10y
Let me address what’s happened in the firm in the two years since. We’re really happy in our cool, creative space on Market in San Francisco. We moved in 2014, after having promised the team a year earlier that we would make the move. With close to 80% of our team living in the city, we wanted to ease everyone’s commute, but also knew that it would affect people that lived in San Jose. A combination of flexible schedules and moving bonuses made it possible to make the move. Being in SF has since opened up a whole new pool of great candidates to add to our talented team.
Soon after moving to the city we reached the first big milestone in our roadmap when we released the first version of our new product. Having worked on this product for over a year, we were excited to be able to share our work with the world. The most important objective on our roadmap was to allow anyone to create their own social network; completely managed, moderated, and monetized by them. On target in June, we released the Beta version which included new web and mobile applications. In just a few months of testing, users have created over 12,000 public and private social worlds. Check out some of the newest, including Travelocity’s Place (Gnomads) and MLB Player’s Place (InfieldChatter). It’s still very early in our process but we’re very excited about the progress over the last year.
As a team, we use an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) planning process. The leadership team defines the company’s quarterly objectives. The individual teams then create their team OKRs that support the company objectives. At the end of each quarter, the team comes together to review the success metrics we set and ensure that we’re on track with the next quarter’s objectives. I would definitely encourage everyone to watch the Google video “How to Set Goals: OKRs” on Youtube to learn more about this process, it can be very helpful in aligning everyone on your team.
Now, in case you happen to be asking what it is that we actually do. I could talk about how we create communities around interests and passions, give people the ability to own and monetize their audience, and take back control over the content you see, but bear with me as I try to explain it a slightly different way.
Sociologists say that our social lives are made up of three distinct places: Home, Work, and what they refer to as “the 3rd Place”. The 3rd Place is defined simply as the social environments that are separate from your Home and Work. We like to think of what we do this way ...
Home -> Facebook(family, close friends)
Work -> LinkedIn(colleagues)
Place -> for all those social environments that you want separate from your Home or Work
Many people want to compare what we do to Facebook, but we compare ourselves more closely to forums. Places have subject and purpose. You decide what you want to join and where you want to participate. In friend networks, as your social graph grows the overall strength of your connections you made steadily drops. The content you see is based on what your friends care about, which means that more and more it isn’t what you care about. When you join a Place you can connect with what’s important to you and with people that love the things that you love.
Lastly, the one thing that we take pride in is the transparency we have with the team. Our monthly town-hall meetings let everyone come together and discuss issues around our business, product, benefits, financing, office, and team. Communication is key to team alignment and is one of the core values that we live by.
