Alex Hillman Part 2_Final

Alex Hillman: [00:00:00] You good? Alright, here we go.

Speeding.

One.

Michael Schweisheimer: Welcome back to the Mission Story Slam podcast, brought to you by PWP Video. I'm Michael Schweisheimer, the executive producer at PWP Video Mission Story Slam. And I'm also an adult who still proudly plays with Lego. So we started Mission Story Slam to share the stories of the organizations that we serve at PWP.

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

The audience also casts ballots for the crowd favorite story, which is sponsored by [00:01:00] our friends at your part time controller. The winner of that receives a 100 donation for their non profit. And then, we also videotape all the stories so that we can share them on social media and everyone can send them to their friends and supporters.

I strongly suggest you get your tickets right now for Mission Story Slam 9. The theme is Moving Right Along, and it's happening this coming Tuesday, December 5th, at our new location at National Mechanics in Old City. Chris Citulo The indefatigable MC continues his unbroken streak. Our judges this time include Hilary Doe.

She's the executive director of Bolt, which is building our lives together. We also have Eric Marsh, the manager of community and engagement at WHYY and Michelle Histand. She's the executive director of the M. Knight Shyamalan Foundation. And a few people have promised me they are putting their name in the storyteller can, including Conrad Benner of Streets Department and the new Art Outside podcast, Trinae Nuri from [00:02:00] CityCast Philly, and we have a young podcast host named Nigel Osei of See Beyond My Skin.

This podcast, today, is the second part of my conversation with Alex Hillman. It stands up just fine on its own, but if you haven't, it wouldn't hurt to go and listen to part one first. And just to remind you, Alex is the author of The Tiny MBA. He's co founder of Stacking the Bricks. He also started the 10, 000 Independence Project.

When we left off, we were discussing community building at the co working slash clubhouse that he co founded called Indy Hall. I want to get a little bit to story, and I'd like, I want to talk a little bit about that connection. You talked about the, that the one big thing with building community, people forget about is communication.

And I want to, Ask you about where storytelling intersects with building community and how you use it.

Alex Hillman: That's an awesome question. When I think about onboarding people to a community in particular, I think stories are one of the most powerful tools because a [00:03:00] community is, is not a static thing. It's moving and growing and shifting.

It's more like an organism than like an, than an organization, if it's healthy and. The best way we have to introduce people to the culture, to the norms, and to the examples of the kinds of things they can be a part of, and that they could create themselves, is the stories that we have of things that other members have done.

I think the best example, and you know Adam very well, Adam's my counterpart at Indie Hall, and Adam, if you sign up to take a tour of Indie Hall, is most likely the person you're going to interact with.

Michael Schweisheimer: You're awesome. If you have a chance to get a tour of Indy Hall, I would get a tour from Adam.

Alex Hillman: A thousand percent agree.

He's the best. He's a riot. And what you'll notice with Adam's tours is that he's not walking around being like, here's the desks, here's the meeting rooms, here's the coffee. It's... These are the kinds of experiences that you can have, you can be a part of, and you can create. Adam has got [00:04:00] this just deep well of stories and examples that he can pull from to contextualize what this community is really about.

So many people use the word community. And really all they are typically describing are like event series. They talk, they're talking about their programming that's heard, right?

Michael Schweisheimer: Here's your story, Sam.

Alex Hillman: Here's your Alex. And I think what's, and again, this is not a, not a critique. It's just like, it's the starting point, starting point.

And I think what's cool is when you. Go the next layer deeper. It is the story of what happens in those events and what happens between those events and how those events come to be. And this is one of the things that's harder in an online community and a bit easier with a physical. Presence is we have art on the walls.

Each piece of art has a story behind it. Either it came from a community experience that was created in the past, a particular [00:05:00] member who has a story, a friend of the community,

Michael Schweisheimer: a project they did, I've seen stuff that represents projects. Yeah.

Alex Hillman: The space becomes a museum. Of those stories, there is a historical tradition in many camps and Jewish communities in upstate New York to throw these kind of giant cross family festivals and things like that.

