Interview Intro

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Richard Rodger:  [0:00:00] Welcome to the Voxgig Podcast. We talk to people in the developer community about developer relations, public speaking and community events. For more details, visit voxgig.com/podcast. All right, let's get started. 

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In this podcast, I talk to the heavy metal bad boy of open source himself, Jono Bacon. We talk about the power of community and how things have changed in the world of open source since the early days. We also talk about how, as a speaker, it's important not to forget that you're part of a community; you may in fact even be building. 

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An important part of that is not just what happens onstage, but also what happens between talks, what happen online. If you're just starting out as a speaker and you're an introverted coder, like me and Jono once were, you're sure to find this podcast really useful and interesting. [0:00:54]

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Main Interview

Jono Bacon

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Richard Rodger:  [0:00:56] Jono, Welcome to the Fireside with Voxgig podcast. It is fabulous to have you here. [0:01:00]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:01:00] Yeah, thank you, Richard. It's great to be here. [0:01:01]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:02] You started your speaking career as a rock star. Tell us how that happened. [0:01:05] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:01:06] We had an opportunity to go and play a gig at the Ruskin Arms in London, which for non-heavy metal and non-Iron Maiden fans will not know this, but this is where the band Iron Maiden started out. They used to play a ton of shows down there. It holds a special place in the mythology of Iron Maiden. 

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So, we were very excited to go down and play at the Ruskin Arms, so we went down there and we set up, and everybody was telling us, our promoter was telling us, you can have a ton of people there; it's going to be great. There was about three people there. [0:01:31]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:31] Wow, awesome. [0:01:31] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:01:32] Literally. This sounds like I'm exaggerating. One of which literally had a dog, it was three people and a dog watching us play. But it was cool to go down there and you know, play the show. And I remember going to the bathroom and peeing and I saw some graffiti on the wall which was from the guitarist from Iron Maiden. So, they- [0:01:50] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:51] Okay, well that is pretty cool. [0:01:52] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:01:52] They'd not upgraded that place at all. I think – I don't think it's there anymore; I think they demolished it. But it was cool, but it was a disappointing gig. [0:01:59]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:01:59] How people were in your band? [0:02:00]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:02:00] That band was four of us, and then I – I won't bore you with all the details, but I moved to the US and I'd written an album's worth of material, and I wanted to put together a band over here. And I actually ran into one of my heroes, this guy called Chris Kontos, who plays drums with MACHINE HEAD, in an airport. 

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And we completely hit it off, and he was like, 'Dude, I know some people I can hook you up with for musicians. So, his best friend Ben Gibbs played drums. And then he had another friend who used to play in a band that I was a big fan of, ended up joining on guitar. We ended up playing a ton of gigs in this area, which is an epicenter of metal is the Bay Area, so it was a lot of fun. [0:02:36]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:02:37] Yeah, absolutely. So, let me get this straight; there was more people on stage than in the audience. [0:02:41] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:02:42] Yes, considerably so. And we thought the gig sucked too. [0:02:47]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:02:50] You gotta start somewhere. This is- [0:02:51]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:02:52] You gotta start somewhere. [0:02:52] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:02:53] This is the thing about public speaking, right? People do have this – people have Tony Robbins in their head. That's what they think. They think they have to be Tony Robbins when they step on stage. And if you're just starting out at a local meetup, you don't have to be Tony Robbins. [0:03:07]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:03:07] No. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:03:07] Just do it.

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Jono Bacon:  [0:03:08] Just go do something. And what's interesting to me about public speaking – I remember when I started out and I was getting into the open-source community in the UK; I was about 19 or 20 at the time. And I was just speaking at – I went to go and speak at a couple of local Linux user groups. And I had all of these preconceived notions about what you're supposed to talk about, and have really cool looking slides and detailed technical detail, all this kind of stuff. 

