The idea of an entrepreneurship community is fundamentally paradoxical. On one hand, surrounding yourself with ambitious people creates boundless opportunities to learn, collaborate, and build. On the other, immersing yourself in a community with shared ideas and incentives can foster conformity and undermine the independent thinking that entrepreneurship demands. So, is the existence of entrepreneurship communities ultimately a net positive or negative for society?

Why am I the right person to ask this question?

I currently serve as President of Entrepreneurs@Berkeley (E@B), Berkeley’s largest entrepreneurship community, and have been part of the organization for 2.5 years. When I joined, I came from Kansas with almost no exposure to startups or entrepreneurship. Over the past two and a half years, I’ve watched my own worldview, and my definition of what it means to be an entrepreneur, change dramatically through my involvement in E@B. Now, as its president, I have a unique perspective from both inside the community and as someone who was fundamentally shaped by it.

The conversations that happen in these communities can easily create million-dollar opportunities. A random conversation after an event can turn into a cofounder relationship. Someone mentions a problem they've been thinking about, and three people start working on it the next week. You meet someone who has spent years in an industry you know nothing about, and suddenly you have a completely different understanding of a market.

But the same mechanism that makes these communities powerful can also make them dangerous.

Entrepreneurship fundamentally values independent thinking and challenging conventional wisdom. Communities, however, inevitably develop their own conventional wisdom. People start building what the community considers "cool" rather than what they genuinely believe should exist.

Below, I want to explore both sides of this tension, and why I think the answer is a little more complicated than simply saying entrepreneurship communities are good or bad.

The case for entrepreneurship communities

The most obvious benefit is access.

There is a huge difference between knowing that entrepreneurship exists and actually being surrounded by people who are doing it. Before coming to Berkeley, I understood entrepreneurship mostly as a vague concept. Start a company. Raise money. Build a product. Maybe become successful.

E@B made the process tangible.

I started meeting people who were actually building things. I met students who were working on startups between classes, people who had raised money, people who had failed, people who had dropped out to pursue an idea, and people who were still figuring out what they wanted to do.

That exposure matters more than it sounds.

A lot of entrepreneurship is knowing that something is possible.

You are much more likely to start a company if you've met five people your age who have done it. You are much more likely to reach out to an investor if your friend has introduced you to one before. You are much more likely to try something weird if everyone around you treats trying something weird as completely normal.

Communities lower the psychological barrier to action.

And then there is the compounding effect of relationships.

Entrepreneurship is unusually dependent on people. You need cofounders, early employees, customers, investors, advisors, and often just people who are willing to listen to your half-formed idea at 1 a.m.

It is difficult to manufacture these relationships intentionally. They tend to come from repeated interactions.

That is one of the things I value most about E@B. Someone might join because they want to meet founders, but after spending a semester together, they end up becoming friends. Six months later, they might start a company together.

The community creates the conditions for those relationships without necessarily knowing what they will turn into.

There is also something less tangible that happens.

Being around ambitious people changes your perception of what is normal.

If everyone around you is applying to YC, building a company, or trying to solve some absurdly difficult problem, your own ambitions start to feel less absurd. That can be incredibly powerful.

But there is a cost to being surrounded by ambitious people

The problem is that communities don't just transmit information.

They transmit norms.

Every community develops an implicit answer to questions like:

What is worth building?

What does success look like?

Who is impressive?

What kinds of ideas are interesting?

What kinds of people should you listen to?

You rarely notice these norms forming because nobody explicitly announces them. They emerge from what gets attention.

If the person who raised $5 million gets treated like a celebrity, while the person quietly building a profitable business gets ignored, the community has communicated something about what it values.

If everyone is excited about AI agents, suddenly everyone wants to build an AI agent.

If everyone thinks consumer startups are dead, nobody wants to build a consumer startup.

If a certain accelerator becomes the ultimate status signal, getting into that accelerator can start becoming the goal rather than building something people actually want.

None of this requires anyone to be malicious.

In fact, it is almost inevitable.

People are social creatures. We look to the people around us for signals about what is worth doing.

This is where entrepreneurship communities can become a little ironic.

