MSSP Alex Hillman Part 1

Alex Hillman: [00:00:00] You good? All right. Here we go.

Three, two, one.

Michael Schweisheimer: Welcome back to the Mission Story Slam podcast, brought to you by PWP Video. I'm Michael Schweissheimer, the executive producer at PWP Video, Mission Story Slam, and an avid collector of rubber chickens. We started Mission Story Slam to share the stories of the organizations that we serve at PWP Video.

Those include non profits, B corporations, triple bottom line companies, and sustainable organizations. People who are on a mission to make the world a better place. We get together twice a year and pick the names of volunteer storytellers out of a horn and hard art coffee can and they compete for a 250 donation to their favorite non profit.

The audience submits votes for the crowd favorite story, which is sponsored by your part time controller, for a 100 donation. We videotape all the stories for sharing on social and with [00:01:00] friends and supporters. And this here podcast entering your ears at this very moment is about the story behind those stories.

What in the world motivates someone to tell a story in front of an audience? Like seriously, what does it, how did they come up with a story they wanted to tell? And what was the experience like? Plus we get to learn about the storytellers themselves. And sometimes those storytellers are sort of walking open books, or at least that's one way I think of today's guest, Alex Hillman.

He's typically introduced as the co founder of the legendary co working community, Indie Hall, but he is so much more. He's the author of The Tiny MBA, co founder of Stacking the Bricks, and he also started the 10, 000 Independence Project. Alex, I am a little winded and exhausted just reading that bio, but I am excited.

You and me both! And I know there's stuff that's not even in there, which feel free to bring in other things that I am not thinking

Alex Hillman: about. I never envy anybody who has to do the intro. But also I never know exactly what's going to be in the intro. So it's, it's just [00:02:00] as much of a fun surprise for me as it is for you, dear listener.

Michael Schweisheimer: That is, I think part of the fun and part of why I like to actually read the intro with you on so that you know how I'm setting it up and which type of description I'm giving of all the things that you do. Yeah. But yeah, I really. I don't know. Actually, I'll ask. I feel for good reason. Everybody leads with Indy Hall.

Maybe, you know what? Once in a while I meet someone who doesn't know what Indy Hall is. What's the elevator version of what Indy Hall is?

Alex Hillman: You bet. Yeah. Indy Hall is a community of independents, entrepreneurs, freelancers, and remote workers, people who do all different kinds of work. But the thing we have in common is that at least some of the time we don't like the feeling of being alone.

As a community, I started in 2006 community eventually wanted a clubhouse that turned into one of the first coworking spaces in the world, the first coworking space in Philadelphia and one of the longest running. These days we are a mix of an online community and in person clubhouse and increasingly a platform [00:03:00] for collaboration with other awesome communities that are doing amazing things through the act of bringing people together in the city of

Michael Schweisheimer: Philadelphia.

I've known you for a while, is the, have you always referred to Indie Hall as a clubhouse because I feel like there was a time where you talked a little more about it being a co working community. Yeah. And I love the fact that you're community focused and you are an expert community builder, but tell me about that clubhouse word.

Is it newer in the vocabulary?

Alex Hillman: We're in like a return to roots mode.

Michael Schweisheimer: It's better than return to office

Alex Hillman: in some ways, right? That's also true. Um, I wrote a post. I think it was the one year anniversary of after we had opened the original space on Strawberry Street in 2007. And it was sort of a tribute to the idea of a clubhouse.

And that was how Jeff and my partner, who I started Indie Hall with, and I... Jeff DeMasi. Jeff DeMasi, right. We thought about it not as we need a place to work. Jeff had a literal office in South Philly. I also didn't need a place to [00:04:00] work. I had a comfortable place to work at home, but what I... have and what so many people who connected with the idea shared was this idea that there, where do I go to find people like me?

There's no door to walk through literal or conceptual. And so clubhouse really was the mental model that we had for the very beginning. And what's wild is that I think was also. The default mental model for coworking early on. And as coworking evolved and became more mainstream and some of the bigger corporate players came in, coworking as a term started to become more associated with office than it did with clubhouse.

