Gardener, Not CEO: Saumya Gupta, Co-Founder, Build IRL

Saumya Gupta was six months postpartum when she read a statistic she couldn't digest: one in three teenage girls feels persistently lonely, and one in four has considered suicide. She'd worked in health her whole life. She left her full-time job without a plan.

That question took her and her co-founder Colton Heward-Mills around San Francisco, asking the people who host clubs how it was going. Everywhere they heard the same answer: I'm burnt out. I love this work and I can't keep doing it. So they built Build IRL, an accelerator for social clubs. Three cohorts and more than 100 clubs later, they've open-sourced everything they learned as 12 hot takes at buildaclub.org.

Aaron wants to start an e-bike club and Saumya coaches him through her three ingredients: the who, the rhythm, and co-creation, because if you're doing everything, it's not a club. Saumya insists that scale is a myth. There is no club of 5,000 people that works. Relationships don't scale, they deepen.

Meanwhile, Aaron and Charlotte debrief a rare shared weekend: Priya Parker at Town Hall, a Best Day Ever in Hillman City, and a thousand paddleboarders raving on Lake Union.

00:00 Introduction

01:55 Priya Parker: The Art of Fighting

07:20 Best Day Ever in Hillman City

09:25 Paddleboard Rave on Lake Union

15:20 Meet Saum: Build IRL

19:20 Saum's Origin Story

22:00 What is Build IRL?

25:55 The Build a Club Playbook