Grow Your Business Through Community Strategy


I get things done by leveraging community and connections.
With a visionary outlook and over 15 years of experience leading strategy, operations, and growth in global teams, I help CEOs, Founders, and Leaders build thriving communities using evidence-based strategies. Community is at the core of everything I do.

Words from Clients, Managers, and Peers

  • "Laís is one of those rare people who lead their life by how they think the world should be, and in ways that can help the most people possible around them. This is what makes her the best type of community builder."

    Derek Andersen
    Co-founder and CEO at Startup Grind and Bevy

  • "While Laís has proven herself as an impactful community builder [with ODCB and Hacking Communities], what makes her unique is she is both a skilled practitioner and a teacher. As a result, she understands the theory and the practice of community building, and her insights are rooted in what works."

    Erik Torenberg
    Founder at Turpentine, On Deck, and Village Global:

  • "Laís has been crucial in helping us develop our programs at Startup Genome. Her proactive, solution-oriented approach to building community is invaluable. She excels at leading by example, which is crucial for fast-moving teams. She has a special blend of strategic and operational focus that any community-focused organisation would be lucky to have"

    Liam Ward
    Programs Director at Hypergrowth (by Startup Genome)

  • "Laís can do it all! She is a skilled strategist and leader, who is also adept at designing and implementing key systems and processes. At Startup Genome, Laís established and managed a global expertise network from scratch, meeting complex requests with 'ideal' matches within weeks. She is diligent and focused, an engaging and credible contributor in group settings, generous with her knowledge, and collaborative in her approach. The impact of what she can achieve in a short space of time cannot be understated."

    Ama Williams
    Startup Ecosystems & Innovation Expert and Peer at Startup Genome

  • "Laís has been absolutely instrumental in helping us define a hybrid community strategy, combining local chapters as well as a global membership community. Her passion, deep expertise and hands-on approach has been invaluable and key to the success of our community"

    Maiko Schaffrath
    Founder & CEO, Impact Hustlers

  • "I wanted to give my utmost thank you for our time together in our coaching relationship. Your wisdom and experience provided the foundations needed to really hack a community from scratch. Since our times together I've been able to refine that there are many different communities of donor organizers, and each of these communities needs different kinds of support."

    Haley Bash
    Founder & Executive Director at Donor Organizer Hub and Lais’ Client at Hacking Communities

How Can We Work Together?

Strategy Consulting & Mentoring

  • One-on-one coaching for community leaders and executives

  • Guidance for strategic planning and leadership development

  • Customized mentoring programs for community managers career growth

Fractional & Interim Leadership

  • Fractional Executive: key partner to the executive team to deliver an evidence-based community strategy

  • Interim Head of Community: full time, from strategy design to management

  • Strategic Consulting (Project-Based): time-bound commitment

Advisory & Public Speaking

  • Keynote sessions on community building and leadership

  • Emceeing and Moderation (panels and round tables)

  • Facilitation of workshops, masterminds, and open spaces

Let’s Connect

Schedule a call with Laís de Oliveira to discover evidence-based approaches for driving exceptional engagement and growth.

How Can I Help?

  • Relationship-Building Systems Design and Management

    Community Design and Architecture

    User Contribution Journey and Lifecycle Design

    Community Intelligence: Data-driven Engagement Models

    Community Experience: Interaction Design and Serendipity-Engineering

    Community-Led Learning (Membership, Cohorts, Incubator/Accelerator Programs)

  • Creative Problem-Solving

    Taking Ideas to Execution

    Budgeting & Bootstrapping
    Vision-Led Management

  • Talent Scouting & Recruitment

    Team Building and Management

    Capacity-Building, Training, Empowerment, and Delegation

  • Content & Educational Curriculum Development

    Event Agenda Design

    Learning Experiences Design

    Social Learning (Membership, Cohorts, Incubator/Accelerator Programs)

    • Strategy for Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Development

    • Ecosystem Mapping and Strategic Partnerships Management

    • Building Expert Communities and Knowledge-Sharing Networks

    • Founder-Centric Educational Program Design (Mentoring, Peer-to-Peer, Domain-Expertise

    • Space optimization through community activation

    • Placemaking consulting for real estate projects and community hubs

    • “Offline SEO”: increasing foot traffic trough programming

About Laís de Oliveira

Laís de Oliveira is a seasoned entrepreneur and executive with over 15 years of global experience in community building, business management, and innovation.

She has successfully led ventures and developed thriving communities for government agencies, private companies, and non-profits. Renowned for transforming ideas into reality through strategic planning and hands-on execution, Laís creates scalable systems that drive engagement and growth. Her diverse expertise spans sectors including tech, education, real estate, and social impact, making her a versatile leader in fostering highly relevant communities.

Laís's work has significantly shaped and strengthened entrepreneurial ecosystems, fostered economic development, and driven social change across multiple continents. Having lived in Mauritius, Argentina, Chile, Malaysia, Indonesia, the United States, and Portugal, her rich international experience uniquely equips her to connect with and understand diverse communities. This global perspective makes her an exceptional leader, capable of fostering dynamic and impactful communities wherever she goes.

