The Origin of Change.org | Apple SIri/Viv Creator Adam Cheyer

Let's shift gears for a minute and talk about how you were involved in founding Change.org and what you've been able to do with that. Sure. So I talked about verbally stated goals. So let me set my— give you my mindset when I was about to start these things. So I was working on the CAILO project in a research organization. It was wonderful. We accomplished a lot. But I was getting frustrated. I was hitting one of my chapter boundaries. And the core fundamental angst was around 2 things. Number one, I had all these ideas I wanted to create, so I was feeling stifled and kind of confined in the ability to get my ideas out. And I was a little bit worried that the research software we were creating wasn't going anywhere. It wasn't, you know, it was great ideas, It was intellectual waste product, but it wasn't going to get to a real user. And so my verbally stated goal in 2007 was 5 projects that can impact users in 2007. So people are like, wow, you're going to build 5 projects in 1 year? That's a lot. Why not 3? Why not 1? Right? And so one of my philosophies in life is do more than you think you can. And it always goes back, your moral obligation is to make the most out of the time we are here, to realize the gift we've been given. We don't know why we're here, but let's make the most of it. And so I said, 5 projects. And I told everyone I'm working on that. So, Then I was like, man, I only have 3 ideas, but I told everyone 5. I better get going, because next year they're going to ask me, how'd those 5 projects come out? So I actually built prototypes. I was kind of brainstorming. What would, you know, what would people want? What should I do? And I built prototypes of 5 projects, and most of them went along my career interests. So my career interests I describe as a triangle. So 3 points. The first is human to machine. How can people interact with computers and devices more naturally? So one of my projects was Siri. The second was— so human to machine. The second is human to human. So And I was— one of my mentors and inspirations was a man named Doug Engelbart. If you do not know who he is, run down the hall after this meeting, look him up. I think it is not too big a claim to say he is the most important person in computer science, in the history of computer science. Pretty big claim. He's known for inventing the mouse. He's not known, but he also invented the first multi-windowed systems, the first text editors, the first hyperlinked systems. So everything that became the web was a minuscule part of his vision. He did a demo in 1968 for the National Computer Conference, which could not be reproduced today. And in it, he showed working with an editor, he could— as he's typing, he could have graphics and images. He could have links. And not the simple links we have today on the web. You could actually click in different ways to express how you wanted to semantically traverse that link and what the view should be on the other side. And if you wanted to collaborate on a document, any document on the web, you could kind of WebEx or whatever the sharing solution is today. You could fade the face of the person you were working with behind the text. So you could be looking— both looking at the words at the same time in real time and be editing it kind of Google Docs-like where you can see each other's cursors. This was live, wireless, 1968. I mean, there are so many ideas in there you could start companies. Anyway, I won't go on. He was not a technology— just a technology god. He was about how can you harness the collective intelligence of the world to solve complex, urgent problems. That was his mission statement. He said, we're going to be facing increasing huge problems that cannot be solved by any one person or any one team: global warming, poverty, crime, health, all of these huge issues. He says, if humanity does not get better at solving problems globally, we're not going to survive as a species. And all of these things, these inventions he had of the mouse and editors and hypertext and all of that, were just tools to enable harnessing the collective intelligence of the world to solve problems better together. And he died maybe 2 years ago, 2, 3 years ago. And I can tell you, he did not think we had made much progress on this front. We have— now we have devices and we have, you know, the World Wide Web is everywhere. But are we better able to solve complex urgent problems? I just saw the, you know, the debate on whether there's climate change or not. And it's just like— We're not at the point that he imagined. So for me, Change.org was an example of the human to human. How can you harness the collective intelligence of the world to make the world a better place, to take action? And the third axis of my triangle, which was a third company that came out eventually, was machine to machine. So I have human to machine, like a Siri, human to human like a Change.org, and machine to machine. So I was a founder of a company called Genetic Finance. It's now called Sentient Technologies. They're doing very well. All 3 companies are actually, I think, advancing at just about the same pace here. We're about 8 years later now. But so I had some themes that I had been pursuing my whole career around and around and around. And I keep trying and I keep trying and I keep trying. So I said, I'm going to— in 2007, I'm going to create 5 projects that can impact users in 2007. I built prototypes of all of these. I could show them to people, try them out, see what seemed to work. And then in 2008, my verbally stated goal was one major, one minor. Take the best 2 ideas and start them as companies. And you said entrepreneurship forever. I had never started a company before until I was in basically mid-40s. I'm not a, you know, a Harvard dropout like a Zuckerberg, or I had a career. I'd never been to an accelerator or taken a class on entrepreneurship. I didn't even know that existed. But I said, I'm gonna somehow, with my verbally stated goal, I'm gonna do one major, one minor, take the 2 best ideas. And actually, 3 companies came out of it. Siri, Change.org, and Sentient Technologies. So, in a, you know, so it really came about having my long kind of career interests, which I keep trying and trying and trying. And then getting to a point where I said, I'm going to think for a year, prototype 5 ideas that I think matter and will impact users, and then try to make some of these real. And so that's kind of how it came about. Let me just say a few lessons and stories from Change.org. So Ben Rattray is the heart and mind of Change.org. I mean, my contributions are are tiny. That wasn't even, you know, when I picked one major and one minor, it was the other 2 that I picked, and I'll tell you why. Not that I didn't care about it, but we started it out and he had a vision for trying to make the world a better place. He said there are 2 good ways to do it. You either raise money for a really good nonprofit and, or have people on the street and can go do this. And we don't think the way that's done is efficient, and we're going to do tools to build that better. Or you go to politicians and you let them know what should be done. So that was our initial start. So he came to me about, can we use social networking— we were introduced— to harness the collective intelligence of people along these 2 dimensions? I'm like, that fits my model. I'm going to dive in. I'm going to help. So I was the first developer. I remember. I brought in a bunch of my friends, because we had no money. We had no— it's a nonprofit kind of thing. And the people who took over this initial system I built were far better developers than I. And they took it forward. Today, change.org probably has 300 employees. There's maybe 125 million active monthly users. And it's become a petition site, which is not at all what we imagined in the beginning. In fact, we tried every single possible thing you could try in this space of social meets, you know, making the world a better place. We were— when the economy tanked, we ran the largest jobs board anywhere for socially responsible jobs. Go back to work and do something that makes— that matters. We had gifting features, so you could donate 1 square meter of rainforest saved, or, you know, some carbon emissions lowered, things of that sort. We tried everything. But one thing that the Change.org guys did great is they instrumented the data. So everything, every click, they instrumented everything. And at one point, petition, this little petition feature, was getting a little bit more traction than some of the others, so they moved it a bit more to the middle and made it a little bigger. And today, they just simplified, and that's what Change.org is. And so, if you look at the growth, year 1, about a million users. Year 2, about a million users. Year 3, about a million users. Year 4, about a million users. And this included Barack Obama choosing Change.gov as his campaigning website when he was running. So we got a little spike, and then it went right back down as people got confused. Year 5, 10 million users. Year 6, 50 million users. Year 7, 100 million users. So all of a sudden, it went like that. And so it shows the persistence of this team, their ability to be trying different things and iterating. believing and watching the data, and then really running with it and going, once they found the right idea, expansion. And so it's now a very successful company. They're profitable, I believe, meaning they're taking in more money than their costs. And yeah, I'm very proud to be, you know, I was there at the beginning. I can't take credit for much of anything. I've been an advisor primarily after the first— you know, year. But I'm very proud to be associated with change— with what they've done at change.org.