In this episode of Clear the Static, host Paige Buan sits down with Laís de Oliveira, a renowned community builder with a mission to create memorable experiences that foster authentic connections. With her work spanning across four continents, Laís shares her journey from accidentally discovering her passion for community building to becoming an influential figure in the startup ecosystem and beyond. Tune in to hear her insights on designing communities, the importance of authentic connections, and how her personal experiences shape her professional endeavors.
Key Highlights and Lessons:
Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of the intricacies of community building, the importance of authenticity, and actionable insights for fostering meaningful connections in their own lives and work.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Laís de Oliveira is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with over 15 years of global experience in community building, business management, and innovation.
She has successfully led ventures and developed thriving communities for government agencies, private companies, and non-profits. Renowned for transforming ideas into reality through strategic planning and hands-on execution, Laís creates scalable systems that drive engagement and growth. Her diverse expertise spans sectors including tech, education, real estate, and social impact, making her a versatile leader in fostering highly relevant communities.
Laís's work has significantly shaped and strengthened entrepreneurial ecosystems, fostered economic development, and driven social change across multiple continents. Having lived in Mauritius, Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, and Portugal, her rich international experience uniquely equips her to connect with and understand diverse communities. This global perspective makes her an exceptional leader, capable of fostering dynamic and impactful communities wherever she goes.
Follow Laís de Oliveira on LinkedIn | Official Website
Follow Paige Buan on LinkedIn
In this episode of Clear the Static, host Paige Buan sits down with Laís de Oliveira, a renowned community builder with a mission to create memorable experiences that foster authentic connections. With her work spanning across four continents, Laís shares her journey from accidentally discovering her passion for community building to becoming an influential figure in the startup ecosystem and beyond. Tune in to hear her insights on designing communities, the importance of authentic connections, and how her personal experiences shape her professional endeavors.
Key Highlights and Lessons:
Listeners will come away with a deeper understanding of the intricacies of community building, the importance of authenticity, and actionable insights for fostering meaningful connections in their own lives and work.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Laís de Oliveira is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with over 15 years of global experience in community building, business management, and innovation.
She has successfully led ventures and developed thriving communities for government agencies, private companies, and non-profits. Renowned for transforming ideas into reality through strategic planning and hands-on execution, Laís creates scalable systems that drive engagement and growth. Her diverse expertise spans sectors including tech, education, real estate, and social impact, making her a versatile leader in fostering highly relevant communities.
Laís's work has significantly shaped and strengthened entrepreneurial ecosystems, fostered economic development, and driven social change across multiple continents. Having lived in Mauritius, Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, and Portugal, her rich international experience uniquely equips her to connect with and understand diverse communities. This global perspective makes her an exceptional leader, capable of fostering dynamic and impactful communities wherever she goes.
Follow Laís de Oliveira on LinkedIn | Official Website
Follow Paige Buan on LinkedIn
Clear the Static | Laís de Oliveira on Creating Spaces and Unique Experiences for Authentic Connections
Paige Buan
Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Clear the Static podcast. I'm your host Paige.
And today we have a truly inspiring guest with us. Lais de Oliveira. Did I get that right?
Laís de Oliveira
Yes. You did. Yes.
Paige Buan
She is a community builder and expert in creating memorable experiences that foster authentic connections. Her work spans across four continents and she has helped numerous organizations build strong and engaged communities. Welcome Lais.
We're thrilled to have you on the show today.
Laís de Oliveira
Thank you so much Paige for the awesome intro. I really appreciate your invitation as well.
Paige Buan
I love it. We're so excited to have you on and now let's dive into it. But before we dive into the specifics of community building, could you share how this journey started for you?
Like what inspired you to become a community builder?
Laís de Oliveira
What inspired me? In fact, I think I stumbled upon this path as most community builders do. So I was building community way before I knew it had a name and that's what I was doing.
So it's hard to say what inspired me to do something I didn't know existed. I think from a very early age, I always cared a lot for impact and achieving things with people. I was always the kid outside of the classroom and I was a nerd.
I was a good student, but I always liked getting involved in leadership. And getting people outside of the classroom. And if anything, what really got me into it was entrepreneurship.
There's one thing I'm really like crazy about. I'm obsessed with people fulfilling their true purpose and not fantasizing what purpose is. I'm just in love with people who are on their track, who are like fully themselves, who seem to be like, I'm an artist and I found context in which I can thrive.
So I'm passionate about people finding their element. And I've been obsessed with topics like education since a very early age. And then I fell into organizational culture and what I thought was organizational culture.
And I decided that like building work environments that allow people to become the best version of themselves is the best way to change the world. And I tried to get into talent development. I got into it.
I became like VP talent management for an NGO, president of an NGO. And I was working on leadership development. And I felt like we need better leaders because want it or not, people spend most of their time at work.
So I wanted to change the way the world works to change the way people grow and allow people to be the best version of themselves. That is my inspiration. That's what got me into building context where people can thrive and become their best version.