And there is a role within these parties and festivals called a tummeler. Not Tumblr, Tumblr, T U M M L E R. And a Tumblr's job is sort of a community activator of sorts. Imagine walking around a party and talking to people and getting a sense of who they are and learning their stories. And in your mind, looking for dots that connect.

And I think of that in terms of relationship potential and the potential energy of collaboration and unity and community. And so what a tumbler does is they spot those patterns and they look for subtle ways to put those people together. [00:06:00] And instead of saying, Hey, you two are both into podcasting, you should talk, which is what I think a lot of us would instinctively do.

They start the conversation somewhere else and they let those people discover what they have in common, knowing that the odds are. pretty good because they do have, they have at least one thing in common. And I think that I've learned over the years is the difference between telling people what they have in common and allowing space for them to discover it on them on their own is the difference between a networking event and something that feels truly magical.

And that magical experience is what we're going for. I just use it sort of like an antithesis to community management. Communities don't want to be managed. Well, you

Michael Schweisheimer: said organism versus

Alex Hillman: organization. Exactly, exactly. But I was like, every other term that I had seen to describe community management just felt derivative.

Community activator, community escalator, party starter. And like, they were all variations of what I describe as the cruise director mindset [00:07:00] where your job is to be the dancing fool in the middle of the room who makes it okay for other people to be dancing fools, right? And there's nothing wrong with that.

But the problem is once you go away, do they continue dancing or will they start dancing again without you? It's not a yes or a no, but probably not. And so the tumbler is a more, I would say, subtle and artful approach that through the lens of sustainability, that is, how do I create the environment where people will start dancing?

Metaphorically speaking. And so it's cool. So we've always thought thought through that. That's how we. Build relationships, connections and opportunities and experiences between individual people at Indy Hall. And now with the groups that we're collaborating with, it's sort of doing that one level up and going, all right, I know things about this particular community leader and their group of folks and this other community leader and their group of folks.

I want to work with both [00:08:00] of them individually, get a sense of how they work, build those relationships and build the trust. And at some point down the road, I want to put them in the room together. With the confidence that something cool is going to happen, but no idea what it actually is. And I'm confident that will

Michael Schweisheimer: be magic.

Well, that's like the Mission Stories Salon. I think you actually threw that idea at Dave Winston and I to do those Jeffersonian dinners. And it is like gathering a small group, having a featured person, and then throwing a cool group in a room, and yeah, cool stuff happens. I have so many things that I want to ask you about.

But one thing in terms of... A lot of our audience are in the nonprofit sector, and I know that you give and use a lot of your time to help advise people on that idea of building community. I know you do it a lot within co working worlds. Have you worked with any nonprofits? Because so many organizations need to build communities of volunteers or communities of activism, or even [00:09:00] just communities of supporters.

And I'm just wondering, are there ways that it transposes well to nonprofit

Alex Hillman: community? I absolutely think so. The reason that I think it does is because we're talking about fundamental human behavior. This is stuff that we're wired for. Whether we're talking about a co working community, a non profit, or frankly a for profit for that matter.

We're truly talking about different mechanisms for bringing people together and different motivations for bringing people together. The way I've always described this is Indie Hall. Through all of its incarnations has been a room literal or online full of people who don't need to work together. But often do in one way or another.

Sometimes it's in a concrete formal setting. Sometimes it's just sharing an idea over a casual conversation that unlocks an opportunity or whatever it is. Meanwhile, the world is full of rooms, organizations, nonprofits of people who need to work together, but they don't. And the question is always [00:10:00] why?

And I think in the white space between those two examples, we have a lot of translatable lessons that come down to the fact that Indie Hall is this laboratory for observing, understanding and experimenting with how do you create environments where people can build trust and relationships before they need anything of or from each other.

And if I think about the non profit space, I think the non profit space often leans really hard on the do gooder yness of it and the fact that if we're doing good, people will be motivated to support it. And I think that's generally true because people, on the whole, are, I believe, are good and want good things for the world.

