Healing Societal Division Through Community and Technology with Lisa Conn
Episode 15
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Lisa is the co-founder and COO of Icebreaker, an online event platform that builds community and gives people a sense of togetherness. Previously, Lisa held leadership roles at Facebook, the MIT Media Lab, FWD.us, and President Obama’s campaign.
Throughout her career, Lisa has consistently focused on healing societal division through community and technology. She’s launched dozens of partnerships with academics, peace-builders, and community leaders around the world. Lisa is on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list and her work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Vice News, and more.
In Episode 15, Lisa and Marsha chat about community across politics and tech, how to create a sense of togetherness virtually, finding common ground with people we don’t agree with, Lisa’s incredible wedding, and so much more.
“To me, community is about a collection of people who give to each other and receive things in return. And that currency of giving and getting back and forth is the currency of the community.”
- Lisa Conn
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A huge thank you to Origins Media Haus for producing this podcast. You can find them at:
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Lisa’s Full Bio:
Lisa Conn is co-founder and COO of Icebreaker. She's held leadership roles at Facebook, the MIT Media Lab, FWD.us, and President Obama’s campaign, consistently focused on healing societal division through community and technology.
At Facebook, Lisa worked on Facebook Groups where she led the company's efforts to strengthen community, reduce polarization, and build empathy on the platform. She taught a course at HEC Paris, spoke at Aspen Ideas, and launched dozens of partnerships with academics, peace-builders, and community leaders around the world.
At the MIT Media Lab, Lisa created the Electome which tracked the public response on Twitter to the 2016 U.S Presidential election. The product produced the first visualizations of the electorate’s ideological polarization and was described by Vice News as “a treasure trove on how Americans discussed one of the most contentious presidential races in history.”
Lisa led large-scale community organizing programs as the National Organizing Director of FWD.us, and as a field director in the battleground state of Florida for President Obama. Lisa studied social movements at NYU and earned her MBA at MIT.
Previously named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, her work has been featured in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Post, Vice News, and more.
Episode Transcript:
Marsha Druker 0:54
Lisa, thank you so much for joining me today. I'm super excited to chat with you.
Lisa Conn 1:48
Thank you for having me. This is so much fun.
Marsha Druker 1:50
To start these episodes off, I always like to learn a little bit more about my guests and how they actually became a community builder in the first place. So kind of a random place to start, but I'm curious what you were like in high school. What were some of your interests and extracurriculars? And how did you find community at such an early age?
Lisa Conn 2:09
Oh, man, I was weird in high school. I think that I didn't totally know myself in high school, the way that I became sort of familiar with myself in college and beyond. I was born in Los Angeles, and I grew up in Orange County, California, specifically in Laguna Beach. And if you ever watched the TV show, the OC and there was a reality show on MTV, that was really bad, called Laguna Beach, and it was post 911 pre economy crashing. And so people were really into spending money. And I think that when I was growing up, there was a lot of community but high school specifically, there was a lot of superficiality and commercialism, and people sort of hiding behind things. I was really interested in musical theater and I was the Co-President of my mock trial team and I started an organization that was for physically disabled adults. And I did all these things. But when I sort of like put myself back in the memory of being in high school, I was so insecure and weird and self conscious and cared about the wrong things. I was really into school and getting good grades and my friends, but I didn't know myself the way that I do certainly now and the way that I started to after that,
Marsha Druker 3:21
I think it's hard to find somebody in high school who does know themselves. I would even argue that most people don't really know themselves throughout their 20s. It's really later on when you're 25 or older, that you really start to come into your own and really start to understand your identity.
I also know that growing up your grandma was a really big inspiration for you. Can you tell me a little bit about her?
