Susanna Harris (00:00)
people that you want to attract to you? Who are the people who are going to be helpful? What is the experience that you want them to have when they're interacting with each other? You don't need to boil the ocean. There are so many people in the world. 50 of the right people, that is going to be so much better than 10,000 people who
are not on the same page and meet each other, disagree, the whole thing falls apart.
Joachim Eeckhout (00:20)
Welcome to Science Marketer, the podcast where we dive into how science-driven companies can communicate and market more effectively. Today, we're diving into a topic that every science marketer should pay to. How to build and engage with scientists' communities.
My guest today has dedicated her career to creating exactly those kinds of communities. Susanna Harris is the Director of Platform at Breakout Ventures,
A venture capital firm investing in early stage biotech startups.
In this conversation, we'll explore what it takes to start a community from scratch, how to nurture genuine engagement among scientists, and what marketers in life sciences can learn from these experiences.
So whether you're working on building thought leadership, engaging researchers, or simply trying to better understand your scientific audience,
This episode will give you practical insights into building communities that truly matter.
Joachim Eeckhout (01:13)
Hi, Susanna. Welcome to Science Marketer podcast.
Susanna Harris (01:16)
Hello, thank you. I'm very excited to be here.
Joachim Eeckhout (01:18)
So let's jump in the topic. Your career has been deeply rooted in engaging scientists, and that's what we want to talk about today. So could you share what first motivated you to build communities in this field and how your career evolved around this topic?
Susanna Harris (01:35)
I think for me, communities, it really comes down to these base needs of people. And I think that's one of the things that folks really don't think about from the start. Right now when we say community, it's a little bit of a fluffy topic or it's an add on. It's the thing that you say, oh, you know, it'd be nice if we had a community. But the reality is, that humans as a society forever, we're based on communities.
can't really get all of our needs met unless there are other people around us who have similar goals, who aspire to the same things, who hold each other in esteem. Those are all basic needs that we rely on others for. really the originating factor for wanting to build communities, just myself and I think others, is kind of a sense of loneliness or a sense of isolation and feeling like...
I'm the only person or I'm the only person that I can see that is either struggling with these things or wants to do these things. I think it's a thing that we've all experienced when we get into a certain room or a certain space. For me, it was getting into grad school and feeling initially that, I found my people. I can get really excited about microbiology and really excited about these weird little details that any other space in my life.
entering a party or talking to friends, can kind of see them go, that's nice, all right, let's move on. And finally, finding these group of people who they were just excited and they were just as excited as I was. So yeah, it's about finding those people and instead of it all being a one-off interaction, that those people are also friends with each other and you kind of create these really exciting.
new ideas, new experiences, but in any of the situations, you feel like you belong.
Joachim Eeckhout (03:18)
before going into more details, can you maybe explain your past experience with building communities? So I think there was an initiative you created, PhD balance, right? So maybe explain a bit more and tell us also like what you are doing today with breakout ventures in terms of community building.
Susanna Harris (03:36)
It's been a really interesting pathway for me because building communities was never a thing that I really did intentionally from the start. It's easy to look back now and kind of draw this clear pathway from X to Y to Z. What it all started from, like you mentioned, was this group called PhD Balance. And that was just this little experiment that I tried where I said, okay.
There was this paper that came out that talked about how grad students were dealing with really high levels of depression and anxiety. I sort of looked around and felt, again, that isolation going, well, yeah, I resonate with that. That's something that I am dealing with. I'm dealing with these mental health issues. But it must not be reflective of the room that I am in currently because everyone else is doing a great job. There's no way that a quarter of the people in here would understand what I'm going through.
So it didn't start as a community, it just started as storytelling where I went onto Instagram. It was a platform that people were starting to really lean into for more of these vulnerable conversations and just put myself out there, said, hey, here's the image that you see on Instagram. Here's the person who I'm trying to kind of project. And then here's a 2000 character background of the things that I don't really talk about and that why life gets hard.
