Bold (21 page)

It's also for these same reasons that Page has devoted considerable resources to the pursuit of AI. “Artificial intelligence would be the ultimate version of Google,” he explains. “The ultimate search engine. It
would understand everything on the web, it would understand exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. And we're nowhere near doing that now. However, we can get incrementally closer to doing that. And that's what we're working on.”

In the spring of 2014, when Page hosted a group of XPRIZE donors at GoogleX, he reflected on the benefits of bold ambitions. “You'd think that as we do more ambitious things, our failure rates would go up, but it doesn't really seem to. The reason, I believe, is even if you fail in doing something ambitious, you usually succeed in doing something important. I like to use the example of our first attempt at creating AI, which was started when Google had less than two hundred people back in 2000. We didn't succeed in creating an AI, but we did come up with AdSense, where we target search ads against web pages, which has become a good chunk of our revenue. So we failed at making AI, but we got distracted by something useful. Pretty much 100 percent of these things have gone that way.”

Of course, AI is not the only futuristic technology they're working on. Google is also the title sponsor for the $30 million Google Lunar XPRIZE—with the goal being to put the first robot on the Moon (seen as a first step toward extending humanity's reach and economic influence beyond the Earth), which is to say that, just like Bezos, Branson, and Musk, Page too dreams of outer space. But his ambitions don't end there. Unlike the others, Page has taken an even more adventurous step, announcing the longevity start-up Calico in November of 2013,
⁴⁴
which is Google's entry into the anti-aging world, or, as
Time
magazine put it: “Google vs. Death.”
⁴⁵

In his widely circulated essay “Google Wins Everything,” Internet entrepreneur and blogger Jason Calacanis puts it this way: “If you work for Larry and are not thinking 10x, don't expect to keep your job for very long. That insanity-by-design is creating a one-upmanship that hasn't been seen in the history of mankind. Larry's campaign, if successful, will make Caesar, Napoleon, Columbus, the Wright Brothers, the Apollo 11 Mission, the Manhattan Project, and our Founding Fathers look limited in scope.”
⁴⁶

It's the fall of 2000. There are now more than 20 million websites on the Internet.
¹
The browser wars (AOL versus Netscape) are in full swing. And with the recent bursting of the dot-com bubble, there are a lot of out-of-work graphic designers hanging around cyberspace, just looking for something to do.

Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart are among them.

Nickell and DeHart are both nineteen years old. They too are out-of-work designers. They met during an online T-shirt design competition—something that was then occasionally starting to happen—and decided they wanted such contests to happen more frequently. Instead of a competition just once a year, they decided to create a website that hosted them once a week. Anyone with a good T-shirt design could enter. Everyone in the community could vote. The winner got a hundred dollars, and the winning T-shirt was put up for sale on the site. They named their new venture
Threadless.com
, and mostly it seemed harmless enough.
²

Turns out, people liked to vote on T-shirts. They
really
liked to vote on T-shirts. Within a few years, Threadless was turning an annual profit
north of $20 million. Almost unintentionally, Nickell and DeHart had become the third largest T-shirt manufacturers in the United States.

And Threadless wasn't alone in finding ways to tap into the burgeoning online community. During this same period, a software designer named Philip Rosedale noticed that hardcore gamers weren't just interested in playing games; they also seemed to want to spend their time designing the games themselves. So he created Second Life, a massive virtual world that was essentially built for free, with Rosedale merely outsourcing software development to the gaming crowd. And the crowd, as Jeff Howe wrote in
Wired
, “[was] only too eager to do the work.”
³

So eager, in fact, that throughout the early 2000s, the Second Life community generated 10,000 developer-hours worth of content a day. An entire economy emerged inside the game. Right around the time that Threadless was starting to make $20 million in annual profits,
Business World
put Anshe Chung on their cover—the very first virtual citizen who had become a real-life millionaire because of his Second Life business.
⁴

It was also Jeff Howe, alongside
Wired
editor Mark Robinson, who noticed what was happening with the likes of Threadless and Second Life and coined the term
crowdsourcing
. Howe defined the word as “the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call. This can take the form of peer-production (when the job is performed collaboratively), but is also often undertaken by sole individuals. The crucial prerequisite is the use of the open call format and the large network of potential laborers.”
⁵

As crowdsourcing gained steam, crowdfunding (covered in detail in the next chapter) was developing. While the idea dates back to the 1980s, it became a mainstream phenomenon in 2005, when
Kiva.org
became the first microlending website, tapping the crowd to provide tiny loans (usually less than $100) to entrepreneurs in developing countries. By 2009, Kiva had distributed over $100 million in loans,
with a staggering 98 percent repayment rate. By 2013 that number had jumped to $526,460,675 in loans from 1,047,653 Kiva lenders while maintaining a 98.96 percent repayment rate.
⁶

This was also the same time when crowdfunding sites like Indiegogo and Kickstarter came into being, giving birth to a new way to raise money for creative projects. Want to make a movie? Cut a new CD? Design a new kind of watch? Just put a video up on either of these sites and ask the crowd for the money. It didn't take long before the
New York Times
started calling Kickstarter “the people's NEA [National Endowment for the Arts],” and well, they weren't kidding.
⁷
In 2010, the site raised over $27 million and funded 3,910 projects. The following year, the amount raised jumped to $99 million, funding 11,836 projects. In 2013, these figures were north of $480 million and some 19,911 projects.
⁸
And Kickstarter is only one example. While Indiegogo has not released its growth numbers, in early 2014, its success was impressive enough to command a $40 million equity investment, the largest venture investment yet for a crowdfunding start-up. All told, across the entire sector, hundreds of crowdfunding platforms have materialized, giving entrepreneurs access to what will soon exceed tens of billions of dollars in annual funding.

