Networking, Community Building In The Digital Era: Dinis Guarda Interviews Thomas Power, Founder Of BIP100 Club

In the latest episode of the Dinis Guarda Podcast, Thomas Power, founder of the BIP100 Club, shares insights on the importance of networking, building safe spaces for networking and leadership, and how to stay on the frontline of emerging markets. He also shares his experiences of building the first social business network and the evolution of technology and how AI is shaping the future of society. The podcast is powered by Businessabc.net, Citiesabc.com, Wisdomia.ai, and Sportsabc.org.

Thomas Power is an entrepreneur, mentor, and board member known for his work in business innovation and digital strategy. He is the founder of the BIP100 Club, a special community for business owners to build meaningful connections. Over four years, Thomas connected with 65,000 professionals and invited 250 experts to join the club. The BIP100 Club hosts monthly in-person events and digital interactions, creating a supportive, non-competitive environment. 

During the interview with Dinis Guarda, Thomas Power discusses the importance of networking:

"Networking and community building are different. One is about birth and connection, one is about nurture and retention. I was always sort of a database of people, a database of humans all in my head and on ACT for DOS and ACT for Windows later on my laptop.

We decided to build a private community, not a public one, a community of 100 business owners in London and Surrey

Having a network around you in your life is critical to your growth and career... Networking is about connecting with others, understanding what they need, and being there when they need you.

Your legacy is not your house or your money or your assets or your books... It’s actually the network that you give your children. That’s worth the most to them.”

BIP100 Club: A safe space for business owners

“We wanted to do another community again, we wanted to keep the number down to 100 and price it so we can manage and support 100 people. It takes a team of 10 to support 100 members. It’s a very personal, intimate service we provide.

We launched it on Zoom, and we marketed it on Clubhouse. We advertised it on LinkedIn, and I started doing more and more interviews on Zoom, looking for the right people.

We were completely blown away because 7 and a half thousand people registered to come for lunch and dinner in a very short period of time.

Since then, we’ve had 2,000 people for lunch and dinner. We've run over 200 lunches and dinners in London and Surrey, and it’s been mind-blowing. From those 2,000 who’ve come for lunch or dinner, we invited 100 to join the club, and then we focus on supporting those 100 every week.

It’s become a thriving community and a thriving marketplace. It’s kind of like a community of friends, a network of experts, and a marketplace of deals.

We keep it small so it’s manageable. Keep it private so it’s safe. And don’t let any bad guys in or bad girls in. Just have a very, very safe, intimate, secure experience where you can be yourself.

If you’re having success in business, celebrate that with your peers. If you’re having a nightmare in business and cash flow is tight, share that as well and let’s talk that through and see if we can find a path through. "

It’s a group support. It’s a group safety. It's group therapy. And it’s also a thriving marketplace. You know, people do lots of business there as well." 

Thomas Power, during the conversation about building safe spaces for networking and leadership:

“Business is tough. It’s really tough business. People want to make it out to be easy, but the truth is, people are struggling to find the right suppliers or struggling to find the right recruits or to raise capital.

In BIP100, we wanted to create that place of trust, that place of safety where if things are not going well, you can talk about the fact things are not going well."

You need the listening, deep listening... and at our lunches we sit there for 4 hours and we listen... in those 4 hours people talk for five or 10 minutes about their issues and challenges and we really listen.

I think it’s really hard to find a safe group... The online world in Silicon Valley never delivered the offline, face-to-face, in-person - the world that Penny and I believe in. I think it’s very challenging for young people to network now... It’s very challenging because the online world is not the same as the in-person world. 

If you can’t find a group that works for you, build one."

The importance of networking and innovation

Thomas Power discusses his journey through the tech world, the evolution of digital technologies, and how to remain on the cutting edge of emerging markets:

"So you learn and you study and you network and you read and you try and get underneath a subject. I'm a historian by trade, so I know how important history is, and in many ways, history repeats itself in a different form. You know, it’s not exactly the same, but it always says history rhymes, and it does rhyme, but you still have to know what that means.

When you get under the covers of social media, or social networking, or SaaS, or cloud, or blockchain, or AI, these are hard, tough new technologies that you're really trying to get your head around to figure out what is the application of this technology, how can it be used, how can it benefit people, how will it make an impact on their lives, how will it make money, how will it be financed.

You’ve got to stay right on the cutting edge of the market all the time, and the market never rests. It’s flying along all the time.

A lot of people are going to lose their livelihood, that’s for sure. That always happens with new technology, but millions of new jobs are going to be created on the back of AI."

Talking about the importance of networking in the tech world, Thomas said:

"You’ve got to stay right on the cutting edge of the market all the time, and the market never rests. It’s flying along all the time.

