4/16/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Melanie Kalmar already had one of the most complex jobs in IT, and that was before the recent addition of Corporate VP and Chief Digital Officer to her Chief Information Officer title. In a previous interview, Kalmar shared insight into Dow Services Business (DSB), a business she established and runs which provides services to Dow’s joint ventures, divestiture activities, and affiliates (tenants). The value that DSB provides is clear when one considers the extent of Dow’s merger, acquisition, and divestiture (MA&D) activities: the Dow-DuPont merger was the largest ever in the chemical industry, and their MA&D team evaluates and executes between 30 to 50 transactions annually. To support the MA&D strategy from an IT perspective, Kalmar led the development of a unique architecture and “tenant” platform that allows Dow to provide varied business services and enabling technologies to joint ventures or divested entities while leveraging core capabilities.
Asked about the Kalmar’s contribution and the tenant capability, Dow Chemical President and COO Jim Fitterling – who will become CEO of Dow in the first quarter of 2018 – noted, “The unique architecture and tenant capability that our IT experts developed has allowed us to be proactive and extremely agile during business transitions. This greatly benefits our customers and stakeholders, while accelerating our growth and allowing us to keep doing what we do best – creating solutions to help solve global challenges.” The capability has delivered over $45MM in savings since being implemented, and Fitterling notes that to date, it has “Delivered hundreds of millions of bottom line impact [through cost savings and revenue lift] via speed to deal implementation, time value of money, better terms of the deals and operationalizing the new entities.”
Peter High: Please describe the innovative idea that you and your team in IT pursued.
Kalmar: Our company is very active with MA&D activities. The DowDuPont merger transaction was the largest ever in the chemical industry – and one of the world’s largest mergers of equals. The intent is to bring together the complementary portfolios of Dow and DuPont and then to create three leading companies that will drive innovation in their respective industries.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
4/9/11
Late last year, David Bray became the first Executive Director of the People-Centered Internet (PCI), an organization that has a vision of creating projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. Vint Cerf, the co-creator of the Internet, is a co-founder of PCI.
Bray has a remarkable career in government prior to PCI. He began his career in government as a 15-year-old working at the Energy Department in the Continuous Electron Beam Accelerator Facility. Since then his experiences have included stints as an IT Chief for the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s Bioterrorism Preparedness and Response program, where he led the program’s technology response to 9/11 and the 2001 anthrax attacks, and as a Senior Strategist at the Institute for Defence Analysis (IDA) and a Defense Researcher at the Science and Technology Policy Institute (STPI), where he deployed to Afghanistan to help “think differently” on military and humanitarian issues. Bray spent the past several years at the Federal Communications Commission.
As he embarks on an entrepreneurial journey of sorts, I was curious how Bray’s government experience has helped prepare him for this role. He indicated that there are two advantages to government experience for an entrepreneur: first, it teaches one how to operate with resource constraints, and second, it provides experience in navigating across multiple constituencies.
Bray was once the most social CIO in the world, with hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. A new path forward, a growing family, and a perception of a lower returns on the investment in social media have him curtailing his efforts in that realm. His vision for the future of the Internet is as ambitious as ever.
Peter High: You recently joined the People-Centered Internet (PCI) as Executive Director. Can you talk about the mission of PCI and your role there?
David Bray: The People-Centered Internet is a coalition founded by Vint Cerf, one of the co-creators of the Internet, and Mei Lin Fung, who we say is the mother of Customer Relationship Management (CRM). The two of them came together with a vision of creating measurable demonstration projects that help improve people’s lives using the Internet. The idea is that if we are not careful, we may lose the hope and the enthusiasm the Internet had in the 1990s.