Then I got into entrepreneurship because I felt founders are starting new companies and you just start them off with the right culture. And then I fell into this rabbit hole of startups, entrepreneurship, development, startup ecosystems, and started building community for founders. And that's when I was living in Malaysia, organizing meetups for founders.
And someone from the Malaysian government approached me and said, we need more community builders like you. He invited me to work with them to help nurture other community builders. And that was my first time listening to the terms.
And I remember them inviting me to like possibly the coolest restaurant I had ever been to until then. I had been a student and then working on my first jobs. So, you know, on a budget.
And I remember just saying like, yeah, sure. Community builder, that's who I am. That's what I do.
Sure, it can help. I had no idea what he was talking about. And at the same time, that name resonated and felt so true. I fell in love with community and decided that the way I show up in the world is not necessarily my mission. It's just the way I do things is through community.
My operational, you know, area. That said, I fell in love with it because the more I understood what I was doing and spoke with other people who are doing the same, I found out I wasn't the only one. And that's when I decided to write a book and create Nomenclature because pretty much understood this is not just me.
There's a community of community builders out there. And I want to start a conversation with them. And that was 2014.
And that's when I idealized my book that I published later in 2020. And the rest is just history.
Paige Buan
A decade summarized. Yes, it is. Full circle.
It sounds like you've been working with a lot of people who are just unapologetically themselves.
Laís de Oliveira
Is that the right way to- I love that term. And in fact, I used to name for my social media unapologetically curious. I love that term.
I think that's more it. I think it's about curiosity. And it comes from almost like a frustration, like dark place, if I'm honest.
I love my dad and he's one of the best musicians I've met. Guitar player, he's self-taught. Composed more than 50 songs, I guess.
They're very good. Like Bossa Nova, Brazilian rhythms that are so authentic and so unique of him. And he did not live in a context where that was valued.
He was in a family from a farm. And there's many stories of people like him who got lucky, but more likely he would have been successful and got into music and become an artist maybe if he had lived in a different context. And I've learned from a very early age.
And I don't know how I had that hunch, but I knew context mattered and context was everything. So I don't wanna say that I live in a context where people are unapologetically themselves, but that's what I aspire to. And that's what I aspire to build for the world, and that's what I aspire to build through communities and programs. And that's what I'm doing even now with my newest community is about parenting, and I wanna build a community for parents who are also entrepreneurs.
And the reason I like entrepreneurs so much, it's because the same thing for artists or any sort of creatives. They are, by default, by definition, going against the streams in a way. They are inventing the way they wanna live in the world.
They're creating solutions that do not exist. And that takes a lot of work. And without being very authentic, it's very hard to stick to that path.
By default, you're entrepreneurs because I feel they are the most authentic ones out there. And I try to surround myself with those people. That being said, that's what I aspire to.
There's other ways to show up as your most authentic self, not just being an entrepreneur. My husband is an entrepreneur and I admire him for being very authentic to himself. That being said, that's my area of focus because that's what I wanna create in the world.
Paige Buan
And I think a lot of people struggle, number one, to figure out who they really are, the unapologetic versions of themselves. But I love that you mentioned your dad and I am curious to know if he's on Spotify or any of the music platforms.
Laís de Oliveira
Yes, I think that's a sad story, which is he isn't. He is not, and I don't think he wants to. I love him and I learned to accept that.
But I wanna create an environment in which if my son is as talented as my dad was, he will follow his dreams. And I think my dad has been a happy man and I cannot speak on his behalf, but a part of me wished I had seen that successful artist in him come out. And I accepted in a hard way that that was not his trajectory, that was not his choice.
But I understand that that was because of years and years of conditioning to run with people who were extremely discouraging and telling him to follow, I would say, the safest path. He became a farmer and he is a veterinarian by the end of his career. So that's why I mentioned in the beginning, my motivation comes from a story that I wish had ended in a happier way.
And maybe I should do therapy about this instead, but I just feel it's my motivation to create environments where people have context, where their true selves are encouraged. And now that I watch my child grow, I can give a brief example of how deeply that resonate as I build this new community for me. And I wanna highlight, community is not something you just do for work and then you go home and it's done.
Community surrounds everything we do. It all pervades it. And I'm obsessed now with building an educational community for myself as a parent and for my baby as he grows.
And I'm choosing methodologies of education where they don't force my child into a curriculum. I like the idea of a program. I like the idea of Spanish classes.
I like the idea of music and yoga classes, of course, but I also like the idea of like giving him room to explore, observing what he's drawn to, and then enabling him to do more of that things he's interested in, getting to know him and his state. And that's the type of daycare school I'm choosing to send my child to is one that first tries to observe that child, let them be, and then help them interact with their choices. So the world is designed in a way which is the opposite.
We are forced into a carved path of classes, courses that are designed to fit us in a box. And I wanna change that from a very early age. So very deep, maybe we should go back into talking about community, but I wanna create more environments where people learn to listen to each other and listen to themselves and understand what is that they're more inclined to and how to follow that path.
Paige Buan
And it really highlights how your perspective can really change once you have a child. I know a lot of the things that I used to see before has changed from when I had my daughter or so. And what you're trying to build now is something, it's a better place for our children.
