Biznik Blog

Lara and I wrangle with different topics around entrepreneurship all day. We get to work with solopreneurs as they look for ways to engage with other business owners. All this mixing with smart business types can be very inspiring.

After attending the Guiding Lights Weekend 2011, I have a new lens with which to be inspired as I work with entrepreneurs: Good Citizenship.

The Guiding Lights Weekend is the brainchild of Eric Liu, a civic thought-leader in Seattle. Eric presented four precepts that would steer the weekend, compelling the 400+ participants to dig deeper, to show up in creative ways to inspire and foster the society that we can be proud of:

All contribution should be progressive.

Society becomes how you behave.

Every one of us is a gardener.

Show up for the young people.

Eric uses the metaphor of a garden, and it is a good one. A garden takes continuous and constant work. Like gardens, civic life flourishes when we plant seeds, and then care for the plants we seeded.

GLW11 has brought together dozens of luminaries to speak on panels, host workshops and deliver speeches; their contributions for the hundreds of attendees is making a powerful impact on how we all go fourth in our businesses, teaching roles, and civic relationships.

What follows is a selection of the really awesome discussions and workshops we attended from the weekend.

Teach Civics
Sandra Day O’Conner had wanted attend the weekend, though unable to, she was generous enough to produce a video welcoming the Guiding Lights attendees and made a special plea for Eric to share with her the results of the weekend. O’Conner has developed icivics.org, a web solution to help teach students learn about civic life.

The former Supreme Court Judge is concerned that millions of native born citizens would be unable to pass the test required to become an American today. Icivics educates students on democracy, encouraging students and teachers to engage in civic responsibility.

Marching Orders
US Secretary of Education, Arne Duncan joined the discussion via satellite, and encouraged adults to step up and work with students independently, noting the school system can’t do it by itself. When we do that, students will meet us more than half way.

During the last part of his marching orders Friday, he asked us all to hold the senators feet to the fire, they need to get better, faster, with less money. We cannot wait. Demand reform, challenge reform. Senator Duncan left us with these thoughts:

Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.

Education is an economic imperative.

Education issue of national security.

There are millions unfilled jobs in America. Duncan’s marching orders for American adults to make strides to engage in students lives can occur in a variety of ways for entrepreneurs: through mentorship programs, interns, summer jobs, and business intensives. He called for this move towards youth as early as possible – starting to engage young Americans in their mid-twenties is great, but it’s too late.

Teaching the Art of Citizenship
Either overtly or subversively parents and teachers are what brought the notion of civic duty to the highly skilled and dedicated panel members on Day 1 of Guiding Lights 2011. Maya Enista, Ted McConnell, Andrea Levere, David Smith, Maya Wiley all approached the panel discussion about how to teach the art of citizenship from their unique lens, and they did not all agree on how to best bring about the shift which must occur in America, to recognize the areas of growth we need to pursue.

The Ladder Out of Poverty
Van Jones began the Keynote address on Saturday morning by acknowledging that he was asked to not stick to hi schtick, and to talk about something that he dos not usually talk about. So he decided to talk about the American Dream. A topic that he noted seems to be in conflict with itself, and with a large number of Americans.

The American Dream is under threat from the inside. There is a quest and a calling that we have a nation to work hard and aspire to get there – the middle class is falling off the table. It is under threat. Neither the right nor the left can defend it alone. We need the best of the markets and the best ofgovernment, we need the best of community, and best of our individual selves to come forward.

Jones keenly echoed the theme of responsibility in his speech. He spoke about the importance of the entrepreneur. Now, more than ever, social entrepreneurs are working to use their business degrees to solve civil problems, problems such as poverty. Though Van was quick to share a quote from his father, Willy Jones, “Every child has to climb the ladder out of poverty themselves. Society has a responsibility to make sure there is a ladder for that child to climb.”

The New Story of We
Following an amazingly inspiring story from Dan Savage about how and why he created the It Gets Better Project – a full panel of social change agents took the stage to talk about their story and how we use story to improve our citizenship. On the panel was Nassim Assefi, Deepak Bhargava, Kathy Johnson, Timm Lovitt, Dan Savage, Dawn Trudeau, Vivek Varma, John Vassall, M.D. The panel was moderated by Eric Liu, here are a selection of tweets from the panel discussion. For the full scope, check out #GLW11:

Tell It How It Is
Guiding Lights Weekend closed with an eminent speaker on global warming, Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org. 350 is what scientists say is the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. After showing the audience amazing photos of people around the world impacted by global climate change, he astounded the room with the obtuse direction that the US Chamber of Commerce is trying to drive the nation, as it secures the big business polluters, and politicians. If The US Chamber does not speak for you or your business, speak up here!

Wrapping Up
It was hugely inspiring to be with the on-stage and off-stage participants of GLW11. The Biznik Team is excited to have the opportunity to work with Jena Cane, who, with Eric Liu, and the rest of their team will present The Guiding Lights 2012 to offer wisdom, perspective, and new possibilities of civic engagement to the Biznik community.

Guiding Lights Weekend 2011 – Images by Alan Alabastro

Recently, I co-hosted an event at The Sorrento Hotel. I chose this joint because it is warm, there are big leather couches, stiff martini’s, and it is centrally located. Like the relationships we create with one another on Biznik, we build and create a community with the venues and the hosts of venues when we organize a Biznik event. Some members in the Biznik community have taken it a step further to champion venues.

This is true of the Biznik members who are helping to remodel a portion of the community space at The Mosaic Coffee House, called The Den.

The first Biznik event I attended was in the Mosaic Den. I arrived a few minutes early, so I thought I would grab a coffee. My usual routine of looking to see what beans are being used and the cost of stuff was interrupted by not seeing any prices anywhere. It was the first pay-as-you-wish café I had ever been to.

At the Mosaic, you decide what your quiche and coffee is worth–to you. Wireless is free in this open and egalitarian space. Off to one side of the room is The Den, where many Seattle Biznik’s host their event. And because so many Biznik’s host their events in that particular space, they took it upon themselves to host a series of fundraisers to update and modernize the room to best suit the needs of not only the Biznik community, but the larger Seattle community as well. How cool is that?!

The work that Amy C. Darling, Kate Phillips, Amy Woidtke, Jessie Wolfram, and many others have done and are doing strengthen the Biznik community in Seattle and beyond. Think of this: the work that is done in that room effect YOU! The meetings, discussions, and ideas that generate in The Den effect those in attendance, and then that informs how they interact with the Biznik community far and wide–which includes you, when you post an article or a question in the Biz Talk forums or an event–even in another city.

Tshombe Brown, in Portland, found a similar event space in Portland called the Oregon Stamp Society. Something about the space resonated with Tshombe and he wanted to host a series of events there, and so he got connected with someone attached to the space and began working with the Oregon Stamp Society on a continual basis.

Go to the Mosaic website, support the community there, even if you don’t think you are connected with it. Because you are. Because you are connected to me. Granted loosely, and its not like I’m going to be able to go out for a beer or a coffee with all several thousand of you. But through this post and through the events and energy which are created in the events which happen in The Den, and in the dens which are near where you live, we build this community in ways we don’t see–which is the exciting point of all of this crazy mixed up world called business networking.

There is an emotional release and an exciting bond created in trusting what we don’t see. I don’t know that you are going to get anything out of the remodel immediately, but maybe you will. And then one day when you are really old and shuffling down the promenade in your retirement village in Florida you will bump into another retired entrepreneur and BAM! you will connect at The Den.

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!