But I also think it's often used as a crutch. I think it allows people to not really interrogate. Core motivations of why people show up, why people do work. And I think a, a problem that exists in the nonprofits, it's, it's not exclusive nonprofits, but a thing that I, I see and I hear from friends that are very active in the space are, are challenges around [00:11:00] leadership, ownership struggles.

Mm-hmm. and collaboration challenges. This is not unique to Philadelphia, but Philadelphia expresses it in a very certain way. I always say people in Philadelphia, uh, love to collaborate on things so long as they get to do it their way. . And I think that illustrates the

Michael Schweisheimer: entire point. I don't know if that's specifically a Philly thing, but I have certainly seen it quite a

Alex Hillman: bit in my time.

Again, I don't think it's unique to Philly, but I think the Philadelphia expression of it is unique. Well, just more direct. And more true. When we build teams and groups around the work, and the work goes away because it didn't go well, the project failed, or even if it succeeded and it ended, what are we left with?

Are we left with the relationships that we built? Is it even possible to build relationships while we're doing the work? I think the answer is yes, but I think it's, we're so busy doing the work often that the depth of the relationship doesn't get very far. Whereas I think if we build relationships in [00:12:00] other settings and then have those relationships reinforced while we're working, whether the work goes well or not, we still have those relationships.

And I think if we translate that to the volunteering space and things like that. Volunteering because I care about the impact is one thing, but I want to go to a volunteer experience where not only I'm going to make the impact that I came to make, but I meet a bunch of people I haven't met before, or I see people that I haven't seen since the last time.

I always say people come to IndieCall once because they need to get out of the house. But they come back because they look forward to seeing the people that they met last time. And I think you can translate that same sort of thing to the impact space, the nonprofit space, where, you know, folks are coming to a thing the first time because they care about the cause, but the reason they keep coming back is the sense of community that they find in the experiences while they're volunteering and supporting.

Michael Schweisheimer: We'll be right back with more of the mission story slam podcast.

David Winston: Hi, I'm Dave Winston, and I've been a storyteller all my life. Some of my best memories of childhood [00:13:00] are the times my family gathered at holidays and told stories of the past. I didn't grow up around extended family, so these stories helped me feel connected to something larger than myself.

They helped me see myself as part of a continuity and part of a community. It also served to remind me that, as Edward R. Murrow once said, We're not descended from fearful men, or women. To remind my kids that they're stronger than they realize, I would often say, You know, one of your great grandmothers fought off saber toothed tigers while crossing the Alps barefoot, carrying one of your great grandfathers as an infant, just so you can be here now, make the most of it.

They really hate that one. It puts modern problems into perspective while being, at least metaphorically, true. The facts of our past can be quickly lost. Days and dates lose meaning. But the stories of our [00:14:00] past serve to remind us of not only who we are, but what we value and what we aspire to. Those are tricky things to articulate, which is why the story is the best way to illustrate values.

How the story is told is as important, if not more important, than the story itself. Did you hear the one about the teenage girl who faked her death because her parents didn't like her boyfriend? And then he kills himself because he thought she was really dead and then she finds out he's dead and really kills herself.

It was a mess. And that was the least interesting way to tell the story of Romeo and Juliet. I guess I should have said spoiler alert there, but you get the idea. How you tell the story is important. The ending is not the story. How to get to that ending, what you experienced along the way, is important too.

It provides context, [00:15:00] it tells us about the people who are involved, and it gives the listener the opportunity to find themselves in the story. And that's the point where the story ceases to be just a story and becomes an experience for the listener. They feel your pain. With a well told story, they experience your failures and triumphs right along with you.

The facts of anything enter the brain at the cerebrum and are stored for future reference. A story about those facts is an expressway ride directly into the limbic system, deep in the brain, where it is felt and stored as experience. If you want something to be remembered, If you want to make it truly sticky, put it in a story.

