Aaron Strout:     

Hi, my name is Aaron Strout. Welcome to the We Show. 

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Aaron Strout:    

Thank you for joining us on the We Show today. My name is Aaron Strout, and I’m the VP of marketing for Mzinga, a leading provider of workplace and customer community solutions.  This podcast is one in a series and can be found on the WeAreSmarter.org site, Mzinga.com, and iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Our guest today is Jasmine Antonick, who is the VP of communications at Cambrian House. Welcome, Jasmine.

Jasmine Antonick:     
Thank you.

Aaron Strout:  Today I’d like to just dig down a little bit more.  You guys were mentioned as really fairly prominently, I think, in the book in the first chapter of We Are Smarter Than Me, which will be coming out, as I mentioned.  One of the reasons why you got mentioned, I think, is because of your tagline, which I loved.  It’s “the Home of Crowdsourcing,” so Cambrian House, Home of Crowdsourcing, a term I think that you mentioned was coined by Jeff Howe of Wired magazine.  Tell us a little bit about Cambrian House and what your role is, and how you guys got started, Jasmine, if you don’t mind?

Jasmine Antonick:     
Sure.  Kind of as you and I were talking about beforehand, is, I think, the interesting thing and amazing thing about online communities or people that work with crowds is that we’re constantly evolving.  It was an exciting experienced to be involved in the We Are Smarter Than Me book project, because we just knew it would be a work in progress and that it’d be ongoing.  I love the fact that we’re doing podcasts and allowing people to kind of comment, and continue to submit. 

With Cambrian House, we started back – we incorporated in 2005, but we didn’t do anything until the early part of 2006, so probably that.  The term “crowdsourcing” hadn’t been coined by Jeff Howe yet, but we kind of had a feeling that online communities were taking shape and that people were getting involved in products and development, and giving companies and organizations more feedback.

People are getting more freedom to communicate and express themselves online, and be involved in things they loved, whether or not it’s entertainment or products, etc.  We had a feeling, because a lot of us came from software backgrounds, thinking if you have a software company, more often than not you get a couple developers around a table, you develop a product that you love, you create an inventory of software and then think, “We’re going to magically release this to the public and they’re going to love it and they’re going to eat it up.  Well, more often than not, you end up creating inventory that no one needs, wants, or loves.  So what we felt is that with people becoming more and more engaged online, with the success of Wikipedia, which was even quite rampant around 2005 to 2006, is kind of [inaudible] that people are becoming more prosumers, and that people are actually passionate and excited about things, whether or not they’re involved in software or marketing, or research and development in their 9-to-5 job.

When they come home and they get involved online, they’re opinionated, they’re excited, they’re passionate.  So we felt, “What if we create a home called Cambrian House and basically kind of define it as software evolution: Involve the crowd in coming up with software ideas, determining the best ideas through a voting process.  Then we would work with them to actually build it and market it.  So the cool thing was we weren’t just an open-source community.  We actually involved a royalty point system, because we felt, “If people are involved, then they should actually get a piece of the pie, and let’s create a commercial community where people get involved and get a piece of the pie through a royalty point system.”  So if the product becomes successful, they get a cut of the net profit.  Unlike in the open-source world, where more often than not people do it because they’re passionate.

A couple months after we launched the website, Jeff Howe came up with the term “crowdsourcing,” and it was like a light bulb went off.  We are the Home of Crowdsourcing.  We started off, of course, with software, but we’ve evolved beyond that.  In fact, when you think of crowdsourcing in its simplest terms – and this isn’t a Jeff Howe definition, but definitely the way the Cambrian House looks at it – is one, create a crowd; and two, source it for wisdom and participation.  Because the more diverse your crowd is and the bigger it is, the more wisdom you get out of them and the more feedback they’re willing to give. 

Whether or not you’re looking for T-shirt designs, like Threadless does, if you’re looking for R&D solutions like InnoCentive does, or you’re looking for software business ideas, like Cambrian House does.

