The title comes from a gem of a tweet by Cheryl Douglass, presumably tied to a heartbreaking elimination in Crypto: the Game.

This tweet hit different because I recently split ways with Polygon Labs. I continue to admire their tech, and have a lot of really smart friends who work there.

Now that my plate has more room, I plan on spending time to communicate about my experience and offer some insights through growth at a big protocol, studying early internet culture & repeating social patterns, my general life perspective, and exploring our collective manifestation of a bright future for more people.

In my first post, I am offering an intro to who I am, what people like me do in crypto, & ways we can think about crypto community pros who help grow your product’s adoption & feedback loop, sculpting your tailor-made product market fit.

So, who am I & where did I come from?

Like many other folks in this renaissance, I have lived a lot of lives, and had the opportunity to do many wildly different things. I have been a professional opera singer and musician, stage manager for live events, worked in costuming and art direction for advertisements, and I’ve already helped change the world in small, innocuous ways as a specialty coffee pioneer.

Wherever I put my energy, a sprout of my community grows, and I am humbled every time likeminded individuals show care for the world and people around them. It’s the most rewarding part of what I do and who I am.

I first came to the Ethereum ecosystem as it became clear this movement was enabling a new wave of growth and value for creatives. To me it represented the change all creative industries direly need, and I wanted to be a part of that. While I was already familiar with crypto & some principles through dabblings in Bitcoin (via a few Silk Road purchases), I feel compelled to show how crypto’s value can impact lives in order to propel the adoption of tech.

I am grateful for my two years at Polygon Labs, as it was such a unique opportunity to run with a company during wild growth in extreme and pivotal directions. I brought value to big projects, worked with best-in-class talent, and learned a whole lot of information about ZK technology, which has become a fun pastime for me.

Aside from my time at Polygon Labs, I co-lead and create for GENRE, a community branch of beloved LA experimental record label Leaving Records where we reimagine what a community-driven music label can be. I also love voting, shitposting, and participating in the FWB community, and worked as a community contributor at Seed Club for several of their early seasons, sparking my curiosity for human coordination early in my Ethereum journey. Being an active participant in these orgs was the first time all my varied passions, patience and care for people, industrious nature, and obsession with the internet came into some odd culmination where I felt like home.

Ok, what do community people do?

The hardest easy question for those all working in community.In crypto we generally have two sides of a spectrum with overlap. There’s the business professional, something like a web2 community builder (think Google or Microsoft). These folks are typically effective organizers and, if they’re experienced, can create longtail strategies to reach broader business goals. Then there’s the fun crypto professional in every TG chat and Discord DM, hosting shows, posting memes, and generally in the trenches of the community. These people are the vibe aggregators who keep the community fun to be a part of, and are critical for overall maintenance. I tend to serve a combo plate of both, and it’s helpful to get you a crypto pro who can balance a bit of both.

While crypto community leadership positions are less standardized than established roles like Chief Operating Officer or Marketing VP, I have optimism for more orgs to take this position as seriously as other execs on the team. My last role’s function was very intuitive and strategic; collabing on overall goals, sussing the vibe on the ground, creating high level global strategies, then diving into the details for implementation.

One of the reasons it can be difficult to understand the impact of these positions is because they are day-in/day-out maintenance positions, and sentiment is hard to accurately track unless you’re an empath. But an effective community professional can expand an org’s organic footprint, lower operation costs, and thread people together for a balanced impact on needs and asks.

Another reason, and probably the most insidious one, is that real communities, ones that facilitate connection and care, are incredibly misunderstood in the first place. Misconceptions about what a community is, who is or should be in it, or how they affect the overall mission leads to poor decision-making, weakening the bond that brings the community together. It is critical for orgs to work with their community leaders to create a holistic plan to accomplish overall goals. Not a mandate, but rather a developmental collaboration to create the steps to get there.

Also in crypto communities, things move quickly. Building a community in the 2017 ICO days is not going to yield the same results as today’s market and landscape. The zeitgeist shifts fast and is sensitive to instability. This is why it’s important to build a resilient community which can withstand these fluctuations. Slow growth is the name of the game here. And with any luck, the community may even become stronger through turbulent events.