That's what we do at PWP Video. We're storytellers first and foremost, and video is our medium. But it's the story that matters [00:16:00] most. One of the most gratifying things about our work comes in watching an audience experience one of our stories. To see them make a connection with someone they've never met.

And that's what we see at Mission Story Slam, people sharing an experience and making connection through stories. It's far too easy to forget how important and how valuable our stories are. Don't forget tickets for the December 5th Mission Story Slam with a theme, Moving Right Along. Our first slam at National Mechanics on 3rd Street.

They're available from the link on our website, mission story slam.org, and from the events links on Facebook and LinkedIn. You can follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and now TikTok, or become a missionary. And sign up for our slam mail email blast on the contact page of [00:17:00] mission story slam.org.

Michael Schweisheimer: We're back with more of the Mission story Slam podcast. Alright, so you mentioned. The differences between leaders and I think obviously nonprofits, any organization is really susceptible to leadership. And you earlier talked about how your skin sort of crawls when someone brings up a community manager or the idea of community management.

And my skin similarly crawls when someone talks about creating culture, like the part of the reason that thing makes me nuts is I'm really proud of PWP video of the culture that exists, but it's not necessarily, I don't feel like I. Built it. I feel like it grew. And when I hear leaders or speakers at conferences or people putting out books who are like all about like how to build a culture, and I feel like you're failing the moment that you talk about how I am going to take exact certain steps that will automatically build some culture and then, because it also makes me nuts because [00:18:00] people are like, yeah, no, let's have a culture that's based on work life balance, but you have to be here at this time and this time, and you've got to get your stuff done in 20 minutes.

And I'm like, what, you have no idea. What, so that just, yeah, I'm just curious if you have any feelings about that idea of culture creation.

Alex Hillman: I do. And the way you describe PWP's culture as something that you didn't create, but that grew is the most perfect description. The analogy I always use is it's like gardening.

You can plant the seeds, you can provide them with the nutrients, the soil, in the soil, the water and the sunlight, but ultimately the plants need to do the growing. And I think when it comes to culture, it is, it's environmental work. In that sense, you can build an environment where cultures are possible.

You can enable a culture. And the other thing I always remind people is culture is not inherently good. There's a lot of awful cultures out there and people think that happens by accident. I think it's just as much work to create an awful culture as it is to create a good one. The difference is ultimately the core design patterns.

When I've done work in the [00:19:00] past with organizations who want to build a culture like Indie Hall, Similar to you. I'm like, well, you can't, it's impossible. The culture is the sum of the network of the relationships and interactions between these specific people. And you have your specific people. They're going to be inherently different.

So the other piece about it is I think that you can't change a culture into something without being honest about what it already is. Things like who is in the room and who is not, who has the power and who doesn't, who gets to speak and who doesn't, what words do we use, what words aren't used, not because there are rules, but because those are the emergent behaviors.

And when you get honest about what's there, then you can have a conversation about what would it be like if we were over here. And you can't usually go from A to B. You've got to do incremental steps along the way. So I always say that culture work and culture change is all incremental. And like most [00:20:00] self development, it's like working with a therapist.

We're not here to fix you or help you to get here to help you get honest about who you are and where you are so that you can become a better version of yourself. So my line with culture work is always, you can't create or change a culture. You can only make it a better or worse version of what it

Michael Schweisheimer: already is.

That feels much better in terms of. Cultivating versus creating would make a big difference for me, right? Tumbling versus total management. I guess I hear it and it makes my skin absolutely crawl is when you've got an organization that has some level of toxicity within it, and it could be from the top, it could be from the middle.

And they're like, we need to. Take this culture and it now needs to be this other culture. And we have to do it in this amount of time. And it's a project and a thing. That

Alex Hillman: acceleration I think is one of the most poisonous things people bring to this work. I can share a story that I have not talked about much, uh, that it is very related to this though.

If you're interested. A

Michael Schweisheimer: story would be great.