According to Pew, 20-somethings are less optimistic about the Internet than they used to be. They still say they cannot live without it, but they do not necessarily see it as a source of hope and freedom or as the uplifting force of people’s lives that we saw it as in the early ‘90s. If we can provide demonstration projects that measurably improve people’s lives using the Internet, these will serve as change agent case examples that local communities can then adopt, or policymakers can use. Even private corporations might be able to use these as a model going forward. It is easy to say, “This is not working,” or “This is bad,” and do the negative stories. The positive stories are harder, but we want to beat that and provide the support and expertise.
There is also the hope that we can espouse Doug Engelbart’s original vision. Doug Engelbart, who was the inventor of the mouse and graphical user interface [GUI], had the vision that technology was a way of bringing people together. If we think about our current lives, how many of us think the Internet is bringing people together versus polarizing and being divisive?
High: The emphasis on people is interesting because often when people think of the Internet they often leap to the technology behind it.
Bray: It is. Consider that just one presidential cycle ago, back in 2008, most people still had flip phones, not smartphones. Back in 2001, less than 2% of all households – meaning one family member in the household – had access to a mobile phone. Now, 98% of all households in the world have at least one family member with access to a mobile phone. That is a dramatic change in less than two decades. Not only is the pace of technology accelerating, but the adoption curves are shrinking. In some respects that is good because if something’s out there that can help uplift people and bring communities together, that is great.
However, there is also a challenge because technology is not neutral. It depends on how we use it, and it can be used for good or for bad. Vint and I often talk about how programmers and engineers rarely think about the second, third, and fourth order implications. In fact, it is not part of their training. Their expertise is making sure that devices do what they are supposed to do. Understanding the implications is another skill set, and it is partly a combination of vision, of artist, of sociology, and awareness of human history. We need to consider the unintended consequences that may occur.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
4/2/18
Barry Eggers is the rare venture capitalist in Silicon Valley who grew up in the region. He can recall a time when the area was covered with fruit orchards rather than start-ups. He spent time in the mergers and acquisitions department at Cisco, which had a remarkable track record during his tenure. After a brief stint in private equity, Eggers and a couple of colleagues founded Lightspeed Venture Partners in 2000. As he notes herein, the firm’s approach has been to identify key themes that the company can focus its investments around.
One area of interest for Eggers is Industry 4.0. This describes digital transformation in the manufacturing sector, and the moniker suggests that it is the fourth wave of change to manufacturing. It is especially interesting, as it brings together a wide array of technology trends such as data, analytics, human-machine interactions, and digital-physical conversion. Eggers describes this trend, and its broader implications in this interview.
Peter High: Industry 4.0 is a topic that you focus on at your firm, Lightspeed Venture Partners. Could you define the term and provide insight into the technology trends that are embedded within it?
Barry Eggers: Broadly speaking, Industry 4.0 is the digitization of the manufacturing sector. The reason it is called Industry 4.0 is that many see it as the fourth industrial revolution: the first was steam, the second was electricity, the third was automation, and the fourth is now digitization. Some people also refer to it as cyber-physical systems in the manufacturing industry. We see this as a huge opportunity.
The second technology is analytics and intelligence. That is where breakthroughs like machine learning and artificial intelligence are taking place
The third technology is human-machine interaction. Even with automation, humans are not going away. It has become easier for humans to interact with machines through touch interfaces, voice interfaces, augmented, and virtual reality. I think augmented reality will play a huge role here.
The last enabling technology is the digital-physical conversion. This is what allows you to create things quickly, such as multi-material 3D printing. The combination of these technologies is going to change the way manufacturing is done over the next 10-20 years.
High: You not only have deep connections in the start-up community, but you also spend a good deal of time with leaders – CEOs, CTOs, CIOs – of large organizations. How fast do you see the adoption of Industry 4.0 technologies happening, especially among larger organizations?
Eggers: An industrial revolution takes time. You have to look at the amount of machines and equipment that has to be replaced. With the advent of the steam engine, absolutely everything had to be replaced. With the advent of electricity, very little actually had to be replaced because it substituted electricity for steam. With automation, some estimates say that between 80 to 90 percent of machines had to be replaced.
