Look around you. If you are at work, pop your head up above your cubicle for a moment. Study the faces of the people sitting just a few feet away. Consider, for a moment, who they are. Do you like these people? Do you admire them? Do you enjoy your time together? These are the people you spend your life with.
Now sit back down into your cube. Take a look at the last five emails you wrote. Glance at the ones you’ve just received. Review your inbound and outbound Tweets. Quietly reflect on your biggest project today. This is your work. This is what you are doing with your life. Does it matter to you? If you succeed in your work goals, are you proud of the change you have brought in the world? If you fail, does it matter to you at all (beyond the possibility of job loss)?
Sure, it sounds obvious when you think about it. But how often do we do we think about it? I realized a few years ago that I spend more of my waking hours with the people that I work with than my mate, my family, or my friends. I devote far more of my time to the work I do than to the living it enables. And knowing that, I became aware that my personal happiness depends, in part, on the people that I work with every day and the work that we do together.
This year, I have been thinking a lot about how I live my life. Perhaps it was the shock of American consumerism running full tilt into a wall that made me pensive. Maybe it’s the realization that I’ll be 40 in 16 months. No doubt one contributor was the end of a relationship that mattered to me. But whatever the trigger, I have been spending a lot of my time thinking about what it means to live an authentic life. There are big benefits to doing it. I find it remarkably hard to do.
Over the past few months, these two themes began to congeal in my mind. Four years ago, I started my second company (Gather). Six months ago, I realized I wasn’t sure what we are doing here. Don’t get me wrong, I knew the strategy we had developed. I had memorized the elevator pitch. I could explain it to investors. I could share how it helped Gather’s marketing partners. But I wasn’t sure why it mattered to people. And even if I figured that out, I wasn’t confident that it would matter to me.
I was frightened by that (particularly because I have invested a lot here, as have family and friends that believe in me, who I imagined are equally frightened having read that last line). But I am committed to leading an authentic life, so I put those fears aside and set out on a bit of a personal journey. I wanted to understand what it meant to build an authentic company. And once I did, I planned to figure out whether this company could be just that.
Part I. What’s an Authentic Company Look Like?
In May, we assembled at the University Club, tucked just off of Copley Square, under the shadow of the Hancock Building in Boston. The dark mahogany walls were adorned with framed newspaper articles and photographs of oarsmen and squash champions, with simple smiles that betrayed their innocence. “What,” I wondered silently, “would people frame in ten years, when the newspapers are gone?”
The Gather senior team and I had come together on that particular morning to do strategic planning for the year to come. We were on the cusp of closing new financing and it had been over a year since we sat down to do big thinking. Our last strategic plan had spawned product and marketing plans that were now coming to completion. We had made progress on our financial and growth goals, sometimes exceeding and sometimes not achieving our goals. The team was anxious to figure out how to put down the accelerator. I wasn’t sure exactly where we were going.
I entered the room with the two, basic questions. They made me sound surprisingly like Admiral Stockdale in the 1992 Vice Presidential debate when I uttered them. “Who are we and why are we here?”
Stockdale’s questions may have been rhetorical. Mine were not.
We had, over the course of the past three years, built a social platform different from that of Facebook and Myspace. Facebook, for example, is terrific at keeping you in touch with the people you already know. Gather’s social conversation platform connects people, often strangers, around shared interests. But does that matter? What does it do for people? Why do they care?
As the conversation moved through the room, I began to actively consider how “living an authentic life” should change my work. How should who I am affect the company I am building and the work I do? How does it determine whom I work with and whether we find our time together and the work we do to be personally rewarding. How would it change how we work at Gather (or whether Gather is the right place for us to work at all. In short, I began to wonder how to build an authentic company, that would line-up with my living an authentic life.
As we were talking, I started to sketch-out that thinking, and came up with these ground rules for our discussion:
1) Find a problem that matters to you
2) Make sure it’s a problem that affects a lot of people, or powerfully affects a smaller group of people
3) Hire a team of people who care about the same thing
4) Create an environment where team members can be themselves and bring their own solutions to the table
5) Build a solution that genuinely helps solve that problem
6) Talk about it honestly with the world, and explain to them why you are proud of what you do.
Part II. What’s our problem? (no…seriously): Gather’s Authentic Purpose
Admittedly, we were answering these questions a bit late. About 1.3M people come to Gather each month. On average, an active member comes here more than 8 times in 30 days and spends over 21 minutes/visit. So our members are finding value here, but coming into this conversation we didn’t grasp what that value was.
What problem do we solve? Our marketing and technology teams had examined the question with different approaches. Our marketing team surveyed a couple thousand members with open-ended questions, inquiring why they came to Gather, how they use the site, and what they find most valuable about the experience. Instead of guiding responses with multiple-choice answers, we asked our members to share their thoughts, then we grouped them by hand into buckets, so we could estimate how important each bucket was. We also evaluated the specific responses in each bucket to make sure that we thought we understood what our members had responded and had grouped them accurately.
Our technology team compiled data from member registration forms and profile data. We looked at how members responded when asked what they were looking for on Gather. They grouped answers by common words and created a list of the results that was easy to scan.
They presented their data and we found that, overwhelmingly, people come to Gather to make new friends. There were variations on the theme, of course. Some people come to Gather to make friends who love to do the same things they do. Some came to discuss the things they think are fascinating or important (where their current friends do not). Some came in search of people who share some life experience. Others come for counsel, advice from those more experienced, or comfort. And some came to express themselves creatively, in search of an audience who would appreciate, or help critique and improve, their work.
But what, then, was the specific problem that people had? “I want more/other friends,” didn’t sound like a problem. When people want food, their problem is that they are hungry. For about an hour, we poured through the data and tried phrasing things differently, but each answer felt like another step in an elaborate dance around the truth.