You know the things that maybe you don't bring to the lab or you don't bring into your social circles But you go home and you have to deal with yourself And I just encouraged other people or I kind of put out this ask and said is there anybody else who wants to do this is anyone else going to? To say also me and it really scary actually because I I guess the nice thing about Having a very small Instagram page at the time is you can just delete it. I wasn't too worried about it, but There was this one
very brave person and she stepped up next and she had this story. think it was, I think the picture was her with her dog and then it was this story that was really, really intense and it was really vulnerable and it was, I just felt really honored to be able to hear it and to share it. And from there, it kind of just snowballed where another person wanted to share and it kept going and then people said, hey, I'm dealing with more than depression or anxiety or.
different mental health issues, being a parent in grad school, all of these different pieces that sort of wrapped around the theme of community. That we have a group of people who has these same ambitions, has these same fears, and just doesn't have an outlet to talk about it. It doesn't feel like they belong because they don't see other people talking about this thing. And it just, I don't know, it's really fun now. The sort of most amazing part to me, we ran this for five years and I say we because
Over that time, everyone was volunteering. There, I think there was a total of 103 volunteers over those five years, 10 to 15 at any given time, literally all around the world. The, one of the hardest things that we had to deal with was thinking about how do we schedule a video meeting, which was before those were super standard that works for Europe, California, Boston, and Australia. so.
Kudos to everybody who jumped on these calls at horrible hours of the day. But it was just this like online you could find people that you didn't, you might not be able to talk to other people nearby you in those same ways. And I guess it...
it turned into a community. People started identifying each other or started seeing each other's stories and it no longer went through me. And that's sort of the definition to me of community is that you don't have a central hub. It's not that everything feeds into this one mix master and then comes back out. Occasionally people get connected to each other. It's actually very different where you kind of create a system where the center keep putting out energy and provides that that kind of base alignment.
But then you have all these little pockets and these nodes that form. And so I started to see people who would say, hey, I saw your story. I'm also in Madrid. Let's hang out. And they would form their own little pockets. it was just really lovely. And it was very unintentional, definitely during grad school. This all started when I was, I think, a third or fourth year in grad school doing my PhD. Honestly, I don't know that I would have started if I knew.
how big it was gonna get and it's, I think it's for, I don't know, maybe for the rest of my life gonna be the best thing that I've ever done because I've seen so many friendships and so many projects come out of that. And turns out that that can be a job. You can have a role where you are thinking about how do we bring all these people together? How do we have a core goal? And what I do now at Breakout Ventures,
We are a biotech venture firm, which essentially just means that we're out there looking around for what's the next biotech company, what's the next science-based company that's going to change the world, that's going to create a product that saves lives or that helps our climate, speeds up medications, those sorts of things. How do we find them? And my job is to then think, how do we create that community of people who needs to be around them?
in order for the founders of these companies to reach that ultimate success? How do we create something where similar to PhD balance, where you had people saying, hey, I had that interest or wow, what are the odds? We met each other through this. Let's run off and do our own thing. Yeah, how do I create something that people see the breakout logo on a founder's page and have that fuzzy feeling and go, yeah, I'd like to learn more. I'd like to help this person out.
It can be the make or break sort of aspect for these startup companies who might not have those connections or might not have that insight to the industry. Having that little boost can make a really big difference.
Joachim Eeckhout (09:11)
And what's interesting, I think, and what's so special is that you interact with scientists, you try to build communities around or from scientists. from my experience and many others, think scientists are usually more skeptical of everything that looks...
a bit like marketing oriented, right? So sometimes community buildings has this connotation. So in your experience, how do you make them engage authentically and without having this bad perception?
Susanna Harris (09:42)
I think the biggest mistake I see people make when trying to build a community, I guess there's two biggest mistakes. So just broadly, the biggest mistake is seeing their community as an audience, trying to always center themselves. The whole point is how do we make them think about breakout ventures constantly or whatever it is? How do we make them think about us constantly? And honestly, that's just not interesting. I mean,
I love Breakout Ventures, I love our founders, they are a center point in my world, but I don't expect anyone else really to have that belief. so realizing that we're gonna be a small part of somebody's life, and so how can we be valuable? And that ties into that second kind of like great sin in community building, which is not thinking about the value.