Having a network around you in your life is critical to your growth and career... Networking is about connecting with others, understanding what they need, and being there when they need you.

The critical thing is you've got to keep yourself on the frontline edge of where it's all going, not just with the engineers who are building it, but with the capital following it, the VCs, the money people. 

AI is now that xAI has taken over Twitter, and xAI will compete with ChatGPT and Claude. We're going to see all of that battle, but provided you're right on the edge of using these tools, you’ll be fine."
 

Building the first social business network

Thomas Power discusses the creation and growth of the Academy, a pioneering social business network, in the late '90s:

Building the academy was incredibly hard. But if I take you back to 1998, the idea was connecting business people for learning, for networking, and for career development. That was our tagline: 'Networking for learning, networking for career development.' To kick it off, we didn’t have lots of capital. We only had our savings. We weren’t backed by a VC, but we had people who believed in the idea of a community.

We rented the bar at the brasserie at the IOD, invited everyone we knew for a drink, bought about 10 bottles of Chardonnay, and gave everyone a drink. Penny stood on a chair and said, 'We’re going to build this network. We’re going to build this community.'

Next month, we’d like you to all bring one friend. And the following month, we did the same thing. The 27 became 54, then 108, and so it went on. Within a year, we had about a thousand people coming for networking to learn about e-commerce.

We ran hundreds and hundreds of events. Thousands of bottles of Chardonnay. We had a thousand people coming for networking.

In December 2002, we agreed on a payment mechanism with World Pay connected to the Royal Bank of Scotland. We launched a SAS for £10 a month to be part of this community. In that first month, 36 people bought a £10-a-month subscription, and we were over the moon.I sat at the IOD from Monday morning at 8:00 till Friday night at 8:00 and met every single member who paid, face-to-face, for one hour. I met a thousand people a year for three years, and we had 3,000 subscribers by 2004.

By 2004, we had 3,000 paying subscribers, and I’d met every single one. I had done 3,000 one-to-ones and taught people how to use this Drupal system, which was incredibly complicated, but I learned it inside out.

We discovered this application as an invite application out of Singapore... It allowed you to invite all your friends on Outlook to join the Academy... we went from 10,000 members to 100,000 members in 2005 and then 650,000 members... We went from 10,000 to 100,000 to half a million in 24 months.

The reason I’ve survived at the front of the market for 40 years... is because I get my energy from being at the cutting edge, from reading, studying, and learning.

You can only be on the front line of the market if you’re connected to the people building it—scientists, engineers, artists, entrepreneurs, investors—you have to be on the frontline edge where all the ideas are happening."

Talking about AI and the future of technology, Thomas said:

"I’m not really scared or fearful of AI. I only see opportunity there. But the critical thing is, you've got to keep yourself on the frontline edge of where it’s all going.

The market never rests. It’s flying along all the time. If you slip off the pace and you're not networking with the right people, you’ll starve, and your family will starve. That’s not acceptable. You’ve got to feed your family, and to do that, you have to be right on the cutting edge. You don’t learn much from success. You only learn from errors and mistakes.

We’re going to see all of this competition with AI, but provided you're right on the edge of using all these tools, you’ll be fine.

You’ve got to bring people with you. We’re teaching our community social networking, social media, blockchain, Bitcoin investments, and AI. We’ve got a gang coming with us right on that cutting edge.

Markets are brutal. I’ve been on the receiving end of them very successfully and disastrously. You learn the most in business when you lose money, particularly your own money. Not many people can achieve that. But by keeping yourself right on the front edge, you discover where the opportunities are, where the impact is, where the margin is."

On the difficulty of raising capital in the UK:

"It was always very hard in the UK... UK investors like roads, bridges, and electricity. They don't 

like SAS or software tech... we don’t have a mega scale success story in the UK... even with AI now, it’s still difficult.

UK is not a tech investing nation... we don’t have a Tesla, an Amazon, or a Microsoft... Europe is just a consumer of American and Chinese technology.

The Americans are going to win [AI]... but they’re not going to win it easily. I’m a huge fan of Jensen Huang [Nvidia]... if I was putting my money on it, I would say America has the best chance to own the AI space."

Concluding the interview, Thomas Power and Dinis Guarda talked about the future of business:

"The future of business is mass automation at scale. I can see multi-billion dollar companies run by one person. But at the same time, I see a great shift to private groups and intimacy, small intimate groups and private marketplaces all over the world. 

There are going to be billions of robots: robots walking the street, cleaning the streets, driving the cars, cooking your food, loading your dishwasher... business has got to figure out how to deal with leisure."