jobs every couple of years, and so it's important to know what skills you're looking for. It's important to know where you're going, where you want to take your career path, because there's not some sort of great pathway that says, "Here's how to be successful. Follow these paths." Ultimately, it comes down to you and you figuring out, "What does success mean to me? What's going to make me happy? How am I going to find meaning?" Number 4, create meaningful offline experiences. This is an event we did, General Assembly did, with Pencils of Promise, which is a really cool nonprofit organization building schools all over the developing world. And we really tried to do a lot of offline sort of magical engaging experiences that would create really memorable moments for people that they would take with them through their weeks and through their days. You know, there's so much talk about online UX design, right, and user experience. And a lot of that is referring to a mobile app, or a web app, or something, right? One of the things we thought a lot about is, well, what about offline UX design? What about experience design, right? How can we create experiences that are magical and memorable? How can we get people engaging in real life? You know, people connect far more deeply offline than they do online. You know, there's only so much interaction you can have with another human through a message board, or through a group. Or through a message, you know, text or something like that, or through an image. But getting people together in real life and set the lighting and the music and the entertainment and the vibe and the people and the speakers that create the content, create these, you know, really magical experiences that people are gonna take with them and remember and say, "Wow, that was powerful. I met some great people. I connected with others, and I have now a much stronger connection to the brand or the product or the organizer putting this experience on." A couple of examples there. We did an event called Heartbeats a number of times, actually, here in San Francisco, New York, Hong Kong, London, a few of our cities. And essentially, it was a social event where we set one design constraint. We said, OK, this is a social event where there's one rule. And the rule is you cannot talk about your job. So no one could go around and say, what do you do? Because that's such a common networking thing. That's the first question everyone asks. We thought, well, if you can't talk about what you do for a living, And instead, we encouraged people, talk about what you love to do outside of what you do for a living. You know, music, art, activities, hobbies, whatever it is. And it got people interacting in a really interesting way. And it was a lot more memorable and interesting of an experience than, you know, just your typical networking event. A couple of other ideas, you know, fireside chats, live bands. You know, try to break the norm. Try to create original, memorable experiences that people are going to take away, because that drives community in a big way. Number 5, balance curation with openness. This is tricky. You know, with any community that you want to build, there's really this balance, right? So a really tightly curated membership, where you're very selective about who you want in, and choosing just the most incredible people, will yield quality individuals, and a great community, and high-quality interaction. At the same time, to the outside, might come across as unwelcoming, too exclusive, too clubby. And this was a concern that we had with General Assembly. We said, OK, well, Early on, we offered coworking, and it was this invite-only, membership-based coworking community. And we really wanted to make sure that it wasn't just pay-to-play, that it wasn't just anyone off the street, but that you could actually— but that only really high-quality startups and entrepreneurs were able to be a part of that community. And by doing that, we knew that people in that community, the members, would know, all right, there's some minimum bar of quality. I can let my guard down a little bit. I can feel familiar with these people. I can interact with them knowing that the other people here are sort of like-minded and of my same ilk, right? However, we knew that if we just did that, we had the run— we run the risk of becoming an exclusive club or a membership that would feel weird to the people who are outside, right? And so we said, OK, let's have a curated invite-only community of coworking members, but then take all of our programming, all of our classes, and events, and workshops, and open that up to the public, and have that be an opportunity for anyone who was interested in learning skills, getting involved in the startup scene, making it, that they could come in and feel like they were a part of the GA community as well. So think about how you want to do that. Balance curation for quality, but also make sure that you're welcoming and open, because that's important for building your brand as well. And then last, be authentic and live your mission. So be earnest. Think about how can you authentically live the values of your community and of your brand. If you're building a community, you really need to care about your people, right? So the spirit— remember I was talking about those core values and core norms. You need to live those yourself every