Penny Power co-founded the world’s first business social network, closed it after fourteen years, and has spent every year since proving the lesson underneath it survived the ending.
Penny Power OBE co-founded a community with her husband Thomas, that grew to 650,000 members across 52 countries and delivered, at its peak, 5,000 in-person events a year. In July 2012, after fourteen years, they sold it and the buyer changed its purpose. “What many leaders get wrong,” she says, “is believing that efficiency and productivity are enough to make people thrive.” Technology can make a business extraordinarily efficient. It cannot replace the responsibility of making a person feel like they matter.
Penny Power OBE, founder of BIP100 and co-founder of Ecademy, received her OBE in 2014 for Ecademy’s contribution to the social digital economy.
The Community Ecademy Became, and the Lesson It Left Behind
Power’s core argument is that people do not thrive in isolation, and that significance, the felt experience of mattering, is what drives loyalty, performance and revenue, not efficiency alone. She traces the belief to a simple observation she made in 1998, when she and her husband Thomas Power founded Ecademy: business owners could be exceptionally well connected professionally and still feel entirely alone. So the pair built something else. Long before today’s social networks existed, Ecademy combined online profiles, blogging and worldwide groups that met face to face, designed so members could be known for who they were rather than only for what they did. “A successful community isn’t ultimately built on platforms, processes or rules,” Power says. “It is built on how people feel.” Life isn’t linear, she argues, and what turns a network into a community is whether the people around a person can empathize, share their own struggles and help pick them back up.
The community reached 650,000 members across 52 countries and ran as many as 5,000 in-person events a year at its peak, tracked through its own membership database, subscriptions and event participation. Members have told her, in the years since, what that scale felt like from the inside. One wrote that a Power-built community “gave me a community in which I finally feel a sense of belonging.” Another said it made him feel that “humans mattered again.”
Power is candid about what the model could not survive. Ecademy’s revenue came from its members, not advertisers, a discipline she calls a point of pride because the community was never asked to become the product. But as free networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn rose around it, that same discipline left the business without a sustainable commercial model, and belonging alone was not enough to fund it. In July 2012, she and Thomas exited Ecademy after fourteen years. Two years later, in 2014, Power received an OBE for the contribution it had made to the social digital economy. “What I would do differently today,” she says, “is understand much earlier that belonging alone isn’t enough. A community also needs a sustainable commercial model, people now expect so much for free, and yet, they wonder why the algorithms are designed the way they are.”
The lesson survived the ending. Power calls community leadership a form of stewardship: a leader holds people’s trust and vulnerability, and the job is to create the conditions in which they feel seen, valued, safe and able to contribute. “The community leader must serve, not take,” she says. “If a community is simply a side hustle, a marketing strategy or another way of extracting revenue, people will feel it, and the culture will suffer.” Every community she has built since, including BIP100 today, has been an attempt to keep that serving posture intact while fixing the model Ecademy could not.
What Any Leader Can Steal From a Community Builder
Power opens her keynotes with a check most leaders never run on their own teams: how human did today actually feel, against how productive it felt. Did anyone talk to the barista, look a colleague in the eye, notice whether the person across from them felt seen or invisible. A leader can run the same check inside a team meeting before running any other diagnostic. Treat AI-freed time as a choice rather than a default: Power’s argument is that artificial intelligence gives people back time, and most simply use it to work faster and disappear further into their devices, when the harder and more valuable choice is to spend some of that reclaimed time in real conversation. Measure whether people on a team are known for who they are and not only for what they produce, and build in room for someone to be vulnerable or ask for help without being made to feel smaller for it. Above all, run the team, the client relationship or the community as an act of stewardship rather than extraction, and check regularly whether the people inside it would describe it the same way.
“I believe we have another choice,” Power says, “to use some of the time AI gives us to become more human.”
Who Is Penny Power?
Penny Power OBE is the founder of BIP100, a peer community of 100 independent business experts, and the co-founder of Ecademy, the world’s first business social network for entrepreneurs, based in London, United Kingdom. She has spent 42 years in business, 28 of them as an entrepreneur, beginning in technology distribution and community building before co-founding Ecademy with her husband Thomas Power in 1998, a year ahead of Friends Reunited and four years ahead of LinkedIn. Ecademy grew to 650,000 members before its close in 2012, and Power received her OBE in 2014 for its contribution to the social digital economy.
In 2010 she wrote the Digital Business Britain Manifesto, work that led to founding Digital Youth Academy in 2011, launched at the House of Lords, which built qualifications in digital skills with partners she names as O2, Accenture, Lloyds and Prince Andrew’s iDEA Awards, before the business was sold to national training provider Seetec in 2015. From 2013 to 2019 focused back on creating a community, this time on the High Street. The Business Café, a high-street space in Surrey offering free digital skills training. In January 2019 she published Business Is Personal, drawn from 21 years as an entrepreneur. In 2020 she and Thomas founded BIP100, a community deliberately capped at 100 members so each one feels known, and she is now building the platform for her keynote, “Significance in an AI World,” and a forthcoming book of the same title.
Family runs through the work: Thomas, Ross, TJ and Hannah each bring a different strand of expertise into BIP100, from personal branding to emotional wellbeing, Ai education to Performance advice. Forty-two years in, the number Power keeps returning to was never the membership count. It is whether the person in front of her walked away knowing they mattered.
Penny Power OBE is the founder of BIP100, a peer community of 100 independent business experts, and the co-founder of Ecademy, the world’s first business social network for entrepreneurs, based in London, United Kingdom. To connect with Penny or learn more, visit her linkedin Profile.