So it's the design for connection. And you've mentioned the community design is a resource for building strong connections. And I think it's especially important today with our children having access to social media, the internet, the digital natives.
So have you changed your key design principles or what key design principles do you use to build deep and meaningful connections in your communities?
Laís de Oliveira
To keep it very short, I have not changed my principles and I think they are not gonna change in terms of framework because I think the framework is very simple. People need excuses to get together. And once people get together, they have the interactions that matter, that build intimacy, that start from deep conversations, maybe shallow conversations rather than talks that become deeper talks.
And the more recurring the interactions, the deeper the experience, the more the connection happens. And I think this is very relevant getting into the realm of experience design to note that before I go into my framework of interaction design, let's take a step back and understand communities are made of people can relate to each other on a deeper level of a journey. So talking about people becoming themselves, we're not born ready.
That idea of having a purpose clear, it's not true. We are always on a journey to search for a sense of fulfillment and it's one step at a time. So to give a concrete example, I'm on the journey from becoming a clueless, curious mom, becoming someone who's confident about the environment context I'm providing for my child to grow.
On that journey, I need community. I need child development experts. I need teachers.
I need other parents to guide me, to help, to share notes and with whom I can also share my notes. So the stronger the journey of transformation, the deeper the bond. That happens in general.
Whenever you're building a community, you got to know what is the journey you want to guide these people on. What is the transformation you're providing to them? It's the same as when you're selling a product.
Like in a very silly example, if I'm selling toothpaste, offering that you go from point A, which is you have bad breath to point B where you have fresh breath. In terms of community, you're also definitely people from point A to B in an almost productized manner, but it's in a deeper sense of transformation. It's from being an executive who works and of nine to five to becoming an entrepreneur.
That is a struggle. That's a tough journey. That's why I think this communities around founders, parents, mothers, people gravitate more about this high transformation communities because that journey in itself is so strong and painful.
So I'm very much highlight communities are journeys and it should be clear on what is the journey you're providing when you invite people, join a community. And it could be something to become healthier or more mindful. Whatever your community journey is, make that A to B point very clear.
That's your value proposition. Then come to interaction design. Your job is to make excuses, to bring people together.
And once they get together, what matters are the interactions around the table. I like that quote. I mentioned it in my book from a friend of mine saying, community building is like the turkey on the Thanksgiving dinner.
People gather to meet the turkey, but what matters are the conversations around the table. So your role is to roast enough turkeys to attract more people and do it in a recurring way that builds familiarity and over time makes people feel more comfortable with each other. Now, I mentioned there's three aspects and I know that I'm giving a very, very long answer, but I'm just going to wrap it up after this.
There's three main stages of interaction design, which is attraction, engagement, and commitment. We can talk about that later. What I want to emphasize now is that there's three variables that you can influence and that impact experience.
One is frequency. You need to do recurring events. You need to have people meet again.
Just one off events don't build community. Second is density, which is coziness, closeness. How do you engineer that in your environment, which is, by the way, extremely challenging in online context, but we can talk about it.
So frequency, density, and third, catalyzers. And if you notice, and if you're a nerd like I am, this is collision theory, like a comic theory applied to people. Like not every reaction will be successful, but the more reactions, the more likely there's going to be a successful reaction, which is, in this case, a successful connection, collision, someone who builds a relationship with someone else.
So you have to engineer those human collisions to be successful, and the catalyzer is the experience. When you design a transformation experience that brings people out of their comfort zone into a situation, could be a new place, a new location, a performance, something that sparks something that they had never seen before, the unexpected connects us. When people go through something unexpected together, that builds an unconscious bond between the people who went through it together.
So people talk about near-death experiences, for example, causing deep connections. I very likely have not gone through any of that experience, but I've read accounts of people who have, and it's, in a way, connected to the idea that deep experiences that we navigate together connect us, especially if they relate to that journey that we committed to walk through together. I'm going to stop here because there's a lot to unpack, but yeah.
Paige Buan
I love that. There's a lot of conversation here, but I love the direction that you're going. It does take a community to raise a child.
Let me just say that before we move on to the other one. Frequency, density, catalyzers, you have a lot of people coming together more with a common journey. How do you push comfort zones safely?
Do you have an example of a unique experience that you've designed that has successfully achieved this balance?
Laís de Oliveira
Yeah, I don't think it needs to be something crazy, even because you don't want to push people. That's a very good question. You don't want to push people so much far against their comfort zones that they lock themselves out when they get in that experience and don't want to show up, you know?
Very small example, when I was living in Asia and I was hosting events for founders, there was an event in a specialty host called Startup Grind. And first, I started by never hosting Startup Grind on the same location. It was a gypsy event.
So there was a little bit of a surprise element and an inside, like, I promoted the event with the vibe of like, we don't want to attract too many people to this. The first rule of Startup Grind is you don't talk about Startup Grind. Fight club style.
