Ben Lukszys on Entrepreneurial Community-Building

Good morning, Ben. How are you doing? Hello, Jeremy Quintana. Been a while. Long time. Yeah. Been like... 12 hours. Yeah, that's crazy. Anyways, yeah, I think... So I've known you for a while. I think maybe a good way to intro this for people who maybe don't know you is you can talk a bit about just like a short pitch about yourself and what you've done in university to build the skill set that you currently have and when it comes to entrepreneurship. Yeah. I think it's useful if I start a little bit farther back, because I think I have a little bit different background than most people in this space. Yeah. Specifically that I come from a very for-profit lens, kind of almost corporate upbringing in a sense. Maybe that's a little bit extreme. But the person I ascribe most of my entrepreneurial nature to is my father. He is a business professor in the School of Business here. He teaches supply chain. and so he's always been he's worked in these massive like 100 plus billion dollar companies he worked in big pharma his first 10 years doing like these erp system migrations which is like enterprise resource planning so it's like all your production planning all your raw materials all your shipping and all that so he was an industrial engineer and like very into this like big corporate world that's where he got his start and so he also started a company he's so he transitioned to becoming a professor in the business school and also on the side started a company and so that was kind of my first experience seeing a company get started and was one of the things that made me entrepreneurial from a pretty young age as well as him introducing to me this this podcast I saw when I was a kid called how i built this which is like this very uh well-produced npr guy ross podcast and uh that's the host his name's guy ross and just absolutely fell in love with this story of entrepreneurs really what it was for me was this combination of the lens i saw business through that my dad taught me which is organizations are a way to organize people towards a common mission to do more good than you could possibly do as an individual. So organizations are a way to do more good than you possibly do as an individual and that was how I saw the world as like a 12 year old. So that was super influential and then combining that as an entrepreneur it seemed like to me like this was like the most dense potent manifestation of being an organization builder was being the entrepreneur. So after I was listening to these stories, because it seemed like this was the way to get most obsessed about being an organization builder or building a company or whatever you want to call it. And I was an obsessive kid. I was like three obsessions as a kid. It was school. I was an absolute nerd. I was also really big into soccer. So I was a big sports guy. And also super into piano. That was probably one of my biggest ones. So I was a competitive pianist as well as a jazz pianist and so really I got into the entrepreneurial world because I was obsessed with building organizations and trying to do that so I get to college with that this obsessive wanting to build a company but I'd gone to a high school where nobody was like me I went to a rural Wisconsin high school with 2,500 kids we had four hallways in our entire high school four hallways it was one square the entire high school math was on one side science was on this side english is on this side plus the other languages and then everything else over there and then art over there so it was like very very small high school and i literally created like the business club at my high school like nobody knew what business was everyone just thought it was like some greedy guy in a suitcase trading in the stock market something like that which I did not see it as that however that was what I grew up in so I got to college and I really really really wanted to find my people because I'd just been deprived of it for so long it almost felt like I was wearing a mask in a sense because I just didn't know where my people were at least professionally and honestly this more impact values deeper level because I had already kind of had this philosophical nature as a child because I was an only child I'd love to think So I come to college with this kind of like entrepreneurship plus philosophy impact backing. And really to me, like the way to make an impact was through entrepreneurship. That's what I saw. And so I wanted to find other entrepreneurs doing that. There's two things I wanted to do. I wanted to start a company and I wanted to find other people who wanted to start a company. I figured the latter was the best way to start. And so basically the next four years became just a mission of an only child finding his people. and really what I did for that and what I hanged into is I just made it my mission to provide as much value as possible to entrepreneurs such that it was as obvious for them as possible to become my friend because what what's a good friend other than one just that gives relentlessly sometimes I like doing a thing my friends where I'm kind of like in a giving war where I'm constantly trying to give more than the other person and it makes a really fun dynamic and that's kind of who I've become in college and I really enjoy being that person and so for the next four years I built the entrepreneurship community at UW-Madison I co-led I was kind of like co-president vice president of an organization called Transcend we ran a 42.5 thousand dollar pitch competition two-day pitch competition we claim is the largest student-run pitch competition in the nation We even found one that's bigger and fully student-run. At the same time, I was running a student startup accelerator. We had startups in there who are now valued at, there's one that's valued at $35 million that started there. There's one that exited for seven figures. There's another one that went on Shark Tank. It got invested in by Mark Cuban. There's just a whole host of some of the coolest people. Another one just raised around $1.6 million pre-seed is going to raise a 10 million dollar round in the coming months so just some really talented people in entrepreneur speak this is like proof of like good people okay so I get into this room I really see what's happening and it's exciting to me like people are ambitious people are striving for solving really big problems and just relentlessly acting it's it's to the point like one of my one of my one of my friends uh his name's jake he like he's a great example of your like epitome of an entrepreneur he's just always thinking about his business always acting every single conversation there's something about his business that's being talked about it's a pure obsession and he would say that himself it's it's a pure obsession of just doing going go go go go accelerator shut down that I've recruited like 150 members. I then have done three job fairs since. I've done like 20 private meetups since in like two years. I built a company, which we can talk about, a recruiting agency, which has gotten 14 people placed. I've done all this stuff in the entrepreneurship world. But what I kind of started realizing is this, I had two sides of me. I had this entrepreneurial side of me that loved to just solve big problems, and I had another side of me that loved thinking about why, why do I solve these problems? At the same time, I was getting a philosophy major, I'm a triple major data-centered business philosophy, and I had stumbled across a TED Talk my sophomore year. Well, first thing I stumbled across was Peter Singer's Drowning Child analogy. I forget what the paper's called. But that Peter Singer paper, in my ethics class, my sophomore fall ethics class, and then shortly after that, I found Will McCaskill's TED Talk about effective