RM: To me success is less about the outcome, but the process of getting there and being happy in that process. My story on changing the world is a different one where I started off, fresh out of school working in the non-profit sector, and was trying to change the world there and found, as someone just starting their career, it was hard for me to have the impact that I really wanted to have. And then I went and worked in the public sector and worked as an advisor to the President of Estonia.
Again, I found myself not having as much of an impact as I wanted. Then tried the public sector in being an entrepreneur and I think, as an entrepreneur you can have as much of an effect as you put into it. You really do have a profound ability to make change.
It’s like Pierre Omidyar says, there’s this function of how people need to discover their own power. So I don’t really have in my mind a pure definition of success, also because I recognise that one’s own understanding of what is success and what is happiness, changes so often in your lives. Something like every five years your definition of happiness changes.
What it is, is instead trying to find success in the things that you’re doing and having goals for yourself, but those goals not purely being about a fixed understanding of what it is to be successful.
HK: As you said, you moved from public sector to private sector to be an entrepreneur, what was the most difficult thing?
RM: Well, part of it is, I think when I was young and coming out of college, I was very suspect of markets, and suspect of business, and corporations and the role that they play as hyper-empowered individuals with more resources than individuals and in some cases more rights than individuals. And then when I went into the private sector, first of all it was very easy for me to justify it because of what I was doing. I was starting an internet service provider in Eastern Europe in a post Soviet economy. And there communication and enhancing its freedom was a true path to freedom. In general connecting people in various ways does a tremendous amount of good.
I went through in that path, from working within internet service providers and we started a web design company and worked with a larger telecom group there, and then when I came back to San Francisco – I’m originally from Palo Alto – I ended up co-founding a company that was a B2B Exchange for telecom capacity and there I was actually helping create a market. A lot of it just simply, looking at the structures in which markets had operated before largely through things that were good old boy networks in tremendous margins at that time. When we started that market the price of making a phone call to Hong Kong at the wholesale level was $6 per minute; by the time I left the company it was 6 cents a minute.
That was just not a function of there being more transparency in the market and more competition in liquidity. But what was interesting also was near the end of that having this realisation that what really made markets work wasn’t just creating the most efficient mechanism for transaction in which liquidity would flock to, but it was also that markets were social themselves. The way that two phone traders, or phone brokers, would extend each other even credit over the phone that might not necessarily be backed by papers, and the role of social capital in capital markets was something that was pretty profound. Then you fast forward to the work that I’m doing now with Socialtext where it’s all about social software and collaboration.
There’s also some positive similarities that you can pick up. When you manage a political campaign, the same tactics that you would use are the exact same that you would in marketing a brand. And I do think having a little bit of a background working within the public sector, again I was still really young and I only went so far and so deep into it, what you really did start to recognise was some aspects of the power of communication, about how even at the highest level of diplomacy it ends up boiling down to real basics about the way that people interact with each other, and especially when they’re representing groups. And you see the same patterns, whether it’s doing business development and a text start up or sales or whatever, there’s tremendous amount of similarities. In the end they’re all institutions; institutions are the dominant construct that affect society and understanding the way that institutions work and trying to help improve them can affect society significantly.
HK: That’s a very interesting point. You focus on similarity between online and offline. What is the biggest difference between online and offline?
RM: It’s a really good question, also because it’s changing so fast. One of my co-founders for Socialtext, Pete Kaminski, has a saying that time spent face to face is too valuable for working. And where that comes from is, our company is actually a distributor company. The majority of the employees actually work out of their homes in places all over from Taiwan to Canada and across the United States and in Europe. What’s interesting is that, let’s say, whenever we have a company wide get together some of it is: okay, we need to sit and we need to work on a meeting and make decisions. A lot more of it is: providing the time where people can just get to know the other person, because when you’re doing remote collaboration there’s such a difference when you’ve just met that person a little bit face to face. You need to be able to visualise that voice you’re hearing on the phone, pick up a little bit about what they’re interests are and not just their work interests, but who they are.
I think what’s interesting is a lot of backroom collaboration was all about computer supported co-operative work. Almost all the focus was how do we help people interact remotely. Well, you’d say now is much more a virtual way. But I think one of the pure differences that we saw within the social software movement, even early on in 2002 when you’re looking at examples like Meetup and other players, was really using social software as a way to help augment and create new forms in real life interactions. That’s accelerated a lot, principally because of ability and today you’re look at examples like Foursquare and all of the smart mob activity that happens.
