In his senior year of college, Ankit Shah founded Tea With Strangers to meet people he'd never gotten the chance to. Today, it's a global community organization. Hundreds of hosts who have brought more than 50,000 people in 25 cities together in real life for small, meaningful group conversations. In his personal and professional life at Airbnb and now Facebook, “social courage” is the driving force in everything Ankit does. From neighborhood gatherings to global tea times, we talk with Ankit about facilitating connection and leading organizations that increase our sense of belonging.
“If you're going to lead an organization, it's likely that more of your time and energy is going into building an engine and less of your time and energy is going into facilitating connection between people. It's really important for community leaders to recognize if they want to lead an organization or if they want to facilitate connection.” -- Ankit Shah
Motivated by a sense of nostalgia during his senior year of college, Ankit Shah posted an open call: he wanted to get tea with anyone on campus who he hadn’t met before. To his surprise, 250 University of Pennsylvania students said “yes” and he found himself spending the last 6 weeks of college meeting with six new people for three hours every night in the same cafe.
He realized that strangers were excited to meet and learn about each other beyond surface day-to-day interactions. After graduation, he founded an organization called Tea with Strangers, which paired strangers together for small group conversations. Since its founding in May 2014, it has brought over 50,000 people in 25 cities together. Today, Ankit has brought this community-first mindset to his work at Facebook and Airbnb, and also to his personal life, creating Silent Hike Society and weekly neighborhood gatherings.
In this episode, we learned about how Ankit grew a global community of hosts for Tea with Strangers, how he translated his learnings into a career, and the value of alone time as a community-builder.
Hear more stories from community leaders like Ankit who are passing the torch and creating more leaders at: https://gettogetherbook.com/resources#pass-the-torch
👏Learn more about Ankit and say hello at https://www.ankit.fyi/
✨Learn more about our correspondent Maggie Zhang on her blog, Commonplays.
📙Grab your copy of GET TOGETHER—our handbook on community-building 🔥: bit.ly/gettogetherbook
👋Learn more and reach out about the work we do coaching passionate, community-centered organizations like Nike, Substack, and Surfrider at http://people-and.com/
Note: This transcript is automatically generated, and there may be some errors.
O0:06
Welcome to the Get Together!
00:11
Speaker 2: It's our show about how to bring communities to life that can bridge the gaps between us in a digital world. I'm your host, Bailey Richardson. I'm a partner at people, I'm company and a coauthor of get together how to build a community with your people.
00:25
Speaker 1: And I Maggie get together correspondent,
00:28
Speaker 2: Each episode we interview everyday people who have built extraordinary communities about just how they did it. How did they get the first people to show up? How did they grow to hundreds, thousands, more members Maggie, tell us, who are we interviewing today?
00:42
Speaker 1: Today, we're talking to on kit Shaw. He's the founder of an organization called tea with strangers, which pairs people together for good conversation. He also worked in community building roles at Airbnb and Facebook. And why are you so excited to interview on kit? Magley, he's just someone who lives in breeze, community in all dimensions of his life. And you can just tell, he thinks about this kind of stuff in his free time. I participated in tea with strangers when I was in college and I also attended on kids, TEDx talk in London, and I loved all his viewpoints around social courage and making it more normal to just connect with strangers and have deeper conversations.
01:16
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. I love that that point you made is very clear in our conversation. I'm sure the listeners will notice too how much he uses his like shower, brainstorm time to think about community building. So what's one thing that you learned from on kit today that you want to share.
01:32
Speaker 1: I was just reminded that the success of a community, isn't always about scale it's about the meaning you can create for your members. So although ti was, strangers did grow to be quite immense. His tea times have served over 50,000 people on can also emphasize the value of micro-communities in his personal life. He's created silent hikes society with just less than a dozen people getting together for monthly silent hikes. And he also does these Sunday evening gatherings with just as apartment neighbors and these meetups have just as much significance to his life as the larger communities he's worked on with T with strangers, Facebook and Airbnb. So I think that's pretty cool.
02:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely. And a point that's important to remember, we talk about our egos getting into the mix or scale and growth, but it doesn't necessarily make the meaning any richer. Awesome. Well, let's jump in on kit where you at
02:19
Speaker 1: On kit. Thank you so much for joining us today. It'd be really cool to start by talking about tea with strangers. Can you tell us about tea with strangers, for those who don't know about it?