altruism. And that was kind of, that along with my philosophy classes that I was just starting to take, were kind of the first time where, one, in a class, I felt like I was in flow state. I'm like, this is who I am, discussing purely logical arguments, not trying to like make these like emotional statements to prove your point I just was never really into that I just loved having this clear logical argument and also like truly trying to do the most good was very influential to me but what I started realizing in this group is that there's for the sake of being able to go faster like the only reason really in the entrepreneurship we think about why is such that we can go after a bigger market or such that we can figure out what customers want such that we can build a bigger company it's all for the sake of building a bigger company and driving more action and raising more money but really at the end of the day like the goal of a business is to drive a lot of revenue and ideally make a big exit like that's the goal of startup and over time that was less appealing for me especially once I started once I started my own company and I've done like I've been lucky enough to do like a five-figure deal in my company where I am on a sales call I close a deal I fulfill that deal I send the invoice and for most entrepreneurs that's like that's the joy is like doing that doing that game but for me that was never fulfilling there was always this missing sense this like gap of like but why like but if I abstract away the money if I see money as like this vanity metric that doesn't matter and I look away and I look at what's actually happening it just feels like there's nothing that I'm truly contributing like maybe there is I'm solving some sort of problem someone wants it but like the amount of value that I could contribute is just so much higher if I wasn't just trying to optimize for money and that was when I found like really at that this was about a few months ago and this was when I really was like okay I need to do I need to like I need to pivot here I need to try to find people that are a little bit more aligned on this front to like I love the entrepreneur community these are my best friends but they just get excited about a little different things than I do which I think is I think the economy set up that way to be guess I have all those things but I'm just a little bit different and that's when I I went to EAG I flew there and I have a lot of opinions about how that went from my perspective from coming from this world that I've come from but there definitely is like a small niche of that community that does fulfill that from what I've seen so far which I'm very very excited about and I'll leave it at that but that's where I'm at right now is is like there's this community I've done a lot of community building which you can talk about more I built this company I've spend a lot of time in the entrepreneurship world. However, it feels for me like there's this piece missing where it's thinking about why am I doing what I'm doing? How can I create the most impact? What does it mean to create the most good? All the questions that EA asks and apply that with this entrepreneurial spirit. That's like kind of the world I'm trying to get into. Yeah. Sounds good. I think, yeah, a good setup for the rest of the conversation is to talk a little bit about your experience at eag especially uh i imagine you found people that fit that small gap where they're doing they have their hands in like both worlds at once um i'd be interested in uh if you can name names like who you met or uh just like maybe just like the general takeaways you had from meeting them um and at least for me like in conversations that we had after eag um for you the main thing was like these people need to stop thinking and start acting more or have like a stronger bias towards action or at least on the spectrum of like thinking acting like this is the entrepreneurship world this world i don't know what that would be probably like pure philosophy yeah like i think i think right now it's it's maybe too far towards pure philosophy from what i've seen and how i've seen value being driven through the entrepreneurship world it feels to me that that needs to be at least pulled this way some degree yeah makes sense not all the way but some degree yeah so could you talk more about just like your EUG experience as a whole like when did you have that realization I guess yeah the realization that this was too far to the right for me too far towards your philosophy yeah I think it wasn't so much of a I think it was more of just the entire experience of EAG that really solidified for me I had the hypothesis going in that this would be the case from what I had seen however I didn't like know until I met people so I'd say so I had maybe seven I probably like 10 conversations seven like scheduled one-on-ones at EAG and I met with the thing is I met with mostly like people who were in the entrepreneurship world or at least interfaced it with it more than most others for example i met with ben williamson at charity entrepreneurship he was the previous director of recruitment i met with a guy named finn metz who's running selden labs which is a startup accelerator for companies building an agi security so like for-profit companies i met with a guy named jonah weinbaum who's leading Voyager at Blue Dot, which is a startup accelerator for people building in the civilizational resilience space, which is focusing on AI risks, biosecurity risks. I met with, so a lot of people like this, I met with Videhi, her name is Videhi Argoa, she is chief staff at Theorem, which is like software verification startup, which is also a for-profit startup. So I met with people that kind I had feet in both sides and had learned entrepreneurship in the past. And those people to me, a lot of these people, oh, also Harmon from, Harmon's awesome. I love Harmon. Harmon's watching this. Let's go. But, yeah, I think Harmon's probably, like, probably the best example I can, I've seen of, like, what we need more of from at least what I've seen so far. Like, Harmon's the type of person that I want to build a community of Harmons. like that would be i spoke to you earlier and get this more of like the first step in building community is finding your ideal what we call an entrepreneurial customer profile or ideal community member profile or whatever you want to call it that ideal persona i think more harmons would go a long way for ea um but yeah i i i kind of soaked in so a lot of people i met with very entrepreneurial already but i kind of soaked in from from what i was going to in the conversation i was having that there there's a lot of meta work happening at some level of abstraction maybe it's very very high like you know very pure philosophy maybe something i don't know i don't really have names there i mean i think some pure philosophy is very necessary especially like ea like global priorities like research i think global priorities institute or something like this is like necessary that's maybe very philosophy and then i think there's levels of abstraction lower than that like a lot like a lot of the kind of accelerators like these talent accelerators maybe like a mats or any of the other mats um variations in ea i don't know all the names but uh where still the work being done is getting people into the field which is still is a level of abstraction like it felt like most people were at some sort of level of abstraction it was very hard to find people just doing the work there are a lot of researchers like within it but it still feels like that is some level of abstraction to me in the entrepreneur world like I know researchers is like a very prestigious thing in the EA world but not personal world research is like almost it's not frowned upon because there's a whole