Lisa Conn 3:41
Oh, man, she was the best. Her name was Gertrude and she was an activist in the civil rights era. So she was a powerless person by all societal measures. She was Jewish. She was a woman. She wasn't wealthy. She wasn't particularly educated, and yet she saw things happening around her that she wanted to change. And so she did community organizing, and she organized people and she fought for change. And she accomplished things that sound little today like desegregating the swimming pool next to my dad's elementary school, but actually in the context of that era, and that time and of her own sort of structural powerlessness is so so, so incredible. So when I was growing up, I would hear these stories of what people can do when they come together to make change. For me, politics did not feel like the avenue for that until I went to college. because growing up was Bush, it was Clinton. They weren't the most sort of grassroots community inspiring leaders. And so I saw sort of service as a way of building community to make change and really not politics until I got a little bit older.
Marsha Druker 4:39
She sounds like an incredible woman. And I'm so glad that you had that influence and that inspiration growing up. It sounds like it was really influential in what ended up being your career and your journey.
What did you end up studying and post secondary and how did you start your career?
Lisa Conn 4:54
I studied social movements at NYU. My grandmother Gertrude, she lived in New York City, so her husband passed when my dad was pretty young, and she moved from Virginia where she grew up to New York City, and I would visit her in the summers. And it was such a beautiful contrast to where I was from. Laguna Beach was so perfect and pretty white, and pretty sort of wealthy and the sun was always shining. And it was beachy, and everyone was tan and blonde. And New York City had a little bit of everything. And it felt really real and really, really diverse to me. And so I actually recently found an essay that I wrote in fifth grade, that was asking me to describe what my life would be. And in the essay, I wrote that I would go to NYU, which is funny, because I don't remember particularly wanting to go there. But apparently I knew about it. And I did when I was young. So I went to NYU. I studied social movements, primarily in the US context. And when I graduated, I really wanted to work in electoral politics, and help elect awesome candidates so that they could pass great legislation and represent us well.
Marsha Druker 5:54
It's incredible, first of all, that you wrote about yourself going to NYU and then it just sort of happened. I've heard that theme across a lot of people's stories where it almost subconsciously happened.
Can you tell me a little bit more about how you ended up making the transition from politics to tech?
Lisa Conn 6:09
Totally. So the third election that I worked on was a city council campaign in Los Angeles, where I live now. I was working on that campaign right after President Obama won re-election in 2012. I started around Thanksgiving of 2012. And the election was in March of 2013. And during that time period, Sandy Hook happened. And I vividly remember watching TV and watching the parents that were impacted, and watching the images of the teachers and the students and just being shocked and mortified and devastated by what guns in our country could be used for. And it's interesting because I didn't previously have a personal experience with guns or gun violence.
And so it wasn't that it kind of captured anything really specific in that way. But I had this theory that if you elect good people, good things will happen. The job of elected officials is to represent us. That's the basics of how our democracy works. And so I monitored the gun conversation pretty closely. At that time, I saw that 90 something percent of Americans supported a variety of gun violence prevention policies. And so I thought, Okay, great, you know, our elected officials, their job is to represent us. And so they'll vote in the right direction here. And then they didn't. And I was confused. And I recognized that there was this whole set of things that happened in between elections, called advocacy, and that's when policies are made. And that's when people aren't paying attention and communities aren't really engaged.
I was sort of like wrestling with this and thinking about this and technology. It's certainly been a part of campaigns I had done previously, tactically, but I didn't really think about tech or the tech community in any, any way until, during that time. One of the strategies that our campaign implemented was we had these policy dinners on Sundays. We would bring together leaders from the district and there was one dinner, where we were talking about 911 response times and traffic. And there were a handful of technologists that were in the room. And I remember just being totally blown away by the perspective they offered, and by the ability for technology to solve problems that humans alone sometimes can't solve.
And so I had this sort of theory of change, that I wanted to organize the tech community to be a voice in politics, and to sort of bridge the gap between elections and enable all Americans to have a voice and policymaking in between elections. And so it's sort of amazing when you have a mission statement like that, and a theory like that, and you're just sort of open to opportunities.