02:30
Speaker 3: So you have strangers is a community organization. We bring small groups of strangers together for meaningful conversations. I started it in 2014 and to date we've had over 50,000 people come together in small group conversations around the world. It's a really simple concept. We basically just have hosts who put up times and places on the website. So you would strangers.com and up to five strangers can sign up it's first come first serve. Nobody knows who's going to be there until they get there. And then they sit at a cafe for hours and they talk. And what they talk about is never really predetermined. It's all about just kind of creating the space for people to really recognize the humanity in one another, by having a conversation that lacks any context at all. Cool. And you started this in 2014, right? What did that look like to you?
03:17
Speaker 3: As strangers originally was a little project. I started when I was at university. It wasn't even an organization. It was literally just a website that said, Hey, I'm on kit. I'm graduating. Like a lot of you. If I haven't met you yet, let's change that before. We never have the chance again. And this little website, it was pretty goofy, but it went viral on my college campus at U Penn and 250 people signed up in the span of like two weeks. And I had six weeks left before I graduated. And I was very committed to making good on this commitment to all the people that signed up because I just thought it was really amazing and a big leap of faith that they took by even saying, yeah, sure. I'll talk to you. So I did the math and I was like 42 days left divide that into 250 people. And I was like, alright, I guess I'm going to meet with six people every single night. And every night for the last six weeks of college, I sat at the same cafe for three hours, with six new people. And we talked and I brought the same concept out to the Bay area. When I moved to San Francisco
04:15
Speaker 2: On kit, we always ask community leaders. You know, we say you can't fake the funk. Almost everyone that we see that's built a community that thrives and grows from somewhere that originally it came out of personal motivation. And so wondering when you decided to start these tea sessions at your university, what were you feeling? What were you going through? What led to you? See this need to host 10 small groups.
04:39
Speaker 3: I love that question because I think it's so relevant to anybody. That's building a community that you actually need to feel what the community is for. You need to feel like it's fulfilling some need for you. For me, when I was graduating, I was having a pretty rough time in my last two months of college. And the rough time was actually because of how great my last semester of college was. I was really holding on to the experience that I was having. And I'll be honest. I still look back at my last semester of college as one of the most inflow times of my life. I was just so in love with everything that was happening around me. And something that I noticed in this time is that the people around me in my senior class were also similarly the little looser. They were very open and receptive to meeting new people.
05:25
Speaker 3: It was almost like freshman year when you just get to college and you're looking for your friends, except I think everyone was experiencing this degree of retroactive nostalgia. It's like, Oh my God, what if I never get to do this again? And the truth is you probably won't ever be in that environment again. So you just are holding on to everything that is unique about that environment. And for me, that really was realizing that there was an incredible density of very thoughtful, passionate, smart, enthusiastic people around me. And I'll be honest. I looked back at my last three before, and I wondered if I had actually really appreciated that while I was at Penn, I looked around and I was like, I don't actually think I did a particularly good job of seeing the people around me. And I thought, how can I do that? How can I bring these people into my life while I have the chance?
06:12
Speaker 2: I just read an essay that Zadie Smith wrote. And she describes the difference between happiness and joy as happiness as sort of just like, just pleasure, like, Oh, that's something beautiful. Or that sensory like stimulation is great. And joy actually comes with exactly what you're talking about, which is some amount of sadness and some amount of knowing how precious the moment is. So it sounds like, it sounds like he was changers was born out of some very serious joy and those first meetings, first experiences together. What made you decide to keep going?
06:48
Speaker 3: You know how people say the more you know about something, the more you realize how little, you know, you wonder how someone gets a PhD in spider webs and you must think how much is there to possibly know about spiderwebs and then you get into it. And you're like, Holy crap, there's a whole world of spiderweb knowledge. They think I had a very similar experience with regards to talking to people about where they come from and not literally where they come from like geographically, but how they have arrived at this moment that they are in, in their lives, why they are at this table, what excites them? What motivates them? How do you know what are some of the inflection points that have brought them to the life that they're in right now? And after the first few conversations, this persisted over hundreds of conversations was this repeated realization that you really can't assume that you know, what someone else's life is.