niche of of entrepreneurship where it's commercializing research but it's like not that common actually it's it it's seen that to put it bluntly it's seen among most entrepreneurs that researchers have their head in the sky like they're they're not they're not grounded enough like it's something like it's like oh it's like okay research it's like uh okay you're not doing anything so that that's like the sentiment in the entrepreneurship world to like research um which i think is very very different from what i've seen in the ea world uh which i think some balance of that would probably be healthy is kind of what i'm getting at so that that was i saw just a lot of like research and thinking about and a lot of metal level thinking like a lot a lot and like thinking about how do you grow an organization that does more meta work and i just like it was hard to find the people just like actually solving the problems and like putting in solutions in a place right now that like stockpile more masks or like how do we implement far uvc lighting like into buildings that i haven't done a lot of but these are like some proposals that blue dot has had for work proposals or just like actual things that right now could really really benefit us is what's harder for me to find and people both working directly with problems and building organizations directly solving these problems, which is hard for me to find. Yeah. I think this is a good segue into the insights you have on community building and how you've done it here. Maybe we can start with first, like, you mentioned Harmon's, like, an example of, like, the world just needs more Harmons. Can you describe some traits of, like, what this Harmon profile is? Yeah. So Harmon is, I think he's, like, 24 years old. He's a recent grad from Edelia Madison and he was, came out of Edelia Madison, he was the president of Wisconsin Biosecurity Initiative, is that what it's called? Yep. And went to work at SecureBio as a researcher for I think about a year and then ended up joining a co-founder of his now as the CTO of a startup that just went through YC, Y Combinator, a startup accelerator in San Francisco, the largest. And he, they are right now, from what I understand, I haven't talked to Harman that much, but from my like hour of talk with him, basically what they're doing right now is they are running a bunch of tests. they're just they're they're they're they're working specifically on biosecurity they're working in the intersection of ai and bio and trying to figure out ways to maybe create some sort of benchmarks for ai labs that there's like some benchmark companies that are happening right now some sort of benchmark for ai labs to make sure that their models do not spit out bioengineered pandemics as outputs or he's doing other tests as well i don't know exactly they are but this is the life of an entrepreneur you are constantly you're taking some problem that's very very important and you are going out into the world you're talking to a lot of people and you're running tests about literally that the tests are well okay i'm going to come up with what we call some like offer there's a whole nother dimension of what probably world you have to make money like this is like a whole like this is a whole job like business what business means is figuring out a way to make money and so you have to you basically have to find something that people want so much that they're willing to pay you for it and that takes a lot of tests so currently they're like testing they're trying to figure out some sort of solution that they can scale as a for-profit business because if you can make it for-profit you can get a lot more money in the door much faster if it's a viable business because you can raise venture capital money and at the same time make it some sort of dual use purpose where it also is highly impactful and has this kind of dual use where it's like okay there's a there's a market need for it right now and there's a need for it to combat like global catastrophic risks, like bioengineer pandemic risks. So I just really like this, where it's like, okay, I go out into the world, I have some sort of specific problem, I have some sort of domain expertise, like he's spent maybe three years now in this area, one year professionally, and he's at the frontier now. He's 24, he's at the frontier. He's like, yeah, there's not many people at my stage already. You don't need to be that, it doesn't take that long to get there because it's such a new field and he's going out, he's running these tests, he's actually putting something out in front of people like hey is this something you would use because the only way to make stuff that actually does an impact is by getting it in use like if we just have ideas that never get used then there is no impact that is the most ineffective use of our time possible if it's not being used so we need to go make something that's going to be used even if you know that means that it's not like the idealized version of it we live in a world where it can't be always be the ideal solution that has gone through all these random control trials where it's like the absolute best thing sometimes you just have to get it in front of people and build a solution that works very well but at least it's in use and at least it's making some impact Got it. So I guess to summarize the harm and for a fault, it's someone who understands like, let's see, who has the domain expertise that's been built quickly, that is actually working directly on solving the problem rather than at some meta level of abstraction. Yeah. Yeah. And... Yeah, that was a little bit long way to say it. But yeah, the summary is like, yeah, someone who's taking an idea. so for example blue dot writes a lot of work proposals taking one of these proposals of a specific idea and then going out into the world and then talking to people who would actually use this thing talking to people for example if you need to get a certain far uvc lighting into a building that would drastically reduce the amount that airborne pathogens can be transmitted in that area going and talking to those people that run the building it's like hey why can i not get this in there now and then they're going to tell you oh it's like oh because of this building regulation it's like okay maybe we should go lobby that building regulation maybe no one knew about it because no one freaking asked them so it's like you got to go out there you got to ask people and you got to start trying to do it and you learn a lot that way got it cool so in our conversation yesterday that led to me asking you you should come on or like i should podcast you for this um you were talking about your very opinionated way that you build communities and this step that we've just gone through right here is one of them which is like for you it's like identifying being able to point at someone and say I want more people like you in this room yeah maybe that's a good place to start with like give us an outline of your opinionated way of doing community building and then if it's helpful you can go into like how you've done it here Yes. So this is how I would build community. Okay. So basically, I'm going to purchase in a very entrepreneurial way, which you'll see as I'm laying it out what that actually means. What that actually means, I hinted at earlier, but you first want to come up with this ideal profile, this ideal persona of who is this person in your community. Or it's the same thing if you're selling to someone. Like, if you have a customer, who is that ideal customer? Whatever you're doing, whatever goal you have with your organization, if you have identified the goal, and in Blue Dot's case, it's like increasing the number of exceptional people working on critical issues to make AI go well. So, okay, go find that person. Who is