day. If you're not living those values, if you're not living those principles on a day-to-day basis, your community is going to know it, and they're going to feel it, and it's going to feel inauthentic. If you're trying to get other people to participate in these things, and you're not doing it yourself, then you're being a bad leader. I think as a community builder, you're a convener, you're a facilitator, you're a public servant, right? You are there for your people. You're not a celebrity. It should not be about you. It should be about them. I remember early on, people said that the early couple of years of General Assembly community building felt like this grassroots political campaign. And I remember, you know, I knew that we were doing something right when about 3 months before we launched our campus— so this is maybe November of 2010, we launched in January of 2011. In November of 2010, we didn't have a website, we didn't get any press, we avoided all publicity and press until actually we opened. And I had, again, brought about 100 people through the space, I had tons of coffees, dinners, a lot of that grassroots community building. and I started to hear, people were telling me, "Hey, Bremer, I was at this meetup last night, and do you know—" And I wasn't there, I wasn't at that meetup. "I was at this meetup last night, and one of the big topics of conversation between all the attendees was General Assembly, and people were excited about it, and people didn't really know what it was, but they were excited, and it was awesome, and they heard rumors, and they were getting pumped." And I knew that something was going right if other people were talking about General Assembly, and spreading that message, and getting, doing that community building. And it wasn't just me, you know, hustling and preaching, but that I'd gotten other people excited enough because they saw that I was authentically believing in this stuff, and that they sort of took those reins themselves. And so, you know, what had happened is really, you know, became a nucleus of the startup ecosystem in New York. This is me a couple years ago giving a talk, one of our most popular talks, introduction to the New York startup community at the French Embassy in New York, actually. Which is pretty wild. But within 6 months of launch, people were telling us, people were coming to us saying, GA is like a core center nucleus of the New York startup community, which was kind of our dream from the very beginning. And it was just so amazing to hear other people tell us that. We had 10 times the number of applicants than could physically fit into the coworking space. And almost every single night, we were running classes, and workshops, and talks that were sold out. So we knew that we were doing something right. We knew that there was a product market fit there. We knew that the community was vibrant enough that people were coming to us and willing to spend some money to be a part of that community, to learn, to collaborate, to meet other people. And as we grew, our community and brand became pretty well known and respected in the industry. And about maybe 6 or 7 months in launching, in mid-2011, we said, OK, we sort of made it as a core hub of the startup community in New York. Great. But we thought, you know what, we think we actually have a little bit of a bigger vision on our hands. And it's not just about being the center of the startup ecosystem in New York. That's great. That's fine. But we realized, you know what, we have all these people coming to us seeking community, seeking inspiration, but also seeking to be relevant and seeking skills and opportunities in the rapidly changing 21st century economy. And so we thought, you know what, we may have something bigger. And that bigger vision was that we realized we can actually build an entirely new kind of educational institution. One that focuses not on pieces of paper, not on giving degrees, but focuses on giving people really practical vocational skills in 21st century topics like technology, design, business, marketing, etc. As well as plugging them into a really supportive community and network of fellow doers and practitioners and creators. And also creating opportunities for our graduates and alumni so that as they go out into the world, we can actually get them jobs. We can actually help them start companies. We can actually help them find work that they're passionate about and help them— help empower them to pursue work that they love. That was the bigger vision that we realized. And that's what we've been pursuing now ever since for the last 3 or 4 years. So this is a map of a bunch of our campuses right now. We have physical campuses in these cities all over the world, with more coming soon. We do a lot more— a lot of online education now as well. But really, the heart and soul of what we do is in-person, very hands-on educational experiences that are transforming people's lives for the better. So what's next? What's next for us? As I said, we're really focused on transforming people's lives and empowering them to pursue their calling. So we want to make sure that anyone who's willing to work hard and follow all their passions, can have a meaningful career pursuing work that they love. And we intend to build a long-term educational institution that will be around for decades. We're not here to flip something. We're