Listen now (23 mins) | Thomas Knoll started building online communities back in 1996. He was the Community Architect at Zappos.com. He built 5 startups but only sold 2 of them. He has been an advisor for a dozen of my friend’s companies and mentors hundreds of founders through 500Startups, TechStars, and local communities. While he has a technical background, he prefer to speak in gardening and architecture metaphors and is inspired by storytelling, psychology, evangelism, architectural theory, social economics, game mechanics, cultural anthropology, and compassion.