I can't think of somebody in science or in business or in most fields who is sitting around going, gosh, I have way too much time on my hands. I have no problems to solve and I just want to go into a giant room and be super extroverted and meet all these people. That's kind of the opposite of every scientist I've ever met in my life. And so really thinking about what are the barriers that these people need to get over in order to reach their own version of success.
Is that that they need to find a collaborator? Is that that they want to think about building their career? Is that that they just want someone to talk about the science and someone to brainstorm with? You know, in the case of PhD Balance it was meeting an outlet and then meeting people who would validate their experience. Sort of what what problem is your community solving? It's a it's a product that people will engage with and will consume. And depending on.
the value of that product to solving their problems, that's going to determine everything about how important this community becomes to them. I think a community becomes really successful, one, when you can step out as the center, that it keeps going in all these little nodes. And of course, you're constantly wanting to push in this energy. But if you take a vacation, it doesn't fall apart. And the other is that it becomes part of someone's identity. It becomes something that when
it does start to flag, but they lean in and say, my gosh, I would just, I would have not found all of these friends or I would have not had this paper come out if this thing didn't exist. I want to keep building it. so definitely for scientists, it's, it's thinking about really on individual levels, what problems do they need solved? And then also what are the things that they're just not going to overcome to solve those problems? They're not going to go to.
a giant loud conference center and walk around and meet brand new people. It is a wonderful thing about scientists. As an introvert myself, I love talking individually to people. Really don't like crowds. I think it's wonderful because whenever I'm with a ton of extroverts, I feel really isolated. I go and hang out with scientists and everyone's trying to figure out what we're doing and everyone's trying to do this balance of don't show how nerdy you are, but...
How do you make conversation? Someone asked about your hobbies. How do you say like this very niche thing? Yeah, so I think it's just allowing people to be themselves and that you're not saying, hey, come hang out because it's good for you. You're saying, hey, come solve this problem. There's other people solving it and why not do it together?
Joachim Eeckhout (12:51)
Can you maybe explain how you do it at Breakout Ventures? Because I think it's also a very specific case where you're linked to a VC, so there is kind of other problematics. So yeah, how do you do it?
Susanna Harris (13:04)
Yeah, I mean when you when you start thinking about building businesses and you you throw money into the mix I think very reasonably There is a reaction of well who's who's benefiting from this thing? Is it is this just marketing is that just advertising? There's I mean there is an aspect of that we do want people to see the breakout logo and have a nice feeling so Does every business and so does every?
kind of great business. can think of any product that you have that you love that you're like, my gosh, I'm so happy this exists. I mean, I'm looking at my Logitech keyboard right now. They've done really good branding. I'm glad they've survived because I really like this keyboard. So it is important to be aware of that when you are building these things and to not try to slip something past people and sit there and say like, no, we don't care if this helps the business. This is just...
I mean, people are really smart, especially in these industries that we're working in. The approach that I take is weirdly similar actually to my actual PhD work. So I looked at how bacterial communities work together to stick to plant roots. And there's something called emergent properties. It's basically where one plus one equals three. You have bacterium A.
that has these really cool behaviors. So I looked at Bacillus subtilis that in certain situations, different species of bacilli will produce what we call biofilm. Basically they'll start spewing out sticky stuff and that sticky stuff causes the plant to react. The plant has an immune system, the immune system kicks on. And so bacillus being near the plant, having this activity causes the plant to be more resistant to drought or to stress or to pathogens. And so the
Problem here is if you just put the bacillus on the plant, a lot of times it doesn't do that behavior and you no longer see those effects on the plant. But if you can find the right buddy bacteria, we call them these helper bacteria, you find the right helper bacteria, they will stick to the plant and they will cause the bacilli to produce that biofilm, which will cause the resulting kind of effect in the plant. I think about that with human communities, which is, you know, in this case, what is the plant? What are we trying to make more resilient? What are we trying to grow?
