Zoelle Egner: prediction

Transcript context

…Anyway, on this podcast I try to get to things people learn from these experiences, and so I have to ask what you learn about forming something like this, just ad hoc, pulling a bunch of people together, and having them focus, and get things done, or just scaling it, or even shutting down. I guess what have you taken away from that experience that you maybe will bring to either future one-off things like this or even just your work in general? Yeah, I'd say probably three things. One, the incredible power of a simple idea to bring people together. One of the reasons why VaccinateCA was so powerful and got so many people to help is everybody immediately understood why it would be useful and how they specifically could be making a difference. And combining those two things was an incredible way to bring a lot of people on board very quickly, because from a messaging perspective, messaging, something very important to me as a marketer, it was so concise. Like, "Pick up phone, help save lives." Really straightforward. People really, really got that. It allowed them to feel like they had agency in a time when everything felt really, really out of control. I think there's a lot of opportunities we have to activate our communities and give people that sense of control that are both going to be helpful more broadly for society, but also just for those individuals as well to make them feel a little bit more safe, a little bit more like they can actually have a difference in things. I think in tech we often don't jump into these problems. This was not sophisticated technology. It was phones, Discord, and Airtable mostly being used like a spreadsheet. It wasn't anything wild. Even that very simple infrastructure was enough to make a huge difference. And we have some evidence that we saved a lot of lives as a result of it, which is pretty special. I think part of it is also just saying, "We don't have to be hesitant to jump into these problems. It's important to engage with experts in the field, is not to say that tech solutionism is always the answer." And again, this is not super sophisticated technology, but because we were able to go in and talk to the people who are actually affected, get into the system that already existed, and make something really simple, really fast, it actually did have a huge difference and that's really exciting. Just to double-click on that one, actually reminds me, some founders of companies I've invested in, I often hear how much easier it is for companies that have a mission that people are excited about for them to hire versus companies that don't. And so it's a really good reminder of just the power of having a mission and a vision that is really compelling to people versus some B2B software that people aren't [inaudible 00:13:47] excited about, even though there's a great reason to have great B2B software. Love B2Bs.…

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