3/26/18
Vint Cerf is considered to be one of the fathers of the internet, having been the co-inventor of TCP/IP, having led influential work at DARPA, then at MCI, where he pioneered an email platform called MCI Mail. Now 74, he remains as busy as ever. Since 2005, he has been Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist. It is a role that gives him plenty of freedom. As he notes herein, “I focus on doing whatever I can to create conditions under which more Internet infrastructure can be built. This means I need to go where there is not Internet infrastructure to find ways to get it built. In weaker economies, affordability is a big issue, and the rationale for investing in Internet infrastructure is not necessarily obvious.”
As our conversation continued, however, he shared several concerns about the future of his creation. He indicates that his goal is to determine how to make the internet safer, more secure, and more private. He also co-founded the People-Centered Internet (PCI) with customer relationship management pioneer, Mei Lin Fung, installing former FCC CIO David Bray as the executive director. He notes that, through PCI, he strives to identify projects that could “materially improve people’s use of the Internet.” He sites as examples, “creating information in local languages or providing services that improve people’s ability to find jobs or improve their economic stability or safety or health.”
Peter High: As the co-inventor of TCP/IP, you are famously considered one of the “Fathers of the Internet.” Can you talk about your early work and the genesis of those ideas?
Vint Cerf: Thank you for being careful about that, as Bob Kahn and I had two hands on one pencil. He deserves huge credit, as do tens of thousands of other people since that time. You do not do anything on this scale without a huge amount of willing collaboration and commitment.
When I was a graduate student at UCLA, I worked with others on the ARPANET project, which was a predecessor to the Internet. ARPANET was a packet switching experiment within DARPA to connect a dozen universities that were doing computer science and artificial intelligence research for the Defense Department. The idea was to link all their computers together so they could share their resources, computing capabilities, and results to make progress more quickly.
The challenge was how to connect those machines together since the circuit switching technology at the time would have been too slow for the interactions we needed. Packet switching, on the other hand, is more like electronic postcards. They get lost and they come out of order. You must do a bunch of little things to make a postcard postal service work reliably, and the same is true for packet switching. We got the ARPANET running, and Steve Crocker, who remains one of my best friends, led the network working group to develop the protocols to allow different brands of computers to communicate across this packet switch ARPANET.
After I finished my Ph.D., I went to Stanford to work on computer networking. Bob Kahn, in the meantime, had left Bolt Beranek and Newman and joined DARPA. He came to my lab and said, “We have a problem.” The problem was that we were going to use computers for command and control because it would help us better manage our resources. However, this would require us to put computers in mobile vehicles, ships at sea, and airplanes, in addition to fixed installations. Obviously, these could not be wired connections, and we were going to have to use mobile radio and satellites in addition to the dedicated telephone circuits that we were using to build ARPANET.
The problem was that the packet switch nets differed in terms of sizes, speeds, and delays. We started working on this problem in the spring of 1973. By September, in collaboration with the International Network Working Group, we had a solution. We began detailing the design in January 1974 and published a paper in May of that year. By the end of ’74, we had a fully detailed specification for what was called Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The next several years involved implementation and testing and discovery of mistakes and their repair, so we iterated several times until we ended up with a final specification in 1978 which we froze.
By that time, we had split the Internet Protocol [IP] off from the Transmission Control Protocol [TCP] to deal with real-time communications that did not require reliability but required timeliness. With radar communication, for example, you do not want to know where the missile was, you want to know where it is now. You do not need to retransmit old information because it is not of any use. We split the protocols into TCP and IP, and we created something called a User Datagram Protocol which gave the users access to this real-time communications channel.
That occupied my time by 1978, at which point I was already in the Washington area working for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). We continued implementation across as many operating systems as we could and on January 1, 1983, we turned the Internet on. At the time, it consisted of approximately three networks: the ARPANET, mobile packet radio net in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a type of satellite net over the Atlantic. This was followed by rapid growth in the academic community, which DARPA supported.