07:38
Speaker 3: You can't assume why they are the way that they are. And when you actually get to talking about them, not only do you learn something, there's this pleasant surprise. Wow. I had no idea how unique your journey was. I had no idea that that was even a perspective that someone could have. And to me, that's kind of addicting. It's really inspiring to learn about someone and be like, that's who you are. You've been in front of me this whole time. And I had no idea that you have this richness within you. And a lot of times people underplay that people don't even realize how, how meaningful their own stories are. So there's a secondary benefit for me as a host of being able to draw that out from people and then being able to reflect at them how amazing or how unique or how interesting their journeys actually are. And they're like, yeah, I guess I didn't really think about it that way. And from my perspective, it's so extraordinary. And I think that that feeling of shared humanity of deep connectedness is what life is all about. Like not to be cheesy, that sounds like a really cheesy motivational poster. But really when you experience that feeling of, wow, we are living in the same world or resonating, and I get to, I get to witness you, what else could you possibly ask for?
08:51
Speaker 2: You've just broken. What is it, the fourth wall of this interviewing process that we're doing right
08:55
Speaker 1: Now? This is why the podcast is so rad. Like literally I'm just like, look at you. You're amazing. I love what you said about, yeah. As the host, you have to draw out this fascinating information about people and find those moments of awe. When you were growing the community, how did you then train other people to host in the way you did? And what were the ways you hosted to bring out those qualities? In people
09:18
Speaker 3: At the beginning, I was very prescriptive in my onboarding of new hosts. And I very quickly learned that that's not going to work. I was very intent at the beginning. I was like, so minutes, zero through 15 of the tee time, this is what that's about. Then 15 through 60. That's what this is about. Then the second hour, this is what it's about. And you always want to close out with this particular question. And at the end, you gotta make sure you get a picture of the whole group and take the picture. And this way I was very, very prescriptive. And at the time it felt totally normal to me. I was like, yeah, no. I figured out how to make the most amazing conversation in the world happened. Like, let me tell you how to do it. And it's funny because the first host that I brought into the community were actually attendees of my tea times my selection for someone who would be a great host was someone who was at one of my tea times who I thought if I left this conversation would have been automatically picked up by them and they would have continued facilitating.
10:13
Speaker 3: And there's just a feeling that I got from certain people where I remember right after the TCM time, I would write their name down on a list. And I was like, if you ever make this thing, make them a part of it. And I had this list, 20 people out of the first, like 500, the hand raisers the Rolodex. Yeah. That's exactly it. And I emailed them and I was like, Hey, would you be interested in hosting the tee times that I otherwise am hosting? I'll just sub out. I'll email the people who want it to come to my tee time. And I'll be like, Oh, sorry, I got sick. But my friends, so, and so is going to do it. That was the beginning of quote unquote scaling. He would strangers. And I remember I would get on the phone with them for an hour beforehand. I'd be like, all right. So this is how it works. And then after literally I remember I would set a timer. The second, the teatime time was done and I would text him,
10:55
Speaker 1: Hey, can you get on the phone? Oh my God, big brother over here. I had my drone over it. I was watching the whole thing. I really cared, really cared
11:05
Speaker 3: It. Wasn't at all like, Oh, I don't trust you. It was like, I want to know how it went. I've only known tee time when I've hosted it. How was it when you hosted it? Like what was different? And you know, what did you learn about yourself? How do you want to do it the same next time, but differently next time. And I quickly learned that no matter how much prescriptive direction I gave someone before the tee time, it just didn't work that way when they actually did it. And that didn't make it any worse because their reflections were always similarly awe inspiring. Like I can't believe we ended up talking about these things. I feel so connected to all the people in the room. And I was like, but how, if you didn't do it the way that I did it, how did that work?
11:41
Speaker 3: And obviously there's a lot of naivete in that. I just thought that there was only one way to make it work. And what I learned was the most important thing was that the person hosting the, had an openness to what they might find out and they were conscious about like, I want to show up in this conversation in such a way that I am asking people questions that I might otherwise be afraid to ask, but I know that in this space they have signed up and they might be receptive to it. And that's not permission to be overly awkward and invasive. It's just permission to, to take a slight step out of your comfort zone. And obviously I would enable the host with tons of questions that they could ask or little tips on some of the micro interactions. When I say micro interactions, I mean, like someone's talking a lot and someone else has been quiet for the last 20 minutes.