I was asking people do you know anyone interested in tech and politics and sort of long story short, my sister in law, who at the time was my brother's relatively new girlfriend, her friend's friend was starting this thing and I, you know, have had one of these sort of serendipitous conversations, which turned out to be the early stages of an organization called fwd.us which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and a bunch of other tech leaders to organize the tech community to do exactly this - to be a voice in politics. And so I was one of the first hires at fwd.us in the spring of 2013. And the entire strategy of that organization was and still is organizing the tech community, building technology to democratize people's access to our political process. And I was the national organizing director of that organization for about two and a half years.
Marsha Druker 9:25
That's really incredible. And I love what you said about having that personal mission statement when it comes to navigating your way through your career. People these days will have so many different careers and so many things that we could do in our lifetimes. And something like that really helps to guide you. And it helps you filter the opportunities that are coming your way and really bring your best self to those opportunities. So I think that's really cool. And I hope that you know, people that are listening will think about what their own personal mission statement is and how that applies to their career.
Lisa Conn 10:00
And you can be flexible with your personal mission statement. I mean, the world has changed so much, so quickly.
This is obviously an extreme year, an extreme example of that. But that's been true throughout human history. My approach to this idea of having a mission statement is have one, but be really attuned to the way in which the world is changing, and be willing to adapt your mission statement as the world needs something different from you.
Marsha Druker 10:28
While you were working at Facebook, you led the company's efforts to strengthen community and build empathy on the platform. What are some of the key initiatives that you worked on to do this and how did you measure success?
Lisa Conn 10:39
Facebook is another incredible company with brilliant people and incredible resources. So when I was at the Media Lab and looking at Twitter data we ended up discovering that the 2016 election was much more about polarization than anything else. We could only make sense of the data if and when we classified by political tribe or political community. And so it was interesting at Facebook. Facebook had in 2017, just right when I was joining, changed its mission to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.
And the really interesting thing about that mission statement is that those two pieces of the mission statement give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together, and are sometimes in conflict. Sometimes giving people the power to build community actually tears us apart and doesn't bring the world closer together. And so while I was at Facebook, I primarily worked with Facebook Groups and a little bit with Newsfeed. But more so Facebook Groups, and we were really interested in helping people find, join and find meaning in online digital communities. And so a couple of the initiatives that we worked on there was a bunch of product stuff and if people listening our Facebook Group admins or Facebook group members, I'm sure you have seen over the course the last three years many improvements, and many new features to make Facebook groups better and more user friendly and more engaging and more meaningful, but we also rolled out programs.
So we launched a program called the Facebook Community Leaders Program, which was a fellowship program for around 50 Facebook leaders. So folks who use Facebook in one way or another, either Facebook groups or even Instagram or sometimes even Oculus, which is another Facebook company, WhatsApp, to build meaningful communities online. And we provided financial support to those organizations, and training and resources and really importantly, community. It was really amazing to sort of bring folks in a room together who someone who had been running a Facebook group for a couple years, full time, never met anyone that they worked with, and actually had never met anyone else who ran a Facebook group, and decidedly be in a community of people just like you with the same challenges and the same experiences. Finding the same thing is kind of funny, was really, really cool to sort of allow this community of community leaders and community builders to actually start to see themselves as community leaders. And community builders.
Marsha Druker 13:01
Yeah, I remember seeing that program. And actually I applied for it maybe a couple of years ago for my work with Fuckup Nights. Facebook wasn't a huge part of what we did really, I mean, obviously, things have really shifted. But at the time that I was applying, I really was focused on our offline in-person events. And I was just exploring how to maybe start up a Facebook group for this community. So I remember coming across that and just thinking like, “Wow, what an incredible community for community professionals.” That's something that's so unique.
I want to chat a little bit more about the commonalities when it comes to community between politics and tech and what you've seen across all of your roles. I think you have such a unique perspective on it.
