Biznik Blog

There are few things I hate more than preamble, so let’s just cut to the chase: Dan McComb is a damned cool guy. He’s one of those guys all of us should theoretically hate. He’s smart. He’s passionate. He’s got a pretty, smart and pretty smart wife. If I woke up tomorrow and read on the news blogs that Dan had single handedly cured cancer, stopped poverty dead in its tracks and chucked the world’s nuclear arsenal right into the sun, I’d just let out a dry little chuckle, mumble “there he goes again” under my breath and, well, probably feel sort of bad about myself.

But anyway. Dan is half the reason we’re all here. He’s the guy who coded this site, and with his wife Lara has built this community out of sweat, bits and passion. Here’s what he has to say about himself:

Q: Dan, you and your lovely (and tall, can I mention that she’s tall?) wife Lara were the first ever members of Biznik. What drove you to give up all of your free time and try and build your own networking revolution?

Burning Man. I know, you’re thinking, what does a crazy party in the desert have to do with business networking? A lot, actually. I’ve been participating in that community for five years, and it’s taught me a lot about how people working together can create something incredible that’s much larger than the sum of its parts. For me, I discovered that if you have an idea, you can create it. Not only is there nothing stopping you, but there are a lot of people who will help you make it happen if you can articulate a vision and make it interesting. And it’s taught me that if genuine community can be built around something as, well, crazy as Burning Man, then it can be built around just about anything. Possibly even around the idea that business networking shouldn’t suck.

Q: Alright, kidoo, give us the Dan McComb history in 4 paragraphs or less. Where are you from? What have you done with yourself? How did you end up in Seattle? What made you decide to become an independent professional?

Born in Tennessee, where my Dad is from; raised in Canada, where my Mom is from. My dad was a preacher and kind of radical in his own way, a real take-no-prisoners kind of guy when it came to putting the devil in his place. After leaving home at 17 I lived in a teepee in the woods in Montana for a year with a Vietnam Veteran who would occasionally run screaming into the woods for no apparent reason.

I put myself through college at the University of Montana by smokejumping, a job in which you get paid to fall out of airplanes over burning trees in the howling wilderness. After breaking my back and my pelvis in two parachuting accidents (that’s the howling part), I graduated with a degree in journalism and decided it was time to find a real job while I could still walk.

I got one at The Spokesman-Review in Spokane, where I was hired as a photojournalist. On the second day of the OJ Simpson trial I was assaulted by the I-never-used-the-word-nigger cop when he objected to me taking his photo (it’s weird to be famous for being beaten up by somebody who’s famous). But that was nothing compared to having to deal with corporate media bullshit, which after four years led me to abandon the profession entirely and move to Seattle, where I found a great job loading UPS trucks at 2 am. If only I’d had Biznik back then! I tried freelance photography but I felt isolated and didn’t understand the importance of networking. Eventually I got a job doing publication design for a great book publisher, Sasquatch Books, and after a couple of years of that was able to launch my freelance career in web development.

Q: In your day job, you own and operate Visual Contact, a web development company. What attracted you to Web dev? What about internet tech gets you so damned excited? I mean really, every time I see you you’re buzzing about something.

I first got excited about the web when I worked at my newspaper job, because I saw it as a democratic form of publishing. Newspapers are a mass medium, which means they are speaking to everyone and no one. And the newspaper often didn’t publish my best work (or at least the work that I viewed as best) so I built a website and published it. That eventually got me into trouble. The newspapers, like most big corporations, really don’t like competition very much, especially from their own employees. I felt the promise of the early web was co-opted by big corporations, and instead of many voices having many conversations, you got huge portal sites where 90 percent of the traffic ended up.

The reason I’m so excited about the web now is because with the development and popularization to tools like blogs, the web is finally delivering on its early promise, and it’s taking it a step further. Instead of being just a vehicle for democratic publishing, it’s becoming a vehicle for collaboration and creativity. And I’m excited about being part of that. The inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, said in his first blog post that he it was his original intention for it to be that way, and that the existence of blogs and wikis means that “I wasn’t crazy to think people needed a creative space.” We’d be crazy not to use it that way.

Q: What’s the most important thing that small business people need to know about the web today?

Too bad there isn’t more room at the class I’m co-teaching with Daniel Talsky tonight (which is full) – we’ll be talking about that subject for two hours. But to distill it down to a couple of sentences, I would have to say that we need to stop thinking about the web as another form of printiing. Let’s get move beyond simply using the web as a way to publish press releases and product lists, and start thinking about it as a way of really communicating and collaborating. And that means using it to both talk and to listen, which is the essence of communication.

Q: Ahh, well there’s something we agree on. As a writer who works heavily on the web, I’m always having to explain the breadth of what you can do with just a computer and a few tools.

What’s your dream project? If you had a money bin as big as Scrooge McDuck’s what would you do with yourself?

Biznik is my dream project. And the cool thing is – I don’t need a money bin to make it happen. The tools we’re using are relatively lightweight and developing them isn’t too complicated. I’ve done all of this in my spare time. I would definitely say that if I had a bit more cash I’d be able to focus on this full-time. But if someone offered me 8 million dollars to develop this, I’d run the other way. With money comes expectations, and constraints, and deliverables and a small army of micro-managers, and I want to keep this organic and real and about the people.

Thanks to Dan both for his time, and for starting this whacky thing.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 7th, 2006 at 3:33 pm and is filed under Interviews. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.