12:30
Speaker 3: Like how you can gently redirect the conversation to someone who's quieter or how you can make it a little more equitable, how you can diffuse an argument, little things like that. But other than that, I was like, just go with it. Like in the beginning, you want to set the tone in the middle. You want to cut deep and you really want to hear people's stories. You want to give them some space to be who they are. If no one else is asking questions, do you want to be the one to say, tell me more. What's the story behind that? You know, dig a little deeper and at the end, radiate whatever feeling you're feeling at that time. If it's gratitude, share that gratitude. If it's confusion, share that if it's joy and all tell the group about that and invite them to also reflect at the end and then take a picture and you'll see what everybody else later.
13:14
Speaker 2: One thing that stands out to me in your answer is after studying all these different communities, the biggest thing that we saw, which I think you've seen as well on kid is you grow a community through excellent leaders. And once you start kind of distributing the groups, it's a leader's job is to role model the behavior that you want to see. And what I hear with T with strangers is the main task is a sense of openness and receptivity to people you've never met before. And so it sounds like the main task of the leaders was to role model that openness and receptivity and everyone else would probably adopt it. Is that a fair statement?
13:54
Speaker 3: That's spot on that's exactly what it is. It's leading by example, something I've noticed about anyone that ever started a tea with strangers chapter and brought it to a new locale was that they would also have some motivation that wasn't just, I heard see with strangers was cool and I wanted to do it, or I want to host these conversations. They had whatever I had when I was at Penn, feeling this feeling of, I got to know everyone's stories before I can no longer know them. Everyone had some urge like that when they started their own chapters of tea with strangers, as much as I wanted to keep everything pretty universal, I realized that the fire that kept them going, the thing that sparked for them was not necessarily the thing that sparked for me and recognizing that people have different reasons to feel that fire ultimately realizing that everyone has their own spark for that fire can really open your mind to the many ways that the organization can end up looking. It's not just same cookie cut and replicated in every single city. He was strangers in different cities is an entirely different experience. And I love when I get to go to another city and witness a chapter and I'm like, Whoa, I didn't know that this is what T was strangers wasn't for me, there's a really weird and exciting feeling when I get to see, like I thought I knew this thing that I had created, it turns out I don't and in the best way possible.
15:14
Speaker 2: Hmm.
15:16
Speaker 1: Yeah. It reminds me of an earlier guest on this podcast, Jay Harati for TEDx, how he was talking about, he used to be really prescriptive. There were so many rules about how people could scale the Ted conferences. And then for their 10 year anniversary, they decided to pared down all the rules and make them really minimal because they realize, wow, all these are not necessary. A lot of rules were designed around edge cases, and we just want to empower people to have their own styles. They're also continually surprised by what TEDx looks like in one city or another, because they just let the control spread out with everyone.
15:48
Speaker 3: Yeah. I think there's so much to say about trust and belief. Just believing that people's motivations are where they need to be and trusting them to act with that in mind. And obviously, you know, having processes in place in the case that things do go off the rails, but leading with trust can really kind of open doors that you didn't even know existed.
16:09
Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think, you know, you put out a signal with T with strangers of, this is what this is about. This is what this is for. And I think anyone who wants to grab the torch and hosted themselves, just like with the TEDx notices that spirit and likely their signals, their personal frequency is on your frequency. So their motivations are likely similar. And I think that that's where setting the tone from the very early side of the original leader of the vision of how this community operates or what anyone's expected to do together. The tone is so important. TEDx definitely, definitely does that. And the people that host the TEDx, you have to have a certain set of shared values to the head organization.
16:50
Speaker 3: Absolutely.
16:51
Speaker 1: I know that chapters are all different across the world, but if you were to share the key principles that they all share, what would you say they are?
16:59
Speaker 3: So I'll start with socially courageous. The whole idea of two strangers is I think in the world that we live in right now, it just kind of doesn't make sense in the sense that you're not going to a T with strangers conversation for any particular return. You don't go there to network. You just go there to have a conversation. There's something oddly natural, but also unintuitive about that. And I think that baked in that is the courage to connect with people just for the sake of it. That's what I think of as social courage of putting that signal out there, even though there's not really a reason for it. And the reason just being, because it would be nice to get to know you. The second principle that I think is really critical to making tea with strangers, what it is, is a recognition that everyone is welcome.
17:42
Speaker 3: And I know that's a very community thing to say like, Oh, you know, everyone's welcome. Like with two strangers, literally anybody could at that table and have something to share that will surprise you, that will inspire you, or they might just want to listen. And there's a lot of democracy to strangers in the sense that all the conversations are held at cafes and parks, they're all public spaces. We try to keep it at a cafe. A coffee might be two or three bucks. It's pretty accessible. You never have to pay to come to a tee time. You can sign up just by putting your email address in. We don't double check. There's no hoops to jump over. We really trust you. And we say that in our email communication, when you sign up for a tee time, it just like, Hey, we really hope you come.