Finally, as the conversation slowed and we sat frustrated together, one brave member of our team finally spoke-up and said, “Why are we afraid to just say it? Why are we afraid of the word? Look, I’ll say it. People are lonely. Lots and lots of people are lonely. These aren’t losers or whacked-out people. They are the people we pass on the street and in the grocery stores everyday. Heck, I have been lonely myself in the last year and I bet a lot of others here have been too. That’s the ‘problem’ people have. That’s the one we help solve.”
It was a watershed moment for our group and for the company. It was a watershed moment for me as well. Her answer resonated with everyone at the table. The fact that we had been uncomfortable to use, or even consider, the answer showed just how real a problem it is. And how personal. It’s one we don’t like to talk about. But companionship is fundamental need for people and the drive to find companionship is intense. But many of us are shy when it comes to meeting new people, and it's often hard to find people that are interested in the same things that we like (whether those interests are parenting, poetry, or Paris).
We talked through the afternoon about this problem, and our discomfort with using the word because of the social stigma attached. But by the end of the day, we knew that this is the real problem we solve: we fix lonely.
Part III. Envisioning a Solution: We make it easy for people to make new friends.
That afternoon changed us. We left that room knowing who we are as a company. We knew what problem we solved for people, we knew why it mattered, and we discovered that it mattered to us, too. We validated our conclusions with the community. We found members writing things like:
- I don't think I could leave Gather. I'd rather gather than watch tv...In fact, I think it's my husband's TV habit that pushed me further into Gathering. But now, it's the like-minded friends I've found who are working on their writing, communication, and creative skills that keeps me here. Gather friends have become real life friends for me. We choose each other. -Janny H.
- You're so right that when life gets touch, you need all the support you can get. When my mother-in-law passed away in June, I was a mess. It was my many firends that got me through the day with a friendly word, or a prayer. Without my Gather friends, I am not sure I would have made it through such a tough time. - Angela A.
- In three days, I will celebrate my second full year here on Gather. I love the people I chat with, the folks I have met in real0time, the cool fiction stories, and the heart tugging real stories that we all share here. - Penni D.
Perhaps most powerfully, when we recently lost one of our own members, her husband reached out to tell the friends she had made explaining “she had made some of her best friends on Gather and she would want them to know.” How extraordinary it feels to know that when we do our job well, we make people happier by introducing them to others they come to care about.
We found, to our surprise, that tens of millions of people in this country alone (and millions more around the world) have felt lonely at some point in the past year. And some groups are affected disproportionately. In our Gather Moms survey (download a copy here), 58% of Moms reported feeling isolated or alone. So as we consider building a meaningful authentic company, we discovered that we have a large addressable market.
As we continued the conversation in the days that followed, we realized that Gather is different from other services like Facebook (which does a terrific job of keeping you in touch with people you already know, but does not allow you to meet new people). Gather is different. We connect people around shared interests, and allow them to make new friends. And the conversations here, started by thousands of people every day, form easy icebreakers for people who have not met yet.
Part IV. Making it Real
Now the hard part begins. We have identified the problem we address in the market and the solution we provide. We were, I believe, very fortunate to find that we care about this problem and are proud to be able to solve it. To make the solution real, we must:
2) Learn more about the marketplace, so we can understand who would benefit most from being a Gather member.
3) Communicate about Gather in a way that is consistent with our understanding. Describe how we bring people together, the friendships they form, and help people understand how real those friendships become, online and off.
4) Design and create new technology and services that make it easier for people to make new friends. How can we help them discover Gatherers that they might find interesting? How can we make it easier/less risky for them to join in conversation with them?
5) Build our incentive programs (Gather Points) so that it encourages behaviors that align with the problem we have identified and help solve that problem. In recent months, for example, we changed our points program to focus on “experience creation.” We want to reward people who share things on Gather that engage other people and allow them to connect and share their lives.
6) “Monetize” the business, or make the money we need to make to pay our team, share our success with member as points, cover other expenses (like hosting our servers and paying our office rent), and provide a reasonable return to our investors
7) Stay constantly aware of who we are, what value we create, why it matters, and to whom, and use these as guiding principles in our business.
Part V. Telling the Proud Truth
I was excited, when we were done, to discover that Gather creates real value for people: we help them make new friends and enjoy the new friends they meet here. And I was personally relieved to find that the value we create matters to me personally. These are key ingredients to building an authentic company.
One of the greatest benefits to having an authentic company, is that it helps me lead the authentic life I want to lead. I can tell the truth about what we do here, proudly. In fact, I like telling the Gather story now. I feel good when we do.
One of the other great things about having an authentic company is that it is easier to market, especially in a socially connected world. Where marketing has occasionally felt disingenuous to me, like I was trying to con someone into trying a product or service, I now feel like I am creating value when I introduce Gather and our terrific community. I feel like each time I explain what we do, I increase the potential for happiness in the world. And that, I believe, lets us tell the world about Gather in entirely different ways. I’ll share more on that another time.
In the meantime, I am pleased to report that when I stand up from my desk and look around me, I do genuinely like the people I see. When I look at the work on my laptop screen or piled high on my desk, I find it important and rewarding. And I am convinced that when we do our job well, we make the world a better place. All of these things make me feel lucky to do the work I do.
We used to shop a lot when I was a kid, or at least it seemed that way. And I don’t mean shopping for the latest designer labels. No, no, I am pretty sure I spent half my childhood racing between the bank (where they had the fascinating vacuum tubes that shot money and checks from car to building and back), Ruthferds grocery store, the Meyers Meats, Bethel Bakery (for a birthday cake or fresh bread), and then back to the bank again.
