I'm Deepak Kumar.
I build, study, teach and speak about communities.
People call me The Community Man. I work with founders, brands and institutions on community building and community-led growth — and I spend most of my life in rooms full of people who don't obviously belong together.
The short version
Over the last ten and a half years I've built companies — most failed, a few worked well enough. SaaS and micro-SaaS, a design studio, work with Fortune 500 companies, creators and brands. Along the way I built communities and wrote two books.
Everything I do now sits on one line: all exceptional outcomes are social outcomes. Big, rare, meaningful results don't happen in isolation. They happen because people come together.
What I actually do
- Speak. Talks and keynotes on community building, community-led growth and turning an audience into a room that stays — at conferences, companies, colleges and podcasts.
- Run communities. DNA is where all the people I've met over the years now sit together: founders, creators, artists, writers, architects, doctors, VCs, engineers, designers. Every Friday, nine of them from nine different fields share a dinner table.
- Write. Two books — Anyone Can Build a Community and Before 10k — plus notes from the field and a Substack.
- Experiment. A civilization simulation, a cinema tycoon game built in 24 hours, and a wall of the people I've met. Most of it is me trying to understand how people behave in groups.
Where I've spoken
Stages, campuses, offices and podcasts that have had me over.
- TEDx
- NASSCOM
- TiE Global
- CII Connect
- Anna University
- VIT University
- SSN University, Chennai
- SSN University, Delhi
- eChai Ventures
- CMX Connect Chennai
- Led by Community Conference
- Global Freelancers Conference
- AIWO Conference
- Prodwrks
- Being Scenius Podcast
- Sculptors Podcast
- Meta Monkey's Podcast
Working together
If you'd like me at your event, conference, talk, podcast, workshop, college, office or community, there's a proper process for it. If you just want to talk, that's a different door.
Email works too — deepak@thecommunityman.com