We’re at the point pretty quickly where everything you’re going to be doing in reality is actually an augmented reality. And that does mean like walking down the street with goggles and the VR perception of augmented reality.
One of the weird jobs I had for a little while was I was working with a company that was creating virtual reality systems. Even at the time when they were thinking, in the middle of the dot.com bust, we need to re-position, we need to go sell to the military. And I got to go to this incredible trade show that was in Orlando and it was just full of every defence contractor known to man trying to sell different aspects of simulation. We were walking around trying to talk these guys.
And I met this guy, he was a Marine Corp sergeant and he was in charge of training at Camp Pendleton. He’s like, son, your virtual reality thing’s really interesting and I think it’s amazing technology that you have that kind of stuff. But there’s nothing like the ability to put somebody in an augmented reality environment where I’ve got the smell of smoke and sounds and in a true 3D space and the ability of when you’re looking around a corner for it to be around an actual corner, for me to actually effect the learning and training of the people that I’m in. It was a real visceral memory for me at the very least, to think about.
When we work in technology in a lot of ways we try to go off and create these kingdoms like Second Life or with our imagination play World of Warcraft, but in day in day life what I think will be nice is, I actually think the potential for augmented reality in helping the way that we not just navigate the world, but the way that we learn things is going to be really significant.
HK: Do you think the impact we get from visual world would surpass the impact we get from reality? For example the reason I’m traveling around the world is I still believe that the in-person meeting is the better way to build rapport than phone or Skype or email.
RM: That’s what I think my co-founder, Pete, was saying. I don’t think we’re going to be able to replace face to face interaction. I love the way that Linda Stone looks at the difference of meaningful human interactions in a world that is otherwise consumed with distractions and very shallow gestures that happen online. And it’s a thing that’s actually a danger in a lot of cases. If I have a community on the web and I ask people to do things and the things I’m asking are just very basic, shallow levels of participation, that means that community is not going to have that much of an impact, whether it be on each other or the world. And so just because the transaction costs for so many things are falling and the volume of interactions is increasing, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re meaningful and have impact.
One other thing to add on to that. Let’s say you have several interests probably, you may be interested in photography, you may be interested in storytelling, a thousand different things, and for every interest and for every object that you have and every brands that you purchase, there’s a potential for some level of affiliation. I’m not one to believe that every brand has its own implicit social graph or something like that, but over time, on the web, there’ll be a community for everything and something that is asking for you to participate.
Now the reality is you’re going to participate only to the level of interest that you have and there’s going to be some of those communities where you may become very active to the point of being an activist on behalf of that community in the real world. There’s many others where you’re going to have the lowest level of participation, visit a site once, click on one button, type five words or 140 characters, re-tweet something and that’s okay, because I think that’s the natural order of things. You have your own power law of distribution of participation into lots of different communities and each community has its own power law distribution of how much participation it gets from its members.
As an internet entrepreneur, first of all you have to be a user, you have to invest yourself in experimentation from the point of a user yourself. When we founded Socialtext the reason that we were able to find this opportunity and get into it earlier than other people, was because we were early adopters of Web 2.0 technologies before it was called that; early users of blogs and wikis and social networking and so forth. I do think also that entrepreneurship is experimentation at the margin of what you know and what you do. And a lot of it is finding a place to start, of a theory or a prototype from there, and just having the open mind to have both the vision, but then also constantly tinkering and letting that vision change.
Ten years ago there were almost no real resources for an entrepreneur like me to learn how to do this stuff. Now there’s just a wealth of blogs by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs and best practices. Here’s the interesting thing. You can start a company for a nominal amount of money, because of the commoditisation of hardware, open source software, cheap SAS Web Services that you can stitch together really easily, the ability to market yourself across the web, to do so in ways that through social media have relatively no cost whatsoever. And by consequence what’s happened is, because it’s so cheap and easy to start one that means there’s a lot more competition than there was before.
And so the challenge then is how can you differentiate yourself from the noise? And there’s a whole new set of infrastructure that’s been built of a different class of angel investor, great practices like lean start up and customer development. Some of it’s gone too far in that if you just follow a lot of that by the play book you end up with something where I’m over measuring everything, I’m not trusting, I’m not employing design thinking or trusting my own gut on different directions to take and it’s harder if you follow all of that, aside from the customer development part, you can end up with something that’s non-differentiated. And so I do think the key is: how can you create something that solves a very big problem and does so in a differentiated way in which you can rise above the noise that is going to exist and get worse.
HK: What does money mean to you?