Those are the startup companies. Those are the founders that we are trying to give them the tools, the stimulus to enhance what they're doing and to reach that terminal goal of building their product that other people can use. So I think about who are the helpers. I think about, you know, if our founder is Bacterium A, I have no idea how our founders are gonna take this. I love bacteria, so founders, that's a good thing.
You know, if the founders are the ones really prompting the success of that company, who are the people that we need to have around them? Those are other investors. They're going to give them the money. Those are corporate partners, places that are going to do these sponsored research agreements, basically working to take the idea of a product and see, can you actually scale this and reach the patients or the consumers that you need?
It's going to be bankers and lawyers. It's going to be new employees. So my whole approach to it is just saying, what is our end goal? Our end goal is to create companies that are solving these huge problems in the world using science. Who is going to do that? Our founders. And then, well, what do they need to do it? How do we bring those people who have those resources and circle them up and kind of get that effect?
Joachim Eeckhout (16:18)
Is there anything else you think a company should think about when they want to build a community like this?
Susanna Harris (16:25)
So if the goal of creating your community is to foster these interactions that you're not really a part of, that's the ultimate is that, let's say I build the breakout community that has these other investors or these downstream investors that are going to come in and support our companies at later stages and these bankers who are going to be thinking about the valuation, all these different pieces, I'm purposely setting up a situation where
I am no longer going to have control or even insight into those interactions. And I think what's really important is that you have this as a company or as a community builder, either way, both, you're really clear in what you are trying to do and the people that you're trying to attract. Obviously you're not going out there and I'm not going out and saying, Hey, are there any bankers who want to be our friends? However, we are pretty discerning about thinking about how do we talk about
the companies we're building. What are we trying to put out into the world? Because depending on how you phrase things, depending on how you position yourselves, that is going to attract different types of people, not just in job description or not just in, I don't know, social status or whatever. But in personality, in motivations, if I go out and say, we're building these companies to take over the world and to...
I mean, I feel weird even saying these things, but like dominate markets and really harsh language, I'm going to pull together and I'm going to attract people who also kind of, resonate with that, who are going to lean into that astringency and lean into that alpha positioning. If I'm bringing those people in and then I'm also bringing in people with the message of science is incredible, it changes the world, know, scientists are turning into the founders that
we've never had, but we've always needed. And then you let those people interact. You're going to create interactions that maybe don't go the direction you want to. And people are going to start getting this mixed messaging where they say, wow, I love talking to Breakout. I totally align with them, and I align with their vision. And I talk to other people who align with Breakout, and I don't like them. We do not agree on what we're doing. I think.
Getting it figured out, being honest with yourself, who are the people that you want to attract to you? Who are the people who are going to be helpful? What is the experience that you want them to have when they're interacting with each other? You don't need to boil the ocean. There are so many people in the world. If you can attract a few hundred or a thousand of the right people, mean, if you can attract 50 of the right people, that is going to be so much better than 10,000 people who
are not on the same page and meet each other, disagree, the whole thing falls apart.
Joachim Eeckhout (18:58)
this part about engagement, I think is interesting. Getting the motion started with communities is one thing, but once it's started, how do you keep the engagement within the community?
Susanna Harris (19:10)
You can't figure out how to keep the engagement going unless you know where it's slowing down. So I think that's the first step is to start figuring out how are you going to assess that terminal engagement and marketing terms. It's, these like leading versus lagging metrics. can say leading metrics. put on these three events this year. So what are the things that I have control over that I can do and, and measure myself as the builder putting out X number of posts.
hosting chat forums, whatever that is. And then there's these lagging metrics, those are things like, okay, yeah, how many people are showing up to the event? But also can you do network tracking and figure out how many of the people who showed up to that event connected with each other afterwards? Were you seeing people exchanging business cards or LinkedIn's? Did people connect to you on LinkedIn? There's these things that you do not have direct control over, but you can decide.