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And I realized relatively quickly that a presentation is something that you can really make your own and you can really shape it, and you can add your own signature to it quite significantly. And practice really does make perfect, and being able to say, 'You know what?' For this one, I'm going to keep it fairly focused and fairly conservative.' But for some other ones saying, 'I want to try something insane, and see what we can come up with and see how the audience responds.' That's how you get better in my mind; experiment, try new things. [0:03:57]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:03:58] And did you find a difference between getting up on stage with a guitar – were you the lead singer or the bassist or what- [0:04:04]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:04:05] Singer and guitarist, yeah. [0:04:05]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:04:06] So, is there a difference in nerves between getting up on stage to do a gig and speak? [0:04:10]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:04:11] Yeah, there was more nerves to me for playing gigs, because there's four of us. You know, when I'm speaking, I'm in complete control of my own destiny. It's mine to lose, unless the AV goes wrong or something along those lines. But with gigs, particularly when you're playing noisy heavy metal and you can't hear each other very well because you've got some stoned guy on the mixing desk trying to keep things going. It's just a lot more variables for error. But I don't – I never felt particularly nervous for gigs or speaking now. When I do a really big one, then you feel the quivering a little bit. [0:04:48]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:04:49] But you need a little bit. You can't- [0:04:50]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:04:51] Yeah. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:04:51] You need a little bit of adrenalin to make it happen. [0:04:53]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:04:53] Yeah, exactly. But part of this is just, the more you do it, the more you get used to it as well. [0:04:58]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:04:59] Jono, I love your career history. You start off as a coder, but then you started writing and then you ended up working for some really cool organizations like the XPRIZE. Do you have a reserve seat on a rocket ship to the moon? [0:05:13]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:05:17] I wish. Actually, I don't wish; I'd be terrible in space. They were a really interesting organization to work for, because you talk about great speaker, Peter Diamandis who founded XPRIZE. [0:05:26]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:05:26] Oh, yeah. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:05:27] I mean, he is, to me, one of the greatest speakers out there because he – his enthusiasm is infections. And people would often say, 'What's he like in the office?' And he's just as enthusiastic and as focused as he is – in the office as he is on stage. And one of the things I love about his speaking style is he weaves a story and he's very data driven. If you read any of his books, it's backed up with pages and pages of data, and I love that. 

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He gives incredibly compelling presentations, and what I love about it is – and what I've tried to do this in my own work and I don’t think I'm anywhere near as good as Peter – is really understanding how to craft a message. One of the things he said to me was, 'You don't have to have all the answers. You just need to be able to package the answers in a way that your audience can understand it.' And that gets to the heart of great public speaking. 

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And he's got a point of view around exponential technology and abundance and all that kind of stuff, and he spent years refining that message. And that's a really valuable learning lesson, is not so much the slides and the delivery, just how do you construct your message in an interesting way. [0:06:28] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:06:29] You've got to create a – an earworm is a song that stays in your head and you've got to create a brainworm, I guess, something like that. [0:06:36]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:06:37] Yeah. I think so. [0:06:37]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:06:37] But how? How do you do it? [0:06:39]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:06:39] The way I approach it is, I never start with slides. I always start with, who are my audience and what is the thing I want them to understand? There's all of these theories around people take three things away from a presentation. I'm not sure I buy a lot of that kind of stuff. To me, the key thing in my mind is, where do I want to get to? What's the message I want to get across? 

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For example, the big message that I'm talking at a lot of conferences about is that communities are going to be the future of how we do business. The relationship between brands and people are changing, and young people are growing up in an environment with social technology. 85% of millennials have got a smartphone; there's 6 billion devices out there. And that's changing our expectations of how we engage with each other and with companies. 

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But there's a lot of nuance and detail wrapped up in that overall message, so the way I like to think of it is, I know where I want to get to. Now how do I layer the journey so it's easy for people to understand each piece as you build on it? And then how do you tell stories and use examples to illustrate that? 

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And the way I do it is to open up a text editor and break it down point by point, and then that broadly maps to the slides that you're going to start presenting. But I find that I can't just jump to slides; I have to walk through that journey first, to make sure I've got a clear – because the presentation's a linear workflow, I've got to be clear in that message first. And then I use that as an opportunity to bounce it off friends as well. Say, 'Does this point make sense? Does this point make sense' before you start investing in building out a ton of slide3s. [0:08:09]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:08:10] It's a good example of why, if you just start with an empty PowerPoint, that's really hard, because you haven't done that homework; you haven't done that prep. [0:08:18]

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Jono Bacon:  Yeah, and the other thing as well is, you want your presentation to be interesting and fun. So, you're going to want to put some jokes in there, some levity in there to keep things moving forward. And I find, certainly for myself, I can't plan that, so when I'm producing my presentation plan, I won't plan for gags; I'll plan for the message that I'm delivering and how I'll develop and build on it. 

