The Mangrove Journey
3 years ago, we left our jobs and launched Mangrove.
Today, we think it’s the right time to end this journey.
Here is what happened:
January 2016: Essaouira, Morrocco. We rented a riad in this beautiful town beside the sea and invited former colleagues and friends to take a step back on life and think about future projects.
Most of us were quite exhausted by our past few years of professional life. Some had been dedicating 100% of their vital energy to build scalable startups following the Silicon Valley dogma. Some had joined a promising company that turned out to be hierarchical kingdom led by a CEO convinced to be Steve Jobs’ successor.
Something was wrong in the way we approached work. We wrote about it, and got so much support that something had to be done. We weren’t alone.
We were convinced that everybody’s life should be dedicated to causes and projects they truly believe in. That every single minute of their time matters. That the alignment between who they are deep inside and what they do every day is the key to happiness and a better world.
At this point, we saw 3 possible professional paths :
1) Joining a good company — but we were lacking of truly inspiring projects around us.
2) Founding a company together — but we were craving for freedom to explore ideas, build artistic or not-for-profit projects and travel.
3) Freelancing — which is perfect for freedom but terrible in terms of loneliness. We wanted to be part of something bigger, surrounded by people supporting each other.
None of these 3 ways actually fitted our expectations.
So we started Mangrove: a community of people sharing the same values who help each other grow, improve their projects and live a fulfilling life. Our values were Freedom, Benevolence and Transparency. We never stopped referring to them in the following years.
Our vision was to create a community that would both impact the lives of its members and transform society by inspiring and training others to follow our path. We wanted to build a community of hundreds of members, having hubs in majors cities, owning houses for our nomads, and get tangible signs that we were creating changes in the society.
5 of us initiated the project (Adrien Montcoudiol, Matthieu Leventis, Maxime Braud, Olivier Thomas and Yannis Chaouche) but we never wanted ourselves to be seen as the “founders” or the “bosses” of the community. Inspired by the “future of work” leaders like Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organisations) or Isaac Getz (Freedom-form companies), and aware of the potential offered by technology in terms of decentralization & remote collaboration (DAOs, Github, Buffer, Valve…), we spent days imagining our structure in order to create a scalable organization that would engage every single member in co-building it with their peers. This led to our “Playbook”, our internal constitution explaining how the overall structure of our group works (last version).
March 2016: After a successful launch event with 200+ attendees in Paris, “How I Killed Your Boss”, we started giving talks to spread our vision of work. Quite fast, people started labelling us as a “collective of freelancers” which turned out to be pretty frustrating for us as freelancing had never been the final goal. Mangrove was made of entrepreneurs and artists who sometimes use part-time freelancing to finance their projects, rather than relying on unemployment benefit, investors or bank loans.
May 2016: We organized our very first official “retreat” in Portugal. Over 3 weeks, 20 people came to a beautiful house above the Atlantic Ocean in order to meet people sharing the same values, work together and learn from each other. It was an amazing experience that showed every participant the life-changing potential of this project.
Such retreats would happen every 2–3 months, and in the meantime we would share a lot with each other on Slack. This platform was the place where deep conversations and mutual help happened on a daily basis. We developed tools to make this possible. Rachid, for instance, was a bot asking us every day how we feel, and this would lead to encouragements, questions and valuable interactions. The Pairing Dancers would match us randomly with a member the community every week in order to get to know each other or to catchup. We were all part of a global family interconnected online and gathered offline around events.
August 2016: As peer-to-peer learning was key in our community, we decided to take it a step further. We went to Berlin for 3 weeks to organize a Nomad Education program with people coming from all over Europe. Participants were taking turns in giving and attending workshops, everyone bringing its own expertise to the table: Data Science, UX design, Yoga, Self Dev… Tristan Harris warned us about the dangers of Facebook. A doctor told us we could hope for eternal life. We met with the local startup scene including N26 and Blinkist.
We fell in love with the Berlin vibe (people, art, clubs…) and it quickly became our second base after Paris.
October 2016: 6 of us moved to San Francisco to spread our vibe and start the community there.
We organized a big event (300+ attendees) in SF with us speaking as well as experts working in Future of Work companies and organizations (Enspiral, Roam…).
We built our first product for the outside world: Nomad Airlines. It reached the #1 spot on Product Hunt and was useful to thousands of people.
The community peaked at 150 people in 18 countries. Mangrove was shinier than ever.
End of 2016: Our retreat in San Diego was successful in reuniting both the communities from Paris and San Francisco. Mangrove members kept on gathering around retreats, events, and coworking on regular basis.
Early 2017: The community gathered in Bali for a 10 days retreat. Some others retreats were then organized around Europe in France, Spain, Morocco and Germany.
Communities in Paris and Berlin were more active than ever, but the one in San Francisco slowly faded away after most members went back to live in Europe.
Events were organized online as well as in Paris and Berlin:
• Learning nights; moments to share, explore and learn new skills.
• Conferences; times to share a learning about a specific life experience.
• Book club;
• Movie nights;
A Mangrove office opened in Paris.
Mid 2017: We started to perceive concrete life changes on the vast majority of the members. Our desire to see projects flourish within the ecosystem was taking shape on all sides. Among them, Le Règlement, one of the biggest rap media in France. Agape, one of the most anticipated event in Paris. Learnspace, a startup accelerator revolutionizing education. Nouvelle Ecole, the #1 independent podcast in France. This last one inspired Growth Makers, which is now the French reference podcast on startup growth.
We also noted radical life changes, undertaken through the influence of the Mangrove community. Adriana left her job in the UK to become an actress in Los Angeles. Etienne stopped working as a Growth Marketer to become a personal life coach.