is the point of my community to create those connections and to create a space where these different groups that we think are important interact and build a relationship. Is it about getting that next round of funding? We had a really fun, kind of more intimate dinner. I played around with some sort of social engineering stuff and I think a lot about those incentives and how do you use social capital.
and brought together a group of, think, 16 people, which is tiny. Everyone else, you know, it's not an event until you have 45 or something. 16 people. From that, think, ultimately two of the interactions led to investments. I mean, it's again, thinking about what is the output? What's the plant that you're growing? And are you getting closer to that? Are you seeing more leaves or are you seeing more investments? Are you seeing people connect and the
They say, hey, I've got this amazing recruiter and they are passing along those resources to each other. So my job is to figure out what are those things that we want to track? How can we track them without being really weird and trying to be in the center of everything? And then when you do see an area and you go, wow, we keep bringing in these events, we keep doing these events and every single time there's fewer and fewer of these types of people. Why? Okay, that's when you lean in and.
Honestly, a lot of it is just customer discovery. You have to be brave enough to call up one of those people that you're close with and say, hey, you used to come to our stuff all the time. We miss you. What's going on? Sometimes they're like, I'm just too busy. And then you're like, all right, what are you busy with? Well, I'm trying to solve this problem. Cool. Let's have an event that solves that problem. Everyone's individual and likes to be listened to and likes to be taken seriously. And if you come from that open aspect of just saying, you're really valuable to us, we'd like having you around.
we're noticing that you're not. And I think as a group, we're missing out. How can I make this something that feels like an ad to your life? There's very few people who, unless you've been extractive, unless you have treated them as a product, that don't react well to that. Like I think most people like that.
Joachim Eeckhout (21:55)
Yeah.
That's such a great advice for any marketing situations, actually. If you think about a company selling whatever, like lab equipment, they are organizing webinars, events, they go to conferences. So there is a sort of community building around this, even if they are not aware of it. And most of the time, they don't look at the right metrics.
So this is really interesting, looking at metrics that are not necessarily obvious, but that are maybe more important than the click rates or whatever. If we look at, this is maybe a more like really pure marketing questions, but if we look at the channels to engage these type of communities.
So maybe less as an investment people, but more like the scientific purely. What would you say today is a good platform for it? And generally, like without thinking especially about community building, but like in general, I would like your opinion on the media channels today.
Susanna Harris (22:53)
Anything that you have the most control over. I think one of the things that's really hard in marketing is that with all the changing algorithms, with all the changing technologies, on some of these platforms you're just chasing constantly. So I think the area you have the most control over is your website. And that's the space where you get to decide what shape, color,
voice, everything you want. How do you want to serve things up to people? You can track every single metric on your own website. can track clicks, plays, amount of time people are spending on things, downloads. All of that is you create more of a captive audience. You can have newsletters, just everything. But let's say we have a lot of this, a lot of our founders, they're two founders and a couple of consultants. Building a fancy website is not anywhere on their near to do list.
The next thing that's really, really good is LinkedIn. So I would say LinkedIn is the best platform for scientists and for business people. I really grew up on Twitter and it's just a different space now. There's a lot of chatter that drowns out a lot of the conversations that used to happen. A lot of the conversations that were authentic have been deprioritized just by the algorithms.
Whereas on LinkedIn, I mean, they just recently announced that they're updating their terms and services where they're going to be even more strenuous with taking out bots, with taking out accounts that are impersonating others, shutting down APIs that are extracted, that are pulling everyone's data and selling it to everyone. So I have seen LinkedIn working to maintain that quality and to encourage people to not just blast out content. I think it's a great way to view the network. And you do still have
quite a lot of control. There's a lot of metrics that you can track. A lot of different type of content that you can put out there. Photos, videos. I there's ways to kind of to do audio. I think if you have to, I would much rather see people go all in on LinkedIn than a little bit here and there across every other platform.
