Lessons from a Career Marketing Big Ideas

Lessons from a career marketing big ideas
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media
@timoreilly
Brooklyn Beta
October 11, 2013
Friday, October 11, 13

Interesting Work for Interesting People
For those of you who don’t know who I am... I run a technology publishing and events company called O’Reilly Media
and an early stage venture capital firm O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. It was once said “The Internet was built
with O’Reilly books,” and indeed, there is more than one internet billionaire who told me that his company
was started with little more than an O’Reilly book. But my initial business plan was simply this:
“Interesting work for interesting people.”

Changing the world by spreading
the knowledge of innovators
Over time I re framed the real business of my company as “Changing the world by spreading the knowledge of innovators”
That’s obviously aligned with the mission of Brooklyn Beta, and that’s why I’m honored to be here to talk with you.

Work on stuff that matters
When I give talks to Silicon Valley audiences, I generally remind entrepreneurs that they should “Work on stuff that matters”

Create more value than you capture
and “Create more value than you capture,” but I don’t need to do that here, because all of you are already interested
in doing both of those things. Instead, I want to talk to you about marketing, and specifically, how I’ve learned to
market big ideas and social movements, and to tell a story by bringing communities together.

Commercialization of the World Wide Web
Open Source software
Web 2.0
The Maker Movement
Open Data
Open Government
Here are some of the movements I’ve been able to help shape. My company created the first ad supported
web site and did much of the early work to establish the web as a commercial medium. I also organized the
meeting where the term “open source software” was agreed to and adopted by key free software developers.
I popularized the term Web 2.0 to get people excited about the web again after the dot com bust. My company
launched Make Magazine and Maker Faire and gave a name to the Maker Movement. And more recently,
I’ve been working on open data, and more particularly, open government data.

In 1992, few people had heard of the Internet
“We’re not going to market the
book. We’re going to use the book
to market the Internet.”
- Brian Erwin
former director of activism, The
Sierra Club
My story as an activist begins with a book I published in 1992, The Whole Internet User’s Guide and Catalog.
I had recently hired Brian Erwin, the former director of activism for the Sierra Club, to help me with marketing.
He said to me, “We’re not ....” We went on a press tour, we sent a copy of the book to every member
of the US Congress, and I spoke to congressional staff. But I wasn’t pushing myself, or my product,
but the internet itself.

Lesson One: It’s not about you
We were unknown, but that didn’t stop us, because the story wasn’t about us. I was background -
never quoted or mentioned by name - for many early stories about the internet. I’d spend hours
educating reporters. But that gave me the chance to frame the story, even though I didn’t get
any obvious press. And eventually, I did go from being an unnamed source to being frequently quoted.

Lesson Two: It’s never too early to tell a big story
At the time we published the book, there were only 200 web sites. But we knew the web was going to be important.

In 1993, we created an online
magazine and catalog to
celebrate the people who were
making this new medium
happen.
It was originally a demonstration site for the power of the web - we installed kiosks in bookstores so
people could experience the internet, but then we realized “It’s not a demo, it’s a product.” It was
the ﬁrst web portal, and the ﬁrst site on the web to have advertising.

We ended up developing the business model for the web
GNN turned into a business - one that shaped the whole future of the web. We were the ﬁrst site to
provide advertising on the web. But GNN started just as a way to celebrate the people of the web.

Lesson Three:
“It's very hard getting communities
formed. But if a community is
already formed and it doesn't know
it's a community, that's easy.”Brian Erwin
But there was another lesson I learned from Brian. In describing the early work he did to market the
Whole Internet User’s Guide by harnessing online communities, he wrote:

That was the playbook I put to work when, in 1998, I organized a meeting that came to be called
The Open Source Summit, because it was there that the leaders of most of the world’s most
popular free software projects voted to use a new name, “open source software.” I realized that the
subjects of most of my bestselling books were free software packages - and what’s more, while I
knew the authors of all these packages, they didn’t all know each other. There were overlapping
communities just waiting to be formed into a single super-community. You can see in the press release
that we sent out announcing the event how much we focused on the people who created the programs
that ran the internet.

The 1998 Open Source Summit
It was all about the people and their place in the story.
When we held a press conference at the end of the day, I could say: “If your company has a domain name,
it works because of the software written by that long haired guy at the end of the table. If you send an email,
well, it’s routed by the software written by that guy there. If you have a web
site, well, that’s the long haired guy at the other end of the table. And when you use a web browser,
it was written by *that* guy...

