Part 2 - How Gina Bianchini's Childhood Community Inspired Her Leadership

Welcome to this edition of the million dollar Mastermind podcast. This is where we pick the brains of high achievers from all walks of life and get their hard earned real world insights on winning. I'm your host, Larry Wydell. I'll tell you, I know there's a lot of people out here thinking, okay, I've got the yada, yada. Conceptually, I don't know how it would apply to me. It sounds like it could apply to my situation. However, one thing we need to point out at this point that it is big and it's like we used to. I was in a manpower development business for 40 years and we have lots of meetings and you find that most of the learning in person meeting, you know, at big events happen in the hallways. People, you know, in the hallways was where the light bulbs seem to go on most of the time and are in the hotel rooms. You know, on the second or third night when everybody's kind of relaxed and you know, just going over everything. Or in the bus ride, you know, you have people, car and bus rides, they would come from six, eight hours and on the buses they'd have these long conversations and the light bulbs go on. So I see the value of it. I don't see how to go from start to make it happen. But what I do know is that you know how it works. And let's just say one thing, that this is big. This is something that probably I've got a guy named Randy, he's a young guy and he started, I think he's immigrant from somewhere and Hispanic. He's Hispanic family. But the thing is that he started a car wash thing and got himself a van and put things on the side. He's got him and his buddy, they do a great job. Well then he started to do some youtubes, little simple how you do car detailing. And he became a huge hit. Before you know it, he's on CNN as a young entrepreneur of the year. And Randy, he's a big. He's becoming a YouTube star now. I could see Randy building himself, extending this another step to where he gets it from all over the world at all socioeconomic levels, wanting to, you know, my father was a big washer and waxer of the car and I did not get that gene. I do believe in genetics. It skipped a generation. My oldest son has that gene and. But I do not have it and my youngest son doesn't have it. But there are a lot of people who have that. And with Randy putting this on YouTube, little simple type things and he just become this phenomena, the car product. People are going to him and everything. And they saw him on YouTube and they want him to promote their stuff. So I could see how that could go tell people how big this. I just want to establish in this comment that you can figure it out, it can happen and people are doing it. You started Mighty Network.

Let me just address that. So you're thinking about big in terms of like, can you get 200,000 people on a live stream together? And I want to offer a different way of thinking about it.

I'm just talking about big in terms of justify your time.

Yeah, well, let me, let me. That I'm going there. So hold your car washes.

Okay.

As I mentioned, but it might have gotten lost is we have more $1 million communities today with 99% margins being created. And it is because when you are charging $600, $1,000, $5,000 per year and providing value from that, that comes from being the person who brings others together. These businesses get big fast. So it may be thousand people paying you $1,000. And we have those in spades. So some of our biggest networks are anywhere from 15 to 20 million dollars a year with 99% margins, which means you are keeping more and more of that money for yourself than paying it because you have to scale a big team. So coming back to Gary is imagine that he could, in addition to showing the how tos, also talk about how to buy and run a car wash. Because when you can buy and run a car wash successfully and you're bringing in, I don't know if that's a half a million dollars a year, you're probably willing to spend $1,000 to be able to make sure that you're building it as efficiently as possible, you're marketing it as efficiently as possible. You are hiring people and running it as efficiently as possible. That is where people are really making a lot of money today is in these professional networks, health and wellness networks, and then other important interests, these other life transitions. You can imagine. Why would somebody pay 1,000 or even $5,000 to be a part of a network of car wash owners who are actually helping each other build successful businesses? Especially because it can be, as you said, people all over the country or all over the world. And there's a lot of similarities in terms of how they're going to go get customers, get customers to bring in other customers and the like.

And this turns into, for you at Mighty Networks, it says, and I'm sure these numbers, when we get them they're always wrong because they're later.

Because we certainly didn't give them out because we haven't talked publicly about ourselves.

But it's like supposedly 370 million in creator earnings in 2023.

Well that's true.

That seems like a big figure.

Yes. And it's larger today obviously.

And now what is creator earnings? 370 million.

That means. Yes. So that basically means that all the Randy's out there who are running their Mighty Networks, when you add up how much money that they are making on our platform, it is north of $370 million today.

Unbelievable. And so your, this is not your first rodeo on this. You started, co founded a company called Ning which is a global platform for creating social networks. And how is creating social networks different than creating communities like what you're talking about here?

Yeah, it's basically the same thing. The only difference is we were doing that in 2007-2010. And mighty networks is taking advantage of all of the intelligence and all of the most modern software to be able to make those relationships work between members in new and interesting ways.

Well, what we like to do here is to pick the brain a little bit of your journey. And it's like because along the way, right from the beginning, you make choices. We all have choices, forks in the road and you don't end up in a place like you are unless you gotta get out. Most of them have been right. Maybe they're not all right, but most of them are right. And so what informed your decision? How did you grow up and look at life? What were you thinking about as a young person growing up and what attracted you to where you say this is really fascinating for me.