I chose underground places to host it at. And I made people feel like they're getting to a secret gathering. And the reason I did this very intuitively, it's because I felt like it was like, we're trying to build, at the core of Startup Grind, there was a little bit of a hip hop culture element.
The founder of Startup Grind, Derek Anderson, is a big hip hop fan. And I've learned so much more about hip hop culture in the past 10 years, because I'm coming from a borderline in between privileged, not privileged situation in Brazil. So all that to say, I was learning about that culture as building, but I was understanding that there's a similarity between the grind of being a founder and the struggle and that culture around that vibe, pretty much of fight club, hip hop, or to say, I was drawing inspiration from many sources.
That being said, the music we played, the places we chose, were all very cohesive to that narrative of creating comfort in an underground place where founders were allowed to come. And it was a secret from like, whatever you say to VCs, whatever you say to your family, whatever you say to your friends here, you can be true, you can be legit, you can spit it out with no rules, like coloring your true grind, your reality as a founder. So I'm trying to translate here how the intention of my experience was in a way a metaphor for the core value of Startup Grind, which was creating vulnerability and creating a space where people felt like, I can speak the truth here.
I can be vulnerable. I can talk about the grind. I can talk about the hustle.
I can talk about the struggle. I don't need to pretend that I'm doing well. I don't need to fake it to make it.
So I probably went too deep into this rabbit hole, but I just want to give a very concrete example of how, yes, I hosted at different places that created this vibe that like, it's underground, don't tell anyone about this event. And of course I was promoting it on social media. It was just like a vibe, not an actual like, don't talk about it.
And we had 250 people coming to our third event only in Malaysia. And I got in Malaysia knowing only two people.
Paige Buan
Wow.
Laís de Oliveira
So that being said, within four months, I was hosting this event for 250 people and I kept doing it for many years. And that's how eventually I started working for the government. That's how I eventually ended up founding my own business.
And which was related to spaces. Actually, I was listing all those unconventional venues where I hosted events as event spaces. And that was the business.
And I ended up selling it to a commercial real estate marketplace. But that being said, my story was started from this kind of like, creating comfortable experiences that are unconventional and getting people out of their comfort zone by surprising them, but not making them feel unsafe or uncomfortable. The venues we chose were warehouses, galleries, artist spaces, office spaces, all made cozy, fairy lights, beanbags, pillows.
It was just like, there's more to it. But again, it was that like creative underground culture that I wanted to inspire. Let me know if I went too deep into this, but yeah.
Paige Buan
No, no, no. You created an event that was exclusive, but also inclusive, kind of. Yeah.
If that makes sense, yeah. And you made sure that it was a safe space. But what about the pre-existing impressions?
How did you break through that? You go to Malaysia, you know two people. I'm pretty sure that you've gone through some hurdles about people who have pre-existing impressions or biases against like communities or things that they thought, oh, this is just another event where like, how do you break the pre-existing impressions?
Laís de Oliveira
Yeah, I took it as a question because part of why I did the Serebra in the way I did, it's because I wasn't originally gonna follow this path. And I was almost going deep, it doesn't really led to it because I got there and I wanted to host it at the venue for the company I was working at. The first thing I did when I landed was that I met these two people and they connected me to other like three people, each of them who are building communities.
And I interviewed the top community builders for tech startups somehow in Malaysia. There was one building for designers, there was like Ruby on Rails community. So I interviewed some of them and there was one specific community whose founder did not wanna meet me.
We ended up becoming friends by the way. But he didn't wanna meet me because we were competitors and he was the resident meetup organizer for startups at the company I worked at. So he kind of blocked me from doing my event there.
We became friends later, but he didn't allow me hosting the event there. So I had to go my own way. I still remember emailing Derek, the founder of Serebra and say, hey, the venue I was planning on hosting it is not here, it's not available because there's a competing event.
By the way, I did never believe in competing events when it comes to startup ecosystem building, I still don't. And then on top of that, I was actually interviewing other community builders and one of them who was very friendly and very welcoming to me, but he was like, you should not host another event, there's so many events happening now. But I wanted to host it anyways, I just had it in me, I had been doing it in Argentina and I knew it was like a global event, it had a different character.
So I wanted to bring it to Malaysia either way, no matter what they said. So I had people telling me not to do it and I had my pen A thrown to the ground as I got there. And I told Derek and Derek just like, told me to pretty much like find your own way, in a good way, but he's like in a nice tone, but he told me that and then I did it.
And I was forced to find that underground venue that inspired me to build that like underground like event, which was, I don't know, they very similar to the way startup grind started in the Valley, in a sort of like, in a underground event, that hip hop vibe, that fight club vibe. And I challenged the people who told me not to do it, but I also listened to them and I differentiated from what already existed on the ground. I offered eventually startup grind, we partnered with, and again, a very like grassroots, cool vibey burger joint, that was Malaysian founded, to offer food for startup grind.
I partnered with only local founders to make startup grind happen. So it was an event for entrepreneurs, by entrepreneurs, and all other meetups would be like, just ordering Domino's pizza. We ordered Domino's pizza in some events as well, because we were on a budget, but like that said, we established ourselves as like an event that with no other event around, we added value instead of mining others down.
