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| Credit to Haegwan Kim |
Haegwan Kim: Why do you love technology so much?
Robert Scoble: I think it happened in my childhood. My dad was an engineer in Silicon Valley, and I’d always been around technology. We bought an Apple computer the first year it was out, and he was always into photography like I was, and we always had interesting people walking through the house or showing us cool stuff. I remember a friend of mine had a ham radio system, and he would show us how it worked.
HK: So, you’ve grown up with technology?
RS: Yes, it just was part of the culture in Silicon Valley. My mum actually worked for Apple at home, building motherboards. I would earn my allowance building motherboards, and then later I worked at HP on a soldering line. Even from a work life early on, we just saw all these big companies. I got a tour of Apple when they were just one building because I lived a mile from Apple Computer, and I just loved Apple. I was in the first computer club at Hyde Junior High in Cupertino, in the first computer club in Prospect High when it got going, and we were just users of these new toys that people were building: Trash-80s, Apple IIs…
HK – Since you were a kid, I can easily imagine the landscape of technology has changed a lot. What was the biggest change for you?
RS – That’s an interesting one. I remember the day… I ran a camera store and the day we got autofocus SLRs from Minolta I sold 40 of them in the first hour because all the geeks in Silicon Valley wanted the latest autofocus.
Now we take autofocus for granted. I remember people having really violent arguments with me, like, pros will never use autofocus. Now every single pro uses autofocus, and it’s just a funny story. The Macintosh was something that we all watched in the Valley. What does that mean? What’s this cute box? It doesn’t do anything. We can’t run any software on it, but it’s cute.
Seriously, we thought that’s cute, but it only has 128 kilobytes of RAM. You can’t run anything on that. You can run a little, tiny paint program. Did you see they just put the software for the original MacPaint into the Computer History Museum? It was a couple of years before Steve Jobs came out with the laser printer and PageMaker. That was what got me into the Macintosh. It’s been an interesting life because I’ve been there at the switch from analogue to digital. Photography, I used to have a darkroom, and have your hands in the chemicals, the Dectol, and stop bath, and fixer. That’s why I understand why the little tool in Photoshop looks like a little black lollipop. I understand why because I used that tool in the darkroom to make my prints lighter.
Right now my new car has radar in it. That’s a change that I don’t think we’re really going to use in society for five or ten years. TV to cable to HDTV, newspapers to digital… I don’t read on paper anymore; I read everything on an iPad. The mobile phones, we didn’t have these when we were kids. The only mobile device I had when I was in high school was a Walkman. I had a Walkman, and that was the coolest thing that you could listen to music while you were walking around or running.
HK – So it’s kind of the one big story of technology rather than separated improvements?
RS – Yes, I wasn’t there in the early days. My dad worked on vacuum tube computers, and he brought home punch cards because at Lockheed they would have a big computer for doing design with, and it was all punch card driven. I wasn’t there for that transition from that world to the micro or the mini world, but all my life I’ve been watching the personal computer grow up.
HK – You’ve had interviews with thousands of geeks in Silicon Valley…
RS – And around the world.
HK – For sure. What was the most important lesson you learnt from them?
RS – Oh man, that’s a tough one. I was thinking you were going to ask me who the coolest interview was. I have an answer for that; that’s Doug Engelbart.
And one of my first interviews was with Steve Wozniak, and I asked him, how do you build an Apple computer? What I meant was, how do you build a big company? How do you get lucky enough or what was it that caused Apple to happen? And he said, you have to have a new product that pretty much everybody ignores but everybody wants. He didn’t quite word it that way, but that’s sort of what he was saying.
He offered his Apple I to his bosses at HP and Atari, and they turned him down. They thought there was no market for it, or if they thought there was a market for it, it wasn’t the size of market that HP at that time could deal with. HP was focussed on other things and didn’t want to deal with a little stupid project that some engineer came up with. That’s an observation I’ve made. Over and over again I hear stories of, I tried to start this at some major company and they just didn’t get it, so I left and started my company. This stupid idea started taking steam.
Right now we’re here at the Geo-Location Conference. I remember how many people have told me that checking-in at a location is stupid. Stupid and scary were some of the words that people used. And now, people are starting to get used to the idea because they’re starting to hear about it on TV, and they’re starting to see that there’s deals at restaurants, and stuff like that. Five years from now it’ll be something that we all do because we want to get a free dessert or something. There’s something about us that we just don’t get new things very easily. But once in a while all the things align.
Location, for instance, Dennis Crowley, the guy who started Foursquare; he previously founded Dodgeball, the company he sold to Google. He started Dodgeball three years earlier, and the conditions for doing a location-based start-up just weren’t there. Twitter took off that year. So you’ve got to be in the right spot at the right time. If Bill Gates was born five years later, he wouldn’t be “the” Bill Gates. He was at the right place at the right time, and he took advantage of it. In fact, he didn’t even want to do operating systems; he wanted to do compiler tools. He developed a basic compiler. He thought the operating system was just a precondition to being able to sell development tools, so he told IBM to go down and get CP/M from DRI Research. They screwed it up, and IBM came back to Bill and said, hey man, we need an operating system. These guys aren’t playing ball, so can you get us an operating system? So he said, I’d better get an operating system then. Those are some of the lessons that I’ve heard.
HK – That’s great lessons. I think you’re the one who started the blog when blog was at the embryonic stage. Can I ask why you started blogging?
RS – That was my luck. I was running conferences for programmers back in the late 90s, and I asked all of my speakers because I was a conference organizer. I was helping Dan Shafer run the CNET Builder.com conference. I was e-mailing all the speakers and saying, what should we cover at this year’s conference that’s different? They were like, blogging – that seems to be interesting. And I’m like, blogging, I’ve never even heard of blogging!
