Tom reflects on two years building a video community platform with Renato, Ken Argy, Perry Urban, and Joseph Beuys. Their confidence comes from watching how people actually use it: they're driven by belonging, self-expression, learning, and shared discovery. The community itself is what makes it work.
Well, hi, it's Tom. Out here in lovely San Francisco, looking at the bay, looking at the South Bay. Out here talking to some people about the project that you've seen Renato and Ken Argy and Perry Urban and myself and the elusive, mysterious Joseph Beuys, uh, talking and working on— talking about and working on. Now, the thing I wanted to quickly talk about today is the, um, the accumulated benefit of all the experience that that group of people has accumulated in the world of video community and video connectivity. Excuse me. You know, when you, when you think about the last 2 years and those of us who have been here that long working on developing this medium— we weren't developing a medium, we were talking to you guys and getting to know one another through this video-enabled way. And doing so, we have— all of us who have been here for that much time— we have developed an understanding of what it takes to connect with people in this video-enabled world that's pretty unique. And because it's unique, sometimes people don't really You know, they can look at you when you tell them things about what you've learned and what you believe based on what you've learned. They can kind of look at you like, "You think so, huh?" And the fact of the matter is, we don't think so, we know so. We know the way people connect with one another in a video context. We know the potential of creating an environment in which people are going to find and relate to other people who are interested in the kinds of things that they're interested in, who are the kinds of interesting people that we've seen and we've met here, all of us. And if you're a skeptic, not that the people that we were talking with out here are skeptics. But if you look at our experience through the eyes of a skeptic, it's like, well, how do you know what people are gonna do? And how do— what makes you think that doing that is gonna lead people to do this? And at a certain point, all you can do is kind of go, well, because we know, because we've done it, because we've seen it, we've felt it, we've experienced it. So when you have that kind of confidence that your experience really does reflect something genuine and deep about the way people connect with one another, and, and, you know, none of what we're saying would be at all unusual or unrecognizable to any of you who've been here watching and participating, making videos, listening to one another, getting to know one another here in this context. None of it would be unfamiliar to you. You would all be shaking your head, I guarantee you'd all be shaking your head going, yep, that's all you got to do. All you got to do is enable people to get together, to connect them around things that they really care about, to help people to find other people who are as interesting as they want people to be who are enthusiastic, passionate about the things that they believe in, that they are interested in, and bingo, it's going to take off because that's what we've seen. That's what we know to be the— what people call in business a lot of times the secret sauce of this kind of site. The secret sauce is us. That's the secret sauce. We want to connect with one another. We want to belong to something that's interesting and intriguing. We want to belong to something that helps us to— enables us to express ourselves. We want to be able to belong to something that helps us to learn and to teach from one another. We want to laugh. We want to see cool things. We want to participate with one another. So out here talking to people about those things, I just wanted to thank thank you for helping me to have as much confidence in the things that I know based on our experience together here, and to let you know that we're more confident than ever that the things that we're talking about are really going to be terrific. So thanks a lot, and see you soon when I get back to the other coast. Take it easy. Bye-bye.