Got it. And so. And I think we got drug along with that. And then some ways we leaned into it. People are looking for this. We want to be what people are looking for. And there are, from a pure business and marketing perspective, being the thing people are looking for is way better than having to explain what the hell you are.

Every time you say what

Michael Schweisheimer: you are, people at some point, [00:05:00] people know what a coworking space is. And if you say, yeah, I run a clubhouse. They're going to be like,

Alex Hillman: what is that? Please to explain as we've had a chance to restart some things in a way in the last year and a half. Coming out of quarantine and the shifts that we went through during the first few years of the pandemic, it was an opportunity to press reset.

And among the things that we've thought about is like, well, what do people really need now? And once again, most people don't need an office. The assumption is that if you're working from home, you probably have some kind of setup.

Michael Schweisheimer: Well, let's face it during, during COVID, even people that didn't have a setup who could work remotely.

Now have a set up.

Alex Hillman: Correct. And that's also not true for everybody. Some people can't work from home. They don't have the space. They don't have that extra room. They're sharing it with partners or family members. There's a bunch of reasons why getting out of the house is, is necessary, but there's a bunch of other places where you can go rent an office or a desk.

And being another one of those just didn't make sense. But what the common theme across all of them, and we hear this now [00:06:00] a lot is, and I tried those other spots, but. Nobody seems to talk to each other and some people describe it as a vibe. Some people describe it as a sense of community, whatever you use to describe it.

The thing I think that they are describing is what happens when people are coming to a place, a particular place on purpose on that day. For the same reason as most of the other people there, and that is for some reason they needed a change of scenery and wanted that to be around

Michael Schweisheimer: other people. I was mentioning to you just before I hit record, I'm planning to go to Indie Hall on Saturday for your side project Saturday.

Which I'm, yeah, and I've... been a member now since, I don't know, well before the pandemic, but I don't use the space all that terribly often. I'm more part of the community, I think, is even though I could be more engaged, but it's really, yeah, I guess that is part of that feeling is like, Oh, here's an event.

That's just like, Goosing me to leave [00:07:00] my normal space where things distract me to just spend time in community with other people that work alone on a side project and have a block of time where I can actually make progress or even get a hit a goal and get something done. And I think that's, that to me is like a really interesting, just example of kind of how work can work in community, even though you think of a lot of what we do as being solo.

Alex Hillman: I'll also add, you didn't say the exact words, but I'm reading between the lines a little bit. You said, you know, I don't really use the space much at all, and I'm a part, I feel like I'm a part of the community, even if I'm not as engaged as I could be, which by the way, there are so many different ways to engage.

Never. I always tell people never feel guilty. Oh, I, I

Michael Schweisheimer: don't feel guilty. Good. Just, you know,

Alex Hillman: I,

Michael Schweisheimer: I know that's something I under leverage. I'm just saying, I don't feel bad about it, but I'm like, Oh, there's this really cool community that I could either contribute to more or. Receive more joy from, but no

Alex Hillman: guilt.

But what I was getting at is that what I've learned is for a lot of folks, just knowing [00:08:00] that it's there if, and when I need it is actually a big part of the value, even when you're not actively using it. And in a world where so many things are shifting and changing, whether it's the work that we're doing for people who have more traditional jobs, and when you leave a workplace, you also leave behind part of your social circle or other parts of life are changing and things like that.

And so for a lot of folks over many years, the. They don't use Indie Hall. They belong to Indie Hall. Yep. And the fact that there are things they could participate in should they want to, and they can believe and know that it's reliably there of many of the things that I, I view as our job, that is one of them is, is that sense of I can trust that it'll be there when I need it.

That these people are there, are there when I need them.

Michael Schweisheimer: You mentioned being able to hit a reset button. I think that's a really good opportunity for us to actually play your story from Mission Story Slime 8. You've told a story now twice. You're part of our fifth Story Slime, which was virtual [00:09:00] right at the start of the pandemic.

