How to Build an Enterprise VC Community While Hosting 200+ events a year with Work-Bench Founder Jessica Lin

Host Travis King of the Community Builder Podcast talks with Jessica Lin, Co-founder of Work-Bench, about building an enterprise tech VC community and meeting the unique needs of the startups they fund. Episode Highlights:  Work-Bench hosts 200 events per year to support the needs of their community. To support learning, they not only host events but have developed a resource library and prioritize in-person connections and do some matchmaking. One of the biggest questions that comes up that’s specific to enterprise tech is sales compensation, and that’s something that the Internet can’t help you with and these in-person dinners help with. A challenge Jessica faces is how to keep staying ahead of the game and relevant? Work-Bench is able to stay friendly with other VC funds because enterprise tech is so specific and they aren’t necessarily in competition with startups at other funds. Within the Work-Bench portfolio, they’re very conscious and careful of who they bring in so there isn’t direct competition within their community. For events, their strategy was to try absolutely everything to find out what worked and what didn’t. Work-Bench recently launched their first-ever women in enterprise tech summit with over 250 women in attendance. It’s very difficult to quantify the value and ROI of the workaround events and community. 3 Key Points: Even in tech, the best opportunities for learning and information sharing still happen in person. When you see another fund’s approach to something that you admire and want to emulate, remember that you still need to tailor it to fit your community. Don’t worry about proving the value of events and community through ROI because the effect is long-term and often not quantifiable. Tweetable Quotes: “If you get asked something more than three times, you should probably put it into a blog post.” –Jessica Lin “I’m always pushing us, like, ‘If we did this three years ago, how can we “yes, and” this?’ How can we make sure we’re taking it to the next level and that we’re responding to what we’re hearing from our founders and our teams?” –Jessica Lin   Resources Mentioned: Travis King: https://www.linkedin.com/in/travisking1 (Linkedin) http://communitybuildershow.com (communitybuildershow.com) Jessica Lin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jessicalin8/ (Linkedin), https://twitter.com/jerseejess (Twitter) https://www.work-bench.com/ (https://www.work-bench.com/) See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.