that person? Be able to point at them. Maybe be able to point at like 10 of them. But be able to point at those people, and then it's all going to be reverse engineered from there. So, okay, so let's take Harman, for example. I'm pointing at Harman. Now, the first step when you're doing some sort of, usually in a business, I'll use for-profit as an example here to bring in some terms that maybe people aren't familiar with. The first thing you do when you identify that persona is you have to create an offer. You have to create something in the for-profit world that they want to buy. So that's the first step. In this case, if you're building a community, you have to create an offer that gets them to want to come to your event. So that's the first step. So okay, I've identified Harman. What does Harman want? Well in a community it's pretty easy. Harman wants people like him. That's the point of a community. Just like me when I came to the University, I wanted to find other people like me. I wanted people who think like me. I wanted this intersection of entrepreneurship and philosophy that I frankly like never quite found, but I think I'm finding more now. I want more of that. Like that's what I want to be surrounded by. I want to be surrounded by people I respect. So that's very important. It's pointing at Harmon. What does he want? He wants people at least professionally and probably personally too that think like him at least at a very base philosophical level are doing things that he respects. And I have this kind of similar level of ambition and drive up here really is what he's looking for. Okay. So that's the offer. The offer is a room full of like-minded peers in a community. So then we have to somehow figure out. So that's the first step. We have some sort of offer. And there's a lot of different tactics about how to create a better offer. But I won't go into that. That's like the base. Something to offer Harmon to get him to be like, oh, yeah, I'll buy into that. And then the second step is I need to let Harmon know about what I have. Because I have an offer here. Harmon's here. But Harmon doesn't know about my offer. In this world, we call it getting leads. in sales a lead is someone who is interested in the offer so i go out and i try to get more leads this is where marketing comes in this is where outreach comes in this where communications is extremely extremely important both two things here one what do i put in this messaging such that harmon understands what the offer is and understands why it's valuable because we might might have a great offer, but if we communicate it horribly, he's never going to come. He's never going to know we have that great offer. So that's number one. How do you communicate it? How do you message it? Number two is where do you put that message? So to do this, you just really, really, really have to understand a Harmon well. And frankly, you just go find a bunch of Harmons and you just ask them. So you ask them a lot of things about their life. Oftentimes there's a lot So this is where a lot of customer discovery, something like The Mom Test is a very good book, of trying to ask them, this is like customer discovery, you used to craft this offer and figure out how do they speak, what words do they use to describe what they want. In this case, it's a little bit easier with community building because the offer is very clear. It's a room full of like-minded people. But some things, little tricks you can do to get people in the room is you can have a sort of hook. So, for example, in the accelerator I ran, I was able to assemble the most talented room of student entrepreneurs I've ever assembled in a couple months in that room the way that we did it was one of my professor friends convinced a guy who exited his company for 190 million dollars to come teach every Monday in that room give a 30-minute tactical lecture in the entrepreneur world a big exit like that is like the gold standard of like proof of wow this room i need to be there like i want to talk to that guy so you need you can create some sort of hook like that and this is a great way to put this in your messaging such that it's this really high signal that like oh i need to go there it kind of hooks them in so think about like what is this thing that harman really really wants go ask him maybe go ask a bunch of them and try to try to create try to have some sort of hook maybe that gets them in the door um so for us that was and this accelerator is like i was like hey like all i would say to them be like hey i'm running this accelerator jack cozio's there he's the founder of infosec and he exits come for honey 190 million dollars you want to come it's like yeah i want to come okay so that that hooks people in and then you got to figure out where they are so just like what is what does a harman do harmans are usually going through sit like people like harman usually live similar lives they take similar actions so where are they already hanging out both digitally and physically what coffee shops do they go to what's their daily routine look like where are they going to dinner where are they spending time are they on x are they on the ea forum are they in discord are they somewhere else are they on instagram are they specifically following this specific instagram page are they listening to our cash on spotify are they listening to him on youtube like where are they and get super super granular on that and you'll start to see patterns about where they are and then all you have to do is you have to combine this messaging this some probably some sort of hook such that it gets them in the door as well as some sort of messaging that uses their own words they want to remember the goal is ah this is this i belong here so how do you get them to feel like i belong here and then put that somewhere where they'll be and ideally somewhere where like it'd be great if you could have like a someone they respect that's giving that message that adds extra proof okay so like this these are kind of two questions you think about is where are they and what do they what do they want and that is how you get them to know about it properly and there's different like tactics you can use here so for example i'll give i'll give some some tactics of i i really started career for recently in a in a week I got 240 RSVPs and I got 140 of those 240 RSVPs to show up on a venue that is about a 35 minute walk from campus. So like very, very hard to do that. But how was I able to do that? I was able to do that because the event itself was a startup career fair. What is like the number one thing that entrepreneurial students want is they want jobs. Either they want to start a company, but that's really, really hard. So the best second is working in a startup. So it's like the highest value possible event I could do. That's a very big reason why so many students came. It's because students love career fairs, especially ones that don't exist otherwise, startup career fairs. The other thing I did is some tactical things for marketing is I picked, I created an Excel spreadsheet of very, very specific targeted classes of students that I thought in those classes would be particularly interested in a startup career fair. I then created an Excel spreadsheet of all the professors of those classes, as well as all the course numbers. And then what I did is I created a Word document in my school email. I then created an email that felt very natural, like wasn't too long, quite short, and had a little blurb at the end that the professor could send out to their students and what I did is I created it was like maybe four or five line email just one line of like here's who I am a little proof it's like I'm I'm legit here's a link to my LinkedIn I'm running this career for I think your students would find it really valuable could you