Likes & Launch

This is part three of the VC Community Series. Check here for Part 1: Rise of VC Community & 2: Building Community. 

Quick background, I’m the General Manager at Union Square Ventures. I run our 6+ year old community, the USV Network. The VC Community function has increased in popularity and complexity. VC Network structures are a core part of many similar organizations like Accelerators, Incubators and Professional Organizations. This series is focused on sharing best practices for starting, building, and growing a community in these organizations.

The key to any great product is building something customers want. VC Networks are no different. Design your product to serve your customers. We’ll look at the factors that enable you to make the best design decisions for your network. 

Understanding who you are and how you define your community is the first step (refer back to Part 2 if you haven’t defined the characteristics of your org yet). Now that you understand your capabilities, time to understand your audience. 

Describe your customers

At USV, we have 60+ technology startups spread across North America and Europe. They are in a number of industries and range in maturity from companies less than a year old to companies that have been in business for over 10 years. All of the companies fit into our investment thesis, but even that can range from doctors sharing serious medical cases to helping developers easily send SMS messages. The companies are varied but many of their challenges are the same: building a team, leveraging network effects, finding customers, and building products. 

What are the characteristics of your potential network? How many organizations are you including in your community? Where are they geographically located? What do they have in common? How long have these companies been in business? What is their organizational maturity—or the size of their teams? Are they open to collaboration? Are they tech savvy? Let’s start with a few easy ones:

Where is your community located?

If you have a physical space with all of your members in one place, easy, you have a gravitational pull in that spot. If your members are spread out, you need to think more strategically about how to connect them. 

• Same place: Defined by central meeting place or office.
  
• Different places, same city: Connect people in person nearby.
  
• Different places, different cities: Occasional in person or digital.
  
• Different places, some overlapping cities: Can build local and global.
  

How tech savvy is your community?

There are fantastic tools in the market to manage communications, contacts, and organizational discussions. However, tools are worthless if no one is willing to use them. 

• How willing or able is your community to adopt new technology?
  
• Do digital or paper resources work better?
  
• Is your community more prone to want information from email, website, or phone call? This is a great place to ask if you don’t know.
  
• Do you have the skills or access to the talent to build tech to support this community? If tools are required, do you have the capability to manage them?
  

What is your budget to manage the community?

Sometimes it’s hard to know how much money you’ll want to budget for your community outreach and network building. Having a rough estimate around the size of your budget will be a good constraint to understand how you serve your customers.

• None, time to get creative! 
  
• Budget for tools only
  
• Flexible/Fixed
  
• Paid by members/pay to play
  

Who is your audience within the community?

Even if you’ve defined your organization, you have to make the design decision about the participants you plan to serve. You can modify this over time but defining the initial scope will help focus resources. 

• VC: Investments: any employee, executives only, or founders only?
  
• Seed:  Investments: any employee, executives only, or founders only?
  
• Accelerator: Participants: any employee, founders only, mentors included?
  
• Professional: Just members or potential members too?
  

Not all of these design decisions may have clear answers at this stage. Just as we teach entrepreneurs, it’s key to “get out of the building” and talk to customers. Setup a few conversations with your new customers and get to know what they’re looking for. In my experience, entrepreneurs and operators will ask for help with lots of challenges in those conversations. Be patient, define your customers before you commit to what you’re going to provide. 

Not all communities are created equal

Given the growing number of VC Community roles, Accelerators and Incubators, there is a lot of existing advice about how to serve your community. Understanding the differences between your network and the next one will allow you to make smarter decisions for your unique community. 

After 50+ conversations with Network or Community building peers, here are the common benefits and challenges of serving these different types of networks: 

Serving an Institutional VC Community:

Benefits:

• Long term, more flexibility to experiment
  
• Range of experience in network
  
• Big teams, lots of division of work
  
• Low turnover of companies
  
• External reputation of companies adds to credibility of the network
  
• Relationship building
  
• Companies adopt market trends together (ie: mobile)
  
• If on investment team, can see behind the scenes, know co’s #s
  

Challenges:

• Not one and done, long term relationships
  
• Network only expands with investments
  
• Rate of change is slow
  
• Fatigue of services over time
  
• Varied needs
  
• Not network peers for everyone since different businesses
  
• Potentially competitive companies within one community
  

Serving an Incubator/Seed Stage Community:

Benefits:

• All of the companies are the same size
  
• Smaller teams, get to know everyone quickly
  
• Similar challenges and required connections (business 101)
  
• Large # of companies quickly (?) or slowly (?)
  
• Relationship building is done in cohorts
  
• See behind the scenes, know co’s #s
  

Challenges:

• May not have market leaders and company reputations may be unknown
  
• Small # of people with open time, not many employees at each company
  
• Less proven, companies can build or bust
  
• Potentially competitive companies within one community
  
• Clingers after they outgrow the stage but still want resources
  

Serving an Accelerator Community:

Benefits:

• Very clear timeline and goals
  
• Cohort is all in sync
  
• You can supplement expertise with mentors or outside resources (all groups can)
  
• Batch favors/resources at once.
  
• See behind the scenes, know co’s #s
  
• Smaller number of people
  
• Pre-planned Weekly/Daily interaction
  
• Shorter time to “Alumni” who could help
  
• Time to anticipate and prepare in cycles
  

Challenges:

• Not a lot of time
  
• Short relationship
  
• Expertise and experience may vary
  
• All companies need the same resources at the same time: $, talent
  
• Experiments may be static in each cycle.
  
• Potentially competitive companies within one community
  

Serving a Professional Group’s Community:

Benefits:

• Members speak the same language
  
• Same field and challenges
  
• Self-selected group
  
• Relationship building over time
  
• Invested in groups’ success
  
• Clear success metrics outlined in bylaws or group charter
  
• Tight control over membership (you can remove bad actors)
  
• Can help members recruit members
  

Challenges:

• Building trust, since it’s opt-in or pay-to-play
• Varied experience of members
• Expectations are varied or need to be managed
• Desire to deliver value immediately
• Competing for time
• Only as open as members
• Different access to resources for companies or organizations
  

The key to success is finding what works for you. In the next part of the series we will look at how to get started, stories from the experts, and how to measure success.

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