Alex Hillman: Are you familiar with the downtown project in Las [00:21:00] Vegas? No, I'm not. So the downtown project was this major and very buzzy. community revitalization projects in downtown Las Vegas. It started in the Early 2010s, I want to say. And it started, it was spearheaded by the CEO of Zappos, the online shoe retailer that had recently at the time been acquired by Amazon for 1.

2 billion. And this leader. Uh, of Zappos was famous for the culture at Zappos. He had, at that point, written books about it. He had gone on speaking tours talking about this idea their, their mantra was delivering happiness. And the entire Zappos culture was at least, uh, purported to be about really empowering everybody to do what is the best in service of the customer, even if it made no sense for the business.

If [00:22:00] people know of Tony Hsieh and his work, most people know of that. Most people don't know about the Downtown Project. But the Downtown Project started because Zappos was growing so fast that it needed a new, bigger headquarters. They had outgrown their third corporate... Like office park type building.

And they wanted to put everybody on, on a sort of corporate campus, like a Google or a classic Xerox. And so Tony within a short period of time, both was researching those corporate campuses of history and also had read a book called triumph of the city by Milton glazier, which is a very good book and in his.

Brain connected those things to, if we're going to create a campus that is effectively a fake city, right? The idea is that it's got all the resources for our employees on site because we're operating at scale. What better place to build a real city than a fake city like Las Vegas.

Michael Schweisheimer: I was gonna say, we're starting in a fake city, so I've spent time in [00:23:00] Vegas, regrettably.

And

Alex Hillman: this is also downtown Las Vegas, so near the Fremont Street Strip, an apartment post 2008 recession was deeply depressed. There was a van, like empty lots, tons of abandoned real estate.

Michael Schweisheimer: Like half built buildings, if I remember,

Alex Hillman: yeah. Tony earmarked three quarters of a billion dollars of his own money to buy up that real estate, to invest in businesses and build things up because the problem that he had was downtown Las Vegas was destitute.

And he, the employees were pushing back and saying, if you're going to build a headquarters in downtown Las Vegas, I don't want to go there. That's not a nice place to be. And so they were like, we're going to build it up. We're going to invest in local businesses. So instead of having the company owned coffee shop that you go to, it's going to be an actual local owned coffee shop business.

And the same thing with the restaurants and so on and so forth. And he had this like really wild, brilliant in some ways, idea to take all of the, the, the money they would [00:24:00] spend on the per employee overhead and infrastructure for housing their employees and distribute it amongst the ecosystem to make a city where.

It appeared that there wasn't one. Why did I get involved in this project is because he starts doing research on this kind of ecosystem building, discovers coworking early in the arc of coworking and had hired somebody to help him do this design work. And the person he hired happened to be somebody who is a researcher who had done a lot of research on myself and some of my colleagues.

And so the pitch that I got was if you were going to build something like Indy Hall. That was the size of a city. How would you do it? I think of that as a turning point in my career. Cause I'd never been pushed to think about my work in that way. And so I was like, I don't know, but I'm interested. I would.

Yeah. I mean, yeah. And so we went out and we did some work with their team and. It was really my first opportunity to really reverse [00:25:00] engineer some of the things that we had done, some by instinct, some by accident, lessons learned, and go, if I was going to do what we have done on purpose in a new place with the resources that you have and the goals that you have, here are the rhythms and rituals.

Here's some prototypes and templates. Here are the Things to be on the lookout for here are the patterns for bringing people together. Here's how we spot emergent leadership and support them. All of these things that now I can talk confidently about because I've helped lots of people do them, but the genesis of learning how we do what we do often, a lot of it started in this project.

I'm skipping over lots of details. Cause we could do an entire,

Michael Schweisheimer: it sounds like it's more than a story. It sounds like it's its own multi

Alex Hillman: part podcast. There, there's the reason I bring up the story of those is relevant to this because. When we were putting together all of this guidance and these sort of prototypes and ideas and tools, we also provided some warnings and the biggest warning was their project was on an extremely accelerated timeline.