not here to build something that's going to be short-lived. We're teaching Ruby on Rails, and Lean UX, and Google Analytics, right? And just as a handful of little topics that we offer. That's what we're teaching now in 2015, right? In 2020, 2025, we don't know what we're going to be teaching. We know it's going to be relevant to those years, and we know it's going to be practical, and useful, and transformative, and community-oriented. But it means that we constantly need to be updating our curriculum and evolving to meet the needs of the present and the near future, so that when our students come to us, whether they've taken a class before or they haven't, we're going to make sure that they're getting what they need to make them relevant and as successful as possible in the day and age that it is. And so when we think about building an educational institution to last, we're never finished, right? We're always evolving, it's always changing, things are never totally stable. You know, we intend to grow our community to become really probably the most valuable and indispensable part of what we're doing. We want to make sure that the General Assembly community is as personally and as professionally valuable as possible for our alumni. So the skills training and the workshops and the courses and the educational programs Getting people jobs, all of that's really critical. But ultimately, in the long term, we want to make sure that if someone's looking for a job, looking to level up in their career, looking for new skills, looking for opportunities, looking for a co-founder, whatever, that the first place that they come to is their General Assembly alumni community. And that we want that to be one of the most valuable assets that we have at General Assembly. And so that's why community building is so important. And I think for a lot of companies, a lot of businesses, I think that— your community of customers, of clients, or users, or whatever, the more that you cultivate that, and the more that you make that as strong as possible, not just with your interactions to them, not just the brand interactions with the individuals, but how can you get the individuals interacting with each other? We can only do so much for our alumni, but the more that we can help connect our alumni up to each other, and create means, and values, and a culture of reciprocity so that our alumni are helping each other, That's how we can scale this community to become, you know, a truly global and powerful, powerful network. So we're, you know, we're about this— by the end of this year, I think we'll be about 25,000 alumni in our community, and that's growing fast. And, you know, we intend to continue to expand around the globe, both online and offline. So I want to thank you all for having me up here. I'll take a couple of questions. Here's my contact info, social profiles. But yeah, thanks for having me. Take a couple questions. Thank you, Matt. If anyone has any questions, come on down. Awesome.

Well, first I want to thank you for coming in and speaking to us. I think you brought up a lot of really good points, and I definitely learned a lot from you. So I guess what one of my first questions is more focused on scaling the community and still maintaining that personal touch. So how have you been doing that? How do you plan to continue to do that?

Totally. Right. So as I said, we're about— by the end of this, we'll be about 25,000 alumni, right? There's a lot of people. Um, we first started our campus in New York City, we had 200 or 300 people, right? And it's a lot easier to create a really tight-knit cult, you know, cultural, um, energy and community with just a couple hundred people. It's much harder to do with, with with those larger amounts. So I think what I would, I would say, and how we're thinking about it, is it all comes down to nested communities, right? 25,000 is a large number of people, um, and it's hard to feel much intimacy there. So what we do is, you know, we have— as I said, you saw that map, right? We have physical campuses and all these different cities, right? So within that larger 25,000 network, um, every city is building community, right? So New York has their community, right? And that might be a couple thousand people. And then within that, you know, any one city, there's individual courses, right? So any one course might be 25 people, right, in our— in General Assembly. And so it starts by having that nested core community of 25 people in a class, getting those people interacting and tightly engaged, very loyal to each other, right? And then you have that sort of— that's like the smallest circle, right? And then, let's say that's a UX course, right? We might have events or programs that bring together all of our students in New York who've taken that particular UX course. So that might be several hundred people, right? And we'll get those people interacting and start to build community at that size, right? And then we'll have alumni events, or we'll have like a quarterly commencement where we'll invite all of our alumni from the last year or so back to participate in a quarterly commencement ceremony. And that brings people from the whole New York network together. So it really comes down to, I think, these tight sort of small nested communities and then building out from there. Awesome, thanks. Yeah. All right, cool. Thanks everyone.