Both of your stories ended up related to the impacts of what do you do when you run a co working community in a physical space when the government shuts everything down. Um, but I really, I think your second story, which I'm going to play in its entirety, I think does a really nice job of helping understand what happened and also how you approached getting through that with your community.

So

Alex Hillman: there's a date seared in my brain that I think I share with many of you, if not all of you, and that is, uh, March 16th, 2020. Uh, a couple days before that, I flew back to the United States from Indonesia, where the scene around this COVID thing looked a little different than here, but I also didn't know what it looked like here because no one knew what it looked like here.

And I landed, uh, at Philadelphia International on a Friday night, Saturday morning, I texted my tiny [00:10:00] team and I said, things are scary out there. I think we should get together this week and make a plan. And if I'm right, our government's probably going to close everything on Monday. And I'd rather have a plan and not need it than find out we need a plan we don't have.

And I learned on Monday that I was right. I don't like being that kind of right. And at the end of that plan, which mostly focused on Communicating with our community and our fellow businesses and saying what, what we were going to do, it involved calling my landlord and saying, Hey, uh, there's no rent on April 1st.

What do you want to do about that? And they could have responded a lot of different ways, and I want to give them credit where credit is due. In which they said, well, rent will be due, but none [00:11:00] of us know what's going to happen next. And so we're not going to charge you any late fees and penalties. How kind and generous of them.

And at this time we're thinking, two weeks, how bad could it be? And I'd done the math, and I was like, we could... Maybe handle two months as a business who had spent 16 years bringing people together as the core of what we do To be told that the thing that you're really good at is gonna kill people is a really scary moment and I Was looking for support anywhere I could get it So fast forward a couple of months and that same landlord Hasn't called That's interesting.

Landlords usually call when you don't pay them. And, uh, weeks pass, months pass. And I finally get the call that explains that they've had a change of leadership as well. And so it's going to be a little while. I breathe a sigh of [00:12:00] relief. We've got a little bit of time left. We'll figure things out. Months pass.

Finally get in touch with the new... Leadership at this company, this real estate company, and they say, so what's your plan? And I said, I don't know. What's your plan? You bringing people back to the office? No, I said me either and Unlike most businesses our folks pay For the space that they come to versus the company paying for the space Where their employees go that'll make sense in a minute and after what ended up being About a year and a half of the weirdest game of chicken in my life.

Where a landlord who, to call them a landlord feels generous, these two fucking stormtroopers would call and say, Sign this deal to bring your people back into the office. And I would say, No, here's the thing I [00:13:00] can do. And then they'd ghost me for three months. Rinse, repeat. In July of 2021, the co working community that I started in 2006 was relieved from the lease that we had and the three quarters of a million dollars in debt that in that moment I had owed the landlord.

I spent a lot of nights laying awake going, I don't know what's going to happen, but that number keeps getting bigger. And when they made the offer that allowed us to get out of that deal, I breathed that sigh of relief and then I said, What do we do now? And we had a lot of operational things to do. We had to pack up the office, get things out.

And among things that were in common with the beginning of the story is we had to figure out what to tell our community. Who, this, this space was not an office. This was their home. It was a place where they could go and feel safe and comfortable. And for the last year and a half, we didn't have a place to feel safe and comfortable other than our own homes.

And even then, it was unsure if [00:14:00] that was a place we could be safe and comfortable. And... My, my teammate Adam, who's here tonight, and another, Anaya, spent a lot of time talking about how do we tell folks in a period of time where things are so uncertain, what comes next. And while I've never been much of a video game player, I was reminded by my wife, who is, and a bunch of my friends who are, of this idea of a thing called New Game Plus.

And that's what I want to share with you tonight, and what I shared with our community in that time. There are certain video games where when you get to the end, you beat the game. You finish the story, you beat the mega boss, whatever it is, and at the end the game says You want to play again? Which is kind of nuts if you think about it.