Experience Highlights: Instructional Design,
Community Strategy, and Innovation Management

Learning Experience Design:
Program Director at On Deck Community Builders Fellowship

Founded and led the first cohort-based executive education program for community professionals, welcoming 288 Founders, VPs, and Heads of Community from high-growth companies (including Meta, Endeavor, and Canva).

Developing Scalable Growth Systems as Global Community Director at Startup Grind

Expanded the community to 80+ new chapters across Africa, APAC, and Eastern Europe and set the baseline of processes that allowed Startup Grind scaled to 600 chapters globally (growing entrepreneurial ecosystems and collaborating with major economic development agencies).

Innovation and Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Development: Global Community at Startup Genome

Designed and managed the delivery of evidence-based economic models and programs to foster the development of thriving startup communities for national governments and innovation agencies.

Recent Engagements as a Consultant, Fractional Executive, Mentor, Advisor, and Keynote Speaker (2022-24)

Strategy Consulting & Mentoring

  • Provided community strategy, design, and architecture consulting for various clients, including Bluefields Accelerator, Instituto Profesional del Sueño Infantil (IPSI), Donor Organizer Hub, and Impact Hustlers.

  • Providing mentoring community strategy, operations and growth to Founders, VPs, Heads of Community and Senior Community Managers.Providing mentoring community strategy, operations and growth to Founders, VPs, Heads of Community and Senior Community Managers.

Fractional & Interim Leadership

  • Built a global network of over 100 founders and C-level executives to mentor scale-ups from emerging countries. She designed and managed scalable recruitment and onboarding systems, ensuring top-tier mentors provided invaluable guidance. Her strategic vision and execution created a dynamic mentorship ecosystem that significantly contributed to the growth and success of emerging businesses worldwide.

  • Helped structure their community architecture (developing an organisational chart to scale interactions) and built capacity by training a team member into the Community Operations Manager role.

Advisory & Public Speaking

  • Steered innovative initiatives to accelerate positive change toward the SDGs by mobilizing young talent in community leadership, problem-solving, and launching social and environmental solutions

  • Co-created and taught the first academic course on Community Marketing in Brazil at ESPM, the leading Brazilian university in Communication and Marketing.

  • A frequent speaker and podcast guest, Lais’ most recent speaking engagements include:

    • Comunidades Digitais Summit (2024)

    • Build IRL Accelerator (2024)

    • The Learning Revolution by Disco (2024)

    • Loneliness Busters (2024)

    • Community (Re)Focus (2023)

    • CM Summit (2023)

Early Trajectory Highlights
(from 2010)

  • Led 2,000 volunteers in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay to achieve ambitious goals by managing an Executive Team of 12 people from 7 countries and a Board of 18 Local Chapter Presidents as Regional President of a non-profit, at the age of 21.

  • Expanded the community to 80+ new chapters across Africa, APAC, and Eastern Europe and set the baseline of processes that allowed Startup Grind scaled to 600 chapters globally (growing entrepreneurial ecosystems and collaborating with major economic development agencies).

  • Managed community partnerships to increase the adoption of government initiatives to foster entrepreneurship, designed and delivered education programs for their Startup Academy, and provided over 50 mentorship sessions to global startups as a Mentor in Residence for the Global Accelerator Program.

  • Started and sold her first business, 8spaces.co, to Flyspaces.com, where she served as Malaysia Country Manager and Chief Community Officer. [See the story here.](https://e27.co/co-working-spaces-flyspaces-acquires-kl-based-8spaces-20161128/)

  • Acted as a placemaking consultant for major real estate projects, including UEM Sunrise’s Iskandar Puteri, with an emphasis on startup communities. Helped build community to revitalize or activate creative and productive spaces in Kuala Lumpur, from APW (a 63-year-old commercial printing plant spanning 70,000 sqft) to Common Ground (a 20,000 sqft coworking space).

  • Designed and managed the delivery of evidence-based economic models and programs to foster the development of thriving startup communities for governments and innovation agencies worldwide.

  • Co-created and taught the first academic course on Community Marketing in Brazil at ESPM, the leading Brazilian university in Communication and Marketing

Public Speaking Highlights:
Innovation Ecosystems Development & Community Strategy

  • Emceeing at Web Summit 2019

  • Interviewing Brad Feld at CASE 2020

  • Keynote at Startup Grind Europe, Barcelona

  • Expert Panel at CASE 2019

  • Expert Panel at Ecosystem Summit, Collision 2018

  • Emceeing at Forum, Web Summit 2017

  • Emceeing at Startup University, Web Summit 2018

  • Moderator at Startup Grind 2019

  • Expert Panel at Ecosystem Summit 2017

  • Expert Panel at South Summit 2017

Publications

  • This guide makes the case that anyone can develop the leadership and communication skills required to sustain high-growth communities.

  • Portuguese Version of Hacking Communities, released in partnership with a major publisher in Portugal and Brazil.