Without going into another 20 years of history, the National Science Foundation (NSF) picked up the idea and funded the creation of the National Science Foundation Backbone Network and about a dozen intermediate elements to connect 3,000 universities around the US into this growing Internet system. They contributed an enormous amount to the absolute growth of the system and made some important decisions that allowed the network to eventually become a commercial service.
High: At what point in that journey did you see the broader commercial and global implications of what you were creating?
3/19/18
Naresh Shanker was named CIO of HP Inc. prior to the company’s separation from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) This was the apotheosis of a remarkable career. He had been an IT executive in the technology industry for many years, including the CIO role at Palm until its acquisition by HP. The separation would be the biggest challenge he would yet face in his career.
At the time of the separation, there were some who believed that HP Inc. would be substantially weakened by this separation. Moreover, Meg Whitman, who had been the CEO of HP Inc. remained as Chairman of the company and would take over the CEO role of HPE. HP Inc. would be led by a new CEO Dion Weisler. Remarkably, the separation proceeded with few issues and was on time, and the company has flourished.
Since the separation, Shanker turned his attention to a major digital transformation of the business. The legendary OEM that had been the founding company of Silicon Valley would need to truly become a digital enterprise. Shanker noted that with the hyperconnected economy that we now have, HP Inc. needed to reflect this in its own business. In this far ranging interview, he covers all of the above, and offers essential lessons for other companies who must transform in a comparable fashion.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of HP Inc. HP Enterprise [HPE] separated from HP Inc. in November of 2015. This was one of the biggest separations in corporate history, and you were involved on both sides of that transformation. Can you talk about the scale of separation, and how you thought about planning the separation of a roughly $120 billion revenue company into two roughly $60 billion revenue companies?
Naresh Shanker: We first looked to determine the mandatory minimum requirements that we had to meet from a regulatory and compliance perspective. Our goal was to prioritize and execute the separation into an independent company within 12 months. That is not a small feat, and it has never been accomplished before with a high-tech company of this magnitude, scale, and complexity.
After defining the scope of the mandatory requirements, we looked at what it would take to fundamentally stand up two public entities. HPE focused on our compute network storage solutions coupled with HP Software, as well as HP Enterprise Services. HP’s focus is predominantly around our printing business, our personal systems business, and our 3D additive manufacturing business.
A major task was to separate out the architectures from the infrastructure layer, the wide area networks, local area networks, and the underlying solutions, which is the applications fabric. Several facilities and sites worldwide had to be separated and secured so that we could deem ourselves separate identities and meet all the financial and regulatory requirements of standing up our public companies.
We successfully achieved that in 12 months. After that separation was completed, we were able to stand ourselves up as two public companies. We then embarked on using this opportunity as a catalyst for each of our independent companies to transform and reinvent ourselves. We took advantage of the separation so that we could compete in our independent markets more aggressively and in a more focused manner.
The first thing we did was lay out a five-year roadmap. 2015 was the separation year. 2016 was the year of standing up the company and our independent operations. IT had a lot of work to do here, including rebuilding all the operations and capabilities ground up, from the infrastructure layer to the applications layer, and putting in place all the operational metrics and SLAs so that we could stabilize and run our operations on a 24/7 cadence.
2017 was focused on starting our transformation journey. Our goal from 2017 to 2020 is to complete the execution of our transformation journey. A significant portion of that is in flight, and a lot of it has already been completed.
Our current strategic focus is pivoting from being a transaction-oriented company, where our systems are designed around transactions and physical goods flows, to being a more contractual and digital centric organization. How do we move from a hardware player to being more of a solutions services player? That is what we laid out from an IT architecture point of view to start building the foundation of this journey so that we could pivot ourselves to being a digital company.
We focused on two things: one is supporting an omni-channel go-to-market strategy, and the second is everything-as-a-service play, which involved solutions and services across all lines of business. The separation served as the catalyst to help us pivot from a physical goods and hardware OEM manufacture to more of a digital goods solutions and services technology company.