Me.

And what did you think about, were you an athlete growing up?

I was, yeah. So I was an athlete. I always knew I was going to run something and I was super entrepreneurial as a kid.

Why was that? How do you come up? Because how do people get. I always knew that I was going to be a leader, I was going to be in charge of things. So like where does this come from?

Certainly the family I grew up in, yeah, my father kind of could walk into just about any room and figure out what was needed to lead the room. So that was always something that I saw modeled. And I wouldn't say I had his skills or talent for doing it, but it was just always something that.

How old were you when you noticed he had that ability?

I don't remember a time and a place where he didn't. And he was A high school history teacher and then a school administrator, and he was a coach. And I remember going to the high school that he taught at when I was just a little kid, and I would just. It looked really fun and he was having a good time. So he also followed his passions, as did my mom. And so I always had models and role models of people who were curious and engaged and excited about trying new things or building new things and going. When they did something, they did it to their full effort. And so I just always saw that. And I would say there were high expectations for. My grandparents also lived around the corner from us and were really involved in the community in Cupertino. And it just always felt like something that was fun and exciting to do, which was. But I also feel like it just was something that was never in doubt for me. I don't know, I wish I could say that it was a lightning bolt came and struck me down, but that just wasn't the case.

It's funny that you were at Cupertino. You know, all the Apple devices come with the watches. The home base is time and Cupertino.

That's true.

There might be something in the water there or the mentality there or the neighborhood there, but it was safe to say that you got. You learned about winning and being successful and doing well at an early age, and that was attractive to you.

Yeah, I think that's fair.

And so what did you. When did you start to take on your uniqueness, you know, as far as your skill set, your really primary interests? Any role models?

Yeah, I have no idea. I have followed my interest and my curiosity ever since I can remember. And I found it in things like I was saying earlier, biographies, history, political science, and just like, how do things work and how do people work? I was never interested in psychology or sociology necessarily, because I thought that the people systems was the thing that was really interesting. But, yeah, so that was my interest. I loved sports. I played college field hockey and soccer as a kid. I played a lot of soccer, and then I started playing field hockey in high school. And I loved sports. And I remain somebody who loves sports. And I think being on a team is truly one of the best things that we can possibly do.

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Oh, that's cool.

Down in Albuquerque, Microsoft. The name Microsoft came from Bill Gates and Paul Allen winning the contract to put the software on that little box. And so the name of the company was Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems and so Micro software, that's where that came from. And so my cousin Edward was obviously pretty bright guy and he told me as I was coming up getting ready to go to school, he said follow your natural curiosity and beware that all this institutional learning has the effect of beating that out of you and you kind of lose that. But it's your natural curiosity that's going to lead you to what you're supposed to be doing in your life and what you could be great at. Where, where did you think? You know, but you have to give yourself a kind of permission to follow that. Did that you think came from your parents?

I don't know, honestly. I mean it certainly my parents certainly helped. They modeled being curious, they modeled being engaged in the world. Yeah, I was always pretty self motivated.

What was your first job that you got in and really started learning some things or that was a difference maker, you think?

Well, I mean probably right out of college was the first truly. Well, it was the first job full time job I had that wasn't a summer internship and it was at an investment bank called Goldman Sachs. And I was one of the first high technology group analysts in the San Francisco office when it was like four people and then the Internet happened and it was just an incredible experience. So I was incredibly fortunate to be in the right place at the right time, surrounded by the right people. And I wouldn't trade that experience for anything.

Well, you said something that you noticed. You were always interested by communities or people groups or people systems and how that worked. I don't think that's a concept that occurs to most of us to even notice, especially, especially not at a young age when you're in leadership you have to get people together and figure out how to move them it's smaller versions of Walt Disney World. I've always enjoyed going to Walt Disney World and seeing how they move masses of people. Man in the mass, incredible. Man in the mass is totally predictable. Man as an individual is totally unpredictable. And so it's really interesting to observe how these big corporations have figured out how to manage the masses. But you noticed that interaction, I think. What about that did you notice? And what intrigued. Why do you think you were intrigued by that?

What was intriguing about Goldman Sachs?

No, about the idea of communities and people groups and the power of that.