Lisa Conn 13:38
I think about community sort of at its core, being about giving and receiving, you join a group of people, you have something in common with and you give investment of some kind to that community of people and in return you receive benefits. And that could be a sense of belonging, a sense of security, a sense of safety, a sense of learning. Humans are humans and groups are groups. And we, for all of mankind have been organizing ourselves into groups to get that very human need to belong, and to feel a sense of purpose and identity. And so regardless of what brings people together, and it could be a political campaign and a candidate, it could be a love of sneakers, it could be a tragic event, really, at the core, the way that humans form groups and develop identity and a sense of belonging is pretty consistent.
I think what politics does really well, that isn't always part of other forms of community is sort of leadership development and training. So the way that things work in campaigns is the way that campaigns scale with limited resources to contact every voter but you need to persuade and ultimately turn out to vote is by training and creating layers of leadership. And when you invest in people and you give them responsibilities, and you give them areas to have ownership and then connect them to each other in a way that reinforces those areas of ownership and that sense of leadership. People do incredible things and feel much more of a sense of ownership and success and identity and belonging.
And it's interesting in a kind of for profit tech company context, what that translation looks like. And something that you know, we're at icebreaker, honestly, really figuring out right now is what does it mean to build community when you are also a profit driven technology platform and company?
Marsha Druker 15:31
Absolutely. That must be such an interesting challenge to work on. Let's jump into Icebreaker. Can you tell me a little bit about what Icebreaker is and what inspired you to create it?
Lisa Conn 15:41
Icebreaker is a new kind of online event platform that is designed to strengthen communities and give people that sense of togetherness that we typically only feel in person, which is not an option for a lot of people right now and honestly, isn't an option for a lot of communities that are more geographically distributed anyway. We started the company in November. of 2018. And it's interesting that I'm one of three co-founders and we all have sort of slightly different life experiences and perspectives that brought us to agreeing that Icebreaker was the solution for me. I had seen through my work, studying polarization extremism, and through like sort of looking at Facebook groups is a really interesting solution, that the way that we sort of increase empathy and shared humanity is through more kinds of communities.
When we will start talking about a community I always think it's not about having one community but having multiple communities we all have within us so many different identities and interests. And we should be a part of as many communities as possible that foster and cultivate and align with those different dimensions of identity and interest. And once we do, we have the opportunity to interact with people who otherwise might disagree with a different aspect of our interests and sense of community and belonging. And so I was really interested in how we create a digital experience that is soul nourishing and joyful and meaningful for people while strengthening communities and reminding us of our individual humanity and then of our shared humanity.
My co-founder, Perry kind of came to it from an interest in loneliness and addiction. And Alexander, who's our third co-founder, came to it from a series of experiences that he had also working in politics and social movement building. And so I had sort of this like a checklist of the things that all of the academics that I had partnered with in the past thought made a healthy, inclusive technology. And we embedded all of that in the design of this platform that feels actually just really fun and really joyful and really wonderful to people who experience it, but sort of behind the scenes is also fostering that sense of connection and and shared humanity and belonging.
Marsha Druker 17:45
Yeah, absolutely. It's such a cool platform. I use that as part of a happy hour for a conference that I was at specifically for community builders. As an event planner, myself, I have obviously experimented with a lot of different technologies and have attended a lot of virtual events over the last few months. Something that really stood out to me was that when you were chatting with somebody, you only see that person, you don't see a screen of yourself. And I think that it was just something that I didn't think of before. But I realized, you know, when I was on a Zoom call with somebody, or in a breakout room, part of us is distracted and almost like self conscious, looking at yourself on the screen. And with Icebreaker it was totally eliminated. And you're just so like, zeroed in on what the person is saying. And those prompt questions are there and it just made for such an awesome experience. And it's because it's purpose-built specifically for this.
What are some other unique features that the platform has? And what are other things that it has that other event platforms can't really provide?
