Community Companies
Culture is a big element of any start up. Companies want to instill values in employees that encourage commitment to the product over their own personal ambitions. They also want to build a unifying identity — a sense of community, in other words. Having a strong community within a company makes it easier for employees to freely share ideas and spread knowledge, while also making them feel at home, which makes them less likely to leave.
Companies have good reason to build a sense of community within their organizations, but they often try to build communities as an element of what they’re trying to sell.
Starbucks, for instance, envisioned their coffee shops as being the “The Third Place” — the place where people would regularly go (other than home and work) where they could meet with friends and build a community around. A worthy notion, after all, the coffeehouses of Europe served as a the major gathering place during the Enlightenment, and helped dangerous ideas spread. While Starbucks and other coffee shops certainly do serve as meeting places, they’re not quite gathering places. Local communities don’t form around coffee shops. People rarely go to coffee shops to meet new people from their neighborhood or find people to share ideas with. Often, they grab their coffee and go, trying to avoid eye contact with anyone else in the shop.
The whole idea behind the internet was to create a worldwide community. Reddit and Facebook are good examples of the fulfillment of that ambition. Those companies allow you to connect with people from all over the world, share ideas, and hold thoughtful discussions (uhh…it happens). But as we all know, there’s a big difference between communicating with people online and in person. It’s harder to empathize and connect with people on a meaningful level when you can’t see their faces and expressions.
AirBnB, Lyft and WeWork are newer examples of startups aiming to foster a sense of community between people using their services. Their business models are based around a philosophy that your experience with their product should transcend its base utility — it should allow you to form real human connections, and thus, build an emotional attachment to the service. When you use Airbnb to book a place to stay on your vacation, or use Lyft to get where you’re going, or rent a workstation for a few months at WeWork, you’re getting more than just a bed, a ride, and a desk, respectively. You’re getting to be part of a community.
Many might take a cynical view of this and say these companies want to make you emotionally attached to their product so they can charge you higher prices and squeeze more money out of you. I’d argue, however, that you’re getting a deal. The good relationships we have with other people are worth far more than any thing you can buy from a store. Whatever encourages more of those relationships is a good thing, as they will make you happier than anything else could.
The community all those companies are offering is still a far cry from what I think of as a community. I picture a small town where everyone knows everyone else and people’s lives are deeply intertwined. A place where you can’t help but run into people you know every time you step out the door. A place with it’s own way of doing things and a culture that makes them different from anywhere else. A place where you know people will support you no matter what you choose to do and how tough things get.
Startups like Common and WeLive (which is part of WeWork) are starting to build these types of communities by way of rental housing. They’re essentially dorms for adults. They have lots of communal space and events aimed at bringing residents together.
My company, Krewe, is getting straight to the point. It starts by placing people into small groups of their peers who live in the same neighborhood and then gradually allows groups to grow and combine with each other in order to build up a big, local, tight-knit community.
People don’t need to be bound by anything like interests or an activity to get along. For all of human history, people have built close friendships and found spouses from within their small town or village, because they just had to spend a lot of time with those people. The only difference between then and now is that people move around much more and aren’t going to spend their entire lives around the same individuals. So they just need some introductions and a comfortable environment that will allow them to do what they were born to do.
I sincerely hope more companies work to foster a sense of community in the world. People need that in their lives, as it provides an unquestionably huge benefit. I hope Krewe is able to provide everyone everywhere with a chance to meaningfully connect with their community, but I also think that others should explore different ways to making that possible.