Joachim Eeckhout (24:45)
Mm-hmm.
Susanna Harris (24:45)
I would say if you really want to get that multimedia experience, you want something that's a little bit more fun than YouTube. YouTube is the one that's been for the longest, most supportive to creators. And we'll see how that continues. But yeah, those would be my top three in order.
Joachim Eeckhout (25:02)
Have you been trying with Blue Sky a bit? Because it seems the scientific community interested in this kind of old school Twitter conversations is moving there more than on LinkedIn, where LinkedIn feels a bit more corporate sometimes.
Susanna Harris (25:05)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, I've...
yeah, mean, LinkedIn, feels like a madlib situation. know, if you think about Blue Sky or Twitter as more of haiku or poetry, there's still a form that you need to follow for it to resonate with people. But LinkedIn just feels like fill in the blank. You can hear a LinkedIn post if it's read out loud. It feels something.
It synthetic, guess. It's sort of like that fake sugar where you're like, that's just not, hmm, is this really a person? Flip side is it is very safe. I think it's a great platform for people getting started out if they are nervous about sharing their opinions. If you're not nervous, then I would actually say blue sky because on LinkedIn you might, you might want to hold things back a little bit more, but things don't go weirdly viral on LinkedIn. People are much less likely to.
honestly just chew you out and make you feel bad. Sometimes like to the nth degree where you do see a lot of bad takes on LinkedIn where no one's chiming in but you know everyone's talking about it. yeah, LinkedIn can feel corporate. I like Blue Sky. Blue Sky also brings up another piece of community which is that communities really only center if there is other. So and other doesn't have to be other people. It can be us versus nature.
And so you see communities of people who are really into camping or really into climbing, right? They're not, they're not, climbers are not trying to beat other climbers. They're not grouping together and being like, we're going to be the coolest climbing group. You guys can't come. They're trying to beat the mountain. They're trying to beat nature and to figure out the right route. There has to be something you're pushing against. That was something that made Twitter work and made science Twitter really strong and really connected was that there was an other, there were other people who were there.
disagreeing and that no matter what the disagreements were within science Twitter, there was still this feeling of like, okay, okay, but we can disagree with each other, but let's do that politely and let's kind of set up this wall so that people who are attacking us, we're behind each other. The things I worry about on Blue Sky is that you actually have so much homogeneity that people will continue to find ways to then separate into communities and to disagree with each other. Whereas,
You know, actually a lot of people are on the same side. They're just nitpicking and finding ways to disagree because that's engaging. so I'm, I'm technically on blue sky. I haven't played around with it too much. I, I really do miss old school Twitter, but you know, sometimes you have to move on. I don't know. What about you? Like what's you've, you've spent even more time I have thinking about the website and pulling all these things together.
Joachim Eeckhout (27:40)
⁓ Fiaz.
I totally agree first with controlling your own channel. That's why I do so much with newsletters. For me, it's the best channel actually to build communities and that's what I'm using mostly. see more like social media as a way to get people to my main channel, which is email and newsletters, because that's where I get a direct connection with them.
know, message gets in the inbox. Of course, they can choose to read it or not, but at least we have a direct connection. They trust me with an email, which is today quite a lot. So yeah, that's for me also like the most important. That's also what I recommend building for the companies I'm working with. Even if it takes a long time to do, that's usually the issue. Building a...
a community through emails that takes years. You have to be patient and you have to play the long game, deliver quality. think that's In my case, it's more like an information channel, so I have maybe less community aspects that you are building. But I'm learning a lot from what you said today, so maybe some...
So make this for the future.
Susanna Harris (28:48)
I mean, I think again, it's about how do you get when two people are at a conference them to mention, hey, have you read this? Oh, I love that newsletter. Oh my gosh, that's so cool. And then there's just that extra little click of, hey, we're in the same boat. What else is common? And so I think, you yeah, a newsletter can totally do that. And there's so many ways to create a space where
Joachim Eeckhout (29:02)
Yeah.
