Mark Birch, Community Builder

📚 "Facts tell, stories sell." Research says facts are 20x more memorable in stories. Yet founders pitch with bullet points🙄 Use this story framework: Character (hero) → Conflict (tension) → Resolution (your product saves day) 🙌

🚪 *Ring ring* Strange man: "Let's connect!" *Ring ring* "12 minutes to 10x your pipeline?" My house = LinkedIn IRL 😂 1B+ users but endless strangers selling stuff. Be intentional!

📈 "Community = cost center to cut" says every CFO. I spent 4 years working on this problem while at AWS. My answer is the Three Levels of Community Metrics: C1 (business impact), C2 (bridge metrics), C3 (health). Here is how to use this framework:

🤖 Community building is pure drudgery. I hired full-time admins, still couldn't keep up. With AI though, the boring stuff will get managed. This will help people better connect and build bonds through community. I does the busywork, humans create the magic.

🎯 Trading floors taught focus. Startup life = chaos. Harvard found: 87 interruptions/day, 23 min to refocus. Real secret: enjoy what you're building. If avoiding critical tasks = founder-market fit red flag.

Whenever I get stuck on something, I find a whiteboard ⬜ Sometimes I have a lot of conflicting ideas in my mind, and a whiteboard helps to get them out of my head. After an hour or two of furiously scribbling words, shapes & arrows, I can step back and begin to visualize the idea more clearly.

One of the highlights of teaching at NCCU was visiting startups on campus💡 I met a drone entrepreneur, a student startup launching scooters, and an artist doing building cool stuff with paper. It's an entrepreneurial environment for builders to launch startups🚀

What better way to spend the weekend than checking out startup pitches 😂 I shared some thoughts on the need for community for Taiwanese startups to accelerate their GTM during their final session of an entrepreneurship course. Thanks for having me, it was a blast meeting the startups!

🏐 Tom Hanks had Wilson. Founders have laptops at 2 AM. 72% of entrepreneurs report mental health struggles. Loneliness = major factor. Paul Graham said "Low points so low few could bear them alone." Here's some ideas to fight the loneliness:

My startup almost died because I ignored friends warnings about outsourcing my engineering. Adam Grant's solution: Build "Challenge Network" for structured feedback. I created my own called"The Fifty" - best decision ever to get tangible advice! foundersinthecloud.com/p/feedback

💥 "Perfect startup team!" I thought. Same vision, same passion. Then we started working together. Epic arguments over dumb stuff. 65% failures = toxic co-founder relationships. Values = conflict resolution systems.

🏴☠️ "Better to be a pirate than join the navy" - Jobs + 20 rebels built the Mac! Small teams of misfits > big bureaucracy. When hiring look for: breadth, lateral thinking, creation history. Create your one-pizza team, max 5 people. foundersinthecloud.com/p/pirates

🦁 I'm super excited to be back in Cape Town this week 👋 I will be hosting a masterclass on community growth strategies. Then I speak at AWS Community Day South Africa on the topic of "Community as Code"😉 If you have any recs on places to visit or eat, LMK😁 See you soon Cape Town!

🔍 I was that annoying kid asking "why" about everything. Bit it's such an important question! Most founders stumble through ideas without deeper motivation and asking why. Your big why emerges through customer conversations and 3 AM questioning moments. foundersinthecloud.com/p/why

⚡ Every second counts. But only if it's purposeful. Startups are perpetual motion machines. Build → feedback → learn → repeat. The faster you iterate, the better your odds. But you need to prioritize! Real advantage = speed toward right outcome. foundersinthecloud.com/p/speed-comp...

Spent some time tonight at the 9/11 memorial. People say never forget. I say learn from this moment so we can have a more hopeful and caring future.

🎯 Bezos: "Most decisions should be made with 70% of the information you wish you had." Waiting for 90% = being slow. Type 1 (irreversible) vs Type 2 (reversible). Most are Type 2 but treat like Type 1. Slow decisions kill startups faster than wrong ones. foundersinthecloud.com/p/make-faste...

Tariffs are what will ultimately destroy America. That is not to minimize the other stuff going on right now. But the long-termhealth of a nation is based on what people believe to be true about their financial security. And tariffs are already exposing a hole in that safety net.

⏰ 3:59AM wakeup. Cold shower. Espresso IPO (3 cups). 1,000 pushups. Meditate on valuation multiples. Sprint plan in Notion w/ my Japanese fountain pen. Founder mode!!! LOL, forget the hustle theater—let’s build things that last 💪

Was at Innovation City Cape Town last November for an event. It was a business matching session. I was in town to give a talk, and the team invited me to join. Ended up manning the AWS table, even though I just left AWS 😅 It was all good, made some good connections 😁

Stop burning cash on stale growth tactics👎 🔥 Build communities that sell for you instead I grew a community from zero to 30K members across 24 cities with major impact! I'm in Cape Town Sept 18th to share my playbook of Community Flywheel + 11 step process + real metrics💡 trib.co/innocitytalk

This is the real startup mantra Courtesy of Charles Bukowski

I have finally given up and started using Notion. It actually does not suck as hard as I imagined it would. Pleasant surprise is the AI assistant actually does a good job helping to create some of the pages I need without doing it by scratch.

