The Biznik Blog - where collaboration beats competition

Recently, in my capacity as Tech Support Dude, I have received a number of emails from people complaining about other members, or pointing out that someone is “consistently doing XYZ, which is not supposed to be allowed on Biznik!”

People point out spammers, representatives of MLMs (multi-level marketing and network marketing companies), and anti-social abusers of the Biznik community and ask me why we allow them to continue their nefarious activities.

Quite simply, we didn’t know about it, or else something would have already happened.

And, in fact, policing the site has never actually been our job at all: As a member of this community it’s in your best interest, and therefore, it is YOUR job.

Look at it this way: There are 4 of us, and 24,000 of you. It is far more likely that you will see the first spam from an MLM rep than we will, so we rely on you to go to that person’s Profile page, and click the “Flag this Member” button. (You’ll find it in the bottom left corner of their Profile page.)

When you flag or block a Member for any reason, that brings it to our attention, and then I can act accordingly.

But we can’t do anything if we don’t know about the misbehavior.

So I ask you - every one of you - to take personal responsibility for the quality of the content you see here on Biznik. As Biznik Sonia Connolly told me the other day, “I kept thinking, ‘Someone should do something about this!’ and finally realized I was someone…”

We are currently growing by more than 100 new members a day, and we intend to double that number before the end of the year. For this site to be successful and to continue to be a rich and rewarding community to participate in, I ask you to take responsibility for your community. Like a good response unit, we will rush to the scene when called… but you gotta make the call!

As always, I am at your service, and welcome your feedback,
- Christian

Lara and I walked in to Office Nomads about 11:45 this morning, and found the place packed with about 50 people drinking mimosas, eating donuts and intently watching a big screen TV. Aretha Franklin was belting out, in her big diva voice, a tribute to the next president of the United States. We all went crazy when Barack Hussein Obama took the oath, and gave his speech. These words were unforgettable to me:

“What is required of us now is a new era of responsibility - a recognition, on the part of every American, that we have duties to ourselves, our nation, and the world, duties that we do not grudgingly accept but rather seize gladly, firm in the knowledge that there is nothing so satisfying to the spirit, so defining of our character, than giving our all to a difficult task.”

Wow.

How do you top that? Well, we gave it a shot by bringing it home right away. No messing around here, people! We got work to do! It was my distinct honor, today, to officially welcome Andrew Lippert as Biznik’s first CTO. Share the moment with me, will you, as I hold out a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers, and say, “Repeat after me: I, Andrew Carl Lippert, do solemnly swear…”

Expect great things soon.

So. As many of you know, Biznik has been searching high and low for a brilliant software engineer to lead our development effort for quite some time. It’s been a long search. We’ve interviewed many extraordinary candidates. Their qualifications where outstanding. And deeper we went into the process, the more we realized it was perhaps THE most important job we’ve ever had to fill.

In the course of our search, we realized that we needed not only someone who understood technology inside and out, but someone who understood people and their relationship with technology. Someone who was as comfortable brainstorming ideas at a whiteboard as they were comfortable writing Capistrano deployment scripts. In short, we realized we needed a CTO (chief technology officer).

Three years in the making, Biznik right now feels like a big airplane hurtling down a runway, looking to get airborne. So is it any surprise that the person we’ve chosen for this critical role turns out to have once been a Naval pilot and mission commander? Is it any surprise that our guy was an engineering manager and group program manager at Intel? Would you be surprised to learn that he was a senior technical manager at Amazon? That he was once director of product development at a company that was acquired by Kinkos? Or that he’s been VP of engineering and CTO at two other companies since then?

I’m happy to report that tomorrow is a big, historical day. That’s right, Biznik is poised to swear in our first CTO tomorrow. Yes, I know. I’ve heard there’s some other amazing guy getting sworn in tomorrow, too. But this community is built on the idea that collaboration beats competition, right? So we’re staying the course…and sharing The Force!

Stay tuned for updates live from Inauguration day is finally here - let’s watch history happen together!

