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Tech Community Building 9/22/15 OpenLate Meetup
Philip Thomas
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Agenda
Building OpenLate Lessons Learned
Epilogue
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OpenLate Meetup Group
§ Bi-Weekly Tech Talks at OpenDNS
§ Prominent technical speakers
§ SFO and YVR offices
§ Opportunity to share our engineering culture
Engineering.OpenDNS.com/OpenLate/
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19 Months
2776 Community Members
50 Events
10% Technical Hires
2 Cities
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Tech Talks about Innovation in Tech
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A Search for Coffee
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Beginnings – February 2014
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Meetup.com
§ Pros ‒ Access to all Meetup.com members ‒ Ongoing network effect ‒ Send email updates
§ Cons ‒ Dated software ‒ Hard to use ‒ Don’t get access to email addresses
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Team
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Flashback
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Growth
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Themes
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Pitch Night
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Lesson
Have a theme and structure
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Pivot – Tech Talks
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Growth Hacks
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I18N
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135 Bluxome
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1K in 1 Year
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Lyft Line
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What Makes a Good Speaker
§ Keep most talks external
§ A good length is 30-45 minutes
§ Focus on a specific topic rather than a generic one.
§ Have a takeaway for the listener. ‒ I learned about a cool open-source
tool ‒ I learned a new way to approach
some types of problems ‒ I learned about developments in the
industry
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Finding Good Speakers
§ Ask for introductions internally
§ Ask specific people to speak via Twitter. It’s surprisingly effective
§ Always be networking and selling the meetup
§ Co-host an event with another meetup
§ Find draft conference talks
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Recording Talks
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Sustaining Growth
§ Automate
§ Automate
§ Automate
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Retrospective
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Building an audience
§ Share your culture (don’t sell it)
§ Focus on community
§ End results ‒ Social media buzz ‒ Brand advocates ‒ Name recognition ‒ Referrals ‒ Blog content and readers
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Meet (and hire) great people
§ Idea: Your culture should sell itself –and events help expose more people to your culture
§ Build the events you want to attend
§ End result: Like-minded people attend
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Final Thoughts
§ Set a rhythm
§ Keep it quirky
§ Create an independent brand
§ Stickers rock
§ Have fun
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Epilogue