We tell people to think independently while putting hundreds of people in the same room and exposing them to the same ideas, investors, founders, podcasts, Twitter accounts, and success stories.

You can end up with a room full of people trying to be contrarian in exactly the same way.

The "cool startup" problem

I have seen this firsthand.

There are ideas that immediately generate excitement in an entrepreneurship community. They sound ambitious. They are technically difficult. They have a huge market. They are easy to explain in a sentence.

And then there are ideas that are actually useful but just aren't that exciting.

The latter can get overlooked.

This creates a subtle incentive to optimize for the reaction of other entrepreneurs rather than the reaction of customers.

You start asking:

"Would a VC like this?"

"Would my friends think this is interesting?"

"Could this raise a big round?"

Instead of:

"Does anyone actually need this?"

Those questions aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. But they are not the same question either.

One of the easiest ways to lose the plot in entrepreneurship is to start building for the people around you instead of the people you're supposedly building for.

Ironically, the more entrepreneurial a community becomes, the stronger this effect can be. Everyone knows the language. Everyone knows the startup playbook. Everyone knows what a good pitch sounds like.

You can become very good at looking like an entrepreneur without necessarily becoming very good at solving problems.

But conformity isn't always bad

This is where I think the discussion gets more interesting.

We often talk about conformity as if it is inherently negative. I don't think that's true.

If I had never joined E@B, I probably would not have developed many of the beliefs I have today about startups. Some of the ideas I initially held were simply wrong. Being surrounded by people who challenged me was incredibly valuable.

Communities can accelerate intellectual development precisely because they expose you to people who think differently.

There is a difference between conforming to a belief and being exposed to a belief.

The first is dangerous.

The second is useful.

If everyone around you believes something, that should not automatically make you believe it. But it should force you to develop a reason for why you disagree.

In that sense, a good entrepreneurship community should actually make people more independent, not less.

The goal shouldn't be to eliminate shared beliefs. That is impossible.

The goal should be to create an environment where those beliefs can be challenged.

What I think a good entrepreneurship community should do

After being involved in E@B for the past 2.5 years, I've started to think that the job of an entrepreneurship community is not to tell people what to build.

It is to increase the number of interesting things that people are willing to try.

That sounds like a subtle distinction, but I think it matters a lot.

A healthy community should create collisions.

Put a technical person next to someone who understands an industry.

Put a founder who has failed next to someone who has never started anything.

Introduce students to people who disagree with them.

Make it easy for someone to say, "I think everyone here is wrong."

And then let them explain why.

The best communities aren't necessarily the ones where everyone agrees. They're the ones where disagreement is cheap.

You should be able to walk into a room, pitch an idea that everyone thinks is stupid, get challenged for an hour, and walk out either convinced you were wrong or even more convinced you were right.

Both outcomes are valuable.

What I worry about is when communities become too good at producing consensus.

Because consensus feels productive.

Everyone is excited. Everyone is building. Everyone is using the same vocabulary. Everyone knows what the next big thing is.

But entrepreneurship, at its core, is often about noticing something that other people haven't noticed yet.

That requires a willingness to be wrong in public.

So, are entrepreneurship communities good or bad?

I don't think the community itself determines the answer.

The more important question is what the community optimizes for.

A community that optimizes for status will probably produce status-seeking entrepreneurs.

A community that optimizes for fundraising will probably produce people who optimize for fundraising.

A community that optimizes for interesting ideas, genuine relationships, and experimentation has a better chance of producing independent thinkers.

This has changed how I think about my role as president of E@B.

I don't want E@B to become a place where everyone learns the same definition of entrepreneurship.

I want it to be a place where someone from Kansas with no startup experience can walk in, meet people who completely change their perspective, and eventually develop a perspective of their own.

That distinction matters to me because that is essentially what happened to me.

The irony is that the entrepreneurship community that shaped my thinking also taught me to question the community itself.

And maybe that's the best outcome an entrepreneurship community can produce.

Not a group of people who think alike.

Not even a group of people who agree about what entrepreneurship should look like.

Just a group of people who are more willing to think for themselves, because they had enough interesting people around them to challenge their thinking in the first place.