send this out as a canvas announcement which is our software we use for school to dynamic variable section number of your class and then there's also dynamic variable for their name so it sends it directly from my wisc.edu, my school email, directly to their account, their email, from me with their first name on the email and the section number. And then all they have to do is copy and paste that blurb, put it as a Canvas announcement, which is very easy for them. That Canvas announcement is tied to every single student's email in that class. So every single student got a personalized email from their professor about my event in that class. It's like, who's, like, the number one person that you're going to open your email from? It's your professor. You want to see if you got, like, a grade or something like that. So it's, like, you see, so, like, literally what a person's seeing. I know every single student. I know every single student is looking at their email. I know every single student is looking at their professor's emails. And then, then the matter is I'm next to my subject line. I'm going to look at that next. So then I make the subject line, like, one of the subject lines is, like, 25 spots left dash startup career fairs. like, yeah, they're gonna look at that. And then they and then they look at it, then they look at the message and like, oh, start a career fair, 10 startups, and they see the list of all the startups is like, okay, I should probably look at that. So it's like stacking these things. There's proof, it's professor, I know, they're gonna look at it because their professor. So like, that was a tactic I did. The other tactic I did is I ran pre events before that filtered for the types of people that want to go to a start a career fair. So we and this was something a little bit of an unfair advantage, we had run a career fair the semester before so I used that as a very high intent email list of people that wanted to go here I also used an email list that we created specifically from an event we ran that my co-founder ran about how to code with AI it was like an AI coding workshop and there's a lot of AI engineering internships at this career fair so I sent it out to that email list and I did it all specifically I mail merged it what's called which is how I did that outlook word document thing and I sent it to their first name and it was like very personal most people thought it was just like email them directly. So those are like some tactics of what I did. So I kind of combined two things. I found an offer that was extremely hard to say no to, which is a startup career fair. And then I found a way, I know they're all looking at their email. I know they're all looking at emails from their professors. I know they all are going to find that to be much more credible than an email I sent up from a random student. And I found a way to leverage that to make my messaging there to be some sort of hook where they're going to look at it and they're going to find it more credible and I found a way to put it somewhere where all of them are going to see it which is in their email so like is an example it's at all and that was how I was able to send out like I literally spent maybe five to ten hours sending out like mail merging 600 I did like three rounds of like 600 emails total and that and that doesn't include the emails that professor sent their students and then i was able to get 240s per piece 140 attendees to that event and all this in the course of a week yeah it was yeah i did the work in seven days yeah yeah that is very impressive one thing that we touched on uh uh last night at dinner talking about this stuff was like getting people in the door uh is one half of it and then another part is like making them stay and stuff yes yeah could you talk more about that so yes so this all everything just laid out how to get people there but the whole the probably the more important part of the community is retaining people honestly the 80 20 of that is you just need to be extremely particular about who you have in the room so this is this is my framework for how to run events I have a very very different opinion about how to run different types of communities which I think there's two kind of models of communities so there's one which is you just cast a wide net which is this one this one being the event you threw the thing yeah the startup career fair the thing I just went all through here with the offer the where are they all this stuff this is when you're trying to like cast a wide still high intent net of like trying to get a lot of people somewhere a lot of high intent eyeballs a lot of people who are the right person for this event and likely to come however there's a different style of community which is one that i am much more frankly much more fond of and also think works a lot better for certain things like startup accelerators or trying to find founders when these are very very select individuals and it's like extremely hard to just like cast a wide net and then slowly filter down because you're going to lose them along the way most these like individuals who are doing something very outlier-ish which is very unusual will only come out of the room for like very high value things and yes so so you can't just like cast this wide net because you need to make the messaging extremely extremely extremely for them frankly you have to text them like i literally text them i text their i'm like i get their phone number and i text them so retaining people is like very very hard and very very important for this in fact this is how you grow up because most of community especially this like very very high signal like founder community you have to go through referrals because they kind of like find each other and then that's how you grow up so you so okay first for this kind of community i'll say that the first thing is when do you when do you know you have one community over the other you know you have this community when you're trying to run like a large event that maybe it's maybe it's something that's like like for a club or something like this where you don't need you kind of are trying to cast a wide net you're trying to get people in the door that's when you have this type of model you have this type model when you're trying to target very high like high caliber extremely hard to reach um very like outlier type of individuals i'll say like founders okay how do you run this what you do is you literally start with one person or a group of very small people that you and you set the bar extremely high you do not let anyone in that community unless they're better than that person or like like that person that you've picked as like Harman, Harman has to respect them, like at least equally ideally they're like, even like wow, like Harman sees this person as like someone impressive and if you do that properly, which is extremely hard to do, you've succeeded and okay, like that's like the 80-20, you have to set the bar extremely high and you have to not and you have to be really good at not letting anyone into those events that would be lower than the bar, it seems like really kind of exclusive and like exclusionary but it has to be that way for this type of group um okay because most people most people are not doing things like them because they are an outlier by definition what are those events can look like i usually would run i run private meetups is like a really like low cost one if i had more money i would run private dinners or some sort of like some sort of way where it's uh not during the day because they're working but like kind of at night some some sort of way where they are not forced into doing something they don't want to do. There's some kind of events which might be useful to have some sort of structure, but most of the stuff I run is just very open. Like