From Customer Success to Movement:
Community is the Engine.
Of the people. For the people.
Laís de Oliveira is a community-led growth strategist, fractional executive, and author. For 15+ years she has designed growth systems where community is the engine, not the afterthought: across four continents, in startups, governments, and movements.
Laís, from the Greek laïkós, root of laity: root of laity: the grassroots, not the gatekeepers. She took the name literally.
She launched 80+ startup chapters across APAC and Africa with Startup Grind, scaled Timeleft to 70 U.S. cities as Head of North America, built the Community Builders Fellowship at On Deck for 300 global leaders from companies like Google, Reddit, and Duolingo, and advised the Malaysian government on grassroots innovation. She founded and exited 8Spaces, a real estate marketplace acquired by FlySpaces.
She is the author of Hacking Communities: Cracking the Code to Vibrant Communities, published in English and Portuguese. Through Hacking Communities she consults with mission-driven companies on community-led go-to-market strategy, and through Nest & North she guides creative and clarity journeys for leaders navigating what's next.
Currently she serves as Fractional Head of GTM at GigU, a data intelligence platform helping gig economy drivers make smarter earning decisions. There, she built the GTM strategy from the ground up: 25+ qualitative discovery calls with drivers, four distinct personas, an archetypal lifecycle model, and a hyper-local activation strategy that grows market by market, crew by crew.
Her approach sits at the intersection of strategy and neuroscience. A growing body of research shows that when people share experiences in person, their brain waves synchronize — increasing cooperation, trust, and belonging. This is why her work centers rituals, rhythm, and physical co-presence alongside digital systems. Community isn't a channel. It's how humans are wired.
Laís writes about community, economic agency, belonging, and the systems that help people meet life with clarity, dignity, and courage. She is also writing a children's book series about belonging and becoming.
Five languages. Four continents. Based in the New York metro area.
Trusted by Teams, Leaders & Partners
Let’s Work Together
Whether you're building a community from scratch, designing a GTM strategy that starts with your users, or trying to figure out why your growth engine isn't compounding: Laís can help.
She works as a fractional executive, strategic advisor, and guide. Every engagement starts with listening.
Background Story
She dropped out of law school in Brazil and spent 15 years building communities across four continents.
Laís started in law school in Brazil. She dropped out to follow a more uncertain path: one that took her to Mauritius as a volunteer, then to Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay, where she managed 2,000 volunteers across three countries before she turned 23.
From there, the pattern emerged: arrive somewhere new, find the people building something, and help them find each other.
In Malaysia, she founded 8Spaces, a hyperlocal marketplace for underutilized commercial spaces. It was acquired by FlySpaces: her first exit, and the beginning of a deep curiosity about how physical spaces and community infrastructure shape economic life.
As APAC and Africa Community Director at Startup Grind, she launched 80+ chapters across three continents, building replicable systems for onboarding community leaders in cities from Buenos Aires to Kuala Lumpur. In parallel, she advised the Malaysian government on national startup strategy, designing grassroots innovation programs from the ground up.
At Startup Genome, she worked with governments and innovation agencies across 75+ ecosystems, developing evidence-based strategies for economic growth through community. At On Deck, she founded the Community Builders Fellowship: a peer-learning program for nearly 300 leaders from companies like Meta, Reddit, and Duolingo, scaled from idea to global reach in under 12 months.
As Head of North America at Timeleft, she scaled U.S. operations from 40 to 70+ cities, built a distributed team of eight, and launched partnerships with over 2,000 venues, helping nearly double monthly revenue and earning press from the Today Show, CBS, NPR, and Vox. All in service of Timeleft's core mission: engineering serendipitous connection between strangers.
The thread across all of it: community is not a department. It's how growth happens when you design for belonging instead of extraction.
Today, through Hacking Communities, Laís advises mission-driven companies on community-led go-to-market strategy. Through Nest & North, she guides leaders through storytelling-driven clarity journeys, creating spaces where care, creativity, and ambition coexist.
She has lived and worked across seven countries on four continents, speaks five languages, and brings the perspective of someone who has always been building home in places that weren't designed for her.
A mother, migrant, and multidisciplinary builder.
She brings soul to systems and systems to soul.
Publications
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Hacking Communities: Cracking the Code to Vibrant Communities by Laís de Oliveira is a heartfelt and strategic guide for anyone seeking to build authentic, trust-centered communities in a world shaped by disconnection and digital overload. Instead of offering sterile checklists, this book feels like a journey home — a powerful metaphor Laís uses throughout the book to describe community as a place where people feel safe, seen, and free to be themselves.
Why Read It?
Because loneliness is an epidemic, and communities are the antidote.
Because belonging isn’t built with likes and follows, but through trust, rituals, and real human connection.
Because you're not just creating a group — you're cultivating a living system that grows organically, like a dandelion spreading seeds.
Core Frameworks Inside:
The AHA Values – Authenticity, Humility, and Abundance as the cultural foundation of thriving communities.
Community Lifecycle – From Seed to Flying Seeds, each stage helps leaders design growth that is relational, not just numerical.
5Ps of Community Design – People, Purpose, Participation, Programming, Platform – a simple yet deep model for intentional structure.
Engineered Serendipity – Based on Collision Theory, this method helps spark meaningful encounters through density, frequency, and catalysts.
Closeness Circles – A model for scaling trust through transparent, layered proximity (Core, Inner Circle, Network, Crowd).
User Contribution Journey – Guiding members from attraction to legacy, mapping how people grow with the community, not just in it.
Laís combines personal stories (from Brazil to Kuala Lumpur to San Francisco) with systemic thinking, psychology, and practical tools to transform how we approach communities — not as projects, but as ecosystems of shared humanity.
✨ If you’re a community builder, startup founder, cultural architect, or simply someone who believes that connection is the future, this book is for you.
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Portuguese Version of Hacking Communities, released in partnership with a major publisher in Portugal and Brazil.
Book Reviews
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“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
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"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
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“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
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"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
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“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
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"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)