RM: Well, it’s a nice thing to have; no! I’m still working this out. I had a publicly traded company that I was an executor officer and at one point we had millions of dollars of worth on paper and I neglected to sell out of… first of almost all of it was invested because it all happened so quickly, but also for the perception that that might drive down the stock and I was just young and stupid. I’ve come close to having money. I still have to work for a living. I think if I even had money I would still be working at one level or another.
If I had more, the thing that it would let me do actually would be the ability to affect the world through multiple different start ups – I advise a lot of different start ups – but also as an investor; that professionally I would like that. Beyond that I like how money is fungible, I like the idea of liquidity in as choice. I also like the idea that when I look at the role models that I have who have it and the way that they work so hard to give it away in significant ways, that’s a nice dream for me.
The other thing that I’ve recognised though is, in particular over the last ten years, that social capital goes a tremendously long way and if you view everything transactionally you’re not going to be developing that as an asset, because people have an abundant desire to help others, especially as they’ve been helped. And so I think there’s a lot of little tiny things that people can do good in the world without a lot of money and there’s a lot of societies that are not rich, but really run on social capital otherwise and are tremendously successful; it’s just under a different yardstick.
HK: There are many good ideas to change the world online and of course offline, but how to get promotion is different, like even the idea is good, but the promotion is not good enough, the the things don’t go well. So I want to ask you about, as you’re a professional in this field, what would be your advice to spread the idea?
RM: I think it begins with the fitness of the mean and how solid the story and its proof points are. If you have a really truly compelling story and you share it, not just as an outcome, but in the process of building it and involve others in it, they will carry that story even further. That is especially easy on the web. And I’m not talking about building gimmicky YouTube videos that end up having to be about something that’s not necessarily your message.
RM: There’s a saying don’t generate demand that you can’t fulfil. If you do so that actually helps a competitor, it doesn’t help you. So I think beyond that there’s also the power of just pure authentic voice, which is something that I think marketing is discovering. There are too many social media “experts”. But just going back to good old fashioned cluetrain principles of authentic voice and letting people speak as themselves and developing a story that is worth spreading.
HK: Time moves on, so final question. What would be your advice to achieve success in general?
RM: Just in general I think there are things that everyone could be better at. The real thing that makes Silicon Valley successful is a culture of risk taking. And from travels, when I visit different countries, that is the biggest barrier for them to foster more entrepreneurship and innovation. There’s just layers of old structure and expectations where if somebody things that if they fail that will go down on their permanent record and they’ll never be able to have another chance. As a result a lot of projects are stillborn. I think beyond risk, take just risk in general, there are different risks that people can take about being more open and more transparent. Maybe it’s in their personal lives, but also especially within their businesses. I also think Being an entrepreneur actually requires a very weird personality type.
You actually have to be so stubborn and persistent and accept the fact that one day you’re going to have a huge peak and high and another it’s going to be down and low and it’s this rollercoaster ride that makes you pretty sick along the way. But nonetheless it’s a good ride to be on.
Ross Mayfield is the Chairman and President of Socialtext.
Post is written by WBTW Correspondent Haegwan Kim who conducted the interview.
Renee Blodgett is the founder of We Blog the World. The site combines the magic of an online culture and travel magazine with a global blog network and has contributors from every continent in the world. Having lived in 10 countries and explored nearly 80, she is an avid traveler, and a lover, observer and participant in cultural diversity.
She is also the CEO and founder of Magic Sauce Media, a new media services consultancy focused on viral marketing, social media, branding, events and PR. For over 20 years, she has helped companies from 12 countries get traction in the market. Known for her global and organic approach to product and corporate launches, Renee practices what she pitches and as an active user of social media, she helps clients navigate digital waters from around the world. Renee has been blogging for over 16 years and regularly writes on her personal blog Down the Avenue, Huffington Post, BlogHer, We Blog the World and other sites. She was ranked #12 Social Media Influencer by Forbes Magazine and is listed as a new media influencer and game changer on various sites and books on the new media revolution. In 2013, she was listed as the 6th most influential woman in social media by Forbes Magazine on a Top 20 List.
Her passion for art, storytelling and photography led to the launch of Magic Sauce Photography, which is a visual extension of her writing, the result of which has led to producing six photo books: Galapagos Islands, London, South Africa, Rome, Urbanization and Ecuador.
Renee is also the co-founder of Traveling Geeks, an initiative that brings entrepreneurs, thought leaders, bloggers, creators, curators and influencers to other countries to share and learn from peers, governments, corporations, and the general public in order to educate, share, evaluate, and promote innovative technologies.