The 1998 Open Source Summit
Front row, left to right: Larry Wall (Perl), Linus Torvalds (Linux), Sameer Parekh (Apache), Paul Vixie (Bind)
Second row: Jamie Zawinski (Netscape), Brian Behlendorf (Apache), John Gilmore (Cygnus Solutions/GNU Project),
Guido van Rossum (Python), Eric Allman (Sendmail), John Ousterhout (Tcl)
Back row: Phil Zimmerman (PGP), Eric Raymond (The Cathedral and the Bazaar), Tom Paquin (Netscape)

Lesson Four: Language is a Map
There’s another big lesson from my open source activism. Language is a map. It describes the world.
And if it does a good job describing the world, you can get where you want. But if it doesn’t, you can be led astray.

Words help us see and make sense of the world
Alfalfa
Orchard
Grass
Oat Grass
Let me explain what I mean very simply.
When I first moved to Sebastopol, before I had horses, I’d look out at a meadow, and all I’d see was grass.
But eventually, I got a language for what I was looking at, and could distinguish between alfalfa, oat grass,
orchard grass, rye grass, and many more.

“The skill of writing is to
create a context in which
other people can think.”
Edwin Schlossberg
So a lot of what I do in my work is to frame things in such a way that people can see them better.
As Edwin Schlossberg once said:

Free Software Foundation Messaging
For example, look at the map that the Free Software Foundation was offering the world in 1998.
Free software was about developing a “free” variant of the
Unix operating system.

The “Open Source” Summit
Now let’s look back at that press release I sent out for the freeware summit. It was all about the Internet,
and the role that various free software programs played in making it work. My message was that
free software wasn’t some fringe thing out to destroy the software industry - it was at the heart of the
next big software revolution, and that everyone was already relying on it!

Free Software “Meme Map”
Around 2002, I wrote a paper called “Remaking the Peer to Peer Meme.” In that paper,
I used a diagram I called a “meme map” to show how I’d transformed the storytelling
about free software into the storytelling about open source software. I know these are
eye charts from here, and there’s no way you can read them now, but I’ll put the slides
up on slideshare, and even better, you can go read the original paper.
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/05/book_ch01_meme.html

Open Source “Meme Map”
Here’s the corresponding version for Open
Source.

O’Reilly’s strategic planning goal for 2003
“Reignite enthusiasm in the computer industry”
In 2003/2004, I was faced with a big problem. People had lost faith in the web after the dotcom bust. But I was
more convinced than ever that something big was happening. I had to reignite enthusiasm.
I did this, of course, by storytelling.

What do these things have in common?
You can see how once again, I framed the story as a movement with exemplars you could learn from.
This is a slide from one of my talks in 2003.

Harnessing Collective Intelligence
Data is the “Intel Inside”
My colleague Dale Dougherty coined the term Web 2.0 to distinguish the companies that survived the dot
com bust from those that had gone down in ﬂames, and I told a big story about what made them different.
Because these were powerful ideas that became clearer and clearer to everyone over time, the story had power,
and it continued to have power long after the original “Web 2.0” meme had passed.

Web 2.0 “Meme Map”
Here’s another one of those eye charts, this one for Web 2.0.
From http://oreilly.com/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html

“You can leave anything out, as
long as you know what it is.”
- Ernest Hemingway
They may seem like overkill, but it actually really helps to flesh out your ideas. You want to simplify them
down to bumper stickers eventually, but first you want to make them deep and rich, thoughtful and accurate.
Then, as Hemingway said, you can leave anything out, because you know what it is. (I actually first learned
this lesson from Frank Herbert, the author of Dune. I wrote a book about him when I was 24, and during one
interview, he said that at the end of Dune, he wanted to leave the reader “skidding out of
the story” full of unanswered questions. Frank intentionally left stuff out, but he knew what it was.

Reinventing the Faire
Low Tech Meets High Tech
It’s important for your story to draw the right lines. Many of you are part of a movement that we named in 2005 with the
launch of Make: magazine, and the 2006 launch of an event called Maker Faire, which you can think of as a kind of county
fair with robots. There are artists and scientists among you who can call yourself “makers” and say something important
about the overlap of art and science.

Maker Faire 2006
One of my favorite juxtapositions of that ﬁrst Faire was between a booth for Swap-o-Rama-Rama,
a clothing swap in which people remanufacture the clothes with the help of onsite designers, sewing
machines, silk screens, etc, and put on a fashion show for each other at the end of the day, and the
Alameda Contra Costa Computer Recycling Society, which was showing off their biodiesel powered
supercomputer made from recycled PCs running Linux. It was a brilliant stroke by Dale Dougherty to
build a tent big enough to include both crafts and the geekiest of high-tech. Drawing the right
map of the world you want to create can make a huge difference.