What kind of masochists are we that we want to play that game again? But New Game Plus is a special kind of reboot. It's not go back to the beginning from scratch. It's go back to the beginning with all of the weapons, all the money, all the [00:15:00] stuff you've accumulated throughout the course of that game.

Same story, with advantages. It's a pretty cool way to play a game. And the game changes, uh, by nature of that, that gameplay. And I started thinking about what we were about to go through, where we had lost something big, our home, but we had the greatest thing we'd ever had, which is our community, our relationships, our reputation, and we still had a future because we made the decision to close and keep our community members safe.

And so, what we said to our community is, you know, we're closing this space and I don't know what the future looks like. But we get New Game Plus. Whatever we build, we get to build with our relationships, with our stories, with a decade and a half of experience, and everything else that we've done along the way.

And I think, my hope, my hunch, maybe I'm optimistic, is whatever we build next will be even better than the first chapter. [00:16:00] And... While I didn't like being right about closing, I loved being right about the next chapter because three months after we closed and I was not looking to sign a lease because no think October, 2021, nobody knew what you wanted to sign a lease in that time made no sense whatsoever, but I was at a wedding with one of our community members and I ran into another longtime member.

Who had been showing photos of a beautiful new space that he built for his company that he started in our old space 12 years prior. I said space looks beautiful. He goes it is, but I'm there by myself all the time. I said, oh, how interesting. We're a community of people who feel alone when we work from home.

Maybe we can help each other and I think back to the moment when I landed in America coming back from Indonesia where it felt like this is where it all ends and I'm gonna have to come up with an entirely new start. The thing I'm the best at is killing people. To know that [00:17:00] today we're better than we were going into the pandemic because we played the new game plus mode on everything we've done up to this point.

Makes me really proud of what we've done, who our community is, and the fact that we prioritize taking care of people over a landlord who's run by a bunch of stormtroopers.

Michael Schweisheimer: So I gotta ask, how is New Game Plus going?

Alex Hillman: It's a lot of fun. The best way I could describe it is it's, it's still a ton of work.

This mode of work reminds me of major periods of growth and transition, but man, it's a good time. And I think the, that analogy of new game plus, I mentioned all the things that we bring forward with us and all the weapons, all the weapons, all the tools and stuff like that. And. The, the relationships that are being rekindled are really [00:18:00] fun to like connect with folks and be like, let's do a thing together.

And they're like, okay. And I'm like, yeah, like everything we've got here is what, what's the thing you want you're working on? And is there a way that this helps elevate that and make that better or more interesting or just easier for you? Or also just, would it be fun for us to do a thing together? And the ability to go to folks and be like, Hey, let's like, let's play.

And that, and, and know that is. inherently valuable and has been building momentum in a way that I haven't felt in a really long time. It's been an absolute blast.

Michael Schweisheimer: When I'm listening to your story, thinking about your story, I think about that opportunity as a business person to go back through the levels of all the early monsters and having all of the experience and tools and blah, blah, blah.

I'm not a video game player either, so I'm extrapolating from things I remember as a teenager. But having that opportunity to do that, and I just think, oh, that would be so cool as a business person to get that reboot. So, I do want to know how that ends up playing [00:19:00] out for this phase of IH, but the other question I have that I never...

realized is that mature community is also playing new game plus, right? You've got all of these members who are coming back to community at Indy Hall, who are also experienced and

Alex Hillman: savvy. Yeah, no, that's an excellent observation. Operationally. And business wise, there's so many things that once we do them, that becomes the way we do them.

And it's really hard to remove parts and put them back in while the plane is in mid flight. But the, the, the reboot let us go. If we're going to bring something back that we were doing before, ask the question. Hey. Do we even need to bring it back? Are we bringing it back just because we miss it or because it was useful and valuable?

Two, if we're going to bring it back, can we bring it back in a different way? For all the things that were good about it, it was a part that if we could design that problem out, is there a new tool? Is there a new workflow? [00:20:00] Whatever it is. And so every Thing we introduce is an opportunity to both pull from the inventory new game plus style, but also look at the inventory and go, is this serving us?

