The Cultivation of Our Community Focus
The first time we officially identified “Community” as a prime investment area was in March of 2020. However, in January of 2018, we kicked off the year with a post about Social networking that touches heavily upon the community concept. As you’ll recall, 2018 was the time of the allegations against Facebook for secretly harvesting data and promoting fake news, resulting in a huge backlash against social media platforms in general. Our take on the whole controversy was that this was simply another phase in the natural evolution of humanity:
“The truth I’ve learned through long experience is that change is simply….change. It has no intrinsic goodness or badness. It just is. The rising generation, the generation that actually experiences the new reality of change, decides the actual course for that change, not the generation that created the means of change.”
And that, in my view, is what will happen with social networking. The power of human connection over great distances, now unleashed, will never be re-contained. The impacts of social networking change will be deep and abiding. The future, as it always is, will be shockingly different than the past in ways that defy simple extrapolation.”
Heading into 2019, our research showed signs of a new, more personalized form of community that differed greatly from the large-scale dominant community players. So when we officially announced Community as a focus area in 2020, we determined a set of guidelines that differentiated the communities in which we would focus. We chose to primarily invest in what we phrased “Health Communities;” expressions of a broader megatrend where consumers were seizing the high ground in health’s future.
“New health science is moving care closer to consumers. Health communities are a mechanism for shifting power to consumers through deep exchange of experience and information. These communities are growing in importance in bio, neuro, biome, food, and other areas that matter to us, like support communities among women, especially young women under stress.” In 2019/2020, we invested in 28 health-based communities, including She’s Well, Radish, Pollie, Bloom Science, and Lucid Care.
We did acknowledge, however, that we should maintain a secondary focus on communities that create content specifically delightful to their constituents. To that end, we invested in two such community platforms. Last year, one was acquired by Hubspot, and the other raised $60 million in a Series B.
This summer, we revisited the Community concept and determined that with the new generation, a new version of community has emerged, one we call “micro-communities” based on their participants’ specific issues of importance.
This can take many forms, from sharing resources for living with a chronic illness (like our portfolio company Pollie), to supporting one another through emotional challenges like pregnancy (like our portfolio company Mae) or depression (like our portfolio company Mine’d); to dealing with socially taboo subjects like decreased sex drive (like our portfolio company Rosy). Often, these communities bring joy and delight to their participants, like our portfolio company Journey, “the world’s largest, most engaging meditation community.”
Early signs indicate that Web3 and the democratization of community building through DAOs could be the community’s next momentous iteration. Putting decision-making, governance, and financial rewards in the hands of the members themselves is an epochal shift. Tokenization is another way communities create value for their participants. In our portfolio, health movement platform Moveworld, boasting a following of 14K, has launched its $MOVE token to reward community members for competing in their challenges to drive a more active society, and Serif is integrating tokenization into their membership to ensure that their community of over 10K LGBTQ leaders and creators have a seat at the emerging digital asset table.”
Our original statement holds true: “The power of human connection over great distances, now unleashed, will never be re-contained.” The digital world enables the building of micro-communities that would otherwise have been inconceivable a few years ago. Distance, age, ethnicity, and other limiting factors are wiped away in digital space, and AI tools can derive deep truths for the group from their interactions. Now, as Covid slowly wanes, people are showing fatigue with living a predominantly digital life, and many have the desire to be back to in-person events. In light of this digital/physical push and pull, the concept of community is likely set in a state of continual flux over the coming years, and we will fluctuate with it, embracing change and the decisions of the next generation.
By Marketing Director Nicole Staudinger
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