I grew up in a very tight knit, so I grew up around the corner from the Homebrew Computer Club. And that was not rare in Cupertino in the late 70s, early 80s. Everybody, if they were interested in something, there was the Model A Car club, there was the Mini Lop Rabbit or the guinea pig Breeding Club. There was anything you could imagine. There was even something called Lyceum where you could learn how to make candy or about extraterrestrials or all these amazing things. And that was just Cupertino in the late 70s and 80s. And I think that what I saw and what I observed were people that were curious and engaged in the world. They were also. It was a very engaged community. My grandparents had moved there to open a nursery because it was all orchards and agricultural. They moved there and opened their nursery in 1950 and. And they were members of the Lions Club and the Deora Women's Club. And all of that was what I was born into. And so I saw community work not only overall, but also related to your interests and your passions and your goals and what you wanted to accomplish, whether that was as educators or as local business people and small business owners, as well as guinea pig breeders and where. So that was always. That was like oxygen to me. And then When I was 11, my father was killed by a drunk driver when he went on a National Guard trip to Jackson, Mississippi and just never came home. And thank you. But what was so powerful about community. And I think, really, I think that the intellectual puzzle of people and how they do what they do, and you said it so beautifully, as a system, they're relatively predictable, which means you can build things for them. But the way that community is there to lift you up when you fall is also extremely profound. And I think that there is no other dynamic in our lives that is the first place you go when something great happens and the first place you go when something terrible happens. And it's one of the reasons why I think taking advantage of modern technology and what is possible to create community. Just again, what we do is so important. We can hear all the stats and all the hand wringing stories about loneliness and loneliness epidemics. But the only way we're going to actually address that is to bring a community renaissance back that take advantage of those things that I lived in my life and you lived in your life when you could meet people and we were actually better at people stuff because it wasn't necessarily all being generated or filtered through a supercomputer in our pocket.

Right. And what led you to co founding a social media company?

I didn't. No, we're not. I've never like what I do. And the kind of software I build is not social media. Social media is I talk out at you. I'm focused on building the biggest following that I can. You might talk back at me, but no one's actually talking to each other. That's social media. What I build and my team builds is social networks. And networks are about how do I meet the most interesting and relevant people who are on the same path, who want the same things, who want to live through or navigate the same transitions that I am in right now, who I can learn from, that I can build relationships with, that I can go on the path together. That is very different than I'm going to create content five or 10 times a day, I'm going to post it and I'm going to watch my view count.

How did you notice that? Because you obviously noticed it early on because you started ning in what, 2005, something like that. What were you noticing that caused you say we've got to go in a different direction or we got to provide something different?

Oh, we didn't. None of us knew. None of us who were building things in 2004 knew that we needed to go in a different direction. So the story is that I was in a community, a very tight knit community here in Palo Alto. I was running my first startup which did advertising tracking, measurement and optimization that we ended up selling. And as part of that in our sort of small, tight knit group. Reid Hoffman was a good friend of mine and was like showing me all of these really new and interesting things that were being created like Friendster and MySpace and all of these new. And he was really passionate about it, which is why he started LinkedIn. And then separate to that, I was good friends with Marc Andreessen who sat on the board of that first company, that advertising company that I was a co founder of. And I was learning all Sorts of really interesting things from him. And I was like, hey, my friend Reid is doing all this cool stuff and have you checked out all this like user generated content and you know, these really, really early social networks? And he was like, that's awesome. Was super supportive and you know, then came to me and was like, hey, what if we created a platform for creating social networks? So instead of one big monolithic social network or three monolithic social networks, what if similar to the browser and similar to unlocking millions of different websites, there were millions of different social networks that could be created. And that was the genesis and founding of Ning. It turns out Mark is a very smart guy. And we were just off in terms of what the software could do in 2007 versus what the software is going to be able to do in 2027. And that idea was simply ahead of its time. And so the reason that I started and continue to be more bullish on creating your own community, your own social network, very much the same ideas. The language has changed a little bit, is because people love people. And now the software is getting sophisticated enough to play the role of amazing host in people's lives. So being able to, because think about it, it's like the best parties that you've ever been to or the best events you've ever been to, you walk in and the host of that party immediately is like, oh my God, Larry, I'm so glad you're here. I really want you to meet Gina because you guys have this interest in common. So what does that host have? That host has two things that now software has the ability to, to do even more effectively. That host has data and natural language. Data and natural language. And that host can make connections both obvious and not so obvious when they have data and then they use natural language to make the connections. So what we are doing at Mighty Networks is building the. The software that can play that role of host, which has all sorts of benefits. You get to meet amazing people, you get to go on quests together, you get to see and experience different ways of living your life and navigating transitions that otherwise we've moved away from doing it in community to this idea that you're going to just consume a bunch of video content online and maybe add some comments. And that's going to be how you learn anything and change your life. Well, we've never learned anything or changed our lives that way. We have only learned things and changed our lives in community with other people. And so that's why I'm so passionate about what we're doing at Mighty Networks and how we're doing it with people. Magic is because this is taking advantage of what is now possible that I've been patiently waiting for in some level for many, many years.

I'd like to thank you for listening to part two of this episode of the million Dollar Mastermind podcast. Timing is everything. You may feel that now is the time to get moving forward so you can do something even greater with your life. Now, if that sounds sounds like you, I've got a free training video to show you how that transformation can take place. Getting introduced to how the cycle of success works has been a major transforming event for so many current million dollar earners. And that's exactly what this video is all about. And yes, it's completely free. Join us at the video at. And thanks for being part of our community.