At the same time, organizational tasks became a burden to the original members as a small group (<10 members) was giving most of the energy for the rest of the community. We decided to focus on the most active members (35 people) and on our most dynamic hubs: Paris and Berlin.
But something deeper was happening. Thanks to Mangrove and the freedom it gave them, the first members were involved in exciting artistic or business projects they never thought possible before. Making Mangrove grow was not a priority anymore.
At the same time, the initial members did not find a way to get newer members to take ownership of Mangrove’s core projects. Taking ownership sometimes means a lot of work, or at least prioritizing it over other personal projects. Most newcomers never reached this level of involvement.
October 2017: Aware of the falling momentum, we organized the first Mangrove Summit in Malaga. Summits would then take place every 6 months to tackle Mangrove core challenges.
We decided on a new way of organizing things, with clearer responsibilities for members and easier paths for newbies to follow.
April 2018: We gathered for our second Summit in Majorque. The paths we designed for members were working pretty well, but in the end the same people were still making most of the efforts, which was not our goal.
So this time we tried another strategy to get a new momentum. Instead of having the ambition to create a complex ecosystem and developing all its branches at the same time, we decided to focus on only one thing that Mangrove would do very well. Naturally we chose retreats, the best thing we knew to make people grow together.
November 2018: We gathered close to Paris for our third Summit. Since the last one, awesome retreats and weekends had been organized. In Germany, and Lebanon, the new members who discovered the Mangrove vibe were captivated, just like in our first retreats. They told us that we had gold in our hands. Old-timers still felt the uniqueness of what was happening there.
But in spite of a clearer organisation and focus, Mangrove was becoming a small family with only a few people really involved in building the project, and slow member growth. Our model didn’t make it possible to have a widespread engagement within our community and a deep impact on society.
So during this third Summit, we decided to close the project.
The past 3 years felt like dozen of years of experiences.
We are very grateful for what we learnt:
- The people you surround yourself with is the most important thing in life.
- Human links are created through experiences (retreats in our case).
- Communication takes A LOT of efforts.
- Ownership is hard to transfer to new people.
- Structure is the parachute that saves us when everything’s wrong but not the engine that drives us.
- It’s very hard to innovate at all levels at the same time: remote, flat, part-time, volunteer. Next time, we’ll choose our battles.
- Shared values is the most powerful foundation of any organization.
Most importantly, we want to keep Mangrove has a proof that work doesn’t have to be a hassle and that doing what feels right is possible. We want to keep it as a promise to never stop moving and exploring.
The connexions we created along the way will last forever.
Some of us are already working on a next adventure together.
See you soon!
Thank you to all the people who joined this amazing journey,
our Mangrove family:
Hana Ahriz, Claire Antoine, Antonin Archer, Clémence Aristide, Enzo Avigo, Simona Bali, Frédéric Bardolle, Benjamin Barnathanan, Louis Baudoin, Matthias Beikert, Adrien Belhomme, Irwan Bello, Nadja Benes, Rodolfo Benitez, Amélie Beurrier, Davide Bonapersona, Marie Boisseau, Maxime Braud, Alizée Breton, Svenia Busson, Jeanne Carlier, Laurène Castor, Sarah Chambers, Clémence Chastan, Yannis Chaouche, Thomas Chrétien, Rebecca Collins, Ambroise Collon, Tom Coquereau, Ouriel Darmon, Inès Dartiguenave, Jonathan Del Hoyo, Benjamin de Vaublanc, Julien Devoir, Charles Du, Thibault Duchemin, Rodolphe Dutel, Xavier Durand-Smet, Simo Elalj, Saad Elbeleidy, Katharina Erdmann, Charles Falanga, Fajwel Fogel, Jérémie Girault, Gabriel Gourovitch, Mathieu Grac, Marjolaine Grondin, Simon Guigue, Emile Guillemot, Thibaud Guymard, Victor Habchy, Jack Habra, Bill Hamway, Julie Henches, Eugénie Hériard-Dubreuil, Thomas Holsboer, Frédéric Honoré, Alexandre Humeau, Audrey Jarre, Thomas Jeanneau, Adrien Joly, Kevin Jourdan, Arthur Katz, Kevin Kuipers, Amine Lahlou, Edouard de Lansalut, Christophe Lassuyt, Marian Le Calvez, Soline Ledésert, Diane Lenne, Etienne Le Scaon, Matthieu Leventis, Florent Liénard, Penelope Liot, Benjamin Lupton, Etienne Mangino, Florian Mascaro, Alexander Matheson, Jeddi Mees, Antoine Meicler, Lucile Mennessier, Louisa Mesnard, Toni Meuschke, Sandro Meyer, Adrien Montcoudiol, Vincent Nallatamby, Patrick Perlmutter, Jonathan Pepin, Alexia Périneau, Louis Pinot de Villechenon, Elise Prévot, Florent Piétot, Arthur Pivin, Adrien Rahier, Emily Reese, Joris Renaud, Mathieu Renaud, Ivan Rimbaud, Gautier Roquancourt, Louis Rouffineau, Jan Runo, Marisa Sánchez, Steven Sanséau, Emilie Sickinghe, Misha Talavera, Etienne Tatur, Olivier Thomas, Lucas Toledo, Fiodor Tonti, Micka Touillaud, Aimilia Tsakiri, Ben Twichell, Mikael Uzan, Baptiste Vanpoulle, Adriana Vecchioli, Gabriel de Vinzelles, Laïla von Alvensleben, Melanie Watrin, Nicolas Wielonsky, Wenyu Zhang
🖋 Written by Oliver Thomas, Adrien Montcoudiol, Matthieu Leventis and Maxime Braud
