A Collective of Curiosity: Community Building in the Age of AI, Part I
When I began my career in marketing, community looked very different. It hadn’t seeped into content subscriptions, closed WhatsApp groups, Slack communities, the work.
Companies fed you content that matched some part of your ‘vibe’, ‘aura’ whatever you’d like to call it—and the active ones engaged with you 1:1 in DMs. They didn’t build whole platforms around keeping you excited.
But these last few years have seen such a massive shift in how we build communities and what that means for startups today. And the evolution of every social media platform’s product strategy stands testament to that change.
There’s a quiet transformation where belonging, not merely broadcasting, has become the new status symbol.
To understand this, let’s go to the basics.
What People Actually Want
People want to be nurtured into being sold to—by a business.
Allow me to explain that. People want effort and they want it consistently. They want their time and money investment to matter beyond just a working product or service.
They want to be seen
They want to matter
They want to belong
And this is where traditional businesses suffer the most.
Traditional vs. New-Age Companies
Traditional businesses behave and believe that by virtue of being an institution, they are far superior compared to mere individuals. They reach a point where they believe small tier engagements don’t support their business objectives. Which might’ve been true a few years ago—but not in the age of AI.
Take Nike’s Run Club. Nike doesn’t need brand building—they’re Nike. But they’ve built run clubs worldwide because one-on-one nurturing propels what people already love. It’s not about selling shoes; it’s about belonging.
IBM Watson for Oncology. They built a product for doctors rather than with them, treating oncologists as customers to market to rather than a community to co-create with. The product failed in part because there was no genuine ecosystem.
Compare that to Hugging Face – they built a community of researchers and builders who want to contribute because they feel ownership. The community isn’t an add-on; it’s the business model.
And now, when you think about new-age companies, they tend to build with you.
Their ego is not with their customer as much as with the industry because the industry is young and new and you’re in a race anyway. The last thing you want to do is fight with the guy who’s giving you water.
This is why newer companies find it easier to build communities. Companies like Gamma, Cursor, Linear have been built by ecosystems that believe in what they’re doing. Users feel seen because founders genuinely get their pain — there’s a strong sense of “they get it.”
Why I Think This Shift Is Happening
Before we get to the patterns, it’s really important to recognize that in a world where we’re constantly online, there is this constant need to be validated, to validate, and to feel like we’re belonging.
Sounds familiar, right?
Think about human evolution. We are a collective species. We are, in some way, going back to our basics – even as we race toward AGI. The shift is coming from this very inherent human trait.
Research on belongingness (Baumeister & Leary, 1995) confirms what community builders know intuitively: humans are wired for connection and in the age of AI, that wiring is firing harder than ever.
Here’s how it’s showing up.
1. We’ve Become More Isolated and Individualistic
Our family sizes have gone nuclear. We have traveled and moved and displaced across the world, so our sense of home is very different. We believe in building inner worlds rather than building outer worlds, so to speak. And when we do that, the idea of our outer world is beginning to evolve as well.
So in this isolation and individualism, we realize that we want what’s closest to our cultural becoming — even if you’re actually selling workflow automations.
The idea is not “I want to know what’s in your mind about a workflow automation entirely” as much as it’s about: How are you and I similar if our baseline interest or excitement is a workflow automation?
2. We Believe We Can Make a Difference in Businesses
And there are reasons for this. The world has become more entrepreneurial. There are more founders. The pandemic has given birth to more businesses, and therefore there is a better sensibility of what makes a business and what thrives for a business.
And this allows us to believe that we are instrumental in the change and in the growth trajectory of businesses around us.
And hence, you know, we don’t want to be children of consequence. We want to be in the driver’s seat or at least the GPS map in some capacity to help businesses run and grow.
A great example of this is Chronicle’s community. Every day people talk about features they want, bugs that they’ve reported, and every day the founders relentlessly work towards making those changes.
Similarly, if you’ve ever seen Emergent’s Discord, you will notice there are people in the community who self-volunteer to solve bugs, help other people and really truly enable the community. Prettyyy sure they’re not on payroll!
3. We Actually, Surprisingly, Care
One would assume that there is a saturation, but the truth is we’ve created this whole mindshare on what matters.
Exclusivity + curiosity + validation = belonging
And communities are designed to deliver exactly that.
If you look at any independent community — whether it’s only about AI builders and founders or if it is about freelancers — you’ll realize that communities are now beginning to be designed for all aspects of our insecurities and our need to belong.
These are the strongest signals that each community sort of fosters for us.
So what does this actually look like in practice?
I’ve been running community for an AI-focused fund for the past few months. I’ve been assimilating information through our events, watching founders experiment, and talking to people like Annie Warner who runs Lenny Rachitsky’s community (my favorite ever, might I add).
And the patterns in what’s working and what’s not are beginning to emerge. There’s a whole Part II of field notes sitting neatly in my ‘to-edit’ folder on what I’m noticing works in communities for AI startups.
More on that next week.