they aren't listening to anyone. They can figure out how they want to use their time. They can go when they want. They can leave when they want. That kind of stuff. They just want to meet more people like them. That's what they want. So maybe a private dinner. Maybe a private meet up. Maybe you seed the room with people who would be valuable to them, like in the case of a founder, like investors or like, I mean really it would be investors, mentors, people who are like very specifically domain specific or very valuable for those people. And then all you're doing is you're keeping the bar very high, you're extremely dense value which is keeping the room with peers they respect, mentors they respect, investors they respect people that are all mission aligned people people that are all in that same boat have similar outlier status to them and then you just build and then the key is you do it slowly and i do this like for years like this is like like three years it's like i'm not i'm not i'm not rushing i'm inviting maybe a couple new people every meetup and if someone does not mean the bar, I don't invite them back, and I just slowly build it, and I slowly, I'm like, hey, I just slowly keep it in their head, like, hey, if you know anyone else for this, like, if you're enjoying this, like, let me know if you want to bring someone, and I just kind of keep that, every time I invite them, I just kind of keep that from their mind, like, hey, also, like, if you want to invite anyone, I'd love to, you're totally welcome to bring us, especially people, like, you really like in that community, who are really pushing the bar of that community, you want more people like them so you want to ask them and you just grow through referrals i literally don't promote it like i don't do any promotion i don't do any public promotion for this i purely text people i keep it private and i just ask them for referrals so totally it totally like the offer is purely just this high super high bar of an exceptional row of people and there's no marketing the marketing is just me the marketing is me going to these big events and just sifting through people manually and trying to find the one or two like Harman's like oh there they are there they are it's like like like there's a Harmon or there's a Jonah and it's okay like now I need to like put on the selling hat and I need to start the relationship and again I like I'm not like the first step when I find something like this is it's not like oh you need it you need to come to this now it's I I I want to establish respect for myself like if they don't respect me then they're not going to come to my to my meetup so i i want to have a genuine conversation with them be curious about what they're doing ask a lot of questions be someone that they enjoy talking to someone that they feel like understands them and then i get their phone number or whatever and then it's and then it's easy then it's like hey i have this event i'm running next week i would love for you to come do it and i have like this person here this person there this person there i think you might find it really valuable and you kind of position something that is exclusive because they want to be exclusive the right the right people when they see something exclusive don't shy away from that they're like they lean into that because they're like oh finally something finally we're not all like the people i don't respect are in it to put it frankly yeah but yeah in summary set the bar extremely high find the exact person you want in it bring them there keep it very small and then build it organically through referrals with no public market one of my follow-up questions so that as you were talking was uh something i thought was interesting was like the grow it slowly bit and it was you were very assertive it was it has to be grown slowly um which is interesting in a world where like everyone's obsessed with speed and something like this yes uh yeah my question was like why must it be slow but i suppose it was kind of answered at the end with like because organic things move slowly yeah you cannot do public marketing i mean if it it's also the fact that you need to keep the bar very high so if you try to go too fast then you're very likely to make mistakes and you only have so many mistakes you can make in a community like this where if you bring in the wrong people too many times then the community falls apart and you lose people to trust and you no longer have a community you may no longer show up in your are there other failure modes that you've experienced um or have known like in your network of people trying to do this uh have they experienced when it comes to community building besides uh setting the bar too low you think failure modes yeah what does that mean i suppose like my background is i'm mentoring a bunch of university groups that are trying to do this community building thing where we're trying to get people to work um on these problems um yeah not a lot of them come in with the same system or background that you've laid out here it's like maybe like one or two things that like oh like you just described that but certainly not the whole comprehensive system what are the biggest failure points of people like this yeah could have yeah doing it for a means to an end if you have some sort of goal that you're trying to conform these people to they will feel it and they will lose respect can you put an example on that yeah well it's for some reason no like there there hasn't been any other community builders in the entrepreneurship community that have well actually there's been maybe one or two that have truly been able to create this like very high caliber room like i have and it's because when they they they try to do this it's like they have a company and then like the goal is to like build a company and then they try to build a community of like for the sake of growing the company the community has been for the sake of itself and you have to be like i don't know how to i don't know how to like you just have to be genuine somehow like you have to just like genuinely want to build a community and you have to like do certain actions over time which you just have to know in the moment where it frankly is like a detriment to you to your to your thing you're trying to build and it just it's like the people can see it you're just purely giving like a lot of a lot of the times in the I can give an example here of of how I could have gone wrong but I didn't I ran a recruiting company I'm like in the process of handing it off for the past year I ran it and I've been running these private meetups as a way to find people to get into jobs which this is a little different because they don't pay anything and they get a job so it's like kind of just an additional part of my community as opposed to like a means to an end so I've kind of positioned my my service in a way that just like is part of the offer for my community and the community is like the actual thing that I'm building as opposed to my company The company is just like an off branch of it, which that's something notable to note there. However, some way I could have gone wrong is I have a friend who is part of my community, comes to a lot of the events. And he has now graduated and he is hiring for his startups now because he worked his way up very fast and he's hiring for his startups now. And he does a lot of, like, he has a lot of conversations. he hasn't specifically hired through my meetups but he has multiple conversations every time that could result in hires and I could ask him to pay me for those hires like if you hire someone on my community pay me I just don't like I just don't I just don't do that I just like I just don't really care like the community comes first and he was someone who was in my community before he graduated