They [00:26:00] had given themselves three years. To go from a destitute downtown to a vibrant downtown that their employees would want to come to. Wow. And I said, there are parts of this you can speed up, some more than others, but there are some that you can't. Because if you do, you will cut off your nose in spite of your face.

Um, and I say this not to say that I was right, but... The stuff of ours that they followed worked really well, right up until the point where they started ignoring our warnings and the thing fell apart in some of the most destructive ways possible, um, to, to the point where, where lives were lost. Um, I'm, you know, I don't talk about this project because it's, it's complicated, um, in a lot of ways.

And among the lives that were lost was Tony himself. There's, there are some real, I would say like community is one of the most powerful tools in the world. And like every tool [00:27:00] can be wielded for good and can be wielded to dangerous effect. And having seen it up close, I think it is a reminder, an important reminder that these are still human beings and that some things just need time and some things you just can't ignore and hard lessons to learn in that way.

But I think a reminder of. Why we get some of the true crime shows and podcasts that we get, because there's, there's a point where you're building a community, but if your goal is to manipulate people, centralize power, and cut out people who disagree with you, and all kinds of other, like, there's, there's a very fine line you can walk between using these tools for very, very good things, to where you start behaving more like a cult, and really bad things can happen.

Um, but it was, uh, yeah, it's the biggest project I worked on [00:28:00] that I almost never talked about.

Michael Schweisheimer: And understandable. I have asked you, I believe, in some total, two questions from my list of actual questions. Everything else has just been riffing with you, which has just been awesome. Um, but let's share, like, the best way for someone to get a hold of you.

They're your preferred

Alex Hillman: way. Oh man, it's gotten so weird because it feels like the internet is collapsing. Historically, I would say I'm on Twitter all the time and that is just not as true as it used to be.

Michael Schweisheimer: Good for you for, yeah, it's tough to be in Elon's world. So

Alex Hillman: I mean, I would generally say email is still the most reliable.

Send me an email, Alex at indyhall. org. I really do see them. I really do read them. I do my best to respond to everything.

Michael Schweisheimer: You do a very good job, by the way, I will tell

Alex Hillman: you. My go to's is I like answering questions over email or in some recorded fashion, because a lot of times it's the question is not the first time I've gotten that question.

And so I can either point to a time in the past [00:29:00] where I've published something. A similar answer that's useful. And if you've got follow up questions, let's go from there. Or sometimes people pose a question, like I've wanted to write something about this. Now I have an excuse to respond directly to them, give them something really valuable, and then turn that into a resource for the next person who comes along with a similar question.

I genuinely enjoy hearing from people and I like to be as helpful as I can.

Michael Schweisheimer: All right. So we talked about your tiny MBA book, is that, where do people find that? Is that at stacking the bricks? Is that the best place to look? You

Alex Hillman: can find that at tiny. mba.

Michael Schweisheimer: Tiny dot MBA. Oh, so you've got a dot MBA.

Alex Hillman: I got a dot MBA domain, tiny.

mba, I'll take you straight to the page that is, you can purchase those directly through us, both in digital and print format, and then I'll ship out

Michael Schweisheimer: right from our warehouse. I do dig the, um, the fact that it's the Zen cones of business thinking. That's right. Uh, where do we find Stacking the Bricks if people are interested in that?

Stackingthebricks.

Alex Hillman: com has all of our articles and past podcasts and all [00:30:00] the products and all those kinds of resources as well.

Michael Schweisheimer: All right. And I'm going to expand on one thing briefly. Can you do me a favor and not just tell us how to find 10, 000 Independents, but can you explain what it is? Because I think that I know that a lot of the organizations and friends of Mission Story Slam are into workforce development work in particular.

Um, and I think if they haven't heard about it yet, they need to. So what's, what is 10,

Alex Hillman: 000 Independents? So the 10, 000 Independents project is a collaborative effort to help 10, 000 people become sustainably self employed in the city of Philadelphia. on a path to helping create 50, 000 jobs in the region as a part of that plan.

