Hi, I'm Jan König 👋. I'm one of the founders of Jovo, 28 years old, and live in Berlin. < Go back to learn more.

Transparency matters

Wow.

I shared some thoughts on community-first startups and the launch of Matt Schlicht's Octane AI last night.

Overnight, it completely blew up.

This was only one of the posts (I believe the one that got the discussion started).

Community members started accusing the admin of being intransparent and having a conflict of interest. It didn't help that, afterwards, some of those people were banned from the group.

People started investigating the whole story and some things came up that seem quite sleazy (I don't want to write about it here but it feels more like a bad version of a startup-themed Tatort than a Facebook group discussion).

This situation really taught me that transparency is everything when running a community. Even though he apologized, people want him to step down as admin of the group. Trust once lost is hard to regain.
-Jan

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