what in the world is an ecosystem - notes on community

“my name is a.j. and i’m head of ecosystem”

my normal intro is one that often has a quick follow-up, “but let me explain what that means.” i have learned to meander around the answer, but almost always land on, “simply put, i do community work.”

i have been called to work in community from very early on - call it influence from the church, watching parishioners welcome new faces to congregation or shlep cookies to the community table post service or from the years of working at a summer camp. now i wouldn’t call myself particularly religious (or really religious at all) and i no longer reside lakefront at a summer camp, but i still find my work to be as community oriented as ever and echos of these experiences are woven into the fabric of my work.

being an “ecosystemist” in the age of ai has opened up a whirlwind of beliefs that i feel center how i think about community, primarily in the corporate sense, but it of course lingers into my personal life.

what is community?

community by definition is a human concept. but i’ve found that actually defining it in practice becomes fuzzy, a concept without a clean border. there are no clear cut bounds to what a community is or is not. working in community partly asks that person to define community for their organization. for me community is centered on a shared experience, belief, or participation in a cultural zeitgeist. in my current work, i’m dedicating my community building toward engineers, founders, and operators, but providing a space outside of where they exist in day to day. they share the same contexts, but will convene in spaces that are both visually and experientially incongruent to their work days. i feel that transcends into my personal life as well; my community is steadfast in care, filled to the brim with adventure, and is often centered around type 2 fun.

i am far from a studied expert in community, but i do believe my years working as a facilitator and my experiences living in community have lent themselves to color my view of how this word is defined.

the art of being human will never be replicated.

sure, hit me with a cliché, but i fully believe that the imperfection that comes from human touch will reign supreme in the art of community building. when i was a resident assistant in college, living in community with the people i served, i was tasked with bridging the say-do gap. i would hear college freshman say, “i can’t wait for this friday night in dorm activity! i will not be going to this party!” then watch them leave 4 hours later to our fraternity row. my goal: offer a safe haven for folks who (a) decide to go and come back and (b) opt to stay in and have just as much fun (or in my opinion more fun).

i share this story because working in community roles requires intuition for how people will behave and adapting yourself and your plans to that. i also posit that you have to be willing to be different in today’s realm of community work. some would argue why do things by hand when claude can pump out 400 punny event names using your company name or give you a run-of-show for your event? slopification this, slopification that - i’m not going to bore you with the overrun narrative that ai-generated content is on the aggregate average to bad, so i’ll instead narrow in my thesis that by using ai to power your creativity, you are inherently doing a disservice to the community you are aiming to serve.

in the community/event world, ai is great for powering through reconciliation of budget sheets, culling data, refining a spreadsheet, but i’d argue that you get lost in the abyss of claude-designed landing pages and llm invite language. this might be a hot take, but the people i want in my rooms are not having an agent rsvp to my event, thus they deserve a thoughtful, intentional invite.

go out and conduct user interviews, narrow in on their pain points. find a few people and use critical thinking (! - eek!) to find commonality between them and cater your next event or meeting toward that interest. maybe you’ll learn something new about yourself in that process.

why i approach community in venture the same way i did at a summer camp.

when i think back to my days either as a counselor or as the assistant director of the summer camp, my responsibility was tiered as follows: (1) my team, (2) our guests, and then (3) myself. i approach my work in venture similarly, with the caveat that portfolio founders are an extension of my team and thus is as follows: (1) my team and our founders, (2) folks in the ecosystem, and then (3) myself.

my job as head of ecosystem, is squarely to meet people, figure out what they need, and work with my team to be able to meet that need. at a summer camp, the model is the same, meet our guests, figure out how to make their week better, and meet that need. it’s not a groundbreaking formula nor is it revolutionary. where i do bring the ghosts of my camp counselor self is embedded in my day-to-day. i have bowl of mystery candy with a cheat sheet on my desk, i have a “how am i doing today” emotion wheel bearing images of the internet’s best meme dogs. i often have a question of the day or an alignment chart for people to interact with on a whiteboard. this isn’t the personality hire olympics, i’m not trying to boast that “i’m so quirky xD lol” but i am trying to showcase the idea that whimsy can accompany the hard work of supporting a business’ bottom line.

