Mac Reddin and the business of happy accidents

Before Mac Reddin had investors, he had a problem with his parents. His LEGO business was getting in the way of high school. He had discovered that a set could be bought, taken apart and sold in pieces for a profit. The customers apparently approved. The household board of directors eventually intervened.

It is a pleasing beginning for someone whose later work would revolve around connections: first, separate the bricks; later, bring the people together. Reddin’s career has passed through a Minecraft network, a no-code marketplace and venture-backed software. The projects changed shape often enough to make a conventional career ladder look like an unnecessarily rigid piece of furniture.

In July 2026, The Swarm announced its acquisition of Commsor, the company he co-founded in 2019. Reddin was announced as an advisor. His public LinkedIn profile now lists Stealth and offers a compact update: “Building again, more soon.” The language is familiar. Making things has been the recurring occupation; CEO was one of the jobs that came with it.

The bricks came first

The LEGO operation was followed by a business built around Minecraft. Reddin and his team created original content and hosted a server where players could use it. He has described leaving university and bootstrapping the business to 12 employees before selling it. A game had become an employer.

The company was called The Chunk. In a 2021 founder conversation, Reddin explained that the surrounding community had interested him more than playing Minecraft itself. That distinction matters. His attention was already moving toward the arrangements that let people gather, participate and return. The game supplied the setting. The people supplied a reason to keep the setting running.

Looking back over the different jobs involved in running a business, he found that bringing people together was the part he most enjoyed. You can read that as an early clue to Commsor. At the time, however, there was a business to operate. Retrospective clarity has the advantage of arriving after the invoices.

A weekend that kept going

Commsor began in 2019 with a Product Hunt no-code hackathon. The original project, Commsponsor, connected independent communities with businesses interested in sponsorships and partnerships. It was the sort of idea that could occupy a weekend and then politely disappear.

Instead, it kept earning Reddin’s attention. In his later recollection, he carried on working on it over successive weekends, and it started making money. He had not set out to assemble a venture-backed company. He was building something he found interesting and discovering that other people might find a use for it.

He describes himself as a generalist: able to do some coding, selling and design, without claiming mastery of every discipline. A no-code contest was a suitable playground for that combination. The constraint encouraged a working prototype before a grand institutional identity could get in the way.

The hackathon story also helps explain his tolerance for unfinished beginnings. An idea could be tried before anyone knew its final name, its market or the length of its stay. Commsponsor eventually lost some letters. It acquired considerably more responsibilities.

The room behind the software

As Commsor developed, the problem became larger than matching sponsors with communities. A company’s relationships could be scattered across social channels, newsletters, events and forums. Someone trying to understand participation had to make sense of activity happening in several places at once.

Reddin described the resulting product as a system of record for community teams. He compared its intended place in their work with the role of Salesforce for sales or HubSpot for marketing. The team used the term community network manager. The ambition was to connect participation with what happened elsewhere in a business.

There was a practical question underneath the software language. If people were helping each other, attending events and recommending a product, could a company understand that activity without reducing every participant to a sales opportunity? Measurement was useful. So was preserving the reason anyone had joined.

The surrounding work included The Community Club and C School. By December 2022, a Beginner Maps episode framed the roughly 4,000-member Community Club as a central company asset. It also discussed nine months and 50 investor meetings spent raising the pre-seed round. The accidental beginning had required quite deliberate persistence.

In March 2022, Commsor announced a $50 million Series B anchored by Atomico. Participants included Felicis, Slack Fund and 776, alongside more than 150 individual investors. Community professionals appeared among the backers. The business was selling an argument about participation while inviting some of those participants into its financing.

A dinosaur walks into enterprise software

Commsor’s dinosaur began with a spelling mistake. Someone on Twitter rendered the name as Commsaur. Inside the company, the joke spread. Dinosaur references crept into marketing and the product; when a logo was needed, the creature had already made itself comfortable.

Reddin told the story while explaining a company culture that could build enterprise software and still enjoy itself. The mascot gives that claim a pleasantly specific form. Plenty of businesses announce that they value creativity. Fewer can point to an outside typo that was allowed to become part of their identity.

He also made room for experiments inside the team. In a public reflection on Commsor’s original website, he pointed to Meetsy, C School, The Community Club and Matcha as products or programs that grew from a willingness to try things. His instruction to other founders was to preserve space for that activity as a company expanded.

There is a managerial difficulty hiding inside this attractive idea. Experiments need permission to begin, but a business eventually has to decide how they fit together. A founder can enjoy giving an idea its first weekend and still struggle with the decisions that arrive several years later.

Three names were two too many

Reddin eventually acknowledged a product problem in unusually direct language. Commsor had ended up with two products that seemed promising, Bronto and Matcha, and the combination had become confusing. Customers could like the team and still have trouble saying what it sold.

The decision was to let Matcha become a sister company, led by Melissa Moody and Cole Zerr as CEO and CPO. Bronto’s short-lived name was retired. Commsor would be the name of the company and its remaining product. Affection for an idea had to coexist with the need to explain it.

The focus was now on helping businesses use relationships with investors, advisors, partners and champions to find warmer routes to revenue. Reddin called the approach Go-to-Network. In his telling, a company consisted of overlapping networks whose value extended beyond a single Slack group or a community department.

On The Antidote in May 2024, he argued that the work began with a change in how people approached relationships. Software came afterward. He also discussed the possibility that someone who would never buy might recommend the business, or remember it when they moved to another job. A useful relationship could have a timetable of its own.

The trouble with collecting people

By December 2025, Reddin was writing about a small embarrassment familiar to many LinkedIn users: chasing the 500+ connection badge. He had done it himself. His later advice was to choose 15–20 people he admired and invest in getting to know them properly.

“Plant before you pick,” he wrote. It is a short phrase with a rather demanding schedule attached. Be helpful before asking. Pay attention before requesting an introduction. Remember enough about the previous conversation to make the next one feel like a continuation.

“Plant before you pick.”

Mac Reddin, December 2025

His framework at Commsor used three stages: Engage, Connect and Amplify. Begin with useful interactions; connect people to opportunities; make it easier for those relationships to produce further introductions. The appeal lay in treating recommendations as something a company could encourage deliberately, while still depending on a person’s willingness to vouch for another person.

In another article, he argued that a CRM could record deals without revealing who knew whom. That gap was the product opportunity. It was also a reminder of software’s limits: a stored contact and a willing introduction are different things. The latter asks someone to put a little of their own reputation into the exchange.

The next thing to build

On July 23, 2026, The Swarm announced the acquisition of Commsor. The announcement said Commsor’s products would wind down, selected features would be incorporated into The Swarm and some of its raised capital would be redeployed there. Reddin would work as an advisor.

His own message said the platform had already wound down and existing customers had moved. It thanked the community and offered remaining dinosaur hoodies and LEGO sets to people supporting the news. The bricks had found their way back into the story.

Earlier, Reddin had described why he kept starting things: “I’m a founder because I love making stuff.” His current public promise to build again leaves the next project unnamed. That is an appropriate place to meet him: after one business has changed hands, before another idea has acquired the burden of explaining itself.

There may eventually be a product, a team and a name. For now, the habit that preceded all three is still visible. Somewhere between a set of loose bricks and a weekend prototype, Reddin found work he wanted to keep doing.