This was 1999, 2000. I went to Google, which was brand new, and I typed blogging in, and there’s only 200 blogs in the world. What the fuck are you talking about? Is this important?
HK – [Laugh] So you were in the right place to start the new thing?
RS – Right place. Early enough. Not really early. There were people who were blogging for three or four years before me. This is, again, innovation. An innovation is like a penny that doubles every day. For the first five days it’s really boring. One penny, then day two it’s at two pennies, day three is four pennies; there’s nothing here. What’s going on? Nobody thinks that there’s anything going on. But if you keep a penny doubling every day for 30 days, you end up with $5.5 million because it’s compounding interest, and it’s all at the end.
Anyway, I didn’t even think it was important enough to blog because they asked me, why don’t we do a session on blogging? And I was like, there’s only 200 blogs; nobody cares about blogging. Now’s there’s entire conferences about blogging. That’s crazy. I’ve been at conferences in China about blogging. That’s how weird this world is. It’s like, China? Blogging? What?
There were 400 people there. But they convinced me to start one because they said, come on, Scoble, at least start one because you’re talking to all these interesting people, and we want to hear what you’re talking to them about.
I started it, and Dave Winer linked to me the first week or something, and he sent me 3,000 people. I’m like, wow, there’s a lot of people reading these. So I took it a little bit more seriously and started posting more interesting stuff, and Dave kept linking to me and took me to Steve Wozniak’s Super Bowl party, and man, it was great times.
HK – Cool, but there are many people saying that blog will die soon, and instead there will be within-140-words communication on the web.
RS – No, they’re absolutely wrong. If you can say Google is going to die soon, then you can say blogging is going to die soon. Blogging is the best way to get something into Google, and it always has been. When I did the blog I didn’t do it for an audience because there wasn’t much of an audience on a continual basis. I did it to get stuff into Google. I figured out very early that I could write a blog about a restaurant or something, and get it into Google. All of a sudden, I could go to Google and search for that restaurant and find that information. It’s still true today. I can stick stuff into Google by blogging for it, and then I can search Google, and find that blog. So if you’re doing business, or you’re a person that wants to be known about something, you’ve got to blog.
HK – You’re well-known as a tech evangelist, and I guess you’re good at spreading ideas. What is the most important thing, or what is the key thing to spreading ideas?
RS – Find the right 40 people. ICQ was born November 1st, 1996, and it was given to 40 people. By mid-December, six weeks later, I was like the 65,000th person. So the trick is, find 40 people who are going to be fanatical supporters of you, and who are going to tell their friends, and tell the press, and talk about it at conferences, and if you find those right 40 people, then you’re probably going to go just fine.
HK – Is that on the Web or in the real world?
RS – Real world, but I would be looking for people who have good Web presence. There are lots of people who are influencers who don’t really have a web presence. It’s important to still pay attention to the real world, networks of people, and how people work, and spread ideas, but I live in a geeky world, and I look for people who have a web presence that’s interesting and are saying interesting things. That would be the 40 people I look for.
HK – Interesting. As my research is on the Law of Success, I just want to ask you about your definition of success.
RS – That’s a tough one because you start putting all the baggage of what the imagery of what success is in your culture. I was just at a home today, this weekend, in Jackson Hole that probably cost $100 million. It was one of these unbelievably beautiful homes, and it’s like, wow. That clearly is financial success. That’s sort of the American dream to make $1 billion, and go and buy a plane, and buy a house in Jackson Hole on the Snake River. Not very many people would do that, but in our culture that’s sort of the American dream to go all the way like that.
As I get older, the way I judge success is, am I doing something to help other people? Am I helping my family? Am I doing good with that? Is there a legacy there that your kids aren’t in gaol and doing crack, and are aimed the right direction? I’ve been pretty lucky in that sense. The people that I look up to are the ones who are doing something to help other people. That can be from Bill Gates giving away money to cure malaria around the world for billions of people, or it can be even a CEO who hires people. I don’t think we celebrate that enough in American life. Mark Zuckerberg, we all rail on him, but he has 1,200 employees, and they’re not on the street, and they’re not on the government dole, and they’re helping our economy, and they’re helping change our world, so I celebrate that. I think that’s success as well.
HK – As the final question, can you give me your advice to achieve success in general sense?
RS – That’s a tough one as well. I think the things that have made me happy… actually, you should interview Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos. He’s studying what makes people happy, and there are several people who are on the same theme; doing something that has a mission to it. Bill Gates is doing one in which is, I’m going to cure the world of malaria. That’s a mission. I might not have the resources he has, but I can do a mission on my own. I can do something that has meaning to my life. For me, it’s find great technology that helps human beings live better, be more productive, have more fun, connect with each other in a new way, and that’s sort of what my work life is focused on. Having that sense of a mission makes you successful.
Everybody asks me, how can I start a blog? And I go and find something that you’re passionate and authoritative on. Authority means you know something about the topic, which sort of makes sense, right? How can you write a blog if you don’t know anything about it? Although you could learn about something and then write a blog, but that means you become an authority on it. You’d better be passionate about it because when you don’t get any hits on your blog, and everything seems dismal, if you’re not passionate about it, you’ll stop.
You need to be able to keep going even when adversity hits you. Even when at two in the morning you would rather go to sleep and not post a blog post. The people I’ve met in life who are really successful just have to do it; they don’t know any other way to live. Mark Pincus, who started Zynga, said, I got fired from all the best companies. I am me, and I’m not going to change, so I needed to start my own company. That’s the impulse you have to be passionate about what you’re doing, otherwise you’re never going to achieve anything of your goals.
Haegwan Kim is a writer who was born in Osaka, Japan in 1989 and grew up near Tokyo where went to a Korean school for 12 years.
