The Unlikely Lesson | #Hashtag Inventor Chris Messina

I certainly didn't want the social media companies to own it. And there was a time when Twitter was trying to go for their IPO where they tried to trademark and own the hashtag. And I said, fuck no, you're not going to, because that's— because you rejected it in the first place. And secondly, it wasn't for you. It was for the internet. Up until then, I'd been very anonymous about this idea. It was something that I wanted to give away. In that moment, I was like, no, I realize I have to stand up and claim myself as the inventor of this thing, because if I don't, these big companies are going to take it away from us. Hey, so I'm Chris Messina. Today I'm talking about the unlikely lesson from inventing the hashtag. I'm here with a bunch of students from Draper University. If you wanna find out more, you can go to draperuniversity.com. So again, kind of like taking a look back and taking stock of this, this very simple seed of an idea has grown into something that, of course, I could never have anticipated. And that is leading me to this unlikely lesson, which goes back to the question of success and how I define success. And how each of you want to define success for yourselves and why each of you is here. I mean, you guys are at the beginning of this program. You guys are just starting to really think about what you wanna get out of it. Maybe you already have some ideas, but maybe you haven't thought about what happens if you actually succeed. I certainly didn't. You know, I had some ideas and principles about what I wanted the hashtag to do for the world, but we didn't even think that social media itself was going to ever succeed. And yet I'm glad I started where I did. You know, I chose a couple different levers to push on, a couple different values that I thought were important, and I built those into the solution that I came up with. I wanted this thing to be viral. I wanted it to grow on its own. I wanted it to be decentralized. I didn't want people to have to come back to me. And I wanted it to be generative. I wanted people to be able to use it in ways that I had never anticipated, to do better things than I could ever imagine. I wanted to change culture. Now, again, you might be wondering, well, what does this have to do with wealth? You know, aren't you wealthy now? And the answer is no, actually, I'm not. I haven't made money directly from the hashtag. That wasn't the point. And yet, I still consider it a success. The success that I sought was different because of another person who contributed one of his works to the public domain. There was this Lithuanian mathematician who wrote this paper all the way back in 2002 when I was in college. I found it online in some newsgroup, and this newsgroup was about free thinkers, people who had different ideas, who wanted to understand the world as it was, not as it was given to them. And this paper argued for an economy for giving everything away. This is his very own personal kind of mission in life, to figure out how we could live with essentially nothing. And I found this very compelling and very interesting, because without money, maybe you could avoid certain types of corruption or doing things that you really didn't want to do. This is one of the primary reasons why I didn't want to patent the idea. I thought that more people could benefit from this than if I tried to own it exclusively for myself. I certainly didn't want the social media companies to own it. And there was a time when Twitter was trying to go for their IPO where they tried to trademark and own the hashtag. And I said, fuck no, you're not going to, because that's— because you rejected it in the first place, and secondly, it wasn't for you. It was for the internet. And so it wasn't up until then— up until then, I'd been very anonymous about this idea. It was something that I wanted to give away. In that moment, I was like, no, I realize I have to stand up and claim myself as the inventor of this thing, because if I don't, these big companies are going to take it away from us. And so Andreas Kalikowskis, the mathematician, argued that He accepts the idea that he should give everything away because he found that wealth was actually in relationships, whereas knowledge is worthless without context, and money is worthless if there's no one to accept it, especially if there's no web of relationships to back up that currency. And again, given what you guys are gonna talk about later on today and probably throughout this program, I think that last line is incredibly interesting and prescient. So again, Normally, when I finally reveal to someone that I, yes, am the inventor of the hashtag, and they ask me how, I really look at them and I'm like, uh, how is really not the most interesting question. Why I did this, why I thought this was important, why I gave it away, why is because wealth is found in relationships, and the relationships that I've built and that other people have built through the use and adoption of the hashtag over the last, let's see, it's been like 15 years. 15 years. That's not true, my math is horrible. It's been a long time. Is way more than had I tried to own and control and keep people from using this thing. And so that's the unlikely lesson from inventing the hashtag. Thank you. Yeah, so I mean, it was like super awesome to both get like this like standing introduction reception. That was great, and like the students are like super pumped. Super excited about what's going on and really engaged after the talk. And so I thought it was really good to have a chance to, like, talk to them, share my ideas, and also hear from them in terms of things that they're thinking about. So it was a real honor to come to Draper. Thank you.