Community-Led Growth Trends with Olivia O'Sullivan

**David Nebinski** (0:02)
Hey, friend, it's David Nebinski here in Brooklyn, here at the Portfolio Career Podcast, we hope you take ownership of your career and design a life that you want to live. This conversation is with Olivia O'Sullivan. The conversation was recorded at 28th and Park Studio in New York City. If you're looking to record a podcast episode, podcast series or host a signature event, check out their studio in space. Olivia is a partner and COO at Forum Ventures, an early stage fund accelerator and venture studio for B2B tech startups. She has a lot of community building experience, including being the community lead and director of B2B partnerships at Midnight Runners for over five years. She's passionate about community-led growth, which is something we've bonded over recently. She also attended the community-led growth conference that I co-hosted with Substack Hot Off in March, 2026, which is where we actually start this podcast conversation. So if you're interested in community building, company building and community-led growth, this episode is for you. The video of this episode will be available on my newsletter that comes out this coming Sunday at davidnebinski.com/newsletter.
Or you can also just Google David Nebinski's Substack. So excited for you to build and grow your portfolio career. Here we go, the Olivia.
Hey, my name is David. We're here at 28th and Park recording podcasts with Olivia.

**Olivia O'Sullivan** (1:26)
Thank you, David. Excited to be here. Long time listener, first time guest.

**David Nebinski** (1:30)
Oh, wow. Okay. Now no pressure for me. So we're here to talk about community-led growth.
You attended the Community-Led Growth Conference that Zach Hotoff and I co-hosted. I guess let's start there. What brought you to that conference in March 2026?

**Olivia O'Sullivan** (1:50)
Yes. It was a great conference. You guys did it at the Mollins New Space, which was beautiful. I think first and foremost, I'm an angel investor in tight-knit. So I had to go and support Zach. But I think beyond that, I have spent a lot of my career building community, often in non-traditional ways and under titles that aren't necessarily community at the forefront. But I think it's always been something part of my ethos and how I feel as a human being, and I feel like that's extended into my work.
And I love then meeting both practitioners, people who are heads of community at companies, people who are doing it at funds. And I was hoping to kind of open the aperture, meet some hopefully cool people. And I also got to hang out with a lot of people that are building community that I already know and love. So that was what originally brought me to the Community-Led Growth Conference.

**David Nebinski** (2:44)
Cool, cool. And you posted afterwards on LinkedIn. We're not going to pull it up, but I think your post, I don't know if you remember the post, but I think you kind of, like seemed like there were some things that surprised you or really stood out to you from the conference about like who was there, what the conversations were like, or what are the action steps.
Do you remember like how, like what that post was about, or like what stood out to you?

**Olivia O'Sullivan** (3:16)
Yes. I don't remember every detail, but I do remember some of the general sentiment. I think one of the interesting things about this conference, you guys didn't have any speakers, so a lot of it was the people, the practitioners who were coming to the conference, helping to kind of facilitate and lead the conversation. And so a big portion was getting into these small group discussions.
And one of the first groups that I was in was, let's present kind of a challenge that each one of us are thinking through or facing, and then we can help kind of navigate what this looks like as a group. And I found that to be super helpful. I love that dynamic. But one thing that was really interesting to me was, there was this sort of continuous theme across the board of like, how do I get buy-in from the rest of the people in my organization that this thing I'm doing is important? And every person was talking about, I have oodles of metrics of how many people are coming to my events and the NPS and sentiment of how people are feeling about things, and I have all this stuff that I'm showing, and it feels like no one really cares, or the marketing team is deprioritizing this, or I'm not getting the buy-in that I want, and it made me think a lot about how challenging community roles are because you have to service this group of people, oftentimes your customers, and those are in many ways your stakeholders. You have to figure out how to make these people happy and feel connected and purpose and allow them to achieve the goals that they have. But then you also have your business, and that is another set of stakeholders that you have to manage. And I think what's challenging, especially so in community, almost more than any other function, I think, shout out to my marketers, you guys also have this as well, is if people don't really understand the function, if they don't have a shared language of how they think about things, there's also this education piece that has to happen. And so that post was really about like, there's all of these practitioners that are out in the world doing really incredible work. But it's not being adopted widely by businesses, or companies are de-prioritizing some of that work. I think because one, they don't have this shared language and understanding of like, what is this function and why it's important, which is key. And then the second piece is, there is a disconnect between the metrics that these business leaders care about and what the practitioners are thinking about. And I'm at a role, you know, I'm at a small venture fund, we're not a huge company or like 35 people, but I'm in this role as our COO.