Mark Birch and Blake Ethridge on Community Management (Fireside, November 2020)

A fireside conversation on community management: Mark Birch’s path from Stack Overflow to AWS, and the case for a Q&A product inside organizations.

Why it was kept

Kyle listened in November 2020 while working on community as an investing theme.

As Kyle captured it

• Listened to fireside with Blake Ethridge and Mark Birch about Community Management Community #CMX
  • Mark Birch started by making big sales in Oracle, launched an HR company, and eventually found himself holding a bunch of community events
  • Launched a new product at Stack Overflow around Dev.Biz.Ops
  • Then went to AWS and got some pretty brutal feedback before really honing a better narrative
  • Wanting a Q&A sight but for inside organizations. Today we use Slack, Jira, Confluence, internal wikis, etc.
  • The problem with Simon Sinek’s “Why” is that you don’t always know the why and how it will evolve. It may start as a simple vision early and rapidly expand into something much more broad