One of my favorite examples we can see in real time is Farcaster, with its recent explosion in daily active users after the launch of their Frames feature. The tight, early community on the platform established a vibe and rules for conduct, attracting an influx of new users searching for an alternative to to toxic circles on X. The first adopters have been able to handle this wave because the culture around the app was well-established before its virality.

Building in Public

The most important part of my wild journey is sharing what I’ve learned so that others may continue experimenting with these concepts.

Below are some insightful points drawn from my personal experiences. They aim to assist orgs in understanding how to channel their community efforts effectively, while also empowering community leaders to seek the necessary information and collaboration required for crafting and executing a successful strategy or strategic plan.

1. Organizations need a strong reason for being, a compelling ‘why’, or absolutely impeccable vibes.
   Without the reason for being, you will have a hard time retaining a long term, committed community. The people who are here now want to build a new iteration of the internet, one that very often is tied to a set of beliefs about how to correct mistakes in the first/second version. Community pros can help humanize tech and give it the context it needs to be incredibly compelling. I will add that we can attract more of the right kind of people with ethos and a hope for change rather than abstract tech capabilities. I am not the only proof of that.

2. Organizations need to plan ahead for where they want to go, and take appropriate steps to meet their community where it is to get there.
   The ability to answer future-state questions about your ideal community participants will ultimately serve the components you will need for growth. Looking for creatives? Open the convo with the value you are adding to their art practices or revenue potential. Need more zk devs? Might be a good idea to start with concepts & zk language education, or hang out (drop knowledge) in the bars where those devs hang out (online research forums & farcaster channels).

3. Organizations need to understand where and how to show up for impactful community building.
   Going back to those zk devs - you won’t typically find too many researchers on regular X Spaces overflowing with hype. Cultivating a community can be established with a set of steps, but the leader of your community identifies where and how to show up for goodwill & vibes. A good pro can spot areas of improvement and appropriate platforms, a great one can build a long term plan on projected theories, and if they’re S-Tier (like me), you get a dose of creativity added on top.

4. The nature of community work takes an emotional toll on all professionals.
   Even if the work seems effortless, trust me, it’s not. Creating a resilient community requires stability, and stability requires sustainability, and sustainability requires rest and shared labor. A carousel of replacements weakens community culture. It should come as no surprise how loyal members are to the community shepherds. Do not - I repeat - do not undervalue the work your community people are accomplishing to the point of burn out.

5. Organizations must understand that building the type of community they want takes time and sometimes has bumps in the road.
   Bull market communities are easy come, easy go. The ones who stick around carry on because the org is delivering on something they are interested in. But conflict inevitably does arise over time, and every community should prepare for it.
   
   Lesser-seen or talked-about (or remembered) parts of successful communities are events that test the boundaries, rules, or culture. In some of the most complicated examples, it also affects members’ bags or holdings. Surviving these events while staying intact is admirable, and can even attract others’ curiosity to see how the community held the line or evolved.

6. Organizations must understand and honor the emergent behavior of the community, and work with rather than against it.
   Again, anything can happen. No one predicted the Frames primitive was going to boost user acquisition on Farcaster like this. Strategies can be built to exacting degrees, but even after all this effort, the community can and will shift and swing with the current. This is precisely why I enjoy working and implementing programs in seasons as it allows you to align goals on a regular cadence. It also supports my general advocacy for solving complex human problems with biomimetics.

There’s so much more to unpack, but hopefully the image of what I am communicating is forming sharper edges, and you can begin to see some nuance in community work. Through these explorations, I invite orgs and professionals alike to rethink the quantifiably misevaluated ephemeral roles in community. Community is ultimately aligned with growth, as agents of adoption and the lubricant for the feedback loop.

In closing, I plan on writing more openly about everything currently trapped in my brain. My private crypto musings exchanged amongst close friends deserve to be shared and minted. This genesis post is a promise to stop being the iykyk crypto community darling in the shadows, and start building more in public.