and now he has graduated and you know if like he if he thought it was eventually he would probably just ask to pay me if he got enough value from it so I'm just like I don't care like what matters is people get jobs what matters is that this community grows that these people have people who are like them and that's the focus and I'm not going to ask him to pay me if he doesn't want to so that's an example i think i just don't often see a lot of like successful communities like this and i think the main reason for that is people just too short term like they do it as a means to an end and because they do it as a means to an end it doesn't continue as long as it could as as if you just view the community itself as the thing that you need to build and when you view the community itself as something that needs to build it and you so for some reason you're able genuinely believe that it's going to compound over time and if you can just maybe if you can position the the aim you're trying to have is as more of like some sort of value add to that community as opposed to something that the community is feeding like we're trying to convince people to go there as opposed to like hat positioning in a way where it's like oh like i want to do that and people just know they have that option if they want to that could be a good way to avoid these like common failure points of people feeling like you're trying to push something onto them or something like this but that would be from what I've seen from my end the easiest way I could have lost respect to my community and I think a lot of the reason why these communities don't work in the first place is because you're building for the community as a means to some sort of other end instead of building the community as an end in itself got it not very tactical but it's a it's a it's a mindset you have to adopt and it it's something I can't explain except to just like after three years of doing it and you just like don't get paid for stuff you don't get value it's like very this like slow grind but eventually it's like wow I am the most well-networked person by far in Madison and everyone like I had I had a call the other day and this guy has had to this guy has had every single call he's had with someone who's an entrepreneur in the Madison community has said you need to talk to Ben just like naturally and then and then it just like after you get to that point it's like you have this like moat of trust and this was after like two years it's not that long of just like building extremely good events over and over again you have this like you only need to do it once you know and then like once you have that it's like you just as long as you don't mess it up you just have this like extremely valuable thing where people love you and want to help you to put it to put it bluntly makes sense yeah cool i think that's about what i've got if you uh i guess like as a time check it's about like 11 25 or so i don't know when you're okay um yeah we could potentially expand to yeah where you see the need for this mindset and skill set of community building in the civilizational resilience slash existential risk space no for sure okay I would say so for what I've seen and I think I can just play this more generally like I I would I don't know as much about other organizations i know the most about blue dot right now but i know i think kind of like it kind of sums up what i've said right now as like my current recommendation to the effective altruism community and civilization resilience community in very particular but that's like only blue dot so that's kind of one-on-one but more of the effective altruism community as a whole is okay there's like the spectrum of pure philosophy to like this entrepreneur that i laid out earlier that's just like purely not thinking at all about why they're doing it just purely like wherever the market takes me I'll follow like literally but like quite literally it doesn't matter what you're doing you just follow the market and right now I I saw I would say I would put my very instinctual not empiric not actually evidentially backed and it's gonna be that effect dollars from lands at about at least 80% towards here towards pure philosophy I think that's probably generous but I'd say 80% and I would I don't know how strongly like how far over it I would argue but from what I've seen I would almost argue that like again no backing at all that the most effective community if like truly one to make impact is like 20 of these people and 80 of people who are more like this um where honestly it's more like me where i have like i'm like 80 just like doing things but i still care a lot about why i'm doing it and i'm like very mission aligned and i truly take action based on philosophy not on the market you need like like i think those are the most effective people from what I've seen where it's like just enough like like 80% of these people 20% still like more philosophy like somewhere here because I think that's important to direct these people but I think you need a lot more of these people they but they at least need this like okay I am ethically aligned I'm not going to go rogue and I'm not going to do a lot of damage which I don't know what that threshold is, but probably over that threshold, but you need it's like, it's some sort of like you know, like if this is the threshold for where that is, let's say it's at 20% on the spectrum you need like a, you know, like it's like, I don't know if it's a power law kind of distribution, but it's like kind of this kind of thing, and maybe there's like a nice little bump like up here more, or I don't know maybe it's higher, but you need more of this than this, and I think right now it's the opposite okay, so that's like that that's that's a shift i think needs to happen and i was okay how do you do that i think how you do that is i think that i don't know for sure so i'm gonna make guesses here i think there because it's such a radical shift i think you need to take radical action and therefore you need to there's more this outlier model of community that I'm talking about where I think there needs to be more of this happening this being the pick your Harmon and then build an extremely high bar this like exclusive community versus this this is like this is the cast of Ynet what I call it like this is casting a Ynet is this startup career for a model and then this is like the picking your harman this is the harman model you know you pick your harman and then you set the bar very high and you only let people in who are who harman respects they meet the harman bar you know so i didn't need to be more of the harman community the reason i say that is because when i went to eag i felt like i didn't belong because 80 of people were not like me they were way too philosophical for me uh not because i love philosophy but in the professional world i i just see the value in doing things and therefore i lose respect for people who don't have that and so i think there needs to be this like kind of almost new coming any belt frankly like oh like as opposed to just like infusing them in i don't think that works i think you just like start over and you just start building from scratch you take a harman you put them in a room and then slowly over time and I know we don't have time but like I don't think we can I don't think you can do it any other way I think it's better than not doing it because if you don't do it then you're just not going to get it you pick a Harmon and you just slowly over time you grow that you grow that you grow that and then as the group gets bigger you start splitting it because you need to keep the group small and you just and you build these kind of like decentralized like groups there's a company called Hampton that's run by Sam Parr who runs the who's a co-host of the podcast My