And that's my core belief for community. And there's always gonna be communities that try, not community, businesses that try to mine others down as to raise themselves. And those are the ones I never wanna hang out with.
And that's also a choice, those are the ones I wanna exclude. We created value, we added value on top of what existed, and we accepted that we had to do it, instead of like, and I'm saying we, because we were a community doing it, right? And in the beginning, it was pretty much myself running with like the boxes and the chairs, but very soon I gathered a team of people who just wanted to help.
And there was a meetup where the speaker didn't show up because he had an accident an hour before the event. And I brought people from the crowd to do the panel of speakers and entertain the attendees we had, and we still had a good event. So I think you show, you know you have a strong community when people stand up to help you and not treat you as a service provider.
And I'm gonna stop now, because I'm getting very deep into like community, community, maybe we should talk more about the experience design, but I hope I answered your question.
Paige Buan
Yes, yes, absolutely. How did you get the courage to do all of these things? How long have you been in Malaysia when you started creating these events?
Laís de Oliveira
By the way, I appreciate that question because I've been asking myself that recently, different states of life. I have been in Malaysia for less than a month when I hosted my first startup grind. Wow.
Maybe not less than a month, maybe I landed in Malaysia on February. I don't remember anymore, but I think maybe it was within a month. Still?
Yeah. With two connections? Yeah.
Paige Buan
You just went there and?
Laís de Oliveira
That said, I need to say startup grind had about 20 something chapters back then, I guess, 25 or 30. It had a template that existed. I had flown in, I had hosted startup grind events in Buenos Aires for a year before, and I had just flown in from the global conference, met Derek and other directors.
So I landed in Malaysia knowing I was going to do it. I remember telling Derek and Francisco at the time, he was a global community director, when I was in San Francisco, that I want to start Malaysia now, can I do it? And they had me apply again.
Like, I was like, really guys? And I applied to startup grind in Malaysia. They made me create a list of like 10 speakers.
So I had to hustle. The application itself had me like planning for my future events. And the fun fact is that like, I ended up becoming the global director of startup grind for Africa and Asia Pacific and Eastern Europe because of that experience.
Within six months, Derek hired me, actually less than that, within three months. Within six months, I got hired by the Malaysian government. I'm getting old and forgetting the number.
That was all very quick. I got there knowing I was going to do it. Within a month, I was hosting my first event.
Within three months, I was quitting the company. I went to work for joining startup grind in the global team to grow Africa, APATH, Eastern Europe. Within six months, I was working for the Malaysian government while I was still working for startup grind.
Within a year, I founded my first business. That was a very different time of my life. Now I've been in New York for three years and more and counting, and I've been thinking about this community for parents who are also entrepreneurs for about 15 months or more, maybe like since I was pregnant.
So it's almost two years, gonna be two years soon in December. So I want to say people who take time often have a reason to. So don't rush to make things fast.
I have in the past, and I'm surprised by that young adult, Lais, who was such a hustler. And I know I'm in a different phase. I know my things same time.
I want to start a podcast interviewing people who know about child development, parents and authors around parenting and child education. And I've been thinking about it for too long. So I think that the speed doesn't matter, to be honest.
What matters is that you understand your niche. And in some niches, it takes time to really provide value. And it takes time for you to understand your audience.
So that's what you need to understand. So no rush, just make sure when you start something, be ready to add value beyond what is already in the market.
Paige Buan
Do you think it has anything to do with your perspective as a foreigner? Like all of the things that you've gotten yourself, like the path that you've taken.
Laís de Oliveira
So this is a reflection that I wrote about in my book. And it took me years to maybe figure that out in those terms, but there is literally a part of it in which my advice for community builders is to be the foreigners. It doesn't mean that you need to move to Asia if you're in the West side of the world, or you don't need to move out of your town.
It just means that like being a foreigner means taking yourself out of the predefined labels that you're comfortable with, to understand that authenticity is one of the core values I define for a community, is about identifying with people through journeys that are inner definers, not appearance, title, gender, ethnicity that are outwardly defined labels, predefined labels. So being the foreigner, back to your question, I think when I moved out of Brazil for the first time, I lived in Mauritius, and then I lived in Argentina, then lived in Chile, then I moved to Malaysia. And I never thought about it today, but all I knew as I started in the beginning of this conversation is that I was building context where I could become the best version of myself and trying to create context for people to do the same, through entrepreneurship, narrators, organizational culture, you name it.
Then I understood that because I was a foreigner, I did not take community for granted. I knew what it felt to me to find my people in an environment where my people, as defined back home, did not exist. Like the people I would be told that this is your group, socially, economically, ethnically, whichever way, gender-wide, this is who you belong with.
First of all, I also need to set the context, as I shared. I also have a little bit of childhood experience where I was raised in a very mixed environment where part of my neighborhood was very marginalized and I went to school in an area that was close to like extreme violence. And I went to later music class in a more privileged area and to English class in an even more privileged area.