Is this sparking joy? Um, and Marie condo to business. Very nice. All right. And. And it's, there's no one big thing that changes, lots of little subtle things that allowed us to spend more time on the stuff that we thought was meaningful stuff that would streamline operations for the business from early on.

A decision that we made was every membership at a certain number of days included in the membership. And we actually manually took attendance of who was there that day to deduct from what was originally a giant spreadsheet. And then we tied into our membership software and stuff like that. But it was a manual process.

It sounds like hell. And it was hell. It was actually, it wasn't hell when it was a dozen and a half people there on a day, but when it was a hundred people there on a day and starting and leaving at different periods of time [00:21:00] and the team was busy doing other things, the intentionality behind doing it manually.

Initially was there was no tools for going in spaces, but then the justification to continue doing it was this is an excuse for our team to have eyes on the space and know who is around because a big part of the community building role is just having that kind of. consistent sense of what's going on, just eyes on things, but it just, it was proportionally, the juice was no longer worth the squeeze, but introducing a check in system where members were either had to check themselves in.

Trying to retrain people on that mid flight. I was like, that's a whole other nightmare, right? When we were able to reopen, we made some changes in the software platforms that we're using to make it easy for people to check themselves in. But we also had the ability to call this a gift of the pandemic.

It feels a little weird, but the fact that When people check in, we can remind them like, [00:22:00] Hey, this is part of our internal contact tracing tool as well. So if somebody were to report, uh, COVID exposure, we now have a very easy way to pull a list of all the people that were there on that day and say, there were actually physically the bill.

And so this is, this is another layer of caretaking of the people that are in this space. But yeah, I think it's been interesting to really take a look at the day to day of how we run things. And Adam and I work really closely together and go, if we're going to bring a thing back. Let's do it on purpose, and let's learn from the way it was before, not instead of just shoving it back in because we can.

Dave Winston: Hi, I'm Dave Winston, and I've been a storyteller all my life. Sure, I started out by telling whoppers to my mom about who broke the lamp. But now I tell true stories for a living as a producer for PWP Video. And I occasionally take to the stage at various story slams. Today, I'm talking to you as the producer of Mission Story Slam, [00:23:00] Michael Schweizheimer and I developed Mission Story Slam for the nonprofit community of Philadelphia to help us come together and share the stories about how we came to a mission driven life and yes, I have a few beers with friends in the process in the first two episodes of my podcast commentary, I've told you what Mission Story Slam storytelling is.

It's not a TED Talk, and it's not stand up comedy. In our last episode, I talked about how it's important that the story be as true as you remember it. But I think the thing we get asked about most frequently is the theme. How closely does the story need to match the theme? And the answer is... That's totally up to the judges.

The judges are given two areas to score your story, content and delivery. Essentially, was it a good story and was it told well? One of the [00:24:00] questions the judges are told to ask themselves when scoring content is, did it fit the theme? To be honest, I've seen judges score strictly on this and I've seen judges completely ignore it.

You never really know. I once heard someone tell a fascinating and incredibly moving story about managing the care of their dying parents. It was one of those stories that was so well constructed and told and had the audience hanging on every word and it was hands down the best story of the evening.

Just about everyone in the place was wiping away a tear when it was done. And the theme of the night was unemployed. And it did win the night. So my advice to you is, come out and just tell your story. Tell the best story you can. Make it original. Make it your emotional truth. [00:25:00] Make it real. And just know that sometimes the win is not the prize money.

Sometimes the win is the connection you make with someone in the audience. Prize money's nice, but a great story can change lives. And at Mission StorySlam, in addition to the judges prize, we have the crowd favorite award. Often, a completely different story will win that, as the audience most often votes its heart.