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But then as I'm going through, I'll think, this could be a funny little aside to put in there. On the last one I did, I can't remember how I got to this point. But I ended up meeting at a conference a Tom Cruise lookalike, and a friend of mine took a picture. This guy was creepy, creepily like Tom Cruise. [0:09:01] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:09:02] And the same stature as well, I guess? [0:09:04]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:09:05] Same, yeah, he was pint size and he had exactly the same facial expressions and his laugh was exactly the same. He was – I think he's called San Diego Tom Cruise on Instagram or something like that. And he was really good; he was very talented. But you hear some of the Scientology stuff about Tom Cruise and you think, okay, this is a bit weird. And I can't remember, but I weave that into the presentation to break the mood a little bit, because I've been through a lot of heavy data and point making. And then those bits of levity are good, but you can never plan for those. [0:09:37]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:09:38] No. They're super hard. It's – when it happens to me, it happens in the moment. I've never planned a joke; I wouldn’t even presume to try and say something funny. I think that would bomb. [0:09:52] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:09:53] Yeah, it's interesting you say that, but In generally don't plan jokes. But sometimes if I want to – you need slides to make a visual gag or something along those lines, then you need to plan it. [0:10:03] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:03] Yeah, okay, that can work. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:10:05] I don't tend to do a lot of visual stuff; that Tom Cruise thing was a bit of an exception. Because sometimes it doesn't work, and if you get on stage and you read the audience, you're like, 'This is a very humorless group of people.' And you know you've got your Tom Cruise slide coming up; you're like, 'Oh God. This is going to bomb.' [0:10:22]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:22] Yes, they go – wait until they see the kittens and the unicorns; then you're in trouble. You've worked at this community building and this community aspect of technology for quite a long time and in different places, and now you're helping companies do it as well. [0:10:42] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:10:43] Yeah. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:10:43] What's the intersection of the traditional conference scene and developer meetups? I guess the importance of it in the wider tech business world has only really come to the fore in the last five or six years, the importance of community. Where you see people have – there are now community managers and it's a recognized profession. [0:11:05]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:11:06] Yeah. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:11:07] How do these things all intersect, because it still feels like the pieces are assembling. [0:11:11] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:11:12] Yeah, I think they are. What's been fascinating is that the evolution of communities, I'd describe it as a renaissance. When the Renaissance happened, people were doing things and they started writing them down and building recipes and blueprints for how to do math and writing and literacy and all these different pieces. 

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And that's started to happen now with communities. There's – we've been building communities for hundreds of thousands of years, but in a digital setting, we've been doing it for many years, but we haven't been documenting and refining the art and the science of how to do that. So, I think we – and that's a big chunk of what I try to do is – and one of the reasons I started consulting was because I wanted to expose myself to a broader range of companies and problems and verticals, so I could learn as much as I could and then write it down into books like People Powered that I just released. 

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To me, we're still in a transitionary state as we're figuring things out, so anybody who claims they've got all the answers to this stuff, they just don't. Everybody is – and many people are moving this science forward. The relationship between events and especially online communities is very close, and it's very important for a few different reasons. 

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One is that there is just certain things in human communication in person that are missing online. There is body language; there is tonality. There is – it's a high bandwidth environment to be in when you're chatting to people. And there's a set of social cues and experiences that are exchanged; there are – many of us have seen this, where you meet people online and you get on well in a functional setting. But you meet them in person, you immediately hit it off and you become friends. So, you need both. 

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The tricky thing is that events are historically expensive, especially to run, but if you want to travel to go and speak at events. And the big criticism that I've had is that – and particularly for people who run meetups – is that they'd organize meetups – let's say have a meetup once every three weeks – and then there'd be absolutely no interaction or discussion between those Meetup members in between those events. 

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And I used to – I don’t go to a huge amount of meetups, but when I go to meetups, that happens all of the time. And I contrast it to, for example, when I set up the very first group that I ever started, the Linux user group in Wolverhampton in the UK. And we had a mailing list, and we'd have meetings every two weeks. We'd go down the pub and have a curry and talk about Linux and technology. 