Book Reviews

  • “Most people who talk about community building want to romanticize it, or worse, they want to make it into a series of actionable “steps” without heart. Laís de Oliveira explains the required actions in amazing detail, but she does it with a sensitivity and a wisdom that can only come from experience (...) Every page gets better and better. If you care about people, read this book”

    – Roy H. Williams, Author of the bestselling trilogy: Wizard of Ads

  • "An accessible and tactical guide to building community. As if Lais, in her work building up StartupGrind and other communities, wasn't enough of a reason to buy the book, her research-based approach to spark and scale communities is so clearly laid out in the book, within the first few pages I was already writing down notes of what I could be doing."

    – Zvi Band, Entrepreneur and Author of Success Is in Your Sphere: Leverage the Power of Relationships to Achieve Your Business Goals

  • “It's both: practical and heartwarming. Besides rich personal experience told in a raw and authentic way, you can expect to find well-researched insights into community building… get ready for actionable know-how on how you can hack a community around your product, company or an idea.”

    – Natasha Zolotareva, Journalist, International Media Specialist and Writer at Entrepreneur.com

  • "Required reading for anyone looking to build communities. Part raw accounts from the journey of building communities -- from Malaysia to San Francisco -- part actionable guide for building communities; this book is a fantastic read. Highly recommended."

    – Arnobio Morelix, Co-Founder & CEO at Sirius Education, Author of Rebooted: An Uncommon Guide to Radical Success and Fairness in the New World of Life, Death, and Tech

  • “The reason why it is possible using Oliveira’s strategy to hack a community is precisely because she doesn’t focus on strategies and tactics for building community. She wants to help you, the person building the community, grow into the mindset of being a community builder … This (book) is to understand how to build communities intrinsically. We’ve needed this in the space. It’s beautiful prose and it’s highly introspective. It’s tremendously artful and it deserves a read. It deserves two reads. Four reads. It deserves a lot of reads.”

    – Samantha “Venia” Logan, Founder at Socially Constructed Online

  • "This is an incredible book about how to build organizations that are based in trust and founded in a sense of purpose. Many leaders build this web of safety consciously into their business and Lais does a great job at breaking down how high impact leaders intentionally build safety, acceptance and belonging into their organization. Interspersed throughout the book are anecdotes from thought leaders such as Brene Brown and classic 20th century writers. I loved reading this book and as a founder of a quickly growing organization, learned a lot from it."

    Verified Reader (on Amazon Reviews)

In a Nutshell: Community Success, Tailored to Your Needs.

Seasoned Community Executive on a Flexible Basis. If community is key to your business success, I can help: from building a community team to devising a solid strategy to enhance their capacity and achieve your goals. Let’s work together.

Community Team Coach or Mentor

Acting as a guide to your community team by developing their leadership skills and building capacity on community strategy design, operations (platform, content and events), and growth (branding and marketing).

Community Strategy
Consultant

Acting as an advisor to the leadership team, sharing evidence-based practices and knowledge, creating and delivering tailored workshops, and facilitating conversations to develop and implement a successful community strategy.

Fractional Executive or Interim Leadership

Key partner to the executive leadership team and hands-on working with the community team from strategy design to management, aligning their efforts with the business goals to drive growth and ensure community success.

 


Alternatively, Book an Output Focused Session

We can start anywhere. Choose one or more from the key working areas below and let’s build together.

  • Defining customer segments, value proposition and monetization with the 5Ps framework (People, Purpose, Programming, Platform and Participation)

  • Activating user participation is at the core of creating and delivering community value. Make it possible and sustainable by defining 1) how members can contribute to delivering your value proposition and 2) for how long will they do that.

  • Lay the foundations to engineer serendipity by designing consistent collisions that build trust. Use the Attract > Engage > Commit framework to create excuses to bring people together (regularly).

  • Define a data-driven organizational structure and communication systems to reward and reinforce user contribution, deepening people’s sense of ownership and commitment to your community. Learn more about Closeness Circles.

  • Identify the key players in your industry or ecosystem, who could either become a reference point for differentiation, or key partners in the process of growing your community and delivering value to its members.

 
 

Letter from the Founder

 

My experience helping organizations to build community tells that the Chief Community Officers are often the company founders and C-Level executives - especially CEOs an COOs. They know their customers best, as well as how to prioritize goals and to deliver value without losing track of their key value proposition.

Unfortunately, most times founders and CEOS are both too busy to manage community operations, and too visionary to put their community goals in simple terms. More often than not, I find teams get lost in translation. There’s a gap between idea and execution when it comes to community. In their best efforts to understand the C-level vision, community teams often end up burning out after spending time, money and energy with low return of investment.

A solid community strategy makes your business more efficient: by activating user participation, we add them to our value creation and delivery chain - optimizing resources by default.

It should be that simple.

My goal is to help companies sort, prioritize and organize their community drive into a cohesive strategy that yields exponential returns in line with their value proposition. If community is key asset (not an accessory) to your business, I’d like to help you succeed. Let’s talk.

 

Let’s Work Together

Schedule a call with Laís de Oliveira to discover evidence-based approaches for driving exceptional engagement and growth.