Invite Your Friends

Awesome to see this go live!

The about.me Blog

Now you can easily invite friends to join about.me. When a friend signs up, we’ll feature your page for everyone to see.

If you’ve been paying close attention to the site, you may have noticed the recent appearance of our invite page. After some extra testing, we’re excited to launch a clean and simple way to invite your friends.

It’s fun to see how people you know present themselves on about.me. You might even discover shared passions (you love needlepoint too!?!)  or even connect in a new way or on a new service.

You’ll get featured; more exposure can help grow followers,  promote your work, or help you connect with professional and creative collaborators.

But more importantly you’ll show your friends an easy way to express their unique personality identity on the web.

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Thank You for an Amazing Year!

Wondering how we did in our first year returning to being an independent company – what a year it was!

The about.me Blog

It’s our anniversary, and what a first year we had. After buying back about.me, we put so much love into the service, adding Compliments, Collections & Replies, all displayed in a beautiful People Feed that shows you who is interested in you and people you have things in common.

Many of us have been lucky to be involved with great companies (WordPress, MakerBot, Blue Bottle Coffee, True Ventures, Adaptive Path, etc) that embrace openness in sharing their numbers – openness is core to us at about.me and we’d like to share our one year progress:

For our anniversary, help us celebrate by updating your page or sending someone a compliment – hopefully you’ll like what you see.

One last thing: our whole team is plugged in almost 24/7 to reply to your questions and feedback. Whether you need help, have an idea, or just want to say “hello”, we’ll…

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Featured Friday #FFaboutme

I love our Follow Friday series – always great to discover new, awesome people on about.me

The about.me Blog

Happy Friday! The pages today show off informative bios, display creative work, and share personal interests; all the things that make you unique!

Take a look at other great examples below. Click on each image to see their full page, and remember to leave a compliment when you do! Be sure to also check out Helsinki based photographer Anna Jarske featured in the blog post’s header image.

Don’t see your page here? Give it another try next week. We review them all, but it’s impossible to fit every great page in the blog post!

Make sure your about.me link is in the appropriate section of you twitter bio, and tweet the hashtag #FFaboutme for a chance to be selected next time.

Good luck, and feel free to share you page in the comments below!

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Blue Bottle Coffee Growth Round

We’re thrilled about today’s Blue Bottle Coffee news that they’ve raised a $25M growth round of capital. It’s an incredible step forward for founder James Freeman, Chairman Bryan Meehan, Blue Bottle’s amazing Baristas, team and investors. You can read James’ post here & Kara’s post here.

At True, we’ve been incredibly lucky to partner with amazing leaders, mainly in the tech world (Matt Mullenweg at WordPress, Chris Anderson at 3DR, Ayah Bdeir at Little Bits, Bre Pettis at MakerBot, James Park at FitBit, Philip Rosedale at High Fidelity, there are many many more…). What we’ve learned from these inspiring Founders is they do more than just create companies, these type of Founders, they start movements – it’s envisioning a way of life – it’s visionary, a vision of how the world will be in spite of how people do things now (remember when we carried around maps…) and it’s having a sense in your mind, knowing how people are going to use your product to impact their life is what makes it Visionary, and through that vision a movement is sometimes sparked.

When we met James – it was instantly clear that Blue Bottle Coffee isn’t just about coffee drinks, it’s about so much more.  What we saw and why we got involved, is that James and his team are part of a handful of people who are founding a movement around coffee. It’s not just the very specific experience around the coffee Blue Bottle roasts, it’s everything they do from the the way they source the product, supporting farmers in developing regions of the world to grow the purest, highest quality organic beans that promote sustainability, the way they choose store locations that often acts as a vote of confidence for a developing neighborhood, how they serve the product [what cup, what glass, what temperature, single origin beans versus blended bean mixes, espresso drinks only on premise….] – thinking through every detail to offer something beautiful in our daily lives – it’s a philosophy/ an approach that has led to a movement around the integrity of experience around coffee.

It fits into a larger movement we’re all experiencing right now around a greater integrity in the experiences that we already have in our daily lives – we’re not just satisfied to have a meal, we want that meal to have greater integrity and be more aligned with our values, to know where the food is coming from, we want it to have a certain type of quality – this is happening in all aspects of life, we don’t just want to work for a living, we want to make a difference.

Our original investment in James, Blue Bottle and their team was a fairly straight-forward, easy decision given the company’s rapid growth, loyal following, founder vision, management team and potential for broader appeal – we see tremendous opportunity to grow this business in a manner that adheres to the principles it was founded. We believe Blue Bottle Coffee is at the forefront of a “consumer movement” or mega-trend in which consumers are moving to higher quality, artisanal, micro-roasters of coffee, where quality, attention to detail, beauty, and a distinctive experience are being sought over more mainstream alternatives. In addition, we believe the Blue Bottle Coffee brand and products appeal to — and are accessible to — a large audience of coffee drinkers who are increasingly interested in expanding their appreciation for fine coffee.

Raising a cup of excellence to all involved!

Students of the Week

In this social age, students need to communicate their passions, personality and where they’re heading – I think that’s one of the main reasons we’ve seen such enthusiastic adoption of about.me by College Students amongst our broad community of users.

The about.me Blog

We are big fans of students here at about.me – and it’s clear students like us too. We’ve seen a major increase in students on the site in the past year. One reason for the increase is that there are simply more people than ever creating pages. But there’s also something specific driving student engagement.

Pages help students present themselves positively. While a resume may still be necessary to get a job or internship, it only focuses on what you’ve done. Using just a resume (or CV) students will always come off looking second-best compared to someone with more experience. But experience isn’t everything.

An about.me page allows students to showoff their passions, personality and where they’re heading, in addition to past experience. And the free business cards don’t hurt either.

The students here represent just a sliver of the academic community on about.me. Try searching for your college or…

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The Connections That Bind Us Together

Great post – we all use about.me to achieve a few core goals:

1. Present ourselves.
2. Discover new people.
3. Connect with people.

Our simplicity sets about.me apart. There are literally millions of us onl about.me from every country in the world. We swap compliments across continents. We learn about people living drastically different lives from ourselves and about people in the same situation living across the globe.

The about.me Blog

One essential part of building a strong community is helping new members settle in quickly. This process is something we talk about a lot here