Creating Advantage through World-building: Athena Collective

At a Glance

• World-building IRL: Athena Collective

• The New Rules

• The Future of Growth

World-Building IRL

Claude is eating software companies. It’s expected that 80-90% of software will die in the next few years. I see it firsthand, daily. 

As I mentioned in my last newsletter, if you want to survive the revolution, consider world-building. 

Not just creating a community. We have too many of those, and most are ignored. I’m talking about spaces with meaning, where people can co-create and transform themselves. 

The next few newsletters will be about that in practice. Today’s conversation is with Mikayla Stewart, co-founder and CTO of Athena Collective.

Along with her co-founder and CEO, Sarah Bundy, she built a support network for female founders. It was still new, but they had gone from 100 to 1000 members in just a few months, with no growth hacks, performance marketing, or persuasion tactics. 

A Systemic Imbalance 

Mikayla and Sarah were frustrated that male founders seem to have built-in networks, while most female founders feel like they’re starting from scratch. 

They found that communities for female founders were either soft emotional support or elite groups for a select few. There wasn’t much for the middle ground who had started something and wanted to grow it. 

So instead of just “support,” they framed it as momentum-building around that desired growth, credibility, and connection. They bridged an identity gap from imposter syndrome, isolation, and confusion to grounded, confident, and connected. 

What Real Communities Do Now  

I’ve run two different community software companies. You can’t just put a lot of people with shared interests together and expect it to work. There is way too much vying for people’s attention. The raw number of WhatsApp, Signal, and Discord groups is deafening. 

Mikayla’s thoughts:   

1. Start with who someone becomes: Instead of features and value props, consider who they are before they enter and after. In her case, from struggling to operating. 

2. Instead of just a space, create a path: Athena gives people movement. You get matched with members, nudged toward groups, and given guideposts for what comes next. When someone new joins, similar people get a message, “Hey, this person just joined. She’s like you. Say hi!”

3. Contribution > consumption: “Give more than you take.” Everyone across the board must show up with value (even sponsors). It means producing energy, not draining it. 

4. Scale by getting smaller: Athena fosters belonging with 1:1 matches, small pods, and distributed relationships. Intimacy must come before scale. They built a successful feature called “business besties” for small groups of people you want to grow alongside. 

5. Let the world be co-created: As per my conversation with Andrew Greene in the last newsletter, the members' stories are front and center (“wins” and “ask for help” are the two most active channels). Let them help shape the world that it becomes. 

Meaning Matters 

Mikayla’s story is a canary in the coal mine of where we need to head. Your customer isn’t the transactional end of a funnel, but the medium through which your idea travels. That happens through emotional connection and belonging. 

Ideas that change behavior, identity, and culture don’t spread through likes and viral posts, but through relationships. Network science calls this “complex contagion” (see Damon Centola’s work). It’s not about visibility, but making meaning inside the right groups of people.

This is why product building, as we know it, is losing its starring role. The new path is creating living, emotionally fueled systems that can hold systems together when tech alone can’t. Software is just the commoditized, constantly-optimizing enabler under the hood. 

World-building is the new path. 

Up next: a 100k-person community that outlived the creating company and is still growing.

With Love,

Dave 

Conversations like this are shaping the book I’m currently writing on imagination, calling, and human-centered competitive advantage in an AI era. Have stories? Hit reply - I'd love to hear.