And not the rubric. Don't forget the tickets for the December 5th mission story Slam with the theme. Moving right along. Our first slam at National Mechanics on Third Street are available from the link on our website, mission story slam.org, and from the event links on Facebook and LinkedIn. You could follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and now TikTok.

Or become a missionary and sign up for our slam mail [00:26:00] email blasts. You can find that on the contact page of missionstorieslam. org.

Michael Schweisheimer: Tell me about the project with stacking the bricks.

Alex Hillman: Sure. So within a couple of years after we started Indie Hall, which was already kind of a professional transition for me because when I started Indie Hall, I was a freelance web developer.

Within a couple of years, I had become very good friends with this person named Amy Hoy. Who had a bit of notoriety on the internet kind of early days of software as a service businesses and she had started a B2B software as a service that was a time tracking tool that had launched and was basically making money on day one and was growing, she was growing that into a successful business with her partner, who happened to be her husband and, Oh wait, is this NoCo?

Michael Schweisheimer: This is NoCo. Okay, because you should know PWP uses NoCo. We were actually introduced by one of our producers, so I had no idea. And then I met [00:27:00] Thomas Cannon, who doesn't even live here. So, like, that's fascinating.

Alex Hillman: Amazing. So, Amy builds a software product. I create Indie Hall. And these things look very different, but in our conversations, we realized there was a couple of really interesting and important similarities in that people were confused about how we built them.

Well, how did Indie Hall have members on day one? Well, because I built the community first, people would say, how did you launch a software as a service? Like, how did you get your first customers? And Amy's like, They were ready to sign up on day one. And we realized that we had something that was obvious to us, was not obvious to other people.

And we had a lot of friends with the same kinds of creative skills who were interested in entrepreneurship. They had the skills to make stuff, but there was this mental model of. The only way to start a successful business is to go raise a bunch of venture capital, build a thing and hope you were right.

And so this was also, we're talking 2008, nine, 10 kind of the venture capital, very much dominated sort of the zeitgeist [00:28:00] of conversations around tech and business. And Amy and I are just scratching our heads and going, but that's not the only option. And for the people who. We're viewing the options as at one end of the spectrum, a corporate job, they hate at the other end of the spectrum, either a startup job they hate or raising venture capital and starting their own startup.

So Amy and I started sharing what we had done, uh, in terms of how we built a relationship with a community of people, an audience, some would say, as we started sharing that people. Their response was, this is great. We want more. And so Amy and I teamed up to turn that into a platform and a business that includes a number of things.

There's an entire sort of public facing website with articles and podcasts and videos and resources and some mini workshops and stuff like that, as well as more robust paid products. My book, the tiny MBA, Amy's book, just fucking ship and our flagship course, 30 by [00:29:00] 500.

Michael Schweisheimer: Physical copy in my hands of the tiny MBA.

Yeah. You made a statement I hear from a lot of people about that, like, a benefit of the pandemic was, and I'm wondering when, as a society, we're not going to completely be able to abandon our collective trauma around that experience. Yeah. But, I'm wondering how long it's going to take, like, I've gotten a little more comfortable with expressing that the pandemic was actually ended up being a growth period for PWP because a lot of our clients needed our help to have virtual events.

And we actually had some growth during the pandemic. And for a while, that was one where I felt a little guilty because people would be like, Oh, are you guys okay during the pandemic? And I'm like, growing, sorry, you know, but not sorry. So it's just, it's yeah, it's an interesting.

Alex Hillman: I'll tell you what was wild is as we've talked about, I work on a bunch of different things and during the pandemic, the stacking the bricks business grew.

All time highs because people are looking for education, looking for ways to better themselves. And entrepreneurship is a thing [00:30:00] that a lot of people are either considering for the first time or taking seriously. And some business gangbusters, Indy Hall, like on, on a life support and to have both of those things be true at the same time was like, what a head game to manage that on any given day, I've got one business that is thriving and another one that.

