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Hi, welcome to the A16Z Podcast, I'm Zoran.

So this week we're continuing our community series

with a recent discussion that applies to many kinds of community building.

You can find past community pieces at a 16Z.com slash community.

Today's topic, how do you create a platform that people not only use, but tell their friends

about, one that goes beyond just being useful and actually connects deeply with the user?

In this episode, recorded at our crypto startup school in April 2020,

A16Z general partner Chris Dixon talked about building communities with

GitHub co-founder Tom Preston Werner.

They discussed how to engage early users, how to turn them

into your biggest advocates, how to create super-fans, and more. Today, GitHub is the

leading community for open source developers and others. They also discuss in-person

communities versus distributed communities a topic that's very top of mind today. So here's

Chris and Tom starting with the beginnings of GitHub. And so how did the idea for GitHub come about?

That was while I was at Power Set, and we were using

Get internally a little bit.

I was working on an internal project with Erlang and a coworker that I was working with

Dave Farram introduced me to get.

He was like, this is the greatest thing like the Linux kernel uses this this it has this really nice branching and

merging model and I and I he showed it to me and I was like this is this is pretty awesome it's you know the

...