The Co-Founder Episode Pt. 1

I’m Suman, CEO and co-founder of Marco.

Marco helps companies connect their people through intentional experiences.

We’re focused on up-leveling company gatherings, offsites and retreats, which in a distributed world are one of the primary ways that distributed employees connect with their teams.

Re-launching Turning Companies into Communities

For the past several months, I’ve been hosting a podcast called Turning Companies into Communities.

The purpose of the podcast was to interview community builders who I admired to share lessons that we can use as we turn our companies into communities.

We’ve also been hosting webinars and events with community builders and people leaders who we find inspiring.

We want to unify this content in one home.

I’m starting this newsletter to be able to share tangible lessons that anyone passionate about community-building can use.

We’ll share content and invite you to events, including webinars and fireside chats, focused on the theme of community-building.

If you’re a people leader, company leader, community builder, employee who cares about company culture, or just a friend who is interested in hearing about what we’re building at Marco, we’d love for you to follow along!

These lessons are relevant to almost anyone. We all care about community in one form or another.

Whether that’s the communities that we have at work, or outside of work, humans crave community.

The Co-founder Episode

I’ll be re-releasing several episodes, as well as sharing a bunch more.

The first one is my favorite episode to date, because it’s with my co-founder of four years, Nick Freeman.

You can watch the full episode above (highly recommend!).

I’m feeling a lot of nostalgia as I reflect on the few-year journey of building Marco so far.

Three Key Lessons for Community-Building for Companies

1. Building a community of customers and users can be a huge differentiator - Nick shares stories about the benefit of doing this at Instagram, and community-building with our users is something we’re passionate about at Marco.

2. Having friends at work makes for better business - There’s a ton of data that supports how having friends at work improves employee engagement, retention, customer satisfaction, and even profitability. Both me and Nick have experienced the benefits of work friendships firsthand.

3. Cultivate professional relationships for sales, partnerships, and business opportunities - One of the most gratifying things I find is “blurring the lines” of personal and professional relationships. It’s gratifying to be able to partner and work with people you’ve built personal relationships with, so maintain those relationships!

Nick’s background

Nick was one of the founding engineers at Instagram Stories, helping grow the product from launch to 500M Daily Active Users.

Instagram, from its inception, was a community-focused company.

One of the first 10 hires at Instagram was Dan Toffey, who was brought on to lead Community. Dan built & scaled an advocacy program supporting 35,000+ of Instagram’s most creative voices from around the globe.

Insta-meets

One of the unique things that Instagram did was something called “Insta-meets.” These were events where photographers, creators, and other Instagram users came together to

One of the most gratifying (and helpful) things that emerged from investing in the community for Nick and other Instagram employees was to be able to learn from their actual users through investing in these meetups.

You can make lifelong friendships (and meet your partner) at work

Nick also made some lifelong friends through his work at Instagram. As he reflects on his time at Instagram, he says “those are some of my most memorable moments, it’s crazy to look back on the lifelong friends I made during those few years.”

In addition to having tons of close friends that he’s maintained from his years there, last year, Nick got engaged to Lizzey who he met at Instagram!

We spend over 1/3rds of our lives at work…let that sink in. Given the time we spend at work it goes without saying, we should be enjoying that time.

I love the Harvard Business Review “The Power of Work Friends” that outlines the importance of work friends, and the positive business impact work relationships can have.

• Having friends at work increases employee engagement, retention, team performance, job satisfaction, well-being and other metrics.

• You are 7x more likely to be engaged at work if you have a best friend.

• Companies with higher engagement have 21% higher profitability on average.

• Organizations with higher employee engagement have a 10% increase in customer metrics and 20% higher sales.

• You are over 3x more likely to receive recognition at work with a best friend.

My background

My background was mostly traditional before building Marco.

I started my career at Bain and Compan, a strategy consulting firm.

The first thing you do at Bain is something called Associate Consultant Training.

It’s a program where incoming analysts from across the world fly to Cape Cod for a week of training, and equally importantly, meeting other “Bainies.”

Through ACT, I’ve met some incredible people who are friends, investors, and partners. I’ve been in weddings, lived together with, and built lifelong relationships with people I’ve met at Bain.

My last job before starting to build Marco was at SoftBank’s Vision Fund.

I could write a full blog post about my time at SoftBank. I’ll leave it that there were many “opportunity areas” to improve the culture at SoftBank, but one thing that I did gain was some of my closest friends to this day.

Again, you never know the benefits of relationships that you build in your job and the benefits of those in the future.

Several people, including my former boss and Managing Partner Jeff Housenbold invested in Marco. Friends like Austin Hughes have gone on to do some incredible things like leading the growth product team at Ramp and starting Unify, a startup backed by Open AI, Thrive, and Emergence Capital.

Outside of friends I met at work, one of the most gratifying opportunities I have at Marco is to leverage friendships to grow our business. Given how applicable what we’re building at Marco is to a broad audience, countless friends have made introductions to their people teams at companies ranging from Doordash to Dropbox.

Next post, we’ll share more about the history of Marco and how we’ve gotten to where we are today!