Doubling Down on Community

Colab opened its doors to the public exactly 4 years ago today and it’s been a dizzying four years to say the least. It has also been a journey that I have thoroughly enjoyed (as have a few of you reading this, I am sure) and would not trade for anything.

As I thought back over the years and events that have happened since that day, my mind flashed back to this post, which I hurriedly put up on the day we opened to capture my thoughts about what inspired the Colab and also what I wanted to achieve with Colab.

Given how much the world has changed since then, I’m amazed by how relevant all the thoughts I shared there still are today. I’m also pleased about how much of what was outlined in that first post, we have been able to achieve today. To a very large extent, we have ticked everything in those boxes, at least to the point where we have proven that it is possible at scale.

While the progress is clear, there’s still a lot of room to grow into. For starters, we’re still some ways of from being that self sustaining ecosystem that is plugged into the rest of the world, that we hope to be, and while I acknowledge that this is a marathon, not a sprint, we will, starting now, deliberately put some structures in place to propel us into the next phase of achieving that goal

So what’s next?

We’re doubling down on Community.

What does that mean? From day one, we’ve been big on community as a core requirement for achieving our central goal, which is to build that self sustaining ecosystem, so our community centred approach would not be a surprise to anyone that has spent some time with us. But we will be taking it up a notch to see how we can leverage on our now global community to even make more impact.

How can we leverage on our community to keep sharing knowledge back home to the guys just starting out on their own journey?

How can we harness the community to support and build startups and scale ups that cross the million dollar mark in revenue?

How can we empower the community to build more solutions to some of our most pressing problems?

These and many more questions are the kinds that we will be trying to answer in the days to come. As always, we’re open to ideas on how to make this happen, so you can reply here, or shoot us an email at hi@sanusii.sg-host.com. Looking forward to hearing from you.

To our Alumni (We really need to find a cool name for everyone who has passed through Colab at some point Colab Mafia?), we will be reaching out to you too.

Hopefully, we’ll be able to look back after some time and see that we have ticked all the boxes suggested here as well.

Lastly, as always, Colab is not the building, but the people, so thank you for all that you do.

Happy 4th Anniversary.

• Sanusi.