Community at Work-Bench or: How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Unmeasurable
When we launched Work-Bench in 2013, we set out with one floor, four companies and intermittent internet.
We made it our mission to build a community where we could bridge the best and brightest enterprise startups with forward-thinking Fortune 1000 companies to learn, connect, and provide tremendous value to one another. Simply put, a place where “great things happen at the intersection of suits and hoodies.”
In the two years since, we have filled both floors of our 32,000 sq. ft. space with over 35 of NYC’s top enterprise startups, all under one roof and laser-focused on the same mission: to transform the world, one game-changing piece of enterprise software at a time.
We aimed to build a space and community like Cheers (where everybody knows your name…and during Beer Bucket Thursdays, your favorite beer too), whether you are a leading database expert or a marketing guru, meeting over our lunch table, espresso machine, or two offices over.
In 2015, we hosted over 200 enterprise events, including:
- Our Work-Bench Workshops, featuring leading enterprise companies in New York City like Greenhouse, MongoDB, and DigitalOcean and the hard lessons they learned in building a demand-gen machine, optimizing outbound email trigger campaigns, and identifying the best sales prospecting tools to use.
- Our internal roundtable lunches brought our Work-Bench member companies together, where they shared actionable tips and tricks from structuring POCs to landing lighthouse customers. In an environment with trusted peers going through similar challenges, we continue to be amazed by how much people will open up and the impact that the shared learnings can have.
- We hosted conferences with leading data scientists and CROs; and watched our meetup ecosystem flourish, with meetups ranging from Enterprise Sales to Scala.
- We engaged corporates through our CxO lunches and office hours, with corporate executives offering insights into their IT strategies and industry experts sharing one-on-one advice on topics from “Procurement Best Practices” to “Surviving Security Audits.”
- We published deep-dive research to share our investment focus areas like AI-powered applications and HR Technology, and sent out our beloved Enterprise Weekly newsletter unfailingly every Friday.
Yet even as I review these numbers…these metrics feel hollow.
For much of 2015, we struggled to quantify success in community. What is our ROI, relative to pipeline, deal flow, and accelerating our startups’ growth? How do we measure and prove success? In today’s data-driven world, decisions are supposed to be driven off NPS scores, surveys, and customer feedback. As much as possible, we are compelled to remove human unpredictability from conversion funnels and acquisition costs.
If there is one community lesson that we have learned here at Work-Bench at the end of this year, it is this: our community *is* unapologetically and wonderfully about people. It’s about our people and the tremendous goals they set out to conquer in enterprise tech, the challenges they face down everyday, the hard-earned lessons they share with one another, and ultimately the small wins that add up to big leaps: the product releases, closed deals, funding raised, and ever-growing teams whom we cheer on everyday (along with the fat babies, kids’ soccer tournament wins, new homes, and far-flung trips that make up life). It is this shared enterprise hustle and spirit that collectively make our members part of a community so much greater and much more unmeasurable. This much is true and this much we love: our community is only as strong and special as the extraordinary, fascinating, and #nextgenterprise people who are part of it.
As we look out to 2016, we will continue fostering the unmeasurable in our growing enterprise tech community. We will leverage our unique enterprise network to share even more content, events, and expertise, and build platforms to scale and support our companies. So stay tuned, because every day is an opportunity for us to listen more closely to our community and understand how we can best support its growth — for this, we are excited.
To everyone who has helped to bring an unmeasurable to Work-Bench this year: thank you for being a part of it all. We cannot wait to see what great things lie ahead.
P.S. Metrics may not say it all — but a GoPro camera can help capture a year of enterprise tech at Work-Bench…
Big thanks goes out to our incredible community and Work-Bench team, for whom none of the above would be possible, and whom I am lucky to work and laugh alongside everyday: Mickey Graham, Laurel Woerner, Stephanie Manning, Jon Lehr, Vipin Chamakkala, Michael Yamnitsky, and Brooklyn Coats.
