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Inheritors 3/3 - A letter

A path to walk

Filip Nowak · 1 min read

Here's the culmination of this series - a letter to everyone doing their best, especially in this community building space.

Running a community is a journey without a playbook: a group of friends trying to make a bigger group of friends. At some point your ambitions might go beyond one city, or the first 100 people, or you might want to hire some FTEs and of course.

Friction

I dedicate this section to the people who have already left Europe or have made their mind to leave.

This is the right moment about comparisons of US vs EU of Antwerp vs Paris and the list goes on. It is common knowledge that if you'd like to be in tech Sillicon Valley is probably the place to be, or at least to visit. Why is that so? There's a few reasons for this which I outlined in my other braindump The Cost of Connection.

I've heard a few times already that it's sometimes suffocating to be building here. It has caused some people I know to lose all hope and decide to move. I don't know the exact circumstances but either way it's a bit of a shame. I miss you guys!

A stirring flame

I am fortunate enough to be in the middle of European AI & Robotics ecosystem as well as the community building one. It's an incredibly exhilirating time! The continent has been asleep, for quite some time - admin, bureaucracy, fluff - but recently there's an incredible amount of urgency that has spread.

North Star started because there weren't enough hackathons happening in Belgium - we still do hackathons from time to time but nowadays you have something popping up on a monthly basis. On a European level, all these communities are starting to talk with each other and share learnings. You see manifests, speeches and just so much excitement.

I have a saying that I like to repeat to my team, in 50 years I'll be sitting on my wooden reclining chair and telling my grandchildren that back in my 20s I was able to gather and meet some crazy people - and that directly led to your life being better now.

Endgame

Running communities is not a 2 year AI B2B SaaS exit kind of thing, it's a 20/50/100 year play. It's difficult to have tangible ROI on this - I like to say that when you put people with different backgrounds in a room, magic happens. I would advise against talking about "Magic ROI" to your partners, but you will only see this magic pop up when the people who met at your events start the next big thing.

And of course, if you're still aiming to retire your parents early - treat this as a distribution play, help people out and genuinely do your best. My top takeaways from this journey: