How To Build Community: "Rub Your Members Together Until They're Sticky" | Douglas Atkin on Invested

0:00 Douglas Atkin — Invested Transcript edited You were Airbnb between 2012 and 2017. The go-go years. Hypergrowth. And then you left. Yeah, hypergrowth. Why'd you leave? You mentioned the logo. If my memory serves me correctly, that logo was somewhat controversial. Oh, we loved it. I called it the equal opportunity genitalia logo, because there's something in there for everyone. No one's loyal to Marriott like the way they are to Airbnb. No one loves Hilton, you know, Holiday Inns or anything. They just don't.

0:26 And then I thought, well, why stop there? Why not study the original? Why not study cults? TO Deconstruct what it took to create that kind of commitment. If I asked you, the expert, where is humanity? Where are we in 50 years? Does it get better? Is it getting better? Is it getting worse? Welcome back to another episode of Invested. I am thrilled to have with me my old friend — we were just reminiscing that we haven't seen each other in way too long — Douglas Atkin. Douglas, welcome. And Douglas and I met the first time around WeWork, and there's a theme there between Airbnb and WeWork, which we'll get into. And Douglas started at Meetup, but Douglas actually wrote the book on cults. And that's where I want to start, was when I first met him. He said — I said, "How do you know so much about community?" He said, "Well, I wrote the book on cults." So, Douglas, tell us about the book on cults.

1:25 So it all started — I had no intention of writing a book, but it became one. And this was before anyone was talking about community in business. I mean, no one was. But how it started for me was, I used to work in branding and advertising, and I was in my ad agency in New York, in SoHo, and I had some clients come in, quite a famous sports fashion brand. And they were depressed, saying, "Loyalty is dead. Branding is over. We and our competitors copy each other within days. There's no point of difference anymore."

2:02 And then, by coincidence, that same night, I happened to go to a focus group of teenagers that I'd already organized, who were talking about their favorite brand of sneaker. And, you know, sneakers, they're just — they're also, you know, they're a commodity product. They basically function exactly the same. They're bits of rubber and plastic. But you couldn't tell these kids that. They were incredibly committed to this particular brand, happened to be Converse, and they were talking in almost religious terms about these sneakers.

2:39 So there was, two things occurred to me. First was, the marketers, the professionals I had met that morning, were wrong. You can create commitment even in a commodity market where everything is functionally the same. And secondly, the thing that occurred to me was that their commitment was so strong and almost cult-like, I thought, why don't I study best-in-class cult brands? Brands at the time that would have to be like, you know, Apple and Harley.

3:11 And then I thought, well, why stop there? Why not study the original? Why not study cults? Maybe if I can study the most extreme form of belonging and belief, I would be more easily able to deconstruct what it took to create that kind of commitment. Cults that had become religions, such as the Mormons, the Marines, Trekkies, sports team fans, everything. And it worked out, because everyone joined and stayed for the same reasons.

3:49 Well, the first thing to say is, one of the first things I learned and saw were that the people who join cults are completely normal. This was a really important finding, because if they had been marginal, if they had been, you know, kind of not normal, if they'd been, as most people think they are, socially inept or psychologically flawed, then they wouldn't have been good objects for study, because then I couldn't apply the knowledge I had learned from them to the general. But they were perfectly normal. And not just normal, but the opposite of what you expect. They tend to be well educated, come from stable homes, are not socially inept at all. If they'd been socially inept, cults would never grow, because they wouldn't be able to recruit. And a little bit more idealistic than the general population.

4:45 And the second thing I learned is that the reason why people join and stay and believe and belong was the same. It didn't matter if I was talking to members of the Krishna cult and other full-on cults, religious cults, or members of the Harley fraternity. At the time, the motivations were exactly the same. It was just a matter of degree. Not always, actually. I mean, there were members of the Apple and Harley cult and other cults, brand cults, I spoke to at the time who seemed to be equally committed to full-on religious cults.

5:21 So anyway, that became a good thing, and so I was able to deconstruct about — I think I came up with 12 key insights into why and how people join and stay, and also what makes them leave, which was also an important finding. And I never intended it to become a book. But I used that information when I was at this ad agency to pitch for a new bank launched by Citigroup, which we won using the information. And the co-founder got me to meet a really good book agent in the US, and then it became a book. And that's what got me out of branding and into tech, because, as I say, no one was talking about community and business at the time. And I launched the book and was out, you know, doing a tour saying cult community is the next big thing in business. And people were kind of buying the argument, but there was no, you know — it was new.

6:19 But lucky for me, some of the found— Also because this is in 2004, there were no social media. There was no Facebook, no Twitter, nothing. But the founders of some of those social networks, lucky for me, read the book, and that's what got me out of advertising and branding, which I was getting a little bit tired of, and into tech. And I ended up joining Meetup, because the founders of Flickr, Caterina Fake and Stuart Butterfield, read the book and they showed it to me one day. They were on the board of Meetup. That's how I ended up there. And they showed it me one day, and they showed me all the Post-it notes and the markings, said, "Look, we used this book to build Flickr." And that made the whole damn thing worthwhile, because it was really hard work, writing — research and writing a book while, as you know, while working hard.

7:17 You know, by the way, I only hope our audience knows who Flickr was, but— I know, I know. I'm old enough to know what Flickr was. But it was like — Flickr was like the place to go put your photographs back in the day, and find photographs back in the day. I think it was bought by Yahoo at some point, if I remember correctly. Yeah, it was, for too little. And they— $30 million, if I remember correctly.

7:39 Yeah, it was. Yeah, it was the first social network, actually, really. I mean, MySpace and others were around a bit, but that was — it was really, well. And then they went on. Stuart Butterfield went on to start... Slack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which started as kind of a social network for games, if I remember correctly. Exactly. And they became Slack which was the messaging platform. But I want to go back to your comment about religious language. So you said these very normal people, because if they weren't normal, they couldn't influence other people to join cult brands, as the case may be. But the cults use almost religious language. Can you double click on that for a second? What is religious language? Why is that important?

8:26 Why does that matter? How does that affect these normal people to join the cult, or— Yeah, I mean, they were kind of using it unconsciously, really. It was simply an indicator of their degree of commitment. I mean, for example, the ones I can remember I wrote about were some of the people I spoke to who used Apple at the time — Macs. They would say things like, sometimes I talk to people who use PCs and they're almost damaged by PCs. It's like their brains have been damaged. I kind of get what they mean, because you do have to like go through a mental — it used to be, have to go through a mental gymnastics to simply use the damn thing.

9:09 And then this other guy, he was a student, he could barely afford his lunch, and he said, sometimes I, you know, I just upgrade my Mac — this is before the phones even — just so that the mothership Apple can get my money. I want them to have my money. You know, it was like paying it into — it was like a tithe almost into the religion. And they definitely use the religious language in terms of, you know, being missionaries and recruiting people. I mean, definitely when I was interviewing Saturn at the time — I love Saturn, because it was a mass cult brand. It was not a, you know, a niche cult brand. It was mass, and with a very generic product. But people would buy six of these things for all of their families, and they would go to — God, I've forgotten what it was called, but there was this thing called the Gathering, something like the Gathering, that Saturn would run once a year. And instead of going to Disney, Disney World or whatever, they would go to a car factory in Tennessee to meet the makers of the cars and other purchasers of Saturns.

10:24 So they were like religious gatherings. And if you were a cult, what is the language you would use to recruit these members? A full-on cult or a cult brand? It's basically the same. A full-on cult. Yeah, exactly. Very similar. Like, for example, when I talked to members of Krishna, I remember this one woman saying that, like the Apple person, that the people who weren't members of, recruit members, were damaged. They had to be, you know, saved, basically. They had to be fixed. They had to be recruited in and become part of the family.

11:05 I seem to recall you once telling me that people often on the inside of brands, but also specifically, even more so, on the inside of cults, they talk about other people's not being able to understand. This is like a language almost that you can't understand until you're swept up in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, so one of the — I talk about the four Ds of difference. The thing about a cult, as opposed to, say, a sect — a sect is an extreme version of an existing belief system, an existing religion. A cult is a new idea around which adherents gather and become passionate, etc. So for example, Christianity is one of several new ideas, one of several mystery cults in the Eastern Mediterranean, where you are right now, that existed 2,000 years ago.

11:53 And normally they're persecuted out of existence by the incumbents, because they're a threat. This is true both in the religious world and in the brand world. For example, British Airways tried to persecute Virgin Atlantic out of existence in its early days. They did what they came to be known as the dirty tricks. They even — and then Virgin. I love Virgin. So my point about this overall is that you need to be — to be a successful cult or cult brand, you need to focus on your difference. And the way it works generally is to say to recruits, you're different from everyone else. We're different in exactly the same way. Come in and join us, and feel at home and at one with your true family.

12:43 And so one of the ways of creating — the fourth way of creating an extreme sense of difference — is demonization, and creating a sense of the other. This has become very topical in politics over the past few years, but it's always been topical. I mean, religious leaders and political leaders for thousands of years have used demonization. The word demonization comes from the Christian church, that would take local gods, like the gods of nature or whatever, and literally demonize them, put horns on them if they didn't have them, and turn them into devils, and say they're bad, we're good.

13:25 Demonization has two really, really powerful belonging effects. One is, by demonizing the other, you define yourself. So you are the white version of the black you're describing. And demonization also creates a sense of threat, an outside threat, which creates a strong solidarity within. And so the sense of otherness is a technique used by most strong cult-like organizations, whether it's a commercial and branded, or whether it's a religion or a political party.

14:02 For example — this, by the way, I wanted to tell you about this maybe sometime in this interview, this podcast. I'm working on two new communities right now, global ones, and they're both in response to the demonization by the far right of queer people, particularly trans. Demonization, of course — you're in Tel Aviv. If you're Jewish, very familiar: in the Second World War, when the Germans demonized the Jews. It's a classic, classic technique. So going back to your question, there was always the sense of the other. And the other either was a threat, or you save people from the other in order to — and bring them in, and make them part of yours.

14:52 You touched on the movement of culting to politics, and particularly in the moment that we're in right now. I actually wanted to get to this later, but if we're here, we're going to pursue it one second. Do you think that there's something different about politics today that has caught on to more of this us versus the other, the demonization part of it, the cancel culture elements of it? The political party is a sense of belonging in a way that maybe we didn't have in the past, other than in communism. Is there something about this moment that's kind of brought this to the fore, accelerated it, or has it always been this way?

15:30 I think it's always — I mean, I'm not a historian, but from what I can tell, it's always been this way. It tends to come out more when people feel a general sense of insecurity or threat. Normally economically. I mean, better historians — historians have written about the rise of Nazi Germany, happened after the Second World War, and Germany had to pay a really harsh economic price for the damage it did.

16:00 After the First World War. First World War, sorry. Yes. And then — so that led to the — exactly, all of that. So it was easy. And the demons they picked on, so-called demons, were the Jews and the queers and Romanies and so on, as a way — it's always used by populists, and Hitler was a fantastic populist — as a way of distracting from the fact that yes, there are real problems and people do feel insecure, but these populist leaders don't have the answer to them. And so they distract, and create a sense of powerful unity. That's the main reason they do it, is the unity, by demonizing the other.

16:45 No, I think the same thing's happening, particularly in America right now, but in other economies around the world, and the far right. There is a playbook. This sounds like a conspiracy theory. It's not. It is a conspiracy. There is a playbook for this that was initially publicly written in Florida, in the DeSantis — Governor DeSantis — that's been picked up by the Republican Party, namely Trump and that lot, and then also around the world. And there's a lot of swap between it and the Orbán administration and Putin and others. They're copying many of the same techniques, and that's why they're often demonizing the same targets, which at this moment happen to be queers and immigrants, and particularly trans.

17:30 Trans – It's always good to demonize something that can be an abstract threat. So one of the reasons that trans were picked is because it was a deliberate — and I know this because I know a close friend of mine is the leader of the Equality Florida, which is the queer organization that's toe to toe with DeSantis for the past 10 years. And they know the enemy quite well there. And it was a real strategy by the Republican Party in Florida to pick trans, because they realized as a demonization target they'd lost the gay marriage as a target. They just lost it.

18:12 So they thought, what is a population that most suburban mothers will never meet, and that is obviously very different looking, another? And they picked on drag and trans, thinking, tiny population, no one will ever meet them. They seem very other. Perfect. Let's pick on that. And so they did. And that's been picked up all over the world with dire consequences. I have really close friends who live in sub-Saharan Africa, in Senegal, in Uganda, whose lives are under threat every day as a result.

