Founders at Work.pdf

388 Founders at Work
I knew the Internet was going to bubble up its own unique media form. It
was probably going to be user-generated, and it wasn’t going to be like anything
that we see on the other mediums. So I was looking and looking for what that
was going to be at the same time I was getting my degree at business school.
At class one night, they gave us a few pieces of paper and a number 2 pencil,
and we filled out circles for a Myers-Briggs corporate personality test, which is
something they administer to Harvard Business School students. Eleven days
later, we got our results in manila envelopes—all in black-and-white text with a
little graph—and soon we exploded into conversation. People in that community
talked about the test for about 2 weeks—at dinner conversations, on the
basketball court. I watched this and thought, “I’ve never seen anyone talk about
a movie for this long. That’s powerful media. Why?”
So I discussed this with my family, who were involved in psychology, and
asked, “Are we our own favorite subjects?” We’re very concerned about ourselves
and the people we know. I realized that no other technology allowed us
to get media about ourselves. All the other media technologies allow us to learn
only about people we will never know. Tom Cruise, Tom Brokaw—we know a
ton about those people and yet we’ll never know them.
I believed that the Internet would allow you to have a media experience
about you and the people you know—though it wasn’t going to be the best
video, audio, or magazine—and that was going to take a lot of different forms.
And I thought this testing could be incredibly powerful because people love
talking about themselves, love talking about the people they know, and it could
be viral.
At the venture firm, I saw how most online media companies were getting
killed by acquisition costs, and I realized that to build a successful company, you
had to have very low—if not zero—expenses for acquiring users. So I thought
that these tests could be a very promising area to start a digital media company
through.
A lot of these tests were trapped in the ivory tower. Why couldn’t we just
release them online, make them inexpensive, and just benefit humanity? It
could be a good foundation for a media business, and even if it failed it would
be doing something good for the world.
Livingston: How did you get started once you had this idea?
Currier: I had to come up with what the product would actually do. And then I
had to start talking to people about it and getting their ideas. There’s a balance
between thinking that you have this fantastic idea that you don’t want anyone
else to know about and the need to talk about it and get broad-ranging opinions
so that you make as few mistakes as possible.
I was really paranoid because I thought this idea was incredibly obvious. It
seemed like this was the best thing to do online—it would be incredibly viral
and it would be deep because you’d get so much data on people. You could help
them find the right job, get a great date, decide whether to get an SUV or a
minivan, help facilitate conversations within the family. And people would
answer honestly, because the test was about them and they’d want accurate