Gardener, Not CEO: Saumya Gupta, Co-Founder, Build IRL

Saumya Gupta was six months postpartum when she read a statistic she couldn't digest: one in three teenage girls feels persistently lonely, and one in four has considered suicide. She'd worked in health her whole life. She left her full-time job without a plan.That question took her and her co-founder Colton Heward-Mills around San Francisco, asking the people who host clubs how it was going. Everywhere they heard the same answer: I'm burnt out. I love this work and I can't keep doing it. So they built Build IRL, an accelerator for social clubs. Three cohorts and more than 100 clubs later, they've open-sourced everything they learned as 12 hot takes at buildaclub.org.Aaron wants to start an e-bike club and Saumya coaches him through her three ingredients: the who, the rhythm, and co-creation, because if you're doing everything, it's not a club. Saumya insists that scale is a myth. There is no club of 5,000 people that works. Relationships don't scale, they deepen.Meanwhile, Aaron and Charlotte debrief a rare shared weekend: Priya Parker at Town Hall, a Best Day Ever in Hillman City, and a thousand paddleboarders raving on Lake Union.00:00 Introduction01:55 Priya Parker: The Art of Fighting07:20 Best Day Ever in Hillman City09:25 Paddleboard Rave on Lake Union15:20 Meet Saum: Build IRL19:20 Saum's Origin Story22:00 What is Build IRL?25:55 The Build a Club Playbook27:10 Club Building Role Play40:15 Scale is a Myth42:45 Club of Club Builders48:05 Closing48:55 Reflection---The most creative artists in America right now aren’t in galleries. They’re in your neighborhood. How We Connected is a front-row seat to the social artists rebuilding human connection. Hear inspiring stories about roller skating crews, bad art clubs, jousting societies, city saunters, Georgian dinner parties, catch-playing challenges, midnight runners, and picnic societies. Hosted by Charlotte Massey and Aaron Hurst, co-founders of the US Chamber of Connection.Aaron Hurst is the co-founder of the US Chamber of Connection. He’s a longtime entrepreneur focused on purpose and community. He founded Imperative and the Taproot Foundation and wrote The Purpose Economy. Charlotte Massey is the co-founder of the US Chamber of Connection and leads community programs nationally. A Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree and former organizer and founder, she works at the intersection of civic life and entrepreneurship.Connect with Uswww.chamberofconnection.orgSaumya Gupta, Co-Founder, Build IRLSaumya has been a community builder all her life. She grew up in India throwing the biggest Diwali parties in her neighborhood and was social secretary of her hostel in undergrad. She spent a decade in health, from Google to healthtech, but the turn came six months after becoming a mom, when she read that one in three teenage girls feels persistently lonely. She left her job without a plan. With co-founder Colton Heward-Mills, she built Build IRL, an accelerator that helped more than 100 San Francisco social clubs get started, funded, and running. This year they open sourced everything they learned as the Build a Club playbook. She hosts the Loneliness Busters podcast, and she'll tell you her guilty pleasure is talking about how to build clubs. Her mantra for founders: you're the gardener, not the CEO.Learn more: https://buildaclub.orgHeylohttps://www.heylo.comHeylo is a community-management platform built for real-world groups of every kind, giving leaders a clean, branded home base to run events, manage members, communicate clearly, and handle payments without friction. It brings scheduling, RSVPs, waivers, announcements, topic-based chats, and membership tools into one place so clubs, teams, and interest groups can stay organized and connected without the noise of traditional social platforms. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.