18:25
Speaker 3: We know it's easy for you to watch Netflix and just be like, Oh, I don't even know who these people are. I'm not going to show up. I'm a little tired today, but we're trusting that you'll come because someone else could come and you just took their seat. And if you can't come that's okay. Just say, so another principle is to always dig a little deeper. There's a strong belief that I have, and it's always proven time and time again and see what strangers, which is that people oftentimes will share up until they think that the people around them care. And a lot of the time, people don't want to tell too much because they don't want too much attention on them. Maybe they don't know if anyone's interested. Maybe there's not a great degree of safety and comfort in the group. But oftentimes it's like, there's something that exists like one degree beyond what someone has said that can help you understand them and why they might say the things that they do. And at T with strangers, we really want to encourage people to live the ethos of tell me more and not in a way, like, tell me more because I need to know your secrets. It's telling me more because I'm genuinely curious. W w w you know, you're sharing something that is new to me. I'm talking to you to understand you. Tell me more. Yeah. That's really helpful.
19:37
Speaker 2: I haven't asked you about the tea part yet. You did just mentioned you have these meetings and cafes in public spaces, but I personally am a sucker for a community. That's like urbanists with ramen, like strangers and T like some like food X activity. But I was just wondering, like, how important is the tea component? Do you think
19:58
Speaker 3: Not important at all? What's most important is that you have time. What ti represents is patients. It represents the lowness. We're not going anywhere. If we're going to meet for coffee, I'm going to shake your hand and we're going to have another agenda
20:12
Speaker 2: Turbocharged. Yeah.
20:14
Speaker 3: You know, we have, we have real business things to talk about with coffee. I don't know. I feel like with drinks, there's a lot of interesting dynamics around drinks, some awesome and positive, some awkward and uncomfortable tea is a very innocent, innocent, slow. I'm just here to listen, but there is no attachment to like tea with strangers happens at tea houses or tea with strangers happens like you can't drink coffee. I'm drinking coffee right now, while we're talking about tea with strangers, it's just, it's symbolic. Yeah. I love that. So it's 2020. What does the community look like now? Tea with is still active, but not the way that it was in its first four years, its first four years were like a rocket ship and it was just constantly growing. We were starting new chapters bringing on new hosts all the time. And at a certain point it kind of slowed down and it still is active.
21:06
Speaker 3: We still have a number of hosts. We onboard new hosts every few months and we have tea times happening all over the world and an active community of people who are coming to them. But I think the big difference is that we're not in constant expansion mode. It took me a while to really figure out how I felt about that. Because in my mind I thought of the success of tea with strangers as being its growth. And I started to wonder why it wasn't growing so much at a certain point. And something I realized was that I think a lot of communities and T with strangers is no exclusion have, have a certain, I don't know, I guess the life cycle at a time when they are really serving the collective belonging of its members and a time after which it did what it needed to do.
21:48
Speaker 3: And it's not the tea with strangers doesn't exist anymore. But I really do think that in the sense of what its vision was and what it sought to achieve as an organization, it was really to decrease the awkwardness of connecting with people for no reason. And to make it a little bit quote, unquote cooler, to listen to people cooler, to be empathetic, a little more accessible and not so fringe to you. It's ranger started in 2013 as an idea, 2014 as an organization. And I would say between now and then a lot has changed. You know, this podcast is a great indication of the ways in which people are finding it far more normal to build communities, to connect with people around either incredibly arbitrary things like cloud appreciation or incredibly specific things like being a pediatrician. I think there's a whole range of communities that are forming.
22:46
Speaker 3: And I really do think that there's a movement that has begun and is really on fire right now around bringing people together and not feeling so awkward about it. What I realized for me as the founder of tea with strangers is that a lot of what I was looking for when I started the organization, you know, earlier we were talking about not faking the funk, where did this actually come from? What I realized is my stage in life has also changed. And that was a really hard thing to swallow in the journey of processing too, with strangers slowing down. But I realized the desire to connect with everybody around me came from a time in my life when maybe I didn't really know as much who I was. And I was also looking to contextualize myself in the world around me and not to get super therapy about it.