18:50 Do you think the rise of, it's called, cultic politics also coincides with the decline of religion? Yes, I mean, you know, I saw a similar thing. So when I was doing a lot of research on cults and religions, for that matter, I was interviewing all these people, but I was also reading a lot of books by sociologists of religion and so on, and sociologists like Robert Putnam, who wrote Bowling Alone, and others. The general consensus amongst those academics and experts is that there is a — and this is not just academics of religion, but also sociologists, psychologists — is there is a need to belong in the human species.

19:45 We needed it to survive. Literally. I mean, the moment a man in a bear suit, you know, faced a saber-toothed tiger with nothing but a pointy stick, realized he needed his tribe to defend himself, we became a community-led animal that needed a community to survive. And it's still true now. People live longer, survive heart attacks at a much higher rate, if you're part of a tight social network. Not meaning social networks, I'm meaning like family and friends.

20:14 Yeah, like real live people that you can be together with. Yes. In real life, people you can be together with. But we need it to survive. I mean, literally we need it to survive. We still do. Even though there's no saber-toothed tigers. So religion has always, throughout history, provided a really good means for belonging and belief. A lot of people also need to believe in something, have a purpose. Most people do, in fact. And so there's been a useful vehicle for that, whatever religion it is, whenever it was, thousands of years ago or now.

20:51 And when I was doing the research for the book — that's when the start, I was doing it in America, a lot of it — and the decline in religion was already being tracked by Pew and other research companies. And I could see that people were finding, there is this, you know, kind of desperate desire to belong and believe. If it's not being satisfied by one thing, it'll be satisfied by another. Which I think is your point, and I think that's true. So brands were taking over that role at the time, which is why I launched the book. And now I think it's politics.

21:25 I actually want to move on to Airbnb and Meetup, et cetera, and a bunch of other things. But before you get there, you mentioned kind of the populist right as kind of feeding on this, and Hitler. Do you think the same thing exists, for example, on the left, or the Muslim Brotherhood or other places like that? Or is it a unique feature of the right? I think the right are doing it extremely well. No, I think the trouble with the left, I mean, the good and the bad thing is, it's definitely happening on the left too. The left tends to indulge in infighting much more than the right.

21:59 Like, in going back to pre-war Germany, Spain and Italy, there were equally strong movements on the left. They all defeated themselves by defeating each other instead of focusing on the real enemy. And so, yeah, definitely in the left. But we, the left, can't get shit together to organize into a, into a — into really powerful. I have no idea. Maybe because they're ideological purists, even more so than the far right, and they fight each other on ideological purism. I don't know. I don't know enough about it. It's not my forte.

22:32 If you're interested in finding out ahead of time what's going on in Israeli tech, what the latest trends are, who's breaking not only news but breaking the trend lines, then you want to subscribe to Aleph's newsletter, and you can sign up right in the show notes in the description of the show. Please subscribe to the newsletter. All right, so let's move on, one second, because — so you wrote this book on the cults, and you translated that at this moment in history of 2004 to, like, the first era of social networks, which was Flickr and Meetup. How did you join Meetup?

23:02 Oh, because Caterina Fake was on the board of — advisory board of Meetup. And she sent my book to Scott Heiferman, who founded Meetup, and said, this book is all about Meetup without being about Meetup. Because, you know, Meetup had — I wasn't aware of it when I was researching the book. And so I went — so Scott Heiferman reached out. I left branding and advertising and started being a consultant. And then he just invited me to be his partner. So I was one of four partners running Meetup in its early days, which was great.

23:38 I loved it, because it meant that I learned a lot about community in general, cults in specifically. But working at Meetup enabled me to learn a lot about everyday community. Community is the people who like to form groups of pug lovers, or vampires. There was one group I met, they thought that — they didn't like pretending to be vampires, they thought they were vampires. Or, you know, belly dancers, or whatever it was. The diversity was amazing. I loved it. But I learned a lot.

24:14 And again, what you haven't asked me is, what are the key ingredients of a strong belonging community? And that's where I was headed with Meetup, because these are micro-communities of belonging. Micro-communities of belonging. Yeah, yeah. Very successful ones, generally, because there's a lot of intimacy. So let me explain this. The first, the most important principle for the creator, to create a strong community — and I'm going to say it in a way that is memorable, slightly rude. You need to rub your members together until they get sticky.

