Pete Soderling

Yeah, I think it's an awesome question. Because any company that embraces community, to some degree embraces perhaps somewhat of a wild wild west. And I think some companies and brands manage that very heavily top down, and they want to, and they have the resources to, and they're able to some others, I think, let the community sprawl. And, you know, in our particular case, because we're a tiny startup, I used to say that we're three people into PayPal accounts, I'm running events all over the world, you know, even though we're just a touch bigger than that now, not much. But we have 18 meetups all over the world and forming conferences from San Francisco to Singapore. So I think the only way that we've been able to do that, and just to be clear, like we're up for profit business, but I think that's one of the other things that makes us super unique is that, yes, we're for profit. But at the same time, we're embracing a highly principled notion of community. And we use lots and lots of volunteers in order to help you know further that message worldwide, because we can't afford to hire community managers in every single city that we want to operate in. So so that that's one thing. And I guess, for us, we've just had to embrace kind of the the wild nature of what it means to scale a community worldwide and deal with the ups and downs and challenges that come with that. And, of course, there's some brand risk. And there's, you know, other sorts of frustrations, sometimes working with volunteers, but I guess my inspiration, you know, specifically in this was really through through 500 startups, and I went on geeks on a plane back in 2012, I believe. And when I saw the way that 500 startups, which is a startup accelerator in San Francisco, was building community, all around the world, basically one plane at a time. And I saw how kind of wild and crazy that community was, I sort of learned, like the opportunity and the challenge of building community that way. And I think the main thing, you know, if you can embrace the chaos, and if your business situation forces you to embrace the chaos order to scale, I think the main way that you keep that in line is you just have a few really big core values that you talk about, and you emphasize a lot, because basically, the community has to sort of manage itself against those values. And you know, this, this isn't like a detailed, like, heavy takedown process, because you just can't in that scenario. So I think the most important thing is that the community understands the ethos of what you stand for. And that's why with data Council, you know, there's a couple things I already mentioned open source, that's super important to us. And we're always looking for new ways to lift up open source, and to encourage engineers to submit their open source projects for us to promote them. we prioritize open source talks at our conference. You know, that's just one one thing. I think the other thing for data Council is that we've committed to not be an over sponsored brand. This can make it hard economically for us to be able to grow and, and build the to hire the team that we want to sometimes, but we're very careful about the way we integrate partners and sponsors into our events. And we don't want to be, you know, what we see as some of our competitors being sort of over saturated and swarming with salespeople. So there's a few like, Hi thing, I guess the other thing that that's super important for us is we're just deeply, deeply committed to deeply technical content. We screen all of our talks, and we're uncompromising in the in the speakers that we put on stage. And I think all of these things resonate with engineers like I'm, I'm an engineer. And so I know engineers think and I think these three things have differentiated us from a lot of the other conferences and, and events out there, we realized that there was space for this differentiation. And I think all these things resonate with engineers. And now it makes engineers and data scientists around the world want to raise their hands and help us launch meetups, we were in Singapore. Last month, we launched our first data data council conference there, which was amazing. And the whole community came between Australia and India and the whole region, Southeast Asia, they were there. And we left with three or four new meetups in different cities, because people came to the conference saw what we stood for, saw, they were sitting next to awesome people and awesome engineers. And it wasn't just a bunch of suits at a data conference. And they wanted to go home and take a slice of data console back to their city. And so we support them in creating meetups, and we connect them to our community, and we help them find speakers. And it's just been amazing to really see that thrive. And I think like I said, the main the main thing is just knowing the the core ethos of what you stand for. And even in the crazy times, just being consistent about the way you can you communicate that to the community, letting the community run with it and see what happens. And sometimes it's it's messy, and sometimes it's awesome. And but you know, it's a it's an awesome experiment. And I just think it's incredible that a small company like us can have global reach. And it's only because of the awesome volunteers, community organizers, meetup organizers, track host for our conference that we've been able to suck into this into this orbit. And we just want to make the world a better place for them. And they've been super, super helpful and, and kind and supporting us, and we couldn't have done it without them. So it's been an awesome experiment. And, you know, we're continuing to push forward with that model.