So I grew up with contrasts in Brazil, growing up in Brazil from a very young age, so I knew what it felt like that belonging came from within. I learned to find relatedness to people regardless of what we looked like or where we came from. So I had that in me before I left the country, but like what I'm going to say is that like being a foreigner relates to finding connectedness, finding identity from within, not from what is predefined.
That being said, I can talk more about the practicalities of this, but from a principal standing point, being a foreigner means taking yourself out of anything that you judge others at or you judge yourself as and trying to build community and create spaces for people to connect based on journeys, based on what we're trying to achieve, not based on what's your address and who do you work for, what's your title or things like that.
Paige Buan
I agree. I think it definitely transcends beyond race and gender.
The first time that I went out of the country, it was very, very different in terms of like how we look. It doesn't really matter, but it was the mindset of I come from a country that is if you want to travel to one part, it's not like in the U.S. where you could just take a train or take a car. We have to take airplanes to go from one place to another.
It's just like going out to another country, going out the first time and mind you, this was last year. So right after the pandemic, but it hit me like a ton of bricks, how I realized my mindset was very much localized and I didn't realize how I could expand it. It was really like limitations that I set to myself and being outside and knowing that I am not from here, I do not have the same beliefs or circumstances growing up.
I don't know how it would have been if I was a child here and I was in Thailand. So it's still in Asia, but that hit me like a ton of bricks, the opportunities. What if I can see the rest of the world? What more can I see?
Laís de Oliveira
I love it. That's why I love your story. And it reminds me so much of my first time out of Brazil. And thank you for sharing that.
I was in Mauritius and I wrote a blog post saying it was the first time I thought, what if I am the crazy one? So like I am the foreigner and whose ways are wrong here. And not that I didn't do this before, but it was very deep that I'm the one who here needs to observe and listen and empathize first. And that's so much like what product development should be like, what customer development should be like, what community development must be like.
It's like being the foreigner, you learn to understand people first because you have to. And I think that there's a balance of also understanding your inner values. And when I say being a foreigner, we're talking about a mindset, not about a country.
It's a mindset of like, you also learn to understand what are my core values? What are my non-negotiables? And on top of that, what am I flexible to? So I've learned to really like dress down. Like if you think about like just sculpture being polished and like shaping itself, I learned to take out the excess and understand these are my core values. These are what I look like.
I care for abundance mindset. I care for authenticity. I care for kindness.
And these are my non-negotiables. I care for fairness. I care for community, which is pretty much all the above.
But like I learned to understand how to pretty much observe people and be flexible and adaptable and build experiences for them. And I think there's more than can fit in one page about this mindset of being a foreigner. But if I can compartmentalize it in one essence, it is about just letting go of the world the way you think it is and understanding yourself deeply inside to build connection from that perspective.
Find people who also share the same core values that you share. And I think that when you are outside your country, that becomes very evident. And it starts with the cultural shock.
Like what you shared is amazing. And back to my first realization in Mauritius, like, oh, here I am the crazy one. I definitely felt that.
So I can relate.
Paige Buan
Yeah. Yeah, I felt. OK, I think I'm the crazy one. Yes, for sure. And it's been a decade of community for you.
I'm curious. I'm pretty sure this is not really something that's comfortable to go back to or try to relive. But how did the pandemic impact communities?
Laís de Oliveira
It's funny because on one hand, there was a boom for online communities, opportunities involving so many community consultants, managers, experts emerged from the pandemic, stronger than ever.
If anything, the community industry diversified itself where before you would have events and you would have VPs of companies like Atlassian and Salesforce speaking. Right now, if you go on LinkedIn, there's a plethora of community experts coming from very different backgrounds. So I think contradictingly, the pandemic did well in highlighting the importance of community professionals.
And at the same time, post pandemic, we're all going through a little bit of a second life crisis because it was a little bit of a peak of like, hey, we're needed online communities. People are feeling lonely, isolated. They were feeling lonely and isolated before.
They're just aware of it now. That was a pandemic. And we were not hanging out and belonging the same way we used to.
And to be honest, the pandemic just put that in evidence because that had been happening for a long time. I had already wrote my chapters on loneliness before the pandemic. So the pandemic just really like enhanced that by, I don't know, a hundred, a thousand times.
It was really a heartbreaking experience for all of us. Yeah. But on the other hand, that built opportunity.
So community builders went on high and then pandemic is out. Okay. We're out there again.
And then we all went out and it was a little bit of a low, like, oh, we have Zoom fatigue. We don't want to join your clubhouse right now. Sorry.
Thank you. But no. And that was a little bit of a low, but then again, I think many of the people who established themselves as community professionals or understood themselves as such in the pandemic continue to thrive.
And now we're getting to a more stable stage where I feel we understand. One of the movements I've been seeing right now, which I'm very excited about is the IRL community builders. I've just been in San Francisco to speak at an event and I joined a for community builders that built in real life communities in New York city.
And I'm like seeing this coming from all directions. And I love it because as I shared my story on Startup Grind, I come from an IRL community background. If you think about it, I come from like in-person communities, real estate communities.