24:49 All right? Rub your members together until they get sticky. What do I mean by that? You need frequent and deep interaction between your members. Why? Well, what I saw at Meetup was that we did this research to find out what made successful meetups. And the meetups that had the highest ratings, the NPS scores, were the ones where people had shown up four times or more.

25:22 Meaning that– and we asked why. Why do you feel particularly committed to this meetup? And what was interesting was that the reasons why they were there, they became so committed, was because it took showing up four times or more to form relationships with other people in the group, to form friendships and bonds. And so people were going to see Julie and Mustafa, not just to practice Spanish, or whatever the purpose of the meetup was, or to do yoga, or to go watch foreign films.

25:58 Whatever the subject, they were doing that too. But this other reason became more important. And those bonds are extremely difficult to pull apart. That was the source of the strength of those communities. And so you need this frequency and depth. And the thing about Meetup groups is they're face to face. You have to leave your warm home on a cold night, show up and meet complete strangers, and then become friends. So they're very intimate, close communities.

26:31 So that's the first golden rule, is rub your members together until they get sticky. This was also reinforced by the research I'd done on cults. There was a great social study done on the Divine Light Mission, which was a famous cult in the 70s — quasi-religious cult, sort of hippie Christian cult — and also the Mormons. And there was a direct correlation between frequency and depth of interaction and commitment to the belief system and following the rules of the organization.

27:01 So that's the first one. The second one seems it's the most important, but it's actually secondary to the first. And that is, you need to have a very clear, strong ideology, a belief system, a purpose. And because people need to glom onto that and say, I believe in that. And I also feel a deep sense of belonging with people who believe in the same values. So super, super important. This is why the far right has very, very clear values. I don't subscribe to them at all, but they're very clear. And so it's attracting people to them. But actually, what becomes more important is the interactions between the other members who also buy into the same thing. That's actually what creates the stickiness.

27:49 So you started by saying that there's like a kernel of content. Vampire, yoga. Yeah. Whatever. That brings people together, and then they get rubbed together over this small kernel of content until they become sticky. And then you add that there's like a belief system that they buy into. Is that a precursor, or does that develop through the stickiness? Is that created over time? And if you're not a cult but a brand, or a community or set of communities like Meetup, how do you endow the somewhat sticky members who've been rubbed together at least four times with that set of values that they need to have, and, you know, encourage them to be carriers?

28:32 So the answer is the purpose. Now, the purpose is — I'm now going to switch to Airbnb, all right, and use that as an example, because I ended up working — it's the first thing I worked on at Airbnb was the purpose. I was so upset when you went to Airbnb, by the way, because I was so desperate for you to come to WeWork and help us. I know. I remember that. Yeah. I remember sitting with you in a coffee shop and saying, "Don't!"

28:58 I don't know if I ever told you this, but, you know, I was about to say, I went to Airbnb in a kind of weird way. One of the founders read my book and some blog posts, and he invited me to do a fireside chat. So I met him — well, I met him for breakfast. Joe Gebbia. I met him for breakfast in New York in 2012. We got on like a house on fire. He said, I like the way you think. And he invited me to do this fireside chat. So I did the fireside chat in San Francisco to all 140 employees. That's all they were at the time. Now I think there's like 8,000. About community.

29:32 And then I realized, hang on a second, they seem to be interviewing me a bit. But anyway, I didn't think much about it, and I left. And then they asked me back to do a gig, and I flew that night from New York back to San Francisco, met up with Brian again — Brian Chesky, who's still the CEO and co-founder. And he said, you know a lot about brands. Can you help us figure out what ours is? And that took me by surprise, because, you know, I thought I was there to do something about community. And so I said to him, let me think about that, and can I talk to you in the morning?

30:06 So I came back in the morning and said, look, yes, we can talk about the brand, but I think what's more important is we talk about the purpose of Airbnb. Because clearly people — guests, hosts, employees, who also guests and hosts — are extremely committed to Airbnb. Why? What role does it play in their lives? If we can figure out the role that it plays in their lives, we might get an idea of what your purpose is. And if we can figure out what the purpose is of the organization, then that governs everything. That governs what products you launch and what you don't, what you choose not to launch. It governs the kinds of people you hire and the ones you avoid and fire. It governs how you decorate the office. It governs what companies you might choose to buy or not buy. And it also can govern the brand.