Lisa Conn 18:42
It's interesting because there's this concept called nose-biting distance and behavioral psychology, which is that if you are physically close enough to someone to bite their nose, literally, you somehow view them as more human and you end up being more civil and patient and empathetic towards them. It's like some caveman fight or flight response. At all of us have within us and so part of that particular feature that you called out is designed to psychologically kind of replicate this idea of nose biting distance, which makes you a little more patient a little more understanding a little bit more empathetic of the person that you're talking to, which is really interesting.
At a high level. The platform is designed to be inclusive, engaging and participatory. So every aspect of it is opt in, you enter into a zoom and I love zoom I using all the time, this is no way critiques Zoom. Zoom does what it does so so so well, I'm very grateful, especially these days for Zoom. But oftentimes at around six people, Zoom conversations stop really being engaging and participatory, you enter in your camera and your audio is on. But at some point, you hide your camera, you turn off your audio, and you don't know how you're supposed to engage or participate. And these weird like power dynamics sort of come into play. And I think a lot about any kind of unstructured space actually just replicates those power dynamics or perpetuates them.
So if you feel powerful in a conversation either to rank in the organization or the community, societal status, race, gender or personality, all these things contribute to how comfortable you feel entering into a space and talking. And in a Zoom Room. It's often the people who are powerful that feel really comfortable speaking up and dominating the conversation, an icebreaker is really designed to equalize those power dynamics and democratize people's voices and conversations. It just makes it so accessible.
And like you said, it just gives people a voice. And it lets people be heard and participate in a way that really makes it equal for everybody who's on the platform.
Marsha Druker 20:35
I really, really love what you're building. I'm curious, how did you decide to leave your full time role at Facebook to focus on Icebreaker full time?
Lisa Conn 20:42
It was difficult, and then it wasn't difficult. I think endings are always challenging. But then as soon as the new something starts, you sort of forget that it was challenging. I was at MIT and MIT was really obsessed with entrepreneurship. I was someone who wholly sort of felt that you shouldn't start a company just to start a company. Because that's really ego, it's really you wanting to be in charge of something and having a title that you love.
But you should start a company if you feel like you have to. And if you feel like there's no other way to do the thing that you want to do, and ultimately, you know, having worked with Twitter, and then at Facebook, and having an evolved personal mission to kind of go back to that part of the conversation, which was to heal societal division through technology, I ultimately concluded that the only way and the best way to do that was actually to start a new platform, that from day one kind of embedded the values of bringing people together, humanize each other, empathy, etc. And so, I have known Perry, who's our co-founder, who's our CEO, about five years prior to starting Icebreaker. He had started a different company and I was actually his first customer. And so we worked together in that way, you know, years and years ago, and he had left that company and was sort of exploring something new and so we were just chatting a lot and he and Alexander had actually built like a really early, early early prototype of Icebreaker and invited me as a friend to sort of see it.
And I saw just the potential of this concept, this new kind of online event. And it was initially a bit of a no brainer for me that I had to be part of it. And I had to sort of help shape it and bring it into the world. And then there was sort of the whole process of “Okay, are we going to raise money? Are we going to bootstrap? What are everyone's titles? Do we get along with each other and work well together?” So there were a few months of the sort of rational mind making sure this was actually a good idea. And then last was like early November, something like that was my last day at Facebook. And the following Monday, we were together and we were doing it!
Marsha Druker 22:43
It sounds like such a great team that you guys have and really amazing that you were so rational about it. And I think that's such a common thing that you said, you know, they're like why start a company just for the sake of starting a company. That's not the way to go? And I think it's the same thing with a community as well. I think the best communities are born out of a true need and You know, people are really starting to scratch their own edge.
So we're recording this during COVID-19. And so the past few months must have been so incredibly busy for Icebreaker with so many communities transitioning to virtual events and demand surging. Can you tell me a little bit about what it's been like the past few months?
Lisa Conn 23:29
It feels like forever, but it also feels like no time at all has passed. So early March, so we were in beta for about a year and a half. And we have had quite a few hosts on our platform and participants, but all of them I had a personal relationship where we were learning from them. We were partnering with them. We were running experiments together. And so we had this form on our website that was if you want to use Icebreaker, fill out this form. It literally was like one day I went to bed, and I woke up the next day and there were like hundreds of people had filled this form, and that just continued for weeks and weeks and weeks was really wild about those early days a bunch of things were wild.
But the first thing that was wild was that we had these aspirations of you know, one day everyone will use Icebreaker. It would be used in the classroom and Icebreaker will be used among grassroots communities, Icebreaker will be used to help people fall in love and Icebreaker will be used at companies and we sort of wanted all the things but we knew as people building a business that you had to pick a market and launch for that market price for that market and all that stuff. And so it was really wild about those early days was that every market we were ever interested in, and then some, were all interested in us and coming to us. And so we hadn't yet launched such that anyone could just go and host their own event. You had to talk to us, we have to give you some special tag on our database.
And so the first month of COVID-19 was completely crazy. For that reason, we were on-boarding thousands of people every single day. It was a fever dream of this weird period in March where I would just have so many meetings. We all remember early March, people were emotional. And so we'd have these, like on-boarding conversations with the first 20 minutes needed to be, “How are you? What's going on for you? How are you being impacted? How are you feeling?” And so it was a truly, unbelievably bizarre and amazing and sad and scary, but also exciting time for me as an individual.
Marsha Druker 25:24
Right now, community is probably the most important thing ever, if people are really craving that human connection, and you have something that's so perfect for it, and just so well positioned.
Lisa Conn 25:34
The other thing that I have observed is that I am someone as a woman, and as a woman founder who has always valued EQ as much as IQ. I think that the way that sort of teams form and communities are built requires a real sense of emotional intelligence and the ability to empathize with others and to motivate others and to regulate your own emotions and all of the various components of of emotional intelligence, but interestingly in the workplace, and then sort of like business articles not talked about are valued quite as much as strategy and output.
And the interesting thing about COVID is that in addition to accelerating this trend towards remote work, I've also observed an acceleration of the appreciation of EQ. Because if you don't know how to read by a member of your team, or your manager or colleague of yours is struggling, and if you don't know how to talk to them about that, there's no way people can work. People cannot get things done without sort of the basics of being taken care of and feeling safe and secure, emotionally and in place.
And, you know, life is life, like people always have challenges and things that are going on with them. What's really interesting about this time is that it's not a secret. It's not like, you know, somebody is secretly going through a divorce or somebody is hiding the fact that they just had a miscarriage, which happens all the time for people in the workplace, but it's not safe to talk about and it's not asked about, but when we're all aware that there is a global pandemic that people are sick that people are out of work, and people are home and their small apartment with their husband and their kids. You can't avoid talking about these things. And I think that's a really beautiful evolution.
Marsha Druker 27:09
Absolutely. I think empathy and community is just everything right now.
I'm actually really curious about your experience through politics and what you're doing now, do you have any advice for helping people find common ground? You know, like, sometimes people are so rooted in their opinions, and often so angry and passionate about what they believe in? How can we create dialogue and you know, really listen and bridge some of those divides?
Lisa Conn 27:33
At a high level community is what connects us. When we think about the inability to find common ground, I'm reminded of the very definition of polarization. So it's a word that is used a lot in the news, and you read about polarization and you have sort of these understandings of what the phrase actually means. But there's a type of polarization that I think is really important called effective polarization. So polarization is the divergence of beliefs or attitudes or ideas to the extremes. You love something, I hate it.
But effective polarization is when I stop viewing you as a human. I don't like you, I can't be in community with you because you disagree with me on this one thing. And common ground is not about agreeing on our opinions or becoming more moderate in our beliefs, but it's rather acknowledging the right to exist and your humanity as a person who disagrees. So just to give you kind of an example of how this could happen. I, as you know, worked in democratic politics for a lot of years, identify as a progressive democrat, I love President Barack Obama, like these are very much part of my ideology and science itself.
A few years ago, a friend that I'd grown up with passed away due to heroin addiction. I found out that she had passed when I was at work, and I didn't really want to talk to anyone about it. I didn't know if they would judge me or if they'd understand, but I felt really alone. And so I joined a Facebook group called affected by addiction support group and I posted on the group about my friend and it was, you know, some devastating kind of tear. I wrote post about how she was beautiful and we lost her. And I'm really sad. And hundreds of people responded to me, some of whom were former addicts who said, “Thank you for the story. I'm going to stay clean another couple weeks because of you, thank you. “Others were moms who lost their daughters, you know, who wanted to talk about it. And I developed a relationship with this woman in this sort of group and this interaction, who was just so there for me and so wonderful and had gone through this with her daughter several years before.
And you know, eventually one day I was like, I wonder what this woman looks like or who she is. So I clicked on her Facebook page, we're all stalkers a little bit, right. We all go deep. On her Facebook page, she had a cover photo that was also a photo of Barack Obama, except for in her cover photo, Barack Obama was in a jail cell with Hillary Clinton. And I realized, okay, this is a person who if I had met under any other context, I would just write off I wouldn't want to be in community with this person. But because we connected first on our shared values, and I'm never gonna agree with her about her political stances probably, but we were able to find common ground and build a relationship. And if ever she and I were to have a conversation about issues in politics, there would be this foundation of shared identity, and connection.
And so the sort of academic language around this is ADF connector identities. We all have within us so many different identities that allow us to connect to different kinds of people. And some of those are polarizing identities or political, maybe your religious identity. But if we can find these identities that connect us to our roles as a parent or as a lover of skincare or as a person who suffered a loss from addiction, we can at least start these conversations with a sense of shared humanity.
Marsha Druker 30:57
So let's shift gears, I want to chat a little bit about your personal community. I'm curious why you picked LA as your home base. I know you've traveled quite a bit and you're originally from LA. What made you decide to settle down there? And why is the city really special to you?
Lisa Conn 31:12
I'm obsessed with Los Angeles. I'm in my 30s. And I think that it probably wouldn't have been good for me or the right place to live in my 20s. But where I am in my life right now, I'm married. I have a dog. I'm in tech, but I've never been someone who wants to just be in one industry. I really value diversity of thought. I love surrounding myself with people that are different than me and think differently than I do. LA is just so awesome for my kind of life. The initial sort of impetus for moving to LA was a couple of things. One, my family lives here, my parents live here, and my parents are in their 70s. And I just started having this feeling before we moved that I wanted to be closer to them. And interestingly, about six months later, my dad had a heart attack. He's doing great. He's totally fine now, but it was the kind of situation in which I'm really happy that we were here. And we were near him. And even now during COVID, you know, I've been able to drive and see my parents from a distance, which I wouldn't have been able to do if we lived in a different place. And then this sort of secondary piece of it was, you know, my husband and I, and he's a venture capitalist and he works really hard. And he had done startups before, we had just sort of been grinding for like a decade, like we just working our asses off all the time. All we did was work. And we were living in San Francisco before we moved here, which is an obvious place to live. I was working at Facebook, I had to live there.
And you know, we were paying like $4,000 a month in rent for one bedroom. I was traveling for work every single week. My commute was an hour and a half. He was running a startup at the time, we were working until 10pm every day, and we just were not happy. And we looked around at our community in San Francisco, and with all due respect to everyone who lives in San Francisco, everyone was kind of like that, like people had these solo identities of your job title, like that's all you were was your job title. And if your company was doing well, you were doing well, if a company wasn't doing well, you weren't doing well. And it's so cheesy he and I went on a trip to Thailand, and like, didn't have WiFi and sort of came back from that trip. And we were like, “We should just try to be happy.”