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But then in between, we'd continue the conversation on the list, and I think that that fusion between in-person and online is where the magic happens. And I was – weirdly, as a coincidence, I – the CEO of Meetup was in town, in San Francisco last week, and he dropped me a note and we went and had a coffee. 

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And one of the things I was saying to him was, I think that – there's tools that are baked, for example, inside of Meetup for online discussion; they've been doing that for years. But that's not where people go. People have their own Slack channels or their own forums or wherever that might be. That's where they live. They're not going to go and hang out in a forum on Meetup.com. 

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So, to me, that fusion of those two is really important, because the online allows you to scale; it allows you to continue the discussion in a way that is not massively distracting away from someone's day job and their family. But the in-person is where those friendships and those social connections are forged. [0:14:34] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:14:35] Taking this from a speaker perspective, if you're a community builder doing that work and finding ways to enable that and encourage it and grow it. You often hear people say communities aren't made; they're grown. But just coming back to, I'm an individual speaker and I've started doing a few talks. And I have a few blog posts; maybe I'll even write a book one day. Don't do that; there's no money in it and it's hard work. [0:15:01]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:15:01] There's definitely no money in it. [0:15:03] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:15:03] I know what the score is. My first book was more useful to me as a business card for getting consulting gigs. It was less than minimum wage, I worked out, I got for it or something. So yeah, I see a lot of that, where you go to a conference and there's multiple tracks; there's a lot of speakers. And you might see a speaker pop up at a number of different conferences, but the – and it sounds awfully egotistical to say it, but should they be thinking about building a personal community around themselves? [0:15:34] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:15:35] Around themselves? It's a great question, and there is an opportunity to do that in many cases. To me, there's nothing wrong with building a community around an individual. It's about how you go about doing it. I'm not going to profess that I don't have an ego; we all have an ego- [0:15:51] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:15:52] Sure, of course we do. [0:15:52]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:15:53] -to varying degrees. But there are some people who – I've a general philosophy of, if I'm really good, other people will tell other people about me. I shouldn't be going and telling it. The kind of people who are constantly banging on about how great they are and how they know all of these people and how they've done all these amazing things, it sounds desperate. 

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So, if you're one of those people who tends to over-egg the pudding in terms of your own capabilities, I think that that runs the risk of it being the wrong kind of and unhealthy community. But if for example you've got a point of view and a perspective – we talked about Peter Diamandis earlier on, and he's got a whole community wrapped around him. 

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And that's good, because he is really pushing a point of view, which is, technology's exponential. And if we think of what's happening in 10 years from now, it helps us to think bigger and we can do bigger and more interesting things.  

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So, that can work well. The tricky thing is, for a lot of speakers is, typically when you're speaking, you're – that's one thing that you're doing. You have a day job and you've got other things that are going on.  And many companies are pretty suspicious or nervous about speakers that they're on their payroll and going and promoting themselves as opposed to talking about the company and the product and whatever else. 

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So, you’ve got to be really careful. If you're a lone ranger, like I am for example – I run my own business – I could do that if I wanted to. But if I was working for Zoom and I was speaking about how great Zoom is, that'd be whole different ballgame. But there's a lot of opportunities. It's easier and it's – than ever to build communities, because we've got access to a lot of great content and guidance. And the tools are more readily available and accessible than every before. So, there's certainly a lot of opopru8tnity to do that. [0:17:43]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:17:43] It sounds similar to – if you've done some open-source or you participate in open source. It sounds like a similar sort of thing. You – and you often end up talking about open source if you do it, right? [0:17:57]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:17:57] Right, yeah. [0:17:58] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:17:58] So, the two, they definitely converge. [0:18:00]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:18:01] You know, the general philosophy that I've got here is, instead of trying to sell someone on you, just do interesting things and talk about it. You know? [0:18:10]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:18:11] Yeah. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:18:11] And it's easy for me to say that because I'm making a broad assertion that everybody can go out and do interesting things. And it's hard for some people to do that. If you're just starting out in your career; you haven't done a lot of speaking; you're pretty nervous, you don’t 100% know what you're doing and you don't have a lot of opportunities to do interesting things. Then it's difficult to get that leg up. 