30:57 So I think we should do that first. And then he kind of looked — he's very good at, when he's thinking. He's a great listener, Brian. One of the reasons I love Brian is he's a great listener. And he thought about it, and then gave me one of these dead-eyed stares and said, okay, do that. And internally I'll go, oh shit, what have I talked myself into? That's a big job. Fucking hell, can I do this?

31:19 So anyway, so I did. That's what I did during that gig. In three and a half weeks, we ended up talking to over 500 guests and hosts, and used particular research techniques that surfaced the role that Airbnb played in the lives of, why they were so committed. And that's what actually led to Airbnb's purpose, which — it is, the longer version, which is still short, is, we want to create a world where anyone can belong anywhere. And we shortened it to Belong Anywhere. And it still is that purpose.

31:53 And one of the reasons I loved working at Airbnb and loved my founders and my colleagues is, we lived that purpose every day. We used it every day to make highly costly decisions. Really, you know, decisions that — a purpose is only good in any organization, whether it's a commercial organization or a religion or a political party, if it costs something. If you use it every day and there's a real short-term cost, you bear the short-term cost, because long term it will have a better, longer, more profitable in the company's life term.

32:30 So for example, in Airbnb, let me give you a very specific example. After six months of being there — so in 2013, middle of 2013, the Attorney General of New York issued a subpoena against us for all of our hosts' information, which at the time was 15,000 hosts. And bear in mind, New York was our largest market. It was about 50% of our business at the time. This is very early days. And we knew that if we adhered to that subpoena, our hosts would feel betrayed, because they had just prosecuted a host who we then also was — was not un-prosecuted, but, you know, it was dismissed in court, thinking he was a landlord, bad landlord, which he wasn't. And he'd been fined $35,000 just a few months previously. So our hosts were petrified. And I knew this because I was talking to them a lot.

33:29 This was a big deal. And so what are we going to do? Because no one — as it's — in fact, at one point we decided in the end not to, to squash the subpoena and take the Attorney General to court. And they were aghast. I mean, no one had ever said no to the Attorney General of New York's subpoenas. He just got billions out of the international banks the previous week for causing the 2008 recession.

33:59 So. And here we were, literally no one had heard of us. We were a cocky little startup from California, and no one had heard of us. And we were saying no to the Attorney General. And their lawyers literally said to us, do you have any lawyers? Because no one says no to the Attorney General. But my argument to Brian at the time was, we have to say no, because we have to be in lockstep with our hosts. Without our hosts, we have no business. And we can't betray them. We have to feel their pain as much as they feel it.

34:30 And I said, but we have one huge advantage, which is our hosts and our guests. So we had known that the hotel lobby had been to see the Attorney General the previous week, coincidentally, who issues a subpoena against us. And this was just at the time when the hotels were beginning to stop laughing at us and dismissing us, and beginning to take us seriously as a threat. So what I said to Brian was, look, we can't compete with them on money power and lobbying power. We have one lobbyist for the whole world.

35:06 They have, you know, like phalanxes of them just for New York. There's no way we can beat them on that. So they have lobbying power and people power, I mean money power. But we have people power. We have a lot. No one's loyal to Marriott like the way they are to Airbnb. No one's loyal to Hilton. No one loves Hilton or any of these, you know, Holiday Inns or anything. They just don't. So we have that power.

35:32 And I just learned, because what I did before I joined Airbnb was doing a startup, which still exists, this consultancy which helps mobilize millions into social movements for social change. So I said, I know how to do this. So let's organize them. Like a crazy five months. I got some of Barack Obama's grassroots organizing team from the White House, because he had written the playbook on that, hired them to train our hosts to become political activists, basically. They went up to Albany, lobbied the politicians. We had this petition. We kicked it off with this petition, which I thought we'd get 10,000. Which we found this amazing host who was a veteran of the war, Iraq war, and was now being an Airbnb host to pay for her new career, to go to college.

36:24 And we expected 10,000 signees. We got 350,000 from around the world. That got the notice of the press. The press wrote us up. We totally won the cultural narrative around it. And a whole population of New York and the world, actually, because it became a kind of worldwide story, was on our side. And we won in court. We squashed his subpoena, because it was simply a fishing expedition.