Learning from the best: Garry Tan's YouTube Vlogs
And an unofficial community around it
By: Juan José Díaz, Founder & CEO of Wizdem
Gary Tan is Founder of @Initialized and product manager, designer and engineer turned a top 100 venture capitalist.
He is also an amazing YouTube creator. In his channel, he shares thoughtful advice, reflections and interviews that makes his content worth to be considered true XXI century Masterclasses.
One thing I’ve found interesting in his videos is the growing community gathering around the YouTube comments to share ideas, experiences and questions related to his content. And that is key: the content is so powerful people invest their time to share value with each other. That is amazing: that is, after all, the foundation of a participative community.
Just as I said in my last post, there is one key ingredient for the digital communities to thrive: focus on conversations and participation over consumption.
In one of his videos, Garry shares a mindset that finally made him into Y Combinator: give first. This may sound easy and as a truism, but it isn’t. Garry breaks down its advice into three critical points:
Develop great skills: both the professional skills and hobbies are valuable
Find and follow great people: it’s not about fame (that may come later), it’s about shared beliefs
Reap the rewards: find people who are incredibly smart, work with them (be a joiner) and it all starts with a simple idea: “how do I help them”
Inspired by this advice I thought I should give first as well. So, I started to re-watch my favourite videos and take notes for the concepts I found more appealing. I have a Philosophy degree and that skill may be useful if put to the service of the founders’ community. How can I bring value to the table? I came up with two ideas:
First idea: find the nuggets of gold on Garry’s videos.
Looking at his vlogs I found myself distilling what I believe are the core learnings and trying to map them in order to be more clear and actionable for me. Maybe that could help other people. So… I started to create infographics based on my notes. Here are the two I’ve finished and shared on Garry’s channel:
I hope this exercise helps others as it has been helpful for me. And please, feel free to download and remix or recreate my infographics if you please: evidently, design is not one of my most developed skills 😅
Second idea: a “living room” for the community.
Some days ago, on November 16th, Garry asked his Twitter audience “What's the best community platform right now for influencers/creators who want to go direct?”.
And, of course, I thought we could be helpful on that front. After all, we are building almost exactly that on Wizdem: a community platform.
But I didn’t want just to “share the news” of our startup being able to help. I wanted to try and give a tad more: I decided to create an Unnoficial Garry Tan’s vlogs Community by myself.
I used what we’ve been building for the past year to create a nice and cosy space for Garry’s community. There we can gather, share our insights, questions, best practices and whatnot. I believe that I’m unable to imagine all the value the community can create when left free.
Please, feel free to join this community if you feel like doing so. Garry has incredible content and we all can benefit from it if we gather around it and build upon its shoulders.
I’d love to see you there and receive your feedback to make the community a nicer, smarter place to be: https://wizdem.io/communities/finder/5865-18219