That said, I'm very passionate about what's going on now, which is like the pandemic woke us up to the fact that the social structures that we believe are true, that we took for granted no longer exist back to being the foreigner. When you're the foreigner, you understand that like you cannot take community for granted. Communities must be built.
And we all understood that through the pandemic, I think. And now people are understanding that even before the pandemic, maybe those structures were not there. Social media is not connecting us more.
It's isolating us more. So there is more intention right now in real life, in-person, life-changing experiences, memorable experiences. It doesn't cut it to just host an event.
I heard another community manager the other day talk about how she's building community for founders in New York. And she's like, is it truly challenging? Because there's so much in New York, there's so much abundance of unique experiences and events that really have to go over the top to impress these people. And I want to say of all the cities I've lived in, New Yorkers are not impressed more than anyone else in the world.
Whatever you do, they're not impressed. They've seen it all. And that being said, it's extremely challenging.
And I think in general, we're getting to that point of like, we all need to understand how to nurture in-person, in real life communities more than ever before. And that need was just made clear post-pandemic. And in a way, I think it allowed us to see that.
Because if you think about it, the world was already very similar to what it is right now in terms of technology before the pandemic. The tools we have, maybe TikTok was not that big, but it was Facebook, it was Instagram then. So I feel that like, we are still coming to understand the impact of technology in the world we live.
But I think that the post-pandemic is just healing from the social isolation. And at the same time, it has been made clear that that social isolation had been going on before the pandemic. And now we're trying to work on it out of that wave of professionals that emerged from the pandemic.
Very personal analysis, by the way, about this whole scenario, but that's how I see it. And I definitely believe community is a profession that will stick in the future. And that only to a certain extent can be managed through AI.
If anything, AI will help enhance community builders, but not really substitute the intentional design of experiences, especially when talking about IRL. And I think that's the goldmine for community, which is hard to scale and it doesn't need to scale necessarily. But that's something we have to figure out together, how to build more intentional third places, IRL communities to rebuild society.
We need to rebuild that village, which I hope is the name of my next book, talking about parenting, but like we need to rebuild that village. Yeah. I have a question.
Paige Buan
Speaking of like social media, just going a little bit off topic. I know we're almost at time, but community versus fan bases, especially with social media platforms, you will have people who are dedicated fans, but can you differentiate a community from a fan base? Are there any similarities or differences or can a fan base evolve into a community?
Laís de Oliveira
So for me, I have an equation for community. As you know, I like scientific metaphors like engineering serendipity, but the frequency, density, and catalyzing thing.
But like for community versus audience, community is where you have identity. As I shared, identity defined as inner journey. Like we're all going through a type of transition, transformation that we can relate to.
Second element is connectedness. Like we're all connected. It's not a monologue.
It's not a one directional conversation. It's not like a newsletter. We're all connected in one room or in one platform.
Or I can go from point A to Z through all the dots. It's not like a centralized system. So it's like a distributed network model and the two together must lead and show growth, lead to growth.
And growth means active participation of its members. It is when people are not merely consuming content, they are creating content, they are creating value to each other. That being said, a fan base can become a community or depending on the fan base, it can already be a community if there's an element of connectedness and growth.
Most fan bases already have the aspect of identity. And the journey in this case is a journey of enjoying an artist. If you take Taylor Swift as an example, the journey there is like, it might not be clear enough, but it's from growing from like someone who finds her first song and enjoys Taylor Swift to becoming her top fan and buying all the tickets and becoming a top contributor and eventually getting invited to Taylor Swift's secret single launch parties.
There's several things that she does that I don't personally like in terms of marketing. That being said, I wrote an article about specifically, I want to be very specific, what I refer to, I don't like her scarcity strategy for selling merch. It's overused.
That being said, I wrote an article about her as an example of community builder because she, as you just said, has those secret sessions, which are an example of way in which she takes people from an audience where she's on the stage and they are just receiving to a stage of active participation. She has a very good way of communicating with her fans that says, it's because of you that we are so successful. She really empowers them to say, these are the actions I need to take.
So one of the things that make a community a community is not just the sense of that journey that we are sharing together of loving an artist, for example, which is fan base pretty much, but it's also a journey of empowering that fan base to take more action, to elevate us all. So it's all of a journey of elevating that thing we're in love with. And we're all in a path where we can take certain actions to contribute to our collective success to the point of like, Swifties have became almost too much of an army, even when she releases bad music.
That being said, I'm not saying that this is a perfect, good example of community, but it's definitely an audience turned community. It's done through non-scalable events, the secret sessions, it's done through discussion forums that often happen even on social media. The baseline is like, someone posted this one day, I think it was, I'm not mistaken, it was David Spinks or I don't remember who it was, but I think it was him.
It was like, community is not the post, it's in the comments. So you could have a community happen on social media if there's a discussion, if there's a conversation. You see that on Twitter.
