Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Gary Chou, Founder of Orbital, about how to launch new ideas, help others launch theirs, and how he uses behavioral information to inform his work.

Episode Highlights:

• Orbital has found a major use case for people who are in between jobs or in-between stages of a new venture.
• Access to dialogue about their ideas and new projects is a key component of Orbital.
• They created peer-based learning programs for tech employees and recently started their 7th cohort, and almost all of the applicants for this round were referred by alumni.
• There’s an assumption that everyone knows what they’re doing, and it makes you feel like the only person who doesn’t, but really no one knows what they’re doing.
• Chou found he was making assumptions about what people wanted and needed at work because he previously only had access to his own narrative around work, but his view changed when he suddenly had access to 20-30 narratives around work as part of the VC fund.
• Getting the right people in the room is key to an effective community where people engage and share, but it shouldn’t feel like you’re setting people up on a blind date.
• Everything Orbital does is on a small scale since Chou decided not to hire anybody else so his energy wouldn’t be split by having to manage employees.
• He’s found there are advantages to growing at scale, but there are also advantages to staying small.
• All you can control is the space—you can’t control how people behave in the space or when they leave.
• You don’t get to bestow the label of “community” upon yourself; it’s something that has to be consciously practiced, and it’s an iterative process.
• Moving forward, we won’t be able to get away with the faux-connection enabled by the Internet because people have learned about the surveillance and data collection.
• If you don’t acknowledge human behavior and the fact that people may or may not behave in ways you anticipate, then you’ll be slow to innovate.
• A fundamental education shift needs to happen in order to confront uncertainty.

3 Key Points:

1. Community is necessary because the workplace is not an environment for open dialogue, it’s a performative space.
2. Having access to others in your field opens you up to new narratives and ways of doing things.
3. The idea of community and connection will need to shift in the coming years due to technology and a movement away from the fake community on social media.

Tweetable Quotes:

• “Food & the ritual of eating puts everyone on the same playing field where we're engaged in this ritual we’re both familiar with, so there’s not as much social awkwardness… it puts people in a place where they’re more willing to share things or engage.” – Gary Chou
• “The only truth out there is the chaos of the world.” – Gary Chou

Resources Mentioned:

• Travis King: Linkedin
• communitybuildershow.com
• Gary Chou: Website, Twitter
• https://orbital.nyc/

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