Build Squad: a manual for a friendship group that builds together

I grew up in Bangalore, moved to Berkeley when I was 17 for school, and then to London in my mid-twenties. I moved to London without any London friends.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (the kind of name that writes things that people quote) wrote that we must choose between being an anvil or a hammer. We’ll either mould the world or are moulded by it. For people not into tool references, the former is the anvil, the latter is the hammer. As anybody who has ever moved somewhere new will know, at any stage in life, it can be the ultimate opportunity to be an anvil and mould the world around you. Moving to a new city can be an opportunity to pick your destiny: how you spend your time and who you spend your time with.

One by one, person by person, I made London friends. These were people I liked and I knew I could come to love through showing up for each other, having shared experiences and just time passing. During phase one of my “find my London people project” (the name of an actual doc I once wrote), I found my few close friends, a larger group of less close, but more casual friends, some “sidewalk friends” (co-workers, apartment friends, etc.). This phase lasted roughly three years.

So, three years into moving to London, I’d made progress finding my people in London, but I was still missing one big category of London people I wanted in my life: “people I like and want to make stuff with” friends.

This was going to be the work of Phase Two. In early 2021, in deep-Covid, I set out to find myself a “build squad”*. The idea: a group that comes together regularly to build one big thing together, or their own things alongside each other. I chose the building things alongside each other variety, mostly out of necessity, as I didn’t have enough “critical mass” of people to work on any specific project.

*It was more making than building, but “make squad” isn’t as catchy so I let the meaning behind the name take a hit for its catchiness. I’m happy with my choices.

Our goals

Turn visions into projects, mood-based building into a building habit and building friends into IRL friends.

The squad members

The squad was always more important than the building. In the end, I knew, what we build wouldn’t be as important as who we built it with. My criteria for members:

• People who were already working on side projects unrelated to their work
• People I liked and wanted to pursue deeper friendship with
• People who lived in London or were exploring the idea of living in London

The squad was assembled from the internet — from Twitter (hi, Will!), from the OnDeck no-code fellowship (hi, Rachel) and from LinkedIn DM (Hi, Shariq, you’re still the very best thing to come from a LinkedIn DM).

Every member of build squad (except, my friend Will) wasn’t even an internet friend yet. I mean a friend as defined by our significance in each others’ lives, not physicality. The idea that internet friendships are less real because you talk to internet friends over the internet is stupid.

The agenda

We jumped on a Zoom call every Saturday morning for few hours. The agenda:

• Build something alongside others for an hour
• “Show and tell” for an hour

The scope

We meant building loosely*. Collectively, we wrote science fiction (private), started newsletters, built a Django debugger and did arsty things.

Outcomes

I wouldn’t say any one Build Squad session was especially good, but we did them fairly consistently for ~6 months, and ultimately they added up to something great. What we accomplished:

• Mediocre building, exceptional friendships — we had our own projects going into build squad, but gradually, friendship became our collective project. With enough build squads, my build squad friendships became indistinguishable from my IRL friends. Will, Shariq and Rachel are some of my best friends in London.
• The only build-squad member not based in London, Rachel, moved to London which is neither correlation completely nor causation completely, something in the middle. I like having Rachel in London, this is a selfish accomplishment.

Where is build squad now?

Build Squad was a living thing, and living things die. At some point, the world opened up more, and the life went out of the Build Squad commitment. When the first build squad member told me they wanted to drop out, it hurt. Over time though, I realized It’s OK to call a dying thing dying, and a dead thing dead.

Build squad has been forked into a co-working squad, a running squad (with non-build squad members), a traveling together squad. We didn’t fail because build squad ended, but we succeeded in that we replaced squad membership with friendship.