I'm just not sure how much longer I can keep it alive. Took some like emotional and mental gymnastics on the day to day. You're, you're,

Michael Schweisheimer: you're managing growth and success, which is its own set of challenges while managing, like, there's obviously those questions about knowing when it's also time to maybe hang up your keys to the clubhouse, but I'm glad you didn't, but I know that I became more engaged with the online community and.

Did that online community, did it bloom during the pandemic and has it stayed as the pandemic has weighed?

Alex Hillman: A thing that has made Indie Hall unique is that online community has always been a part of what we do. [00:31:00] It's not a bolt on to a renting a coworking desk. I always think of Indie Hall as the community and we have.

And we have multiple different places to gather. The clubhouse or space that we have at any given time is one of them. And we have two different sort of venues online. One is a chat room type platform on Discord. And the other is more of a forum. And for our entire history, People have their participation is varied in terms of very few people to participate in all three.

Some people participate in two and some participate in one and which ones they participated in shift over time. That's always been true. And it's a stat that blows people's minds is that even pre pandemic. More than 70 percent of our members came to the physical space once a month or less or less knowing that when they were in Philadelphia, there's a place they could go.

There's all these different reasons why the online community glued together during the pandemic. We quickly shifted basically 100 percent of our resources and attention [00:32:00] into how do we. Translate the experiences of in person to online, and also how do we just bolster the online stuff that already works.

And to say it thrived is putting it lightly. It was, I think for a number of people, it was a lifeline. People who live alone. In particular, people that were, even if they lived with other people, if they were having very different life experiences, it was, uh, it was almost like the value of going to social media, but without the odds of something terrible coming across your feed.

It's a little island of, of, of people being generally kind and nice

Michael Schweisheimer: to each other. Well, my experience on the online community seemed to, there was a couple of things that I noticed. One was, I, I felt like I kept seeing intros from people who were like, Hey, I was a long time Indy Hall member when I lived in Philadelphia, but I moved to, you know, insert state or country here, but they were all like coming back.

And I think the other part of the conversation was that for everyone who might have either physically moved away or [00:33:00] maybe was coming in very rarely, it gave back the. The water cooler that was taken away, right? You couldn't go to the office and just have a little chat. Of course I saw it as a safe social space, but it wasn't just a chat group or a WhatsApp chain.

It really was like a place to have community that has some relationship to work, but could also talk about other things just like you do at work and have those bonds. It was really, it's been fun.

Alex Hillman: I have a lot of fond memories. I know a number of people who do. We were hosting Saturday morning cartoons.

Every Saturday for like a year and a half. I forgot about that one. And it was a thing that started on a lark. I went and I started downloading episodes of classic cartoons. Scooby Doo, X Men the animated series. Just stuff that was fun. You and I are different

Michael Schweisheimer: classic cartoons,

Alex Hillman: but that's cool. It was so fun.

And it created its own little micro community. And there were so many things like that emerged during [00:34:00] quarantine. A Dungeons and Dragons campaign group started during quarantine that is still going every Sunday to present. So yeah, it's... I will say it's shifted as people now are no longer stuck in one place where all the interaction happens on a computer.

There's definitely folks that are spending less time in front of their screen. There's people that were very active that are less active. But the fact that there is still like a beating heart that folks who join now can find and see that as a part of it is, I'm really proud of and I think it's really cool.

Michael Schweisheimer: I'm gonna interrupt with something else. Really cool. Today's conversation with Alex Hillman was so much fun that we are releasing it as our first two-parter. In the second episode, we'll take a much deeper dive into building community with intention. We will release that episode very soon so you can keep on listening.

In the meantime, head on over to mission story slam.org to get your tickets for Mission Story Slam nine with the theme. Moving right along. The slam is at our new location, [00:35:00] national Mechanics, and it's happening on Tuesday, December 5th. That is in 2023. For those of you who like to listen to older podcasts, the mission story slam podcast is produced by Dave Winston and brought to you by PWP video.

We are video with a mission. You can find us at p w p video. com. I'm Michael Schweizer and I truly look forward to sharing the next story behind the story

Alex Hillman: with you.