Chapter 6: Intimate Tribes
In 2019 I got a job at Zoom Video Communications.
Yeah, that Zoom. The one everyone ended up using during COVID. It was actually pretty wild.
Before the pandemic hit, people would say to me "I don't need Zoom, we meet in person." Like they were almost offended I was suggesting they'd use video calling. And then, obviously, the whole world changed. My dad's best man from his wedding -- someone my dad hadn't spoken to in ages, someone he doesn't even hang out with anymore -- was calling me on my phone asking me to get Zoom set up for his company.
My dad's best man. From his wedding. That's how insane it got.
And then after COVID: "Oh we don't even need Zoom anymore, we've got Microsoft Teams."
I was there for the whole arc.
I was part of a group inside Zoom called the OAEs -- Online Account Executives. In Australia, there were about eight of us. We sat in a specific pod in the office. Everyone in the building knew our pod because we had scheduled chat times where we had to respond to online chat on the Zoom website, plus phone times for inbound calls. We were the frontline.
My friend Patty, she had these fake nails, right? And during company all-hands meetings near the kitchen in the main area, she'd be clicking away on online chat because she still had to cover her chat shift. She'd flick the keyboard really loudly. These fake nails just tapping away while someone's trying to do a company-wide presentation. Everyone was probably thinking shut up Patty. Nobody said it. But everyone was thinking it.
Now here's where it gets crazy.
Usually we'd have like 2, 3, 4, 5 online chats queued up at any given time. We were covering APAC hours -- the US was asleep, and we'd share coverage with Europe across time zones. Pretty standard. Nothing hectic.
Then one day, suddenly, tons and tons of chats started coming through from China.
I'm sitting next to my friend Jess. And there's just these chats flooding in from China because Wuhan had locked down and everyone was trying to get Zoom. We'd have 50, 100, 150 chats coming through. We had Google Translate open and we were translating on the fly, chatting to people in China thinking this is crazy, we never get chats from China. We also thought -- doesn't Zoom not work in China? What the fuck is going on?
Then a day or two later -- tons of chats from Italy. People trying to say hello in Italian. Then it started happening from country after country after country across the world. Spain. France. UK. Everywhere.
The OAE team went through the entire wave of COVID through the eyes of online chats and phone calls.
We watched the pandemic spread across the planet in real time -- not through the news, not through social media, but through people desperately trying to get on video calls because their countries were locking down. We missed probably 98% of the phone calls because nobody could even pick up. The world was freaking out.
Then in April we all got an email saying someone was connected to a COVID case and we had to get out of the office. Just like that. Done. Go home.
I went downstairs with my friends, carrying monitors. Jess has a photo of me carrying my two monitors to put them in an Uber to take myself home. Two monitors, a keyboard, whatever else I could carry, shoving it all into the back seat of an Uber.
That OAE crew -- those eight people in that pod in that office -- that's an intimate tribe.
Nobody else on the planet experienced COVID the way we did. Nobody else watched the pandemic roll across continents through online chat queues. Nobody else was sitting there translating Mandarin through Google Translate at 9am thinking what the fuck is happening. Nobody else has that photo of me carrying two monitors into an Uber.
That's the smallest, most specific, most personal tribe type there is.
The foxhole principle
Military sociology has been studying small group loyalty for decades.
And the finding is consistent and kind of counterintuitive.
The highest-commitment unit isn't the nation. It's not the cause. It's not the ideology or the flag or the anthem.
It's the 4-to-8 person team you were physically present with under pressure.
The fire team. The platoon. The unit you deployed with. The people who were in the specific place where the hardest things happened.
Abstract loyalties -- to a country, to an organisation, to a cause -- are real. But they can shift. They can be reasoned about. They can be argued away.
The small group can't.
The reason soldiers do impossible things isn't usually ideology.
It's the eight people on their left and right.
The OAE crew was my foxhole. Eight people. One pod. One insane wave that nobody else experienced the same way. That's an intimate tribe.
Intimate tribes are everywhere
Now here's where people get this wrong.
They hear "intimate tribe" and they think it has to be dramatic. Military units. Startup founding teams. Some intense survival experience.
It doesn't.
An intimate tribe is any relationship with a small group -- or even one other person -- where you share specific experiences that only you understand. That's it. And when you actually start looking at your life through that lens, they're literally everywhere.
Family is the most obvious one. And it's way more layered than people realise.
Me and my sister -- that's an intimate tribe. It has its own dynamic. The way we talk to each other, the references, the memories.
Me, my brother Dan, and my sister together -- completely different dynamic. Different energy. Different inside jokes.
Me, my brother, my sister, and my mum -- different again.
All of us plus my dad -- different.
All of us plus my grandpa -- different.
Every combination creates a different intimate tribe with its own references, its own feel, its own shared history that nobody outside that specific combination can access.
Me and my wife -- its own intimate tribe.
Me, my wife, and her brother -- that's another one. Different dynamic entirely.
Each of these groups has moments that belong only to them. References that fire instantly for the people who were there and mean absolutely nothing to anyone else.