As we go forward, we will continue to evolve our solutions and services with more user centered experiences and designs in mind. Our focus is ensuring that the user experience, the partner experience, and the customer experience are delivered with a digital mindset. Using the separation as a catalyst, we have fundamentally transformed ourselves to become a digital player in the industry.
High: The transformation that you have been leading is in many ways the transformation that is necessary across a number of industries. As the CIO of one of the original Silicon Valley companies, and one which is now transforming from a manufacturer of physical goods to being focused on digital solutions, can you talk about the changes that are necessary from an IT perspective to deliver that transformation?
3/12/18
Fintech is a hot space at present, with many companies entering the space and threatening financial services stalwarts. It is an interesting time to check on the progress of the first ever global fintech company, PayPal. The company was famous for its early leaders such as Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Reid Hoffman, each of whom went on to make even bigger impacts in the world of technology.
I recently caught up with the company’s chief information officer Bradley Strock, who has been in his role for three and a half years. We discussed PayPal’s transformation into a more customer-centric company, giving customers more choices of funding vehicles. We also covered how PayPal has successfully navigated the shift to mobile finance, resulting in a 50 percent increase in mobile payment volume in 2017. Strock covered his priorities of security, stability, enabling the company’s business strategy, and improving the company’s ability to effectively collaborate. Strock believes that PayPal will play a big part in offering better financial options for the two billion people globally without financial services.
In January of this year, Strock joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he commenced a directorship with $700 million revenue Elevate Credit, Inc., which provides online credit solutions to non-prime consumers, typically defined as those with credit scores of less than 700.
Peter High: Could you provide an overview of your role as CIO of PayPal?
Brad Strock: Most people are probably familiar with PayPal. We operate in over 200 markets around the globe. We are on a mission to democratize money and have had a great deal of success over the last couple of years. 2017 has been a great year in particular.
For tech companies, the role of the CIO is a little different. My scope of responsibilities centers in two areas. One is what I call the more traditional, internal IT function, and this encompasses everything from our corporate networks, corporate data centers, and end-user devices, to most of the internal applications and services that employees use on a day-to-day basis.
The other half is the product development role for customer service. We service our customers globally. We take calls in 24 different languages over chat and email, and we manage the infrastructure and products that our customers interact with to solve their problems. In many cases, we have teammates who help them solve their problems. Those are the two parts of my role.
High: The product portion is the non-traditional aspect of your role as CIO. This gives you the opportunity to not only interface with the greater organization in fundamentally different ways, but also with PayPal’s customers. Can you talk about that collaboration internally and externally and some of the nuances to the ways in which you do so?
Strock: This has been a journey. I have been at the company for seven years, and I have been in this role for a little more than three years. Since our split from eBay the last two or three years, the company has been transforming in a number of different ways. One of those important ways is around a desire to be a customer-centric company, and to be a customer champion. That is true for both our consumers and our merchants, as we have a two-sided network. We have two sets of symbiotic customers.
Over the last few years, we have been diligent about moving away from things that used to be central to our strategy and instead now asking, “What do our customers want?” Part of that process has been deep discovery work, where we sit with customers and understand their day-to-day pain points.
3/5/18
The consumer packaged goods (CPG) industry is a challenging one for a variety of reasons, one of which is the business-to-business-to-consumer nature of the industry. A CPG company must develop a relationship with a customer, who is a middleman in the form of a retailer who owns the relationship with the ultimate consumer of the product. Clorox is a $6 billion revenue CPG company, and its chief information officer Manjit Singh has helped the company work better with customers and with consumers. Singh has developed methods to develop direct relationships with the end-consumers through better consumer journey mapping exercises using digital marketing while facilitating direct shipping enabled through supply chain efficiencies.