23:32
Speaker 3: But I do think that that's where it was coming from from me. There was a desire for me to understand my place in the world. And over time, I actually started to find it, which is awesome for what it's worth. It's a very, very rewarding feeling. But one of the costs of that feeling was my fire to continue meeting dozens of new people every single week really slowed down. And that was interesting. But to directly answer your question right now, we are working on developing a virtual tee time guide, something that will enable people to host tee times virtually whether you're a host of tea with strangers or just someone who's trying to bring this energy into your day to day life with the people around you or people who aren't around you, I guess. And we're also thinking about providing more collateral and materials around what good questions actually look like over the course of building out the organization. One of the key tools that we've used are good questions, sometimes questions that are looking for things that you didn't know to look for. I think that that's really what a good question is. It opens a door that you didn't know that was there and right now to continue offering what's, he was strangers offers in the world beyond our tee times where we're looking to enable more people with the energy and the learnings that the organization has really, you know, amounted to.
24:52
Speaker 2: Hmm. I don't know if either of you have read what I talk about when I talk about running it's hurricane Maria commies memoir. Yes. So good. And one of the things that he talks about that I hadn't seeing parallels in your life is how he spent much of his twenties operating a piano bar. And he was serving cocktails and meeting all these strange characters in Tokyo and staying up really late at night. And then he basically in the blink of an eye, shut that down and decided to become a writer. His first book immediately took off and he's become quite a hermit as a writer and like focusing his energy on his writing, like only his writing. And he talks about that time as a piano bar operator, as what he was doing to gather all the ingredients that became his writing, all of those experiences and harnessing them and channeling them into his future work, like all the characters he met, all the lives he bumped into. And it's interesting how I see that a little bit with you have all these conversations and all these people you talk to and dancing around all of these humanistic connection questions, and now you're channeling it into your work in many ways.
25:59
Speaker 3: Wow. I read what I talk about when I talk about running seven years ago, and I don't remember that detail, but you're inspiring me to reread it because I feel like I'll see it through new eyes. Now, I guess with strangers might be my piano bar. And it's funny, I literally just published a big piece of writing. This first piece was actually a reflection on the white space of tea with strangers, which is called being alone. And it's all about understanding your relationship with yourself and how talking to strangers can help you develop a framework of what it might be like to talk to the stranger that is you and how I've learned through connecting with strangers, a better approach to connecting with myself and realizing that there's a lot to, even about me. And there's a power in that kind of reflection.
26:46
Speaker 1: I actually just finished reading your essay. I did find it really beautiful. This idea of applying the way you would interact with strangers to yourself in terms of spaciousness, curiosity, and awe. And I think it's cool. How now you're open sourcing this thinking so that more people can use it and embrace it. What are your thoughts on now applying these learnings to your personal life and helping other people do the same?
27:09
Speaker 3: Thank you for asking that. I think the most meaningful thing about two strangers independent of the organizational structure or its growth or anything like that, is that it offered an invitation to people that essentially said, yes, Hey, if you would like to have a conversation, this is available. It was forcing them to come. It was not selling them on some value prop. It was just saying that this is a thing and you can join. And I think there's something about that that really opens the doors of people, revealing their humanity, as opposed to some facet of themselves. It's rather just an inherent desire to connect. And I have found that to be the cause of many beautiful moments in my life. So I have recently taken to extending that practice into other parts of my life. One of them being in my local neighborhood, I recently wrote out a little invitation to my neighbors saying, Hey, we all live in the same building, but I just see you guys in the laundry room.
28:06
Speaker 3: And I moved here six, seven months ago. And I still only see you in the laundry room if you want to on Sunday, come up to the roof and we'll all have coffee. I printed this out and I flipped it under every single neighbor's door. And about like six of my 22 neighbors in my building came up to the roof that day. We did it a few more times. And now in quarantine, we do it every single week, except we on Fridays do what we call distant drinks, where we all get up to the roof, stand in a very large circle. And now it's a group of like 11 of us and we just shoot the shit at the end of the week. And it creates a punctuated moment, a ritual every single week where you end and you say the week's done and people still exist.