So, uh, sort of born as a reaction to the Amazon HQ2 project some years ago, where the city did backflips for the worst way possible to generate 50, 000 jobs in the region. And I thought to myself, how could we do this in a way that. that doesn't suck. And my answer was to look at the way people are actually creating opportunities for themselves and other people today, instead of the way most [00:31:00] economic development looks, which is based on stuff is the seventies and earlier where companies.

Don't need to be 20 people to start. So we are achieving this goal through a mix of education, community, and advocacy work. We spent a lot of time in the last six months working during the last mayoral primary, building relationships with all the candidate camps. We had a great relationship with Drell Parker.

We think she's done great work for the business community, um, in the past. There are no perfect candidates, but of the candidates she ranked highest on our way of ranking things for who is going to be good for the small business community. Her and her team have been very enthusiastic collaborators going forward to make sure that whatever our city does to make things better for businesses, um, because we all agree that the city is pretty hostile to a lot of business, uh, business, both in terms of tax and policy.

We want to make sure that. The smallest small businesses are included and considered in those changes and plans. And we do that in parallel with collaborating with organizations and nonprofits and individuals who work to [00:32:00] support people who are starting and growing businesses. One of the most exciting projects, uh, that I'm working on and the last year has been challenging, but very fruitful.

And I'm excited about. Where that work continues to go. So if there's folks that are listening, that your nonprofit focuses on workforce or entrepreneurial support, we'd love to hear from you and you can read more about our bigger plan and all the approach and all the resources and all of our partners at the website is 10 K the number 10 K dot city.

Michael Schweisheimer: I don't know if I've told you this, but as of. March of this year, I became the chair of Be Local Philadelphia, which is the affinity group of regional B Corps in our area, and we're looking for opportunities to help encourage startup small businesses to adopt more sustainable principles in their design, whether or not they're looking to absolutely become a B Corp, incorporating some of those good business principles in.

Early stage design can actually help set people up for success. Totally. So let me know if there's ways that we might be [00:33:00] able to support. And if you're, are you already working with sustainable business network of greater Philadelphia? We've had a bunch of

Alex Hillman: really good conversations with them, both on the policy side and just looking at potential to collaborate and support as well.

Michael Schweisheimer: All right. Listen, sorry, I didn't get to half my questions.

Alex Hillman: So I'm sorry to your editor to figure out what to do with all of this.

Michael Schweisheimer: Oh, we'll figure it out. This will be a longer episode and we're going to be happy for it because I think that there's so many, there's so much cool stuff in here because I really do like the fact that you started what could externally be looked at as a tech co working community and what you really.

Turned into as an expert in building communities and that how that can be translated to so many things. And I, I appreciate your personally showing up for mission story slam, but I also appreciate the support that you've given to us in designing the project and having some conversations with Dave Winston and myself to just talk about that.

Those bigger ideas of building a community, why we might want to do it, [00:34:00] what it can mean, how it can be impactful. And you know what, that's what I hope. That we are able to continue to do, and I will continue to take advantage of your radical generosity with your time and ideas.

Alex Hillman: So you got it. I'm super glad to be friends.

I'm proud of the work you guys do, and I'm happy to be a part of

Michael Schweisheimer: it. And now you all understand why this conversation had to be shared in two parts. I'll also share with you that Alex has said he will be joining us next week for Mission Story Slam 9. The theme is moving right along, and the Slam is at our new location at National Mechanics.

This is happening on Tuesday, December 5th, and for those of you who listen back later, that's 2023, you can grab your tickets@missionstoryslam.org. So the Mission Story Slam podcast is produced by Dave Winston. It's edited by James Robinson and brought to you by pwp Video. We are video with a mission.

Find us@pwpvideo.com. So if I don't see you at National Mechanics, [00:35:00] we'll be back in about a month with another episode. Until then, I'm Michael Schweizheimer, and I look forward to sharing the next story behind the story with you soon.