Lesson Five: Change happens slowly...
Then all at once
I still remember the early years of evangelizing the world wide web, or open source software, or the
second coming of the web after the dot com bust.
It was hard. Nobody believed us. But eventually, the world caught up. It was the same way with
open source software. Or the maker movement. We started Make Magazine in 2005. The startups
and VCs didn’t show up till four or ﬁve years later.
You are all on the cutting edge of world changing movements. Keep pushing, and the world will catch up.

Government as a platform
I’ve tried to put all these principles to work in my current crusade, to transform government.
When everyone else was all excited about social media uptake by government, I told a deeper story,
about what government could learn from the iPhone and the web about becoming a platform.

“The legitimate object of government
is to do for the people what needs to
be done, but which they cannot, by
individual effort, do at all, or do so
well, for themselves.”
-Abraham Lincoln, July 1, 1854
My notion of government as a platform is rooted in the notion that government is, at bottom,
a mechanism for collective action, a means for doing things that are best done together. So
I was delighted recently to discover that Abraham Lincoln had said much the same thing 150 years ago. But this notion
also suggests a level of restraint. The best government programs enable the private sector; they don’t compete with it.
I hope that government follows this lead, that it enables, and to use Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler’s notion, *nudges* the market
in the right direction to produce socially beneficial outcomes, but that it does so with a light hand. As the Chinese philosopher
Lao Tzu said three thousand years ago, “When the best leader leads, the people say ‘We did it ourselves.’”
****
Below, just for reference:
Lincoln elsewhere pointed out: “The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do or cannot well do for themselves fall into two
classes: those which have relation to wrongs and those which have not. Each of these branch off into an infinite variety of subdivisions. The first
that in relation to wrongs embraces all crimes, misdemeanors, and non performance of contracts. The other embraces all which in its nature and
without wrong requires combined action as public roads and highways public schools charities pauperism orphanage estates of the deceased and
the machinery of government itself.”

Jen Pahlka, my ﬁancee, started a nonproﬁt called Code for America to bring talent from the tech industry
to work with local governments to build simple, beautiful and easy-to-use interfaces to government
services and challenging government to reinvent the way it engages with citizens.

“We don’t want government
to work like a Silicon Valley
startup, we want it to work
like the internet itself.”
- Jennifer Pahlka,
But as Jen says, our goal isn’t to make government
work...

Jen started Code for America by quitting her job, and funding it with her credit card. She then
gradually built support for the idea.
By last year, Code for America was being copied by the White House, which launched a program
based on Code for America, the Presidential Innovation Fellows, which brings startup teams into
Federal agencies.
They recruited Jen to come to the White House as Deputy CTO, to run this program and to set up
some new programs yet to be announced.

“We’ve opened up huge amounts of
government data to the American
people, and put it on the Internet for
free.... And what’s happening is
entrepreneurs and business owners
are now using that data -- the
people’s data --to create jobs and
solve problems that government
can’t solve by itself or can’t do as
efficiently.”
- President Barack Obama
And then, Last month, when President Obama talked about his second term management agenda,
open data, and its role in enabling private sector to build on government as a platform, was a key
part of the message.
I think I’m getting through :-)

Health care is another area where today’s skills can be put to use working on stuff that really matters.
Here’s a report I co-authored last year that covers some of my ideas on the subject.
I don’t have time to go into all the details today, but the report is a free download.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2012/08/data-health-care.html

And there are also amazing entrepreneurial opportunities building companies that also solve interesting
social problems. Jen Pahlka, who founded Code for America, wrote a blog post recently that summarized
one of these opportunities, which we’ve been brainstorming recently. How do you reinvent the corner store
so that it delivers what people really need, at affordable prices, in a walkable city?
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20130116032215-198302-bodega-2-0-a-business-for-healthy-walkable-cities

These are the kinds of opportunities that we’re looking for at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, our early
stage venture ﬁrm. If you want to apply the principles I’ve outlined here to build a great business that
also just happens to make the world a better place, we’d love to hear from you. plans@oatv.com

Lesson Six: Create More Value Than You Capture
But in the end, you don’t have to go start a nonproﬁt to create value for society. Business is a huge value creator.
Don’t just think about how much value you can create for yourself, your company, and your investors. Think
about how much value you can create for your customers, your suppliers, your partners, and the world.