💸 "We spent $50 on MVP." - 2024 reality. Cloud + AI + no-code = launch for almost nothing. Biggest cost? Your time. Barrier to starting isn't money anymore. It's having courage to begin. foundersinthecloud.com/p/build-near...

💡 "Live in future, build what seems interesting" Paul Graham. Best ideas from noticing, not brainstorming i.e. my HR startup I asked: why do talented people do unfulfilling work? $1.9T productivity waste! Where do you find your startup ideas from? foundersinthecloud.com/p/where-do-s...

🍣 Never ordered tamago until Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Apprentice made 200+ before Jiro approved. Progress depends on unreasonable people. Startups are unreasonable by definition, but beware of becoming a toxic culture! foundersinthecloud.com/p/unreasonable

🔄 Corporate to startup founder? The hardest part is unlearning corporate habits! Habits that kill startups: Waiting for perfect info, endless meetings, consensus over speed. Startups are execution machines, so reset your mindset first in the transition: foundersinthecloud.com/p/transitions

🔄 Every 20 years tech platforms shift: 1960s Mainframe 1980s PC 2000s Cloud+mobile 2020s AI And it's not just better chatbot! We will see AI-native everything. Intelligence as infrastructure. 1-person billion-dollar AI startups. Read more: foundersinthecloud.com/p/next-20-ye...

Sometimes you just need to take a break to recharge 🔋 I get reenergized in the mountains ⛰️ - hiking, fresh air, clearing my mind. Tired of hustle culture telling us to work 15-hour days. That's just performative burnout waiting to happen. Work hard, yes. But rest so you can scale new heights 🏔️

📖 Writing my first book Community-in-a-Box ran into a buzzsaw of brutal feedback when I shared my first draft😵 Most books are vanity projects, but if you have unique expertise and intentional about the process, a book can open doors! Here are some tips: foundersinthecloud.com/p/books

💸 One typo cost $150M (NASA Mariner 1) Bad writing costs America $400B annually! Most startup content = AI buzzword soup 🤮 Good writing is like a good conversation that opens doors and builds influence. Here are some tips to write better: foundersinthecloud.com/p/writing

📧 I wrote long emails like Russian novels. My boss said: "Maybe you can send us a 50-page summary." Ouch. Less is more. Senior people drowning in info. Amazon taught me how to get to the point in my communications faster: foundersinthecloud.com/p/brevity

🐅 Malaysia Boleh and happy Hari Merdeka! Most overlook Malaysia's startup scene: - 3x longer runway vs Singapore - Multilingual talent - Gov't + tax incentives - Gateway to 650M ASEAN consumers - Carsome first unicorn The momentum is building🚀

🌍 Was I crazy flying 16hrs to Hong Kong for "business stuff"? Stack Overflow data though showed fastest growing dev ecosystems = Indonesia, Vietnam. But going global is like doing another startup🤯 Here a 12-step framework for you global expansion: foundersinthecloud.com/p/scaling-gl...

⚔️ "Best time start business = yesterday. Second = today." Love pirate spirit! But there are some questions you should ask youself first. Do you have curiosity? 10-year stamina? Financial runway? Comfort for the unknown? Take this test and see: foundersinthecloud.com/p/the-startu...

🏀 Obama: "You didn't build that alone." Silicon Valley loves solo founder myth but its sort of BS. DARPA created Internet and gov't funded university research. True leaders credit teams during wins.

🥟 I was the NYC Kingpin of dumplings! My tours were featured in the New Yorker, but I had zero passion for business. That's difference between the idea and founder-market fit!

⏰"Every second counts." Startups are perpetual motion machines. The faster you go, the faster you find product-market fit, the faster you scale your business. Slootman: "Multiple priorities is the same as no priorities." So focus on the 1st priority!

✈️ 251,978 miles. 190 days away. 76% of work days on road. I spent a lot of time reflecting on the biggest observations from the year. Four ideas: Build anywhere but some places better. Amazon hit Day 2. AI changed everything. Community beats algorithms. foundersinthecloud.com/p/my-persona...

👨🏻💻So I demoed last night at the PicCollage AI Demo Night, showed off tools I built to help me scale as a solo founder. Shout as well to my Taiwan Gold Card friends at our monthly happy hour my good buddy Anuraag from NYC to talk about AI adoption in the enterprise!

💥 "Hope you like feedback!" Customer demo disaster. "Dumbest, most pointless shit ever." Reid Hoffman: "Not embarrassed by v1? Means you launched too late." Your MVP will suck because turning vision into tangible product is the hardest part!

🚀 SpaceX caught 20-story rocket with robot arms🤯 People think we're out of innovation like when Andreessen said in 1994: "Tech in US is dead." Pattern repeats. There's no boat to miss because innovation never stops!

Great food discovery at a local weekend fair, a NJ shop that does a solid Nashville Hot Chicken sandwich 🙌

💀 Startup "truths" are cargo cult myths. Don't need: funding, technical co-founder, domain expertise, Silicon Valley, amazing idea. But MailChimp, Shutterstock, etc. bootstrapped to billions! foundersinthecloud.com/p/12-things-...