So, that’s where we started, and we’ve used a variety of ways to tap the community for wisdom, with IdeaWarz, which is our idea tournament, that a lot of people vote and comment on ideas.  As a matter of fact, what happens is after people give their feedback, an idea submitter gets to polish their idea and make it more and more brilliant before they ever start building it.  So when you open up your – when you kind of open up the Kimono, per se, for crowd feedback, you’re often doing something better than the typical entrepreneurial stealth mode model that a lot of us get into when we first try and start a business or have an idea. [It] is, “Oh, heaven forbid I tell anyone because someone will steal my idea.” Well, no, the fact is, as soon as you start telling people, you get some pretty valuable feedback that makes your idea more meaningful, more likely to resonate with consumers. So, that’s what we’ve done.

Aaron Strout: 
Yeah, and I would have to think that you get cheerleaders out of that, right?  You have a very significant number of members – 35,000 – up from the 30,000 quoted in the book. So, to your point, you not only can get some feedback on your ideas, but I would have to think that the rest of the members of the community are rooting for you.  You know, as they go, so goes the product, so goes their success as well.

Jasmine Antonick:     
Yeah.  If you think of it outside the online community ecosystem, and you put yourself at a coffee shop with a friend that introduces you to a colleague of theirs and says, “This person has an idea that I think you might like.”  If you love the idea, it gets inside your cell, and you want to work with that person. You want to join their board, you want to support them, you want to connect them with your contacts.  You want to rally behind this person and this idea. 

The same thing happens online.  If you meet a person online, you always have to go through concentric levels and trust with them, interact with them, message with them, get involved with their blogs, send them instant messages, get to know this person.  But beyond that, if you love an idea, you’re going to get to know that person.

I’ll give you a good example of what happens.  We have a community of over 35,000 people now.  They’re not all software developers.  It’s a really diverse community, because truly it’s like the YouTube of ideas.  We’re a community where it’s like a repository of ideas.  The community rallies behind it.  They help define the best ones.  You don’t have to win an idea tournament to actually have an idea move forward.  A really good example is a community member submitting an idea called “Last.fm.”  He had created an actual device that would allow you to tap into Last.fm – which everyone knows right now, based out of the U.K. – and get it on your mobile phone. So, it was taking Last.fm mobile, and he called it “Last.fm.”  He’s like, “I’ve totally got a working prototype.”  Now this guy, his 9-to-5 job was a courier.  He drove around and delivered packages to companies, but what he was passionate about was mobile devices and actually creating applications for them, so in his spare time he created this.

Now, he had no business savvy.  The awesome thing is he joined Cambrian House.  A fellow by the name of Paul, who’s handling the community of Fish99, stumbled across it.  He’s been involved in the mobile space for a long time, including mobile games, and says, “On my LinkedIn profile, I’m two degrees separation of the CEO of Last.fm. Why don’t I see if I can set you up with a meeting?”  [He] set up the meeting, helped this other guy create a more proper CV, create a LinkedIn profile, clean up his Cambrian House profile as well, so he came off more as an entrepreneur rather than a courier.  You know, if you’re passionate about it, you are an entrepreneur.  You don’t need to go to school and have a degree for an entrepreneur.  You are an entrepreneur; you’re excited about this.

So [he] helped this guy basically build himself up, and actually go and present the Last.fm.  This is a really cool thing because you’re right: You actually get cheerleaders out of the crowd, and they just stumble into each other.

The concept I was telling you about before is we call it “enhancing serendipity.” That’s a cool thing about being in an online community: You’re going to stumble across people that can totally change your future.

Aaron Strout: 
That is fascinating.  I love that case study.  I think more and more of those are happening as people do meet online.  In our sort of pre-conversation, you did talk a little bit about a point that I think is a good one to get across.  You had mentioned you came into the business thinking that you were going to manage this community of – it wasn’t 35,000 at the time –

Jasmine Antonick:     
Absolutely.

