Brooks Buffington

Title:

Building Online Communities Without Identity

Abstract:

Creating online communities is hard. Creating online communities where users are anonymous is even harder. This talk will follow the ups and downs of attempting to build thousands of online communities across the country. When we started Yik Yak we had no idea what it meant to build online communities or reputation systems, we had to figure it out along the way. We made a lot of mistakes and learned a lot of lessons, the main one being that community always comes first. 

Bio:

Cofounder and COO of Yik Yak

Brooks Buffington, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, co-founded Yik Yak in 2013 with his fraternity brother Tyler Droll shortly after graduating from Furman University. Brooks was initially interested in a degree in the arts, but during his sophomore year at Furman switched to accounting to work toward a career in finance. Shortly after graduating though, Brooks decided to put his finance career ambitions on hold to pursue app development full time. Brooks was listed as one of Forbes 30 under 30 for consumer technology in 2014.