Twitter has been a very democratized platform in which anyone can speak to anyone, anyone can tag anyone. It's not like you have your profile, but people rarely go on their profile on Twitter and read their own posts. Like people might open their feed on Instagram and look at their own feed because it's kind of like they're harmonizing it.
It's very like ego driven. So I think there's platforms that are more conducive for communities. And in general, there are platforms that allow conversations to happen, but you can have conversations even on Instagram.
So community is like identity, which is pretty much your inner journey, your collective journey, plus connectedness, which is the conversations in all directions, not a monologue, leading to participation and growth and contribution and users, members as protagonists, not as audience.
Paige Buan
One last question before we wrap up this show. We've discussed a lot and there's a lot of nuggets in there, but what's one piece of advice that you'd like to give someone who wants to explore community building further that we haven't discussed yet?
Laís de Oliveira
Are we talking about someone who wants to start a community or someone who maybe wants to transition to community management as a role?
Paige Buan
That's a good question.
Let's start with... Now I'm thinking, because you also mentioned earlier that the value of community builder, especially for the future with AI. So let's start with the second point.
Laís de Oliveira
I think the second point is more like, I think it's very similar to the first one, but it depends a lot on the field that you are inserted in.
But it doesn't matter if you're an engineer. I've seen engineers, product designers, product managers, operations people becoming excellent community builders. Because what truly matters is maybe find a company or an audience that you truly care about, that you could almost belong to them and maybe join as a before you maybe become a manager.
I think it's very like, it's possible that you start applying to roles and you just try to learn and take courses. But I think the best way to become a community manager is by contributing to an existing community. So I would say like, join a couple of communities that you truly care about and contribute and start making notes of like, first of all, I'm supposed that if you are someone even slightly interested in becoming a community manager, it's likely that you've already been doing this.
So I'm taking it as in like, you already maybe have been participating, contributing actively to communities. And so I think just the key advice is actively contribute to any communities you're part of. If you're not part of any communities, that's weird.
I find it very unlikely join communities that you care about and observe and take notes of like, what do I enjoy doing here? What do I feel when I contribute to people? How can people help each other more? Like what is missing? And essentially a good community is engaged. And what engaged means is that people are gaining value from it in all directions, right? So I think that like, my advice is to just be an active observer. Maybe it's not a very practical advice in terms of like, take a community manager's course from Facebook.
You can also do that. But I feel that like the big deal is to really just understand how to activate contribution, how to build a movement, how to make people take action without you telling them to do it. And the best contributors are often system thinkers.
They are often UX designers. They are product developers because they understand how to guide people towards a path that they want to walk, you know? So I'm going to keep it at that. I hope that's useful.
I think that, first of all, you don't need to be an expert to join a community. In any community, you can become an expert. And that's actually part of the journey.
Some people join from new member and become a top contributor in a week just because they are passionate and curious. So I think as long as you're actively curious, you can grow within a community because it's really about adding value to people. I was clueless when I landed in Malaysia, you know? But like, I was curious and eager to help.
The other thing, community founder. Before starting a community, understand the problem you're gonna solve for whom and go find and go to all the communities existing in that topic. You don't need to go, but map it out.
The first step of community building is ecosystem mapping. I'm starting this network of this community of parents around the future of work, education, and child care. And I'm starting by becoming a member of the kind of space I wish I would start in wherever I move to.
And I want to support them. And I don't want to reinvent the wheel. I might just want to enhance the solution that I already want to see in the world if that already exists.
So the same way when I lived in Malaysia, I first made friends with people who were already providing the solutions that technically I wanted to provide. Some of them didn't want to be my friends in the short term. In the long run, we became friends anyways.
But like, there's no competition. I think that if you're building a community similar to someone else's, it means that you guys are starting to tackle the same problem. And if anything, in the larger scheme of life, you are collaborators to solve that problem.
The real enemy is the problem. So, and the real enemy we're all facing here is loneliness. And we all need to collaborate to reinvent society, reinvent communities, which by the way, the name of my book in Portuguese, to help solve this problem for everyone.
So again, if you want to start a community, go check out what's already out there. And don't start a community without doing a little bit of research, because I like to joke that starting a community is like, without doing your mapping, is like hosting a party at your apartment after moving to a new city where you don't know anyone, like you don't know who you're going to invite. So first, go out, go to the bar, go to the music concert, go to the beach, make friends.
And then you'll be ready to host people in your house. And you can do that within a week, but take your time. I love that.
Paige Buan
Laís, thank you so much for sharing your insight and experiences with us here today. It's been a pleasure having you on the show. For our listeners who want to learn more about your work or want to get in touch with you, where can they find you? I think the easiest for professional matters is just on LinkedIn.
Laís de Oliveira
My name is Laís de Oliveira. And for more information about how to engage with me for work, hackingcommunities.com, and which is also the name of my book that you can find on Amazon. And I think that's it.
Paige Buan
I love it. Thank you again, Laís. We will make sure to add all of the links to the podcast description.
Thank you to our listeners for tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe to Clear the Static and leave us a review if you enjoyed today's episode. Until next time, stay curious and keep building those meaningful connections.
Disclaimer: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors.