I'm Salim Virani. I used to design peer learning programs, and these days I'm having fun building stuff.
Since the first Leancamp, it’s been clear it built community. The problem has been that it is more expensive than a Barcamp, so the sponsorship model has been much tougher to make work. The question of what Leancamp was – a community, a charity, a barcamp, an event business, a knowledge transfer platform, a social enterprise – actually didn’t matter as much as how to make it financially sustainable.
As stewards of this community, how could we enable it to continue?
We ran experiments against a few models: freemium, membership, and various types of media partnerships. After a few pivots, a glaring assumption became clear. Hang on – what if we participants actually paid for this instead of sponsors? Could it really be that simple?
Looking at the business model of Leancamp, this simple change has a number of huge benefits:
We learned a number of lessons from this:
via Leancamp
I’m working on a communication tool for loose community groups and unconference-style interactions. It focuses on individual autonomy rather than top-down coordination.
I recently became a Kernel fellow, where I was exploring models for self-directing communities of care, the history of economic cultural norms, and the connection between mimicry, memes and our sense of belonging.
I did a few advisory gigs too - for Polygon, Limechain and Bankless on education and support programs.
In the past, I designed peer learning programs for Oxford, UCL, Techstars, Microsoft Ventures and The Royal Academy Of Engineering. I also played a role in creating the Lean Startup methodology, and the European startup ecosystem. You can read about this here.
Safe spaces make for better learning (2021)
Choose happiness (2021)
Working 'Remote' after 10 years (2020)
Emotional Vocabulary (2020)
Project portfolios (2020)
Expectations (2019)
Amperage - the inconvenient truth about energy for Africa's off-grid. (2018)
The history Of Lean Startup (2016)
Get your loved ones off Facebook (2015)
Entrepreneurship is craft (2014)
Peter Thiel vs the science fiction masters (2013)
My latest posts are making sense of daos, an agile starter pack for daos and building ecosystems with grant programs.