Does that make sense? The same people, different combinations, completely different tribal energy.
The Sofia Christmas
Christmas 2019. Me, my wife, and her brother stayed in Sofia, Bulgaria for Christmas.
It snowed on Christmas Day.
We got on a Ferris wheel while it was snowing. My wife and her brother had Baileys hot chocolates -- I got mulled wine. My wife hates mulled wine, which she will tell you at every opportunity. Her and her brother had too many Baileys hot chocolates and got sick from it. Like, actually sick. Too much Baileys will do that to you apparently.
I got up early Christmas morning and walked around Sofia by myself and FaceTimed my family back home. They were all at my auntie Nat's house for Christmas Day -- the usual Australian Christmas, hot as hell, probably doing a barbecue -- and I'm walking through snow in Bulgaria on a video call going "Merry Christmas."
Now. Each of those moments -- the Ferris wheel in the snow, the Baileys, the mulled wine my wife won't touch, Christmas at auntie Nat's house on the other side of the world -- those are intimate tribe memories. They only belong to the people who were there.
If I mention the Ferris wheel to my wife and her brother, they're immediately back in Sofia. The cold. The snow falling. The Baileys. Everything fires at once.
If I mention it to anyone else, it's just a sentence about a Ferris wheel.
That's the difference.
The bleach blonde incident
During COVID, I was living with my best mate Andy and my work friend Mary. My wife (not my wife at the time) would come over -- she was still living with her parents at the time.
One day, my wife and I come out of our room, and there's Andy sitting in the corner on his computer. He hated his job -- he was at one of the big four advertising firms and was absolutely miserable. He's sitting there with no shirt on.
And he'd bleached his hair blonde.
Out of nowhere. No warning. Just... blonde.
We come out. Then Mary comes out. And we all just screamed.
My wife thought it looked stupid. Mary thought it looked good. Andy was just sitting there like nothing happened.
Now -- if ANYONE mentions dyeing hair bleach blonde when me, my wife, Mary, and Andy are together, every single one of us immediately goes back to that moment. The no-shirt. The corner of the room. The screaming. My wife's face. It all fires at once.
That moment can't be replicated. It can't be explained to someone who wasn't there. The story I just told you -- you kind of get it, you understand the comedy of it, but you don't FEEL it the way the four of us feel it.
That's an intimate tribe memory. And those memories are the densest form of recognition that exists.
Why dog memes work
Here's something that I reckon most people haven't connected.
Me and my wife have an intimate tribe with each other and our dogs Teddy and Cherry. We have inside jokes. We have specific memories. We have things that only we know about those dogs -- the weird stuff they do, the habits, the funny moments that nobody else has seen.
My wife sends me tons of Instagram reels. Like, tons. I never open them because I never open Instagram. But every now and then she'll go "hey I sent you some reels, why don't you look at them" and I'll open Instagram and there's about 12 sitting there and I'll watch them all at once.
Most of them are dog videos.
And they hit because we have shared memory experiences within our intimate tribe. The dog reels are funny on their own, sure. But they're FUNNIER to us because they trigger our specific memories. Our specific inside jokes. The things Teddy does that look exactly like the dog in the video. The thing Cherry does when she wants attention that's kind of annoying but also kind of hilarious.
This is actually why niche content works at a deep level.
When you post content about being a parent, doing CrossFit, playing computer games, being a runner -- whatever the broader tribe is -- the people who have intimate tribes and intimate relationships WITHIN those broader tribes will have their memories triggered. The content brings up memories of their intimate experiences, which they positively correlate to.
That's why dog memes hit off.
That's why niche memes work.
That's why someone posts a CrossFit meme and people tag their training partner. They're not just laughing at the meme. They're laughing at the meme THROUGH the lens of their intimate tribe experience. Their specific memory with their specific person at their specific box.
The content is the trigger. The intimate tribe is the explosion.
Boardroom
I'm part of a group called Boardroom. They only allow 100 people. About 80 founders. We go away three times a year. This time we went to Cairns.
Now -- intimate tribe references from that trip.
Remember that time there was meant to be a category 5 cyclone potentially hitting Cairns? Remember when Taki got sick on the first day and we didn't even see him for the event but it was still tons of fun? Remember when we went to the lunch and everyone realised the only thing on the menu was pizza and pasta, and everyone wanted to eat healthy, and then someone found out there was a grilled chicken salad and some people got it delivered?
Those references mean something to about 80 people on the planet.
To everyone else, it's just some random details about a trip to Cairns.
But if I posted that in the Boardroom group chat, every single person would know exactly what I'm talking about. They'd feel it. The cyclone anxiety. The "where's Taki?" Running around trying to find a healthy lunch option. Those are intimate tribe moments.
And the thing is, every time the group goes away, more of these moments stack. More references. More inside jokes. More things that only those people share. The intimate tribe gets denser every time you're together as well.
The challenge cohort
I run four-week challenges in our program throughout the year. Daily calls. About 30 consistent people came to nearly every call during the last one.