At the same time, Singh and his team have gotten involved in new product innovation. An example of this is the Brita Infinity Pitcher, which is an Internet of Things product that measures usage of the filter and will automatically order a replacement filter from Amazon so that the consumer knows to change out the filters when the new filter arrives. IT developed the Brita Infinity Pitcher in concert with the Research & Development department. Singh covers each of these topics among others in this far ranging interview.
Peter High: You are the Chief Information Officer of The Clorox Company. Could you give an overview of the organization?
Manjit Singh: Clorox is a global consumer packaged goods (CPG) company. We operate in most countries around the world, selling a number of large brands including Brita Water Filters, Glad Trash Bags, Fresh Step Cat Litter, and our ubiquitous Clorox bleach product. We are also in the personal care business with our Burt’s Bees business. Most recently, we purchased a probiotics business called Renew Life which is doing well.
High: You have focused on both the internal and external aspects of digital transformation. Could you give us an overview of each of those pathways?
Singh: For the last couple of years, we have been focused on improving our digital marketing capabilities. The IT organization, alongside the Marketing organization, has been busy building a platform and a capability for us to ensure that we understand our consumer journey. We need to ensure we can interact where and how the customer wants, whether that is mobile or web or in a store. We are pleased to be one of the digital leaders in the CPG business.
If we want to be at the right place at the right time with the right product for our customer, we must make sure that our supply chain can match those opportunities. Today, we are not geared to do as well because we are used to shipping large truckloads of product to our customers, which may or may not be the way that the consumer wants to receive our product.
Though we would love everybody to have a truckload of Clorox products show up at their doorstep, they might just want a single item or a set of items. We need to make sure that our supply chain is ready to adapt to that changing world, which means it must be much more agile than it is today, much more capable of predicting where products need to be, and when they need to be at that location.
2/26/18
Gill Haus is the Senior Vice President, Retail and Direct Bank Chief Information Officer at Capital One. In that role, he has overseen many of the changes that have made the Bank synonymous with digital innovation. He believes in having his team regularly experiment with the latest technology to judge applicability to the Bank and its objectives. He has overseen the development of innovation labs that further this mission.
Haus is familiar with the difficult work that companies that are larger and that have been in business for a generation or more must undertake in order to become digital ready. These include cultural changes, process changes, and technology changes. Haus has played a critical role in all three. In this interview, he highlights his excitement for artificial intelligence and blockchain, discusses the value that Capital One has gotten out of developing innovation labs, and more.
Peter High: Yours is a bank that is synonymous with innovation and the move towards digital technologies. Could you provide a bird’s eye view of the transformation that you have helped lead?
Gill Haus: It is like the common saying which is, “Technology changes everything.” If you think about Capital One and who we are, for us to be competitive and provide the services we want to our customers, we must keep up with emerging technologies.
Technologies like the cloud and machine learning are more commonly available than they have ever been in the past. The cost of entry for someone to compete with us is small and our competitive moat only helps to a certain point.
Our focus has been on systematically modernizing everything we do. That means we upgrade our legacy systems and go to the cloud. We have approached this in a few ways. One is making sure that we have the right talent on the ground and making sure that the talent has the tools and systems that they need and want to use.
It is one thing for us to say, “Come work at the bank,” which is already not that appetizing to a technologist.” It is another to say, “Come work in the bank, and you will be able to make your own projects if you have an idea.” “Come work in a bank. You will be the first to move the bank’s platform on to the cloud.” “Come to the bank. You will be able to explore different ways of using data, machine learning, etc.”
Denis Robitaille has does not consider himself a technologist despite being the Global Chief Information Officer of the World Bank Group. He came to IT after a career in Operations at the Bank. When he ascended to his current role, first as acting CIO in November 2016 and then as the permanent CIO in June of 2017, he had profound understanding of how the World Bank operated.
He sees a profound connection between technology and the Bank’s mission to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. He also believes that Blockchain and artificial intelligence will have enormous impacts on the people who the World Bank serves. We cover all of the above and much more in this conversation.