As movements, both crowdfunding and crowdsourcing diversified quickly, with all sorts of commercial applications beginning to emerge. The graphic design hub 99designs, for example, allows users to submit a design need and an associated budget—say, a new logo for $299—and the crowd competes for the business.
Gengo.com
offers crowdsourced human translators, CastingWords does audio transcription, and Maven Research—aka the global knowledge marketplace—provides expertise in hundreds of thousands of disciplines.

Big business has also gotten in on the action. Anheuser-Busch now relies on the crowd to craft beers. General Mills has tapped them for everything from packaging design innovation to novel ingredient suggestions. Scientific research has become another growth area. The Polymath Project pits the crowd against unsolvable math problems, Foldit harnesses them for protein folding, and Zooniverse allows anyone
to categorize galaxies, discover new planets and even hunt for alien life.

So why does this whole crowdsourcing arena matter so much for exponential entrepreneurs? Consider what Larry Page's dream of artificial intelligence might look like when it finally arrives. This would be a system that understands your intentions and desires and can help turn them into reality. Make your request to JARVIS and the AI will analyze data, write programs, create, design, and—probably via 3-D printing—manufacture exactly what you require, whenever you require it. Everything from the prototyping of new products to getting real-time data-mining insights about an entire market is in the offing. Sounds exciting, right? But while that extraordinary capability may still be a decade or so away, in the interim, we have the crowd.

Part three of
Bold
examines what we've chosen to call
exponential crowd tools
—all the various permutations of crowd-powered capabilities now available to everyone. These tools are exponential in power for three simple reasons. First, over the next decade, the size of the crowd (those folks online) is expected to more than double—from roughly 2 billion to 5 billion people (perhaps 7 billion if some of the orbital or stratospheric communication solutions are deployed).
⁹
This means 3 billion new minds are about to join the global conversation (this is the group referred to in
Abundance
as the rising billion). Second, the communication technologies underpinning the crowd are growing exponentially, morphing once thin data connections into ubiquitous broadband. The multinational professional services firm PricewaterhouseCoopers projects that the penetration of mobile (broadband) Internet services will reach 54 percent of the world's population by the end of 2017.
¹⁰
As a result, the crowd is becoming hyperconnected and hyperresponsive. Third, and perhaps most important, all of the exponential technologies discussed in part one of this book are starting to become easily accessible to the masses, further empowering this hyperconnected, hyperresponsive crowd. What this means is that the people you can now tap for support are themselves far more capable
than ever before.

Global fixed-broadband and mobile Internet penetration (%) 2008–2017

Internet Penetration: The Rising Billions

Source:
http://www.pwc.com

Before we launch into crowdsourcing in greater detail, it's helpful to pull back a bit and see how these ideas work within the greater context of part three of this book. In this chapter, we'll dive deeper, coming to understand how just about anything you need done can now be done by some crowd-powered platform. We'll also come to understand why crowdsourcing works so well and, critically, how you can get the most out of it. In addition, just in case you'd like to start your own crowdsourcing site, I'll cover the challenges that platform founders had in creating their own and the lessons they learned along the way. Finally, if you are interested in leveraging existing platforms, I'll introduce you to some of the most powerful services tailored to the exponential entrepreneur.

Next, in chapter 8, we'll shift our examination to crowdfunding, one of the greatest capital-raising tools available to today's entrepreneur, providing you with an in-depth overview of the sector and a step-by-step
guide to tapping its full potential. Then, in chapter 9, we'll see how to build a passionate, committed, and capable “exponential community” to support and advance your boldest ideas. Finally, chapter 10 closes out the book with a look at incentive prizes, an exponential tool that lets you harness basic human motivation (our desire to compete) to radically accelerate innovation, providing entrepreneurs with exceptional leverage when tackling grand challenges.

It's worth pausing to unpack this last idea further. Until very recently, grand challenges were off-limits to most mortals. The issue was scale and the fact that scale has always been a pay-to-play proposition. Historically, going big meant huge capital outlays and multidecade bets. It meant arms and legs in dozens, sometimes hundreds, of countries. It also meant an astounding array of talent, the infrastructure to hire that talent, retain that talent, and—as the technology evolved—retrain that talent. But with the array of exponential crowd tools available to today's entrepreneur, the entire playing field has shifted. Today, incredibly, the ability to play at scale is never more than a few mouse clicks away.

To best examine all these exponential crowd tools, throughout part three, we'll be following a format similar to the one introduced in our discussion of 3-D printing. First, we'll examine the past, present, and future: the history of the tool, its current state, and its future possibilities. Next, we'll dive into three case studies, seeing how other entrepreneurs have leveraged these exponential organizational tools to tackle the big and bold. Each chapter will close with a very concrete how-to section, intended to allow anyone to finish the reading and jump immediately into the doing.