Aaron Strout: 
– but what you’ve come to learn and what you now are sort of espousing to other folks is that you really can’t manage a community.  It goes against the nature of it.  It’s using your words.  It’s a living, breathing organism, and you really need to work with the community.  Can you talk a little bit about that, and what you’ve found successful in working with your community?

Jasmine Antonick:      Absolutely.  I think – we’ve gone to a lot of conferences lately. [We’ve] been lucky enough to speak at some and lucky enough to just be audience members, and to kind of be sponges at others.  You hear a lot of people – The buzz around 2.0, and there’s a lot of corporations that have been around for a long time and are very kind of hierarchal, and kind of closed off organizations that still feel – like PR and marketing and business development – “Communicate to your consumer. They will like it; they will buy it.” 

The fact is, they think, “If I have a blog or I create an online community, I can manage this community and I can mange my message.”  [Inaudible], just like they have for the past 50 years, as proper consumers should.  But the fact is that the culture is changing, and the more and more people are getting involved online, the more and more they’re realizing that they have a say. 

One of the cool things that happens to people online, too is they actually kind of go through a self-discovery period.  They actually start to realize more and more about themselves as they interact with other people online.  I think what happened is we fell into the same trap when we launched Cambrian House.  We thought, “We’re going to be a repository for ideas, where we’ll invite people to join as members and we will manage this community.  We will get their feedback on what ideas are the best, and then we will tell them how to build it.  We will break down the tasks.  You will come to us and say, ‘I am a good copywriter,’ so we will say, ‘Okay, you will write copy for the home page of this next product that won IdeaWarz.’”  But –

Aaron Strout: 
Litter did you know, right?

Jasmine Antonick:     
– little did we know!  What happens is as people create their profiles, as they start falling in love with certain ideas, or submitting their own idea, so they’re definitely passionate about it – as a kind of armchair entrepreneur – is they don’t want to be managed.  I think we really started – we learned that fast, absolutely.  They’re going through a self-discovery mode.  They want to interact with each other.  And in fact, instead of us telling them what to do, thinking that will make it easy for them if we say, “Look, here’s how to go through the process,” is … no!  The one really cool thing: They give us the most valuable feedback.  They give us the most valuable to-dos.  The to-do list that we gather from our community on a weekly basis is remarkable: “Clean up this page.  Make this copy cleaner because we don’t quite understand it.  I believe in your royalty point model that you say it needs to be this, but we figure that it needs to be managed this way.”  I think it’s the most valuable experience any company can ever have, to actually have this type of open feedback from their crowd.

Whether or not they’re a software company, an online community like we are, all the way up to Dell, who recently went through some [inaudible] times [inaudible] power of a blog.  That’s where we [inaudible], because we truly thought we’d be able to manage it. But in fact, you don’t manage a community.  It totally is like you and I said: It’s a living, breathing organism, and it does what it wants to do.  What you need to do is one, create a crowd; two, give them the tools to interact with each other, to communicate, to promote themselves, to learn, to reach out.  Create a very rich experience online, which to us now we figure is [inaudible], but this is something that we learned as we went through.  It’s the social networking fabric.  Some places do it better than others. 

If you give them all the tools, then you have to kind of let them be.  Now there are some times where you have to say, “I cannot bow to this command from the community,” because as our vision grows, that we just feel maybe won’t fit into a certain line of development. 

But this is an ongoing conversation, so we are constantly involved in a two-way conversation with our community. We’re in the forums.  They have our personal e-mail addresses.  A lot of them have their instant messages us from within the community, but they also have your IM, your Yahoo and your MSN instant messenger.  They’ll pop up and say, “This is the experience I had,” or, “I found this idea.  I think you guys should really take a look at it and see if Cambrian House wants to have a personal investment.”  They promote each other to us, and they come up with – they’ll pat us on the back, and other times they’ll try and drag us down because they’ll say, “You aren’t treating us well.”  It’s a learning experience, and you have to listen to them because if you don’t, you’re going to lose them.