Peter High: You are the second ever Global CIO of the World Bank. While you are not a technologist, you have tremendous operational experience and have done the “actual work” of the World Bank. The Bank’s mission is to end extreme poverty by 2030 and boost prosperity for the bottom 40 percent of populations in every country. What role does technology play in accomplishing these big goals?
Denis Robitaille: Technology is part of our daily life, and I think we are at the beginning of a big transformation in IT. The role of emerging technologies for development is important. There is a big movement at the World Bank Group to explore how disruptive emerging technologies can help development.
We are looking at how we can use technology in a positive way. The entire organization is mobilized behind this goal. For us in ITS, our focus is to support internal clients and operations and to partner with different parts of the World Bank Group to make sure that we can leverage emerging technology.
High: Yours is an organization that has also been going through a cloud transformation. Can you talk about the work going into building a more sustainable technology stack to support the work of the World Bank?
Robitaille: We are a little bit behind, but our objectives are the same. We have a large scale of legacy applications. Last year, we prepared a new three-year strategy. Part of this strategy is to bring some agility and move to the cloud.
We used to be a traditional IT shop of waterfall, and now I am introducing agile and DevOps combined. We want to enable our lines of business and deliver faster for our clients. When we look at our strategies and solutions for the business, we want to triage faster and deliver more flexibly.
2/19/18
Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in January 2001. He set many of the early policies of Wikipedia. He ended up leaving the organization the following year, and has been a critic of it for, among other reasons, its narrow definitions of credible sources, and the fact that so few people ultimately are responsible for the creation and editing of content on Wikipedia.
In the years since, Sanger has been involved in a number of encyclopedia projects, including Citizendium, which he founded in 2006.
Roughly two years ago, Sanger began to informally advise a new startup called Everipedia, a for-profit wiki-based encyclopedia. Theodor Forselius is a co-founder of the company and its chief executive officer. The core of its content is that of Wikipedia, but it has built more content on top of that base, making it the largest English language encyclopedia. Sanger officially joined the company as chief information officer in December of 2017, lured in part due to the company’s commitment to blockchain technology, which was announced on December 6. They indicated it would convert to using blockchain and a cryptocurrency token called IQ to encourage content creation. The IQ tokens are intended to be exchangeable for Bitcoin. Forselius believes this model will create incentives for broader content creation while also fostering access in countries that currently block Wikipedia such as Iran and Turkey.
I recently spoke with Forselius and Sanger about all of the above and more.
Peter High: Theodor, could you talk about the genesis of Everipedia as well as an overview of the business model and the company’s mission?
Theodor Forselius: Everipedia started a little over two years ago as a project between my co-founder Sam Kazemian and myself while he was still studying at UCLA. Originally, we wanted to build a more modern and inclusive version of Wikipedia because we were both editors and huge fans of Wikipedia. However, we felt like there was a lot that was outdated and that we could do better.
For example, their editing interface, talk pages for discussions, citations, their community guidelines and policies were all things that we liked but that we wanted to improve. That is why we started Everipedia.
We decided to implement blockchain technology because we are a for-profit startup, not a non-profit like Wikipedia, so we had to find ways to monetize. Originally, we partnered with companies and we started running adds on the site. However, it didn’t feel right saying that we were better than Wikipedia while we were running ads, so we started looking at other monetization models. Wikipedia’s model of running massive donation banners did not feel like an innovative solution either. We started looking at other venues of monetization and my co-founder Sam came up with the idea of tokenizing the entire knowledge base and decentralizing it. That way, there is no central entity that needs to run ads to be able to monetize because the whole system will be completely peer-to-peer.
High: Larry, in 2001 you co-founded Wikipedia. As of a few months ago, you joined Everipedia as the Chief Information Officer. Could you share your thoughts about the differences between the two businesses?
Larry Sanger: The co-founders of the company contacted me and told me that Everipedia was moving to blockchain, which is a major difference in its own right. This shift to the blockchain got me interested because the blockchain enables something that I have been wanting to do for a long time.