Chester was from the UK. Alvin was from Europe. Anamika was from India. Megan was from Silicon Valley. People from all over the world, different backgrounds, different psychologies, different time zones -- Anamika was staying up till 2am Chester was getting up at 5am.
These people formed bonds.
Not because I designed a bonding exercise. Not because there was some structured team-building activity. Because they showed up to the same room every day for four weeks and went through something together. They watched each other get stuck. They watched each other have breakthroughs. They watched each other send their first DMs and get their first replies and freak out about it.
The OG ones -- Chester, Alvin, Anamika, Megan -- they have inside references from those calls. Specific moments. Specific things that were said. If I reference something from Week 2, Day 3 of that challenge, the people who were there know exactly what I'm talking about.
That's an intimate tribe that formed in real time within my programme.
And it formed the same way the OAE crew at Zoom formed. The same way family intimate tribes form. The same way any of them form.
Small group. Shared time. Specific experiences.
The YC batch
Y Combinator is a startup accelerator. You've probably heard of it.
What people outside YC understand: it's prestigious, it produces companies like Airbnb and Dropbox, getting in is hard.
What people inside YC actually know: the batch is the unit.
Not "YC alumni." The batch.
W24. S23. W22.
Each batch is 200-odd companies who go through the same three months at the same time. They're in the same building. They're at the same group dinners. They're going to the same office hours. They're watching each other make decisions in real time.
And then there's Demo Day -- the event that the whole batch has been building toward. The room is full of your batch-mates and you all watch each other pitch.
The group chat from your batch -- the one that started the first week and still runs years later -- is something outsiders can't access. Right?
"W24 batch" communicates something precise to 200 people and something vague to everyone else.
That precision -- that smallness -- is the whole thing.
So why does any of this matter for LinkedIn?
Here's the honest assessment.
Most people reading this book should NOT be trying to build their LinkedIn strategy around intimate tribes.
They're too small for content. If you write content that only your eight OAE team members will recognise, that's eight people. Doesn't matter how deeply it resonates. It's eight people.
The other tribe types -- chosen, circumstantial, place -- are where your content strategy lives.
But intimate tribes matter in three specific places. And these three places are actually really important, so pay attention.
One: Carrier Trust.
There's a concept I call Carrier Trust -- the K factor in a formula I'll get into in another book to come. It's the factor that determines how much credibility you bring to a conversation before you've said a single word.
Carrier Trust is built through intimate tribe membership.
If someone from your YC batch introduces you to their investor contact, you come with a level of trust that you could never build from cold content alone. The introduction carries the full weight of the batch relationship. The investor trusts the batcher, the batcher trusts you, you inherit a portion of that trust.
The people who've been in the foxhole with you will refer you, endorse you, and open doors in ways that no amount of LinkedIn content can replicate. That's a fact.
Two: DM conversion.
When you DM someone from an intimate tribe, the language you use can reference the shared experience explicitly.
"Hey -- we were both in the [specific thing]. I've been working on something that might be relevant to where you're at now."
That DM converts at a completely different rate than cold outreach, because the relationship predates the message.
Because you can just go for the relationships you already have.
Three: Content resonance.
This is the dog meme thing I was talking about before.
When you post about broader tribes -- CrossFit, parenting, gaming, running, whatever -- people who have intimate tribe experiences WITHIN those broader tribes get their personal memories triggered. Their intimate experiences fire. The content creates a "that's so us" moment that makes them tag someone, send it in a DM, share it with the one person who would get it.
That's why niche content spreads. Not because millions of people relate to it. Because thousands of people relate to it AND have intimate tribe connections where the content becomes personal.
The broader tribe gives you reach. The intimate tribe gives you resonance.
And resonance is what makes people actually do something.
Your exercise
Write down your intimate tribes. All of them.
Any relationship with a small group or one other person where you share specific experiences. Family dynamics -- and be specific about the combinations. Work teams. Flatmate groups. Travel experiences. Cohorts you've been part of. That group of three friends who went on that trip that one time. Your partner and your shared experiences with your pets, your home, your routines.
Write down the specific references for each one. The inside jokes. The moments only you share. The things that if someone mentioned them, you'd immediately be transported back.
These aren't for content strategy. You're not going to write LinkedIn posts about the time Andy bleached his hair.
These are for understanding WHY recognition works at the deepest level. When you understand intimate tribes -- when you really get what happens in that moment of "holy shit, that's exactly our thing" -- you understand the mechanism underneath everything else in this book.
And they're for DMs and introductions as well. The places where one shared reference changes everything. Where "hey, remember when..." opens a door that no cold outreach, no matter how well written, ever could.
The last four chapters covered what tribes are.
Chosen tribes -- things you voluntarily joined that cost something.
Circumstantial tribes -- experiences life handed you.
Place tribes -- where you're from or where you congregate.
Intimate tribes -- the smallest, rarest, most personal.
The next three chapters shift from what tribes are to how they work together.
How you stack them.
How you score them.
How you build a system that puts the right words in front of the right people and makes them stop before they've thought about why.
We start with the multiplier.
Next: Chapter Seven -- Tribe Stacking