How Chris Heivly Went From Failing English to a Multi-Book Author With Build the Fort
"So I always had this thing that said, you can't write, you can't write. So when I talk about the challenge, you can't have a worse challenge than me."
Chris Heivly
Chris Heivly helped build MapQuest, ran a corporate venture fund, and spent a decade teaching cities how to grow their own entrepreneurs. Then he did the thing a freshman English professor once told him he could never do. He wrote a book. Build the Fort, written with Scribe Media, is now three years old, still selling in bulk, and still opening rooms for him around the world.
The Man Who Was Told He Couldn't Write
Chris failed freshman English in college. The professor asked why he only ever wrote about sports, and when Chris pointed out that no one had told him to write about anything else, the professor flunked him anyway. He carried that verdict for years.
So when Chris talks about the fear of writing a book, he is not talking in the abstract. He had been told, in a classroom, that writing was not for him. Deciding to write a book meant deciding to argue with that voice.
"I love the challenge of doing something that scares me. And so it really was scary to go. Can I really write a book? I don't know."
— Chris Heivly
Why He Wrote Build the Fort
Chris did not write Build the Fort to get rich. He wrote it because he had spent a decade figuring out how real startup communities actually form and grow, and he knew the standard playbook was pointing people the wrong way. The audience was niche. The message needed to be said, and it needed to be said his way, which he describes as stupid-simple and accessible, the opposite of academic packaging.
He also knew a book could carry his ideas further than he ever could in person. He can have hundreds of conversations in a year. A book puts the same thinking in front of thousands.
"I don't think I wrote it for money or consulting or like a lot of people do. I wrote it kind of for me. Just to have written it."
— Chris Heivly
Working With Scribe
Brad Feld, the investor and author many consider the godfather of the startup-community movement, pointed Chris to Scribe Media. For a self-described planner who does not write by the seat of his pants, the process fit how his mind works. All the real work, he says, is in the outline. Once the outline was solid, the writing became a series of small, checkable boxes.
The result is the book he is proudest of.
"So you [Scribe] guys are really great enough to work with me on that book. And I'm probably more proud of that than just about anything I've done."
— Chris Heivly
Three Years Later
Three years after launch, Build the Fort is still relevant, communities still buy it in bulk, and Chris still speaks on it. The book carries a foreword from Brad Feld and endorsements from Steve Case and Richard Florida, names that gave a niche book real credibility in its field. It made Chris the recognized voice for the kind of work he helped define, the community builder of community builders.
And then there is the part he did not see coming. The readers who track him down to tell him the book mattered.
"People go like, Hey, I really loved your book. I've ripped out pages or whatever. And I've given it to five people."
— Chris Heivly
The Long Game
Chris is a digital creator. He podcasts, he blogs, he posts. But he keeps coming back to books because of what they last through. He is now writing his first novel, a story about a founder and an investor over eighteen months, built on a 157-page outline. The man once told he could not write is now writing fiction for the fun of the challenge.
He frames the whole point of writing something down in one image.
"We're planting seeds of trees, we'll never sleep under, but somebody will. And this is the writing version of that."
— Chris Heivly
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