Aaron Strout: 
Right.  Well, to that end, I think it is good if you are responding, and that is the key ingredient to working with [them], is making them feel like, “You know what?  That is a good idea, but we can’t necessarily do it because of X or it doesn’t fit into our grand scheme.”  I think sometimes if they know that you’ve heard them, and you can respond to that and sometimes even publicly, so you can say, “Look, this was a great idea, and it just isn’t going to fit right now,” then it makes it a little –

Jasmine Antonick:     
Exactly.

Aaron Strout: 
– easier than, “I’m just going to ignore you,” and then they go out and create terror on your message boards and your blogs –

Jasmine Antonick:     
Totally.  I mean – exactly.  The olden days of the “no comment” quote doesn’t work now.  Your members are far more savvy than they used to be, and they do feel like they’re full-time employees.  Cambrian House is unique in the fact we’ve totally said – We’ve gone through two rounds of angel investment right now, and we have totally said to our community, when we’re raising money, they’re more than welcome to jump in and actually become investors in the community, but they don’t have to be.  They do feel like they’ve got a vested interest in our well-being, because the better that we do, the better that they’ll do as well.

One really unique thing that we did, which actually happened, of course, after we spoke and did the interview for We Are Smarter Than Me, is we launched something called the Cambrian House Co-op.  We created a separate entity called the Co-op so we would be able to share our equity and revenue with our community, so 1 percent of our equity and revenue can now be shared with the community.  There’s a community board, totally based of community members from Cambrian House.  We’re having an annual general meeting in September of this year to elect the actual proper board for 2008.  Then, any equity that we have, if we ever, down the road, decide to either be acquired or go public – but as well, any revenue that we create as we start to grow our community and our website – 1 percent of that will be shared with community members, so they automatically get a share. 

As opposed to – a good example: I love Caterina Fake.  I think she’s a brilliant community evangelist.  She was one of the co-creators of Flickr.  Now, Flickr sold to Yahoo. Now, the amazing thing about an online community is that value comes absolutely from the people involved.  When Flickr sold for $30 million – which is a great acquisition for them, and congratulations; it’s phenomenal.  I love Flickr.  But the community members who helped build it and make it a rich community, what they got was a photo-sharing and photo-hosting service.  They didn’t get any of that value-add back. 

Now, community members aren’t necessarily in it for the dollar.  Neither are we, as founders of the Cambrian House.  But we thought it would be a really neat experience to say, “Okay, not only can you give us feedback and act as if you’re employees, because you truly do help us grow this business, why don’t we also make it worth your time?  Your idea might launch and actually become commercially successful, which is one point of value.  You might meet some amazing people on the community, which is another point of value.  But just in case, there’s also this other thing here, too, which is we’ll actually share equity with you.  You actually have a piece of the pie,” which is totally unique in the Web 2.0 online community space.  We’re trying it out.  We’ll see how it goes.

Aaron Strout: 
Well that’s great.  You’ll have to keep us posted.  With that said –

Jasmine Antonick:     
I will.

Aaron Strout: 
– I’m going to wrap up and be respectful of your time and the audience’s time.  Jasmine, this was a wonderful discussion.  I think there are probably opportunities for numerous other podcasts, because, as you mentioned at the beginning of the conversation, you continue to evolve as a community business – we do the same ourselves – so thank you.

We have Jasmine Antonick, who is the VP of communications at Cambrian House.  Thanks so much.

Jasmine Antonick:     
Awesome. Thanks, Aaron.

Aaron Strout:     

We appreciate you listening in to this series of the We Show podcasts. To find other podcasts like this, you can check out WeAreSmarter.org, Mzinga.com, and also iTunes under "We Are Smarter."

Thanks so much for joining us. We look forward to seeing you next week.

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