28:51
Speaker 3: I left that people still exists. It's crazy right now. Yeah. I mean, we don't see anybody, you know, I mean we see people, but we don't see people like, you know, recognize, acknowledge, like interact with and relate to. And our Friday distant drinks Hangouts is when we do that. And beyond that, I also recently had this idea to go on hikes with anybody, except we wouldn't talk on the whole hike. We would just commune with nature independent of one another, but still together, alone together. To me, I think there's a lot of introspective value and a lot to be experienced in just looking at leaves and hearing the crunch under your feet and listening to the way that wind passes past your face, noticing a bird, seeing a bug, all these little things. They really remind how complex and magical the world is. I think that there is something really wild about people having that all inspiring experience together, but not being able to talk about it.
29:53
Speaker 3: I think of it like a tension that builds up between people where you wonder if I'm this inspired right now. I wonder what they're experiencing. I guess I won't even know, but I know they're experiencing something and that is what became now what I call the silent hikes society. Awesome. Up until shelter in place. It was a monthly hike where it's usually six to 10 people we'd get together. At the beginning of the hike, we would talk about what's on our minds, like what we're bringing with us into this hike. And then we'd put all of our hands in the middle, like a huddle and I'd be like on three and I'd be like one, two, three, and then nobody says a word. And then we just started walking for three and a half hours. It's a very beautiful experience. And again, another idea that just requires the courage to extend an invitation to say, Hey, this is a thing that I would like to do if you would like to do it with me, feel free. And I think that there is something really pure about that.
30:46
Speaker 1: That also ties in really nicely with what you, what you were saying earlier about used to think success of a community is all about growth and the numbers, but now you're continuing this community building in a very micro scale and more intimate scale. And it's made a really big impact to have these rituals in your personal life too. Not just about having a ton of people at once and making sure it spreads everywhere.
31:08
Speaker 3: Yeah. I don't think that all communities need to be big. I don't think they all need to scale. In my perspective, what a strong community does is it creates a deep sense of belonging and connectedness amongst the people who are in it. And there can be more people in it, but you don't necessarily need to have more people in it to make it more meaningful. I think a lot of the time we conflate the idea of size and meaning, and I think there's a lot of opportunity that each of us has on an individual level, as well as amongst community builders to think about how you can make something smaller and more meaningful as opposed to bigger and more. I don't know, branded.
31:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's a hard it's it's I a hundred percent agree. And I also think I've had, you know, you were talking about how the growth, it feeds our ego in a certain way, right? Like a thin there's something neat to see it, see a community resonate with so many people. It kind of feels like there's like an air pocket somewhere that just popped in and something has been solved that needed to be solved for people. But I think it takes self reflection and letting yourself be intrinsically motivated, not extrinsically motivated as a leader to really feel that way. You know? I mean, yeah, you've now probably interacted with, through your work as well at Airbnb and Facebook. So many different people that are organizing communities. How do you see leaders manage that tension of growth is resonating versus
32:39
Speaker 3: Really focusing on the value they're bringing to the individuals in the groups. I see a wide gamut. There are community leaders who are very fixated on growth. The way I think of it is they're leading organizations and leading an organization is not the same thing as building a community. An organization can enable the growth of a community, but it's the same thing as being a CEO versus someone who has a project, the more complex and organization gets the more balls there are to juggle. You now need to think about marketing and branding and growth. You also need to think about retention and minimizing churn. You need to think about increasing the quality of your product. It's not, that is more than making people feel connected to one another. But the beautiful thing about organizations is they can increase the reach and the scale of this very powerful, you know, feeling of belonging.
33:33
Speaker 3: But the reality is if you're going to lead an organization, it's likely that more of your time and energy is going into building an engine and less of your time and energy is going into facilitating connection between people. And I think it's really important for community leaders to recognize if they want to lead an organization or if they want to facilitate connection. They're not mutually exclusive. It's just saying that where your energy comes from, it might be more in one direction or the other. And I know that for me, when I was in the thick of leading an organization, it didn't really excite me because a part of me thought, well, if I'm going to lead an organization, there's a lot of other ways I could use this energy. But if I'm going to facilitate connection that I really want to facilitate connection. I think for me doing the half, half thing made it very difficult for me to feel like I was thriving in either.
34:23
Speaker 3: And I think that really strong community leaders, whether they choose that they want to build more of an organization or just more on the ground, facilitate connection. Both are incredibly meaningful and powerful, but if you know which one really gets you out of bed, then you can really lean into it. If you're growing an organization, maybe you're doing more of enabling other people to facilitate connection, but doing less connection builds, link, connection, facilitation yourself. But you know, in the case of my neighborhood, gatherings and silent hikes and organizing small groups of people for conversations, I'm doing a lot of connection facilitation. And when I was scaling T with strangers to 25 cities around the world, I was doing a lot more organization building. That's a great answer. Thank you.
