Hey friends, today I’m
going to take the time to bring you all up to speed on everything. Why
today? Cause I need something from you, natch. Ha, so typical, I know.
Some of you are waiting for a response to your email or blog comment,
and busy Brent only comes around to write to you when he’s asking
for something. Well don’t worry, I’m doing my best to write back to
everyone eventually, and I’m not going to ask you for a favor without
dishing out some of that sweet info you’ve been waiting on. I really do
feel like you are all overdue for an update anyway. So first, here’s
what I need your help finding:
PHP Developers
Web Designers
Graphic Artists
We are hiring. If you are one of those people, send us an email with some
info about yourself. We are most likely looking to hire developers in
the SF Bay Area, but that’s not an absolute rule. Also if you think you
would be a phenomenal addition to the team in some other position that
we’re not hiring for yet, that’s cool, drop us a line. We will keep
your info on file for future hiring (although we may not be able to
write back to everyone at this point). We have plenty of volunteer
opportunities coming up as well, so write us if you want a piece of
that.
Now, let’s break this update into a few sections: The Fundamentals, The Team, The Future Plan
The Fundamentals
Tales
of the first campaign continue to spread all across the land! I have
video of the contractors installing new lights at K & D Market, so
that’s some nice proof of something, but I haven’t edited the footage
yet. A lot of people and groups have gotten in touch to see how they
can get involved with Carrotmob. There are lots of cool partnerships
that we are pursuing, and lots more we are not pursuing. The first
person I teamed up with is Steve Newcomb (more on him below). We are
co-founding a for-profit company called Virgance. Virgance will be a
sort of umbrella company that will oversee a series of projects focused on using networks
of people to create positive social change. The first product of
Virgance is
Carrotmob. That is, almost all of our resources are going towards
Carrotmob right now and in the near future. After we get Carrotmob
humming along and changing the world like we want, we plan to
release additional projects which are sort of up the same alley. I
won’t get into those ideas right now. We are in the process of trying to raise money from some angel
investors. We’re not rushing this process too much because it’s
important for us to find the right fit. We have a lot of special things
we want to do with this company, such as maintaining high levels of
transparency, and basically not acting like depraved
single-bottom-line-focused scoundrels. So we want to take funding from
people who are going to be more in line with this approach. Our office
right now is a combination of our houses, Morning Due Cafe at 17th and
Church, and the office of another friendly company downtown where we
spend a lot of time squatting in vacant conference rooms. The last
fundamental piece of news is that I have officially left my last job
and I’m now working on this full-time, at long last!
The Team
Y’all know me. Now we are 3 more.
Steve
Newcomb – Steve is the other equal co-founder of Virgance/Carrotmob. He
brings to the table all the things that I lack. And then some. He’s a
38 year old experienced entrepreneur who looks younger than me. He
knows a lot about "business" and "finance" and "investors" and "how to
start a company". On those topics my level of expertise ranks somewhere
in between Nicole Richie and Chief Wiggum. That’s decent company, but
we should all be glad that Steve is around to provide the valuable
analysis that only he is capable of teasing out of an Excel
spreadsheet. But is Steve just "the business guy" of Carrotmob? HEAVENS
no. He is an activist, committed to creating positive social change and
making environmentalism as effective as possible. I believe he is
actually MORE insane than I am. He thinks BIG. One of his many projects
is SF Green, a big environmental event series in the Bay Area that
brings the "green" people together with the "tech" people and spurs
them to solve problems together. Also today we should all give a big
congrats to Steve. His last company was Powerset, which he co-founded,
and yesterday it was announced that Powerset was just acquired by
Microsoft for around $100 million. So there’s that.
Jacob
Park – Jacob is a long-time rabblerouser with a professional background
in human rights advocacy, political activism, and environmental
sustainability. He has a razor sharp strategic mind when it comes to
organizing all sorts of grassroots campaigns and loves to dream up
creative new ways to stick it to the Man. His most recent political
performance art piece required seven planes, two helicopters, one
marching band, a bike-mounted laser, and several thousand intrepid
souls. He recently moved from Brooklyn to SF to get his MBA in
Sustainable Management and to reduce the carbon footprint of his wine
drinking.
Naseem Hakim – Naseem is our lead
developer and exalted sorcerer of technology. I first met him a year
and a half ago when he got me into the Paypal holiday party. Ha! So he
used to work at Paypal and since then has been doing things that I
would explain, but even the slightest contemplation of his projects
would cause your mere mortal mind to explode, and Virgance just can’t
handle that liability (at least until we get funded).
The Future Plan
We
are at the very early stages of planning more Carrotmob campaigns, and
we hope to get a couple going in the next couple months, but that’s not
our focus. You’re wondering why. I know you are wondering why because
you are emailing me constantly with ideas. You got rid of styrofoam
lunch trays at PS154 in Brooklyn, and you want us to help you do more.
You want to make the British film production industry more sustainable.
You want to start Carrotmob chapters in Israel, Australia, Brasil,
South Africa…. What this demonstrates is NOT that the 4 of us here in
San Francisco need to start flying around the world planning more
campaigns. It demonstrates that we need to empower you all to run
campaigns. You will be the strength and lifeblood of Carrotmob. I ran the only Carrotmob campaign to date. It wasn’t easy,
but it wasn’t difficult either. All of you can pull this off, and many
of you desperately want to. So our focus in the near future is going to
be on creating a system that makes it easy for you to plan campaigns.
We want to give you information resources, access to experts, and most
importantly, a vibrant social network of like-minded citizens in your
location that you will be able to tap into to make your campaigns
successful. Another couple months of waiting should be a small price to
pay if we can pull that off. So start thinking of what YOU might want
to organize when the time is right. The other angle we want to take at
some point is the big global brands. When will it be time to have a
face-off between the toothbrush companies? Coke vs Pepsi? Hanes vs
Fruit of the Loom? We think that should come later. Our attempts at
campaigns like that will be much stronger once we’ve built out a larger
global network of consumers.
That’s the update! Let us know what you think, and don’t forget to send some good PHP developers our way…Thank you for your patience and support!