I call it “the big lie” of modern
business
There is this crazy idea, which has become the dominant ideology of modern capitalism over the past few decades,
which says that the only responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders. Leaving aside the fact
of excessive executive compensation as prima facie evidence that no big company really believes that principle,
this notion misses the point that an economy is an ecosystem. If you take out more than you put back, the
ecosystem degrades.

The end game of this kind of value system is the ﬁnancial crisis of 2008, and headlines like these.

Looting
"…the normal economics of maximizing economic value is
replaced by the topsy-turvy economics of maximizing
current extractable value, which tends to drive the firm's
economic net worth deeply negative. Once owners have
decided they can extract more from a firm by maximizing
their present take, any action that allows them to extract
more currently will be attractive--even if it causes a large
reduction in the true economic net worth of the firm. A
dollar in increased dividends today is worth a dollar to
owners, but a dollar in increased future earnings is worth
nothing because future payments accrue to the creditors
who will be left holding the bag."
George Akerlof and Paul Romer, Looting (1996)
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=227162
Economists George Akerlof and Paul Romer nailed this pathology in their 1996 paper on “moral hazard.” The paper
was called Looting, and it’s endemic in not just the ﬁnancial industry, but increasingly throughout our economy,
in which companies try to extract value rather than deliver it. A startup that thinks its business model begins
with VC money and ends with a quick exit is working the same angle as the banks.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract-id=227162

“There’s a wonderful section in Les Miserables about the
good that Jean Valjean does as a businessman
(operating under the pseudonym of Father Madeleine).
Through his industry and vision, he makes an entire
region prosperous, so that “there was no pocket so
obscure that it had not a little money in it; no dwelling so
lowly that there was not some little joy within it.”
And the key point: “Father Madeleine made his fortune;
but a singular thing in a simple man of business, it did
not seem as though that were his chief care. He
appeared to be thinking much of others, and little of
himself.”
This is in sharp contrast to the vision of capitalism in this wonderful quote from Les Miserables, Victor Hugo’s wonderful,
humane novel about social issues in 19th century France.

This desire to build value for a community of stakeholders shapes companies like Etsy, AirBnb, and Kickstarter.

This same desire to create value for a community of stakeholders animates Square. Jack saw this as an enabler for small
business.

Like Square, Uber has a focus on building value for stakeholders - every driver I talk to loves the service
because it increases their utilization and thus their income. It’s a win-win all around.
There are also some technology lessons from apps like square and uber that I wish I had time to
share with you - but that’s a whole other talk.
Uber shows us the principles of Software Above the Level of a Single Device, the use of sensors
(both you and the driver have phones that know where you are), a data back end as part of the
system, and “doing less.” Because your credit card is already on ﬁle, they’ve taken payment
out of the workﬂow. And replaced it with reputation - they ask you to rate the driver, and
the driver to rate the passenger.
(See my talk at Stanford for these technology lessons:
http://ecorner.stanford.edu/authorMaterialInfo.html?mid=3054 )

Lesson Seven: Work on What is Hard
There’s one other lesson I want to share with you.
I still remember the early years of evangelizing the world wide web, or open source software,
or the second coming of the web after the dot com bust. It was hard. Nobody believed me.
But eventually, the world caught up.
You are all on the cutting edge of world changing movements. Keep pushing, and the world
will catch up.

A great example of this is a company called Makani Power, founded by son-in-law Saul Griffith,
which is building drone aircraft for high altitude wind farms.
One of the early employees left a Wall Street hedge fund not because he thought he’d make more money, but because,
as he said, “the math is harder and more interesting.”

What we fight with is so small.
And when we win, it makes us small.
This is how we grow: by being
defeated, decisively, by progressively
greater beings.
(Paraphrase of “The Man Watching,”
by Rainer Maria Rilke)
I gave a talk at my Emerging Technologies Conference in 2008 entitled, “Why I love hackers.”
My son-in-law Saul Griffith was the next speaker, and I knew he’d be talking about Makani and
his vision of solving the world’s energy problems. And I had just returned from a trip to Sicily,
and had been inspired by stories of Archimedes, one of history’s great hackers.
Hackers work on what is hard. They don’t do the obvious. And they don’t do it because they are
focused on some short term reward.
I ended with this advice from Rainer Maria Rilke’s poem, The Man Watching. He describes how Jacob
and the other wrestlers of the Old Testament used to do battle with angels. They had no hope of winning,
but they were strengthened by the fight. Rilke goes on to say, “Winning does not tempt that man.
What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small. What we want is to be defeated,
decisively, by progressively greater beings.” So, relish your challenges, and keep picking big fights.
Thank you very much.

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