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But I'm the eternal optimist; I think there is opportunity buried in everything, and if you look hard enough, you'll be able to find all kinds of opportunities to – there are thousands of technology communities out there looking for help. There are – there's so much data out there that you could put a really interesting talk together about a new analysis of something within the world that you're working in. There's all kinds of things we can do. [0:18:54]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:18:55] Let's turn to open source, because there's definitely this pathway where somebody starts participating in an open-source project and ends up advocating for it, or at least running workshops or helping people. Or they write their own small tool to begin with and then it generates a little community. There's a really great documentary that's just come out about Vue.JS and how that all happened, which I'd highly recommend. Yeah, it's just come out in the last week. [0:19:19] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:19:20] Cool. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:19:21] Evan You is the guy who put who all together. What's interesting is to think about how – and you would have seen this, because you've seen so much of the history of these movements. How open-source communities have changed over the last 20 years, is it easier or more difficult? You start from – my first exposure to it would have been people like Eric S Raymond and the Cathedral and the Bazaar essay. 

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Which was a very technical view that all bugs are shallow with many eyeballs and it's almost a mathematical equation. And there's not just an idea that actually, the thing that makes them shallow is the cohesive community that enables the many eyeballs. And I don't think that's – that view is missed. Up to – the thing that really got me going at it was Karl Fogel's great book, Open-Source Development with CVS, which I'm even staring at right now. 

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Well, I haven't touched in years, but it was hugely inspirational. Which was much – half of the book was about community stuff and the other half was a tutorial on CVS – thank God, those days are over. So, how have things changed in the time that you – since you started to now? [0:20:29]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:20:29] It's a great question. Things have changed interestingly in a number of different ways. First of all, the open-source community is huge.; it's a normal part of business. And with that, you attract different types of people and different companies. Back in the early days, when I got started, pretty much everybody who was in open source was a believer; they were a fully partisan proponent of open source. 

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So, people lived and breathed it. It wasn't just something that you – if you were lucky enough to do it at work, you didn't just do it at work; you also did it in your evenings as well. And now, particularly since we've seen the explosion of open source in the professional world, with organizations like the CNCF and the Linux Foundation and the Eclipse Foundation helping companies get together to collaborate on projects like Kubernetes and TensorFlow and all of those pieces. 

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There's a lot of professional enterprise engineers out there who work in an open-source way, but aren't necessarily doing any of that stuff. They're not necessarily super high proponents or they're doing a lot of that stuff in their spare time. It's just their day job and that's what they do, and that's changed the tonality a little bit. You've still got the hardcore fans as well, but the other thing as well is, we've seen a breakaway from massively centralized projects. 

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If you looked – historically if you looked at projects like Apache and Debian, these were big organizations with governance boards, highly curated. You had to use their infrastructure and their workflow and all these different pieces. And what we've seen with the evolution and the growth of GitHub is a move away from that and lots of GitHub repos set up, where people shove in pool requests and build code together. And they don't have this comprehensive governance and leadership and all this kind of stuff. They're just much more free form. And I don't think one is better than the other; they're just both different elements and different aspects of how we do open source. 

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And what has happened as well is, because of the growth of open source, it's opened up other challenges. With so much open source being built, for example, continuous integration and deployment has become a real big thing. And the formalization of the software development life cycle. So, it's – we've seen the professionalization of a moment, and that's resulted in better technology. But also, for some people, the fun has been taken out of it a little bit. [0:22:50] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:22:50] Yeah. There is a dark side, isn't there? There's open-source burnout, where people, they just spend their entire weekends trying to solve help requests and issues. And you get people leaving the community. [0:23:05] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:23:05] Yeah. It's tricky, because a lot of people who are involved in open source are somewhat introverts. And in the same way that we've seen, with the impact of social media, you've had people who have never had a loudspeaker before having access to a loudspeaker. And some people have wielded that loudspeaker with dexterity and maturity and respect and used it well. And some people don't know how to deal with that loudspeaker and they become idiots and trolls and all the rest of it. 

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And we've seen similar things happen in open source where, as it's grown, you've seen some people be able to handle that growth in a respectful way, and some people have used it as a platform for abuse. And it's all of these intermingling elements of society and human behavior coming together. 