Susanna Harris (29:15)
Like you said, if someone is reading your emails, if they're creating space to actually open your emails, that means a lot these days. So that's cool.
Joachim Eeckhout (29:23)
So one more question. If you had one piece of advice for marketers who are trying to engage scientists, what would it be?
Susanna Harris (29:33)
probably advice for anyone who's trying to engage or convince anyone is just don't assume you know their motivations. Don't assume that you know what drives them. I think that's where I see a lot of interactions fall apart between especially scientists and business people where the scientists come in and go, business people just care about money. And the business people come in and well, science people, they just care about their science projects.
And when you have science founders and science investors, what it turns out is that both people want this company to succeed. Both people want the opportunity to be part of something really important. And there are very few people who actually come in and feel like the only thing that matters is my science. And we know that because people publish their science and they try to publish in journals that others have esteem for and that others will read. So if you're a scientist doing your science,
and you're publishing it, there's some other reason that you're doing your science. You want people to read it, you want people to care, you want people to build on it, whatever. And same with the business side is that everyone in business could be doing a different kind of business. Everyone in science business, especially right now, mean, half the people that I know in science venture are scientists by training, have a PhD or have a master's.
So I think coming in with a set idea of what drives this person, especially if it's really derivative, man, you're just not even gonna, the conversation's not gonna open. It's going to feel, I don't know, it's actually just kinda gonna feel rude. You're gonna make that person feel less than and we know.
We know the stereotypes about scientists. We know the stereotypes about a lot of different people. And it's kind of horrifying to me how many people have felt comfortable saying, it's so cool that you're a science communicator because scientists are so bad at communicating. I'm like, what? Scientists communicate their work more than almost any other sector I know. Every single scientist has to be able to write papers, has to be able to write grants, has to be able to present their work. Scientists are great communicators. So.
And scientists do love community. They just might be on average a little more introverted or they might be a little bit more focused on the logic or the rationale side of things than the emotional side. It doesn't mean that those are better or worse. But yeah, just like don't approach scientists as weird robots. think they're just like, scientists are just really excited about stuff. You have this incredible opportunity to tap into some of the most excited, passionate people.
If you can figure out how to connect with that, like, you're good, you're done. If someone starts talking to me about microbes, I have my microscope tattooed on my arm. I'm not getting away from, yeah, I just love my microscope. Anyone who offers me a time to hang out with a microscope, new best friend. Yeah, so just, I don't know, scientists are great. Find out what they nerd out about and you're sold.
Joachim Eeckhout (32:08)
That's commitment.
Last question, do you have any books you like to recommend about building communities?
Susanna Harris (32:27)
One of my favorite books of all time, all of my favorite books have strange titles, but this one is called Don't Shoot the Dog. And on its surface, it's about animal training. It's written by someone who's a professional, all sorts of animal trainer, but it's actually about human training. And I think it's really important if you're going to think about building communities to understand.
Joachim Eeckhout (32:32)
you
Susanna Harris (32:49)
basic human needs and what drives us and what repels us. I would read it and I do read it from the sense of self mastery. If you can understand yourself and you can kind of have this levity about yourself and you don't take yourself so seriously, you're just like, yeah, okay, cool. If every time I say to my dog, come inside, I give it a treat, it probably is going to be excited to come inside. If every time I sit down to do my emails, I...
check off a box and then if I get 10 boxes I get to buy myself something nice from you know whatever store I'm probably going to be more excited about checking my emails. We're kind of simple we're not that surprising and so yeah don't shoot the dog is a really great way to think about how can you master yourself how can you master activities what is why are people not coming to your events anymore why do people want to talk to each other.
I don't know, it's the social science behind just how people tick.
Joachim Eeckhout (33:40)
Yeah, that's cool. I will read it. So yeah, thanks for your insights. It was really great, as I said, I learned a
Susanna Harris (33:49)
Great to meet you, thank you.
Joachim Eeckhout (33:50)
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