This morning I had the privilege of being interviewed by Colleen Rice Nelson for 45 minutes on her Blogtalkradio show, Freelancer Forum. Colleen is a great interviewer who lives and breathes freelancing. We could have talked for hours! She runs the Los Angeles Freelance Meetup Group, and the Freelancer Forum, a resource site for all things freelance, small business and solopreneur. How does she find time to run her own business AND do all that? I don’t know. But I’ll have what she’s having.

The highlight of our chat by FAR for me was listening to her describe how LA Biznik members have decided put their own stamp on Biznik. Did you hear that? Hello world: Here comes Biznik LA. The Inaugural L.A. Biznik Happy Hour is being hosted by none other than Colleen Wainwright (who many of you may have met on her trip to Seattle last fall) in Marina del Rey on Jan. 21.

There are currently 596 members within 50 miles of LA. Here’s a couple highlights that jumped out at me as I was browsing Biznik LA:

Do you want outrageous, sexy, luxury green living or working spaces that will change the way you want to live?” asks Rex Beasley, an environmental designer who spends his time between Venice and Morongo Valley, California. His architectural designs quite literally turn structure inside out.

“I invite all potential clients, interior designers, builders, entrepreneurs, kitchen & bath manufacturers, developers, gaming companies, furniture manufactures, investors, home theater companies, realtors, politicians, environmental engineers, activists, poets and lovers of the light, stars, music and outrageous living and work spaces to visit me in Morongo Valley, California. My next open house is late January and you are invited! Send a message and I will send you an invitation. Drive or fly in from anywhere and spend a day in the future.”

Elizabeth Alraune asks: “Just heard about this site from BTR, it looks promising, and this looks like a great event. I wish I could attend, but given where I live, it might take me an eternity to get there. Does anyone live in the I.E.? Maybe we could do something out this way? Perhaps one day, if I get adventurous, I will head out your way. Have a great event, and thanks Colleen for introducing me to this site.”

Terra Vita is moving to LA. The Seattle Biznik member is going to be heading south and plans to begin hosting events in the Palm Desert area on her arrival later this winter.

Yesterday Lara and I filled up the Jeep with $2.03 American gasoline and headed north. (Thought: I never thought I’d see the day when I could fill up for under 30 bucks again. But what kind of an impact is this cheap gas having on the brilliant innovators who quit their day jobs to create the next great electric car that we REALLY need?)

As we approached the Canadian border, Lara and I debated whether we needed make up a story for the guards. We were on our way to Vancouver to host our first Biznik workshop north of the border, and we weren’t sure if we owed taxes or something for what we were about to import. I imagined a conversation like this…

Guard: “What is the purpose of your visit?”

Me: “Ah, we’re importing a virus that’s been growing for three years in Seattle. Don’t worry - it’s a relatively slow growing virus - it tends to spread only with direct contact. But once exposed, people often become carriers…”

Guard: “Pull over, please…”

We rolled into Vancouver in time to share a cocktail with Christa Patchen Wagner, Biznik’s first and (so far) only Canadian Ambassador. Christa is, in a word, awesome. She did all the legwork in advance of this event, hooking us up with a sleek, urban venue perfect for our first engagement, called FigMint. The place was virtually deserted, located as it is on the fault line currently known as Cambie Street, where construction workers are sinking a new subway line ahead of the Olympics.

They only thing that sucked about the next three hours was the internet connection. Lara and I tagged team our way through an overview of social media then drilled down into detailed explanations of the website. A couple of members bailed before we finished, causing us to wonder whether they were bored or just busy. But glancing through the comments a day later is reassuring.

After saying good bye to everyone, we zipped downtown to the Pallisades Hotel, where we had booked a $300 hotel room for $99 bucks a month previous (hint: Kimpton Hotels’ loyalty program rocks). It must have been a slow night, or maybe they just sensed we were having a great night and wanted to make it even better. Because without asking, the desk clerk upgraded us on the spot to a room on the 22nd floor, which featured, she said, “an unobstructed view of the city.”

That turned out to be an understatement. Standing barefoot on our balcony before crawling into bed, we could see water on both sides of the island, and look straight down into a thousand living rooms, bedrooms and kitchens. “I want to live in Vancouver some day,” I told Lara before falling asleep.

Note to self: create a backup presentation that you can run totally off of slides. Restaurants, no matter how elegant, always have sketchy internet connections.