First Million very much like for-profit businessy kind of stuff but he runs these like founder support groups where Hampton organizes these like eight-person highly exclusive CEO founder groups to have be they meet you know maybe once a month and have these like very exclusive eight-person events or maybe large like a little bit larger dinners but they don't go for like 20 people and it's like these support groups it's it's something like that and I think that's when you start building up this like base then then i think it starts to kind of like shift the curve a little bit because then you start getting this like new branch where if you have these people that are and let's say these people are the founders these people are building organizations and you have these people building organizations they're going to hire people like them and so you start organically if you activate the right people these like really these hormones who are building these companies maybe a lot of them fail but the ones that the ones that succeed are they're hiring a lot of people then you have this trickle effect you this founder trickle effect where like if you go to like an elon company you see a little of elon in every employee like every employee has this like maniacal you know whatever you think of elon but like this like absolutely maniacal like crazy person in them they have a little bit of that so i think that's how you start shifting the balance is you start with the outlier model you just got to wipe the clean slate and you go for that and then slowly over time you build that up as an exclusive thing and then those people do those people are now kind of part of the community tangentially and they build these organizations that attract people like them and then now you've kind of started shifting the balance got it seems like a good prescription yeah i think that's about what i've got for today i'll leave with the classic question that you introduced me to at eag which is given what you know about our conversation right now what question should i have asked you i hate you write that down i hate you okay just kidding uh i hate you jk i of you. Great question. I think the things that I wanted to cover were this, number one, this mindset that you can adopt, maybe in no particular order, but one thing was this mindset you wanted to adopt where you reverse engineer from the ideal person. And both types, the Harmon model as well as the startup career for a model, the cast to widen that model, both types start with reverse engineering for that person and then there's different tactical steps along the way but once you start there a lot falls into place pretty naturally so I think that's something very important that we already we already hit on I think this idea of building community for its own sake and not to serve a different purpose is extremely extremely important and I think that just takes a type of person to like truly be able to just do that and I did it for like two years without getting paid and I had no it it was it looked like a complete waste of time like I was not getting any professional advancement from it at all but I got friends and that was enough for me so so I just kept doing it and you need more people like that somehow i don't know how you increase that number and i could guess but i don't know but i i maybe that would that tick something in people that makes them more like that that i think is very important but a question that i would ask that we didn't talk about i think we're good i think you got it you did a good job all right boom that's a wrap that's a wrap thanks for coming on ben no problem all right by the way are you wondering this is chai I'm a huge chai tea fan, if you're wondering what I was drinking. Cool. I had a latte with almond milk, but it's in the trash now, and I've already drank it. So wait, all the milk's in the trash, or it's in your stomach? It's in my stomach. The coffee cup is in the trash. Got it. I've been going down the gradient of sweetness in coffee. It started with frappes, and then my ex was like, you're cheating on frappes? And I'm like, okay, I can never drink frappes ever again. Wait, wait, was this what your ex said while you were in a relationship with her? Yeah. And then it was a, then it was mochas. And then my roommate Max was like, you're drinking a mocha? And I'm like, okay, I'm never drinking mochas ever again. And then I asked what Max gets and he's like, I get a latte. So I'm on a latte and recently I've been introduced to the idea of a cappuccino and apparently after that it's my coffee. Wait, you drink lattes? Yeah. Oh, fuck. No. All right. I'm just kidding. I don't drink coffee. This is what, this is what happened to me with sparkling water. I was a sparkling water fiend, fiend during COVID, fiend, fiend, like Travis Scott levels of fiend, and I would fiend for that, and I would have like 10 cans in my room by the end of the day, and it was all black cherry, it was a black cherry fiend, and I got a little sick of it, so then I stepped down to orange, orange and grapefruit, absolute fiend, then one time i had like you know like vitamin c drink that orange vitamin c drink i know yeah i had that for like a week straight because my throat was super sore and i got sick of the orange flavor so i i got sick of that orange sparkling water then i stepped down to a little bit more basic lemon and lime and then eventually i just became so in love with the bubbles of sparkling water that now my legitimate favorite drink in the world is playing sparkling you are crazy i love it I enjoy it like people enjoy art. Do you have like a tier list of like sparkling? Is there like Perrier? Vichy Catalan. Vichy Catalan in Barcelona is the best sparkling water in the world. It's got this nice, oh my gosh, you just need to go drink it. It's indescribable words. It's a piece of art. It's a piece of music. It's incredible. Okay. It's incredible. And I think most probably wouldn't even like it, but I freaking love it. Do you think the pipeline is necessary to get to a state where you can like it? Or do you think you can go in straight? I think sparkling water connoisseurs know that it takes time to refine your bubble palate. Right. Your carbonation divinations. And this takes time. So I think to truly enjoy it, you need some time to work your way down to appreciate the foundation of sparkling water. However, I think anyone can enjoy a nice Vichy Catalan on a nice, warm, Spanish afternoon. So, yeah. Cool. That's what I'll say. Nice. I think we'll leave it at that. Leave it at that. Vichy Catalan. A la Madrid.

Ben Lukszys co-led one of the largest student-run pitch competitions in the country, ran a startup accelerator at UW-Madison, and personally became the most well-networked person in Madison's entrepreneurial scene—all before graduating. In this conversation, he shares the exact system he uses to found high-trust, high-caliber communities from scratch, and makes the case that the EA and civilizational resilience world needs far more builders and far fewer philosophers.

Show notes and transcript: https://jeremykintana.substack.com/p/ben-lukszys-on-entrepreneurial-community
Connect with Ben: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ben-lukszys/
Hosted by Jeremy: https://jeremykintana.com/

00:00:00 Organizations are a way to do more good than you could as an individual
00:04:12 Building the entrepreneurship community at Madison
00:07:34 But why are we solving these problems?
00:11:32 EA: Too far towards pure philosophy
00:18:12 Profile of an impact-driven entrepreneur: Harmon Bhasin
00:23:41 Ben's playbook for founding communities
00:35:55 How do you retain people in a community?
00:44:55 You must build community as an end in itself
00:51:37 Ben's prescription for how EA can attract more founders: Start from scratch
01:00:44 Extras