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And my philosophy is, with all of these big changes in society, the pendulum always swings too far in one direction, and then eventually it swings back. So, we're going to see – the crazy time in open source in my mind was 2005-2010, and we're seeing things calm down to a much more of a predictive slant, and things are a little easier now. [0:24:21] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:24:21] Which is hopeful, which is hopeful. [0:24:23]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:24:23] It always works out in the end. [0:24:24] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:24:26] Yeah, it certainly does. And would you say that open source has become more – I don't know – people powered? Do you like that segue? Do you like that? [0:24:33]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:24:34] I like that. That is one of the finest segues I've ever heard. [0:24:37]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:24:38] Jono has written a little book; tell us more about your book. [0:24:40]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:24:42] I wrote this book called People Powered: How Communities Can Supercharge Your Business Brand and Teams. And I wrote this book for a very specific reason. Many years ago, I wrote a book called The Art of Community, which is a hardcore practitioner's guide for how you build very technical communities. 

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And since I started consulting fulltime about four years ago, a lot of clients would reach out to me and say, 'Hey, I bought your book, People Powered – The Art of Community. I'm looking forward to reading it.' And The Art of Community's in two editions; it's 600 pages. It's a very heavyweight- [0:25:11]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:25:11] Good Lord. Really? [0:25:13] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:25:14] Yeah, it's massive. Yeah, it's a heavyweight book. And the average executive or founder or entrepreneur, or someone who's not necessarily as – a practitioner, they're not going to read that. And they're going to need something that I think provides a much higher-level but very focused overview of the value of communities and how you build them. 

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So, what People Powered does is, it does three things. One is that it provides an overview of not just technical communities but all communities. I break it i9nto three different models: consumer, champion and collaborator. And then I walk through what communities are, many examples of how – of communities that work well such as HitRecord and Salesforce and Fitbit, Harley Davison, Proctor & Gamble, all of these different examples. 

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And then – so it gives a good overview of the value of communities and why someone might want to care. But it's an objective overview; it also talks about the risks and the downsides of doing this kind of work. The second thing that it does is, it provides a really comprehensive framework for how to build a community strategy, from how do you define your value and the mission to how do you build out a set of annual objectives and convert those down to tactics. How do you incentivization and events and build growth and engage your members and things like that. 

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And then the third piece is, it shows how to take all of that and integrate into a business. How do you hire the right people? What does success look like? What are the maturity models that you should be focusing on and things such as that? It's a business book, so it's a relatively short book; it's about 280 pages. 

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But it was fairly carefully crafted to be both high-level and very pragmatic and able to be objectively applied. Because if there's one thing that bugs me about business books is that a lot of them – a chapter will explain one thing and drown you in 30 pages of examples. [0:27:02]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:03] Oh, God, yes. [0:27:04]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:27:04] And you're like, I get it, okay? I've cracked the case; I don't need any more examples. [0:27:09] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:09] It's like, this is an article; it's in the book. [0:27:11]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:27:12] Right, exactly. And I didn't want People Powered to be that, and I was very explicit when I was talking to publishers. I did not want this to be some generic high-level thing; I wanted it to go into a really good level of depth. And that was the hardest element of writing the book was, how do you make it high level and accessible, but with a lot of very pragmatic, applicable detail. And that's – and so far, it seems to be doing reasonably well. People seem to be happy with this. [0:27:39] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:39] Awesome. Yeah, well, best of luck with it. It's- [0:27:42] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:27:42] Thank you. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:27:43] It certainly sounds like if you're an organization that is about to start taking this stuff seriously; it's almost like a handbook. I can speak from personal experience that this stuff is super powerful. It's crazy when it works. At the moment, I'm doing a traditional SaaS startup, but my previous company was four guys who had failed startups who had to pay the mortgage. And we set up a consulting company and randomly spoke to the right people and got the right encouragement to run our own conference. 

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At first, we set up a little meetup. And inadvertently – I don't know – because we weren't business – we focused on the community stuff. And it really works; it's amazing. And we hired – we built a company of 150 engineers and never once used a recruiter, because of the power of community, and it's just awesome. And I – it's hard for me to distil it, so I'm glad you wrote about it, because this stuff works. [0:28:49] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:28:50] And part, I hope is – you're a really good example here, Richard; you've seen it work for you – it's that you can then – when talking to someone else, you can say, 'Go read this book. It'll give you the grounding that you need to know for how to see the value of it and how you can apply it.' 