Marsha Druker 33:18
Well, that's awesome. Like when the city is right for you, you just know and I'm so glad you guys were able to make that decision. What communities are you part of and why are they meaningful to you?
Lisa Conn 33:29
I’m a part of a lot of different communities, some online some offline want me to call out right now is I'm a part of a community called Alpha, which is a community for women and technology. It's a digital community founded by this awesome woman named Adrian. When we first started Icebreaker, I had two male co founders in this industry that is, you know, shockingly male driven. And always been sort of interested in women in tech is kind of an issue but they're all these just sort of odd things that happened early on from people assuming I was the assistant asking you to help us scheduling, just like all this bullshit. And I took it personally, I really personalized it. And I thought I wasn't showing up with enough seriousness that I was doing wrong to not be taken seriously.
And then I found this community and it was, like all women who had the same experiences as I did. And it really helped me differentiate between what was my lived experience and what was unique to me and what was sort of systemic and part of this industry that we all together could sort of fight against.
Marsha Druker 34:27
I love that that's awesome. Something that I found really interesting while I was doing a little bit of research about you is that one of your goals at your wedding was to create a sense of community among your guests. I'm so curious about you know, how did you do this? And also just that wedding was so beautiful and congratulations.
Lisa Conn 34:44
Yeah, I love talking about the short story is that my husband and I are obsessed with our friends and our family and we love the people in our lives and very few of our kind of independent friend groups have met each other. And so it was really, really important to ask every choice he made at the wedding be about uniting and bonding these different groups of friends and these different relatives of ours into one cohesive unified community. That was the point without that, it's like why spend the money just elope? That was sort of the reason to have a wedding. And so we decided to have a surprise ceremony because there's nothing quite like trauma to bond people and a surprise ceremony is a positive form of trauma.
Friday night was supposed to be the rehearsal dinner. We decided to surprise everyone which we had been planning the whole time. And just tell people “Hey, you know, we're going to get married right here right now, let's just do this.” And everyone was shocked and it created this sort of shared experiences shared memory, the story that people could tell, and by the end of the weekend, I mean, everyone's best friends. It totally, totally worked because people had the shared experience and the shared memory.
Marsha Druker 35:53
I love that. I don't know if I've heard the words “trauma” and “wedding” in the same sentence, but it's such a positive thing in this case! And that's so awesome - you bonded people. What a unique idea.
So you mentioned that you're obsessed with your friends. I love that. I think I am too. How do you choose them? How do you choose the people that are closest to you?
Lisa Conn 36:10
I've been reflecting on what my friends have in common because my group of friends are all really different from each other, like an architect or an actor and a stand up comedian and you know, a bunch of different creative types. But I think there is a self assuredness, like my friends are very much themselves. And as I look back kind of always have been, they know who they are. They're not trying to be somebody else. They're weird, and they're quirky, but they're also cool and normal when they need to be and have a great sense of humor. And so I sort of pick people who are comfortable with themselves. And I think what we all have in common is probably that everyone's in therapy in some way, which is a sign of being interested in self reflection and self exploration and a kind of fluency and talking about yourself and your feelings and your life experiences. And that's what brings everyone together.
Marsha Druker 37:01
And my last question for you is, and I ask this of everybody on the podcast, what does the word “community” mean to you?
Lisa Conn 37:10
So when I was at Facebook, we did a year long analysis of the word community, it was a very thorough lit review and lots of interviews. And ultimately, we define community as a collection of people who give and receive. So you give investment of time and support, and you receive a sense of safety and belonging over time. So to me, community is about a collection of people who give to each other and receive things in return. And that currency of giving and getting back and forth is the currency of the community.
Marsha Druker 37:39
I love that. That's such a good way to define it and totally agree with you on that. Awesome. Lisa, thank you so much again for joining me. It was such a pleasure to chat with you.
Lisa Conn 37:49
Thank you so much for having me. It was so nice chatting with you.