when i was assistant director at the camp, i had all of the operational work that required me to lock in at my computer, pore over purchase orders, reconcile the latest cal/osha requirements and changes to hr policies while also juggling the interpersonal worries and woes of my staff, what was happening in their personal lives, and how to meet them where they’re at. community work in venture (and i’d assume the tech ecosystem at large) carries the same challenges; you are the hire responsible for maintaining ‘vibes’ while contributing to your company’s successes. the hardest part of this work for me is never the logistics or eking out the last few invites for an event, it is reconciling the human emotion and reaction to this work and finding ways to support that person. it’s work that these frontier labs claim to be able to support, but never quite meet the mark of understanding that person’s multitudes.

at camp, we often talked about making the magic mundane and the work that we have to do, work that we want to do. i used to don a costume to wash dishes for three hours and craft the perfect playlist to scrub toilets to, but at the end of the day that work was fulfilling. in my work now, the minutiae of detail work is accompanied by hyperpop in my ears and hours of outreach are split up with a walk around the office. the work is also often intangible, in the way that a person will always remember how you made them feel, not what was said.

in a world of -maxxing, we need moments of -minning.

or even respite in the form of just being (or i’d assume the zeitgeist term to be -midding…midmaxxing?). i have a whole slew of thoughts on my desire to midmaxx but i’ll save those for another post. in relation to community, my view in sf in particular is that we need to go back to the roots of pre-social media, pre-partiful (pre-facebook events even) behavior. put in meaningful effort to build intentional relationships.

i recently was brought to this substack via @miriam_tinny on instagram:

and I don’t want to get used to low-effort relationships. i want high-effort ones. i want to care and be cared for. to be seen! and known! to become the kind of friend whose effort isn't spread evenly across hundreds of people, but invested deeply in a handful.

– kiana tipton, "we met once why am i invited to your birthday party"

so it might be naive to believe that i can carry out this desire for deepness in a capitalist world, but i sure as hell would rather try than to milk a relationship for the end goal of making me look/feel/act better. i hold myself to the idea that the small things, the candy at my desk, the good mornings and see you laters, the real conversation beyond kpis and target metrics means i’m doing something for the people around me.

these small things in aggregate are community work. you don’t cultivate community by one offs and happenstance - it is the work of intentional action to craft a network of people who care for each other, and a network of people who can, with trust, participate in the exchange of presence and knowledge. the one bowl of candy on my desk is not in singularity a motion to be “the community guy” at work, but it is an invitation to take a second, talk to a coworker about the candy or something deeper.

to kiana tipton’s point, to be seen and known, and invested deeply is high effort and i don’t think it scales on an individual level. on a level removed, it scales to the people around you, hopefully inspiring them to keep the heart of their interactions rooted in compassion and care over transaction. this is not the hyper-optimized super connector, nor is it the single-lane person who talks to one person, it’s being an average decent human. if that’s what it means to midmaxx, then by all hell, i’m there.

to be transactional in this work would undercut the exact nature of working in this job function. though it’s popping up everywhere it seems, from frontier labs to the earliest stage startup, community work is often misinterpreted as a job who simple aim is to “fill the room”. claude can generate a cold outbound list, but what happens to get it to the final 10%? human connection or a sentence that comes from your lived experience bridges that gap. the say-do gap arises again…many people say they want a community, but very few are willing to do the actual work to build it up.

i will never outsource the labor of being a connector to ai. the role of a community builder is to bear the emotional burdens and joys of interaction, synthesize, and continue to build toward a space where people are excited to be in a common space, challenged safely, and sharing experiences across lives. i’ll continue to be the human-in-the-loop, and i hope that as you think about community, you think about all the small ways in which you can continue to build yours.

connect with me on x/linkedin as to continue the conversation + thread around community