Introducing: The Multitudes Podcast (OnDeck edition)

As part of the On Deck Founder's Fellowship, I'm inviting other Fellows to the Multiverse to connect with one another.

This stage of the Fellowship represents an excellent use case for Multitudes for several reasons:

• The Fellowship is designed to connect other founders to each another for the purpose of fostering peer-to-peer learning, support, and community (we are encouraged to dedicate the first two weeks of the Fellowship to scheduling as many one-on-ones with each other as possible)
• The Fellowship is entirely remote with Fellows dispersed all over the world (>30% are outside of the US)
• There are 290 Fellows in total, all with impressive backgrounds, inspiring stories, and lofty ambitions
• The only information we have to determine whether or not to schedule one-on-ones are the one-page bios that each Fellow submitted (which presents a novel and a half worth of reading!)

Granted, several of the Fellows have very specific needs (e.g. searching for a technical co-founder, advice on getting to market) and interests (e.g. fintech/cryptocurrency, health and fitness), so, of course, it makes sense to sift through these bios and search for what's relevant.

But if the goal is to foster community – and it very much is – it's important to seek a human-to-human connection first. Communities can't simply be built on transactional, quid-pro-quo interactions where I only interact with you if I think you can benefit me in some direct way.

Furthermore, we limit ourselves by only looking for people within our industry or geographic location. The opportunity presented by being in an extremely diverse cohort of individuals from all walks of life is to reach outside your comfort zone and familiarity.

And it's on these two pillars where I believe that Multitudes can provide value:

1. By randomly pairing individuals and masking their identities (so that you don't enter into a space of judgment before you've even had a chance to interact with the individual)
2. By creating a safe space and conversational structure for individuals to discover one another through

Over the coming weeks, I'll be inviting more and more founders to the Multiverse. One thing I'm exploring through these sessions is tracking their overall impact on  community development. More on that in subsequent posts!

Until then, here's the inaugural podcast. In this episode, I randomly paired founders Robert Nowell (of Hearth) and Oladele Fadairo (of PrepFit) in the Multiverse, where they discussed their earliest memories of going on the internet, their first friends, and went deep on a question they wouldn't normally ask a stranger.