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There is enormous value in communities. It doesn't just generate tangible value, like people – provide support and run events and create content and all kinds of things. But it also produces this really powerful intangible value of people feel more connected and they build a sense of belonging. And they feel part, and that's very powerful. [0:29:25]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:29:25] That's the foundation. It's one of those communitive motes that VCs are always banging on about. It's very hard – and I have experience subsequently of pitching VCs, where you're trying to explain this stuff, and they're looking at you going, 'Yeah, but show me your models in Excel.' Let me explain to you the narrative of community though. [0:29:45]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:29:46] And I'm pleased to see as well that this is starting to change. VCs are increasingly – I have a pretty common set of relationships with VCs because a lot of them will send their portfolio companies to me as clients. And there's definitely a sea change happening, where a lot of them are looking at ecosystem related companies or community companies and saying there's huge value in this. And this is a market differentiator. 

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And one of the finest examples of that is a VC called Flybridge. A friend of mine, Jeff Bussgang, he's a professor at Harvard Business School, and we co-authored a piece for Harvard Business Review about the competitive advantage of communities. And I was thrilled to do it because it's always been a bit of a bucket list item for me to get something on HBR. And we wrote this piece- [0:30:34]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:30:34] Oh, yeah! 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:30:36] Spent a lot of time crafting this piece, and the response to it's been incredible, because it was an introduction to this whole topic. And probably the highest demographic of people that I've seen who've responded to that is VCs. I had a ton of VCs reach out and say, 'Can you tell us more about this? This is really interesting.' So, I'm glad that the sea change is happening. [0:30:55] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:30:56] There is. It is – we see a lot of VCs now hiring event managers and starting to take that sort of thing way more seriously. [0:31:05]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:06] Yeah, exactly. [0:31:07] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:08] It's about time to wrap up. I want to go back to – I want to get back to your career as a heavy metal guitarist, which appears to be starting up again. [0:31:16] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:17] It is, and it's just- [0:31:18] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:18] You're based in Southern California, right? [0:31:19] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:20] I'm in Northern California, in the Bay Area. [0:31:22] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:21] Northern California, okay. If you – which I don't know all that well, but if you're down Los Angeles way and you're playing in – what's that bar? Whiskey A Go-Go. [0:31:32]

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:32] The Whiskey A Go-Go. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:32] A Go-Go, yeah, that's the- [0:31:33] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:34] Lemy's Bar, yeah. [0:31:35]

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:34] Yeah. Let me know. It's going to be awesome. [0:31:39] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:38] Yeah, I would love to go and play the Whiskey. Actually, a friend of mine who somewhat amusingly – I was introduced to him through another friend of mine, who's this English guy lives in the town that I live in. He plays the Whiskey all the time with his band and- [0:31:51] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:51] Oh, wow. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:31:53] He just joined a band called Carcass recently, so – playing on guitar, which is a legendary- [0:31:56] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:31:57] Jono, there you go. That's the real bucket list item; play the Whiskey. Never mind all this technology. [0:32:01] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:32:02] That is definitely the real bucket list item, so… [0:32:04] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:04] But isn't heavy metal one of those – it's a great example of one of those original communities, right? Shared interests, and- [0:32:10] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:32:11] Yeah, metallers are super tight with each other as well. You get this reputation that heavy metal people are these drunken idiots who start fights and don't take showers. And I've never seen any problems at a metal show. Heavy metal people are super nice to each other, very friendly, so a fine example of a community. [0:32:30] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:30] They're drunken idiots who don't take showers. [0:32:32] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:32:33] Yeah, the shower thing is (inaudible) Time: 0:32:34. 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:38] Fantastic. Let's leave it there. Best of luck. Get on the New York Times Bestseller List. I hope to see your book in an airport soon. 0:32:47] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:32:48] Thank you, thank you, Richard. [0:32:49] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:49] It's been fabulous, really fun. [0:32:50] 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:32:50] Yeah. This was a lot of fun. [0:32:51] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:51] Thank you so much. 

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Jono Bacon:  [0:32:52] Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it. [0:32:52] 

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:53] Wonderful. 

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Endnote

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Richard Rodger:  [0:32:54] You can find the transcript of this podcast and any links mentioned on our podcast page at Voxgig.com/podcast. Subscribe for weekly editions, where we talk to the people who make the developer community work. For even more, read our newsletter. You can subscribe at Voxgig.com/newsletter, or follow our Twitter @voxgig. Thanks for listening. Catch you next time. [0:33:21] 

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