35:04
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's awesome. Can you just take a step back and tell us what you are doing for community building at Facebook and what you did at Airbnb and how you transitioned into making that a career?
35:15
Speaker 3: After I stopped working on sea with strangers full time, I started to work at Airbnb on their humanitarian team, specifically focused on community engagement projects. Their team works on a product called open homes, which enables posts on Airbnb to offer their homes for free to refugees. Who've been displaced two evacuees of natural disasters and the community of hosts who their homes for these people in need. Yeah, we've built a strong community amongst them to help them stay educated on how to open their homes to people in need. They feel more enabled and connected to other people. Who've also done this because it's a very different thing from just hosting a travel guest on Airbnb. After that, I started to work at Facebook on a team called community partnerships. We exist to enable and support community builders all across the platform and to advocate for those community builders, Eads, both at Airbnb and at Facebook. I've had a incredible opportunity to not only get to know, but to actively support and fight for community builders of all kinds. It really has expanded my sense of understanding as to what community means to a whole lot of different people.
36:30
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's great. Because as a community builder on the ground for tea with strangers, you really saw everything at eye level. And then at Facebook and Airbnb, you're able to zoom out and then empathize with everyone going through what you went through and help them at scale.
36:45
Speaker 3: A thousand percent. The biggest asset that I have in my work at Facebook and to Airbnb is that the people I'm talking to are people that I've been, I've been on quote, unquote, their side of the table. It helps me understand why they need what they need and what could best support them. It's not saying I have the answers. It's just saying that when I hear the answers, I can understand them. And that really puts me in a position to effectively do the job of fighting for their needs.
37:12
Speaker 1: You said you've seen a well, a lot of community builders need, what are some common patterns or themes you've noticed that they do need that can help other people listening to this podcast also think about building their communities.
37:24
Speaker 3: I think community builders need to be more forgiving of themselves. We all put a lot of pressure on ourselves to create something special, to create something that matters to us because we are personally invested in the communities that we're building. We really care that they are, that we're creating the experience for every single member in our communities. And I think what a lot of community builders fail to notice is that what they're trying to do is really hard. It's really hard. Community building is not a profession that sits in the same sentence as doctor, lawyer engineer, or at least not in my parents' eyes. And I think what that can often lead to as far as perception goes is that maybe it's not as serious, or maybe we should be able to accomplish more with the amount of energy that we're putting in. And I think what's really important to know is that people really value this work.
38:19
Speaker 3: And a lot of the time community builders are trying to do it as well, a one person or five person volunteers show. And it's like, you gotta give yourself a little bit of a break because you're doing something incredible and it's good to be really ambitious and aspirational, but not at the of your sense of self. You, you know, you're, you're doing great. I don't know who you are, but you are doing a damn good job and whatever job you don't think you're doing, like be patient with yourself, you're getting there. I love it. That was great.
38:50
Speaker 1: So just wrapping up, you have such a breadth of experience. You've experienced community building for your own organization in the corporate tech sense in your personal life. So what advice would you share with people who want to grow communities,
39:04
Speaker 3: Get to know yourself? I truly think the better you can get to know yourself. The more available you are to get to know other people, to listen to them, to pay attention to their needs and to actually create something that makes them feel the sense of belonging that a good community can make them feel. And I think it's really hard to get to know yourself. And I don't think that it's get to know yourself, then built a community. Yeah, you get to know yourself. They help you build new communities. And I truly hope that anybody who wants to build a community can put that aspiration and ambition side by side with the ambition of getting to know who they themselves are.
39:43
Speaker 1: If you want to connect with tea with strangers, you can learn more@twithstrangers.com to learn more about on kit, check out his personal site on k.fyi, which he describes as his internet living room. And you can learn more about us, the little company behind this podcast@ourwebsitepeopleand.company. Also, our book is on Amazon.
40:03
Speaker 2: Get together book.com. It's a handbook full of stories and learnings from conversations with community leaders like this one with armpit. Oh, and last thing, if you don't mind, please review and subscribe. Those things really help more people who are interested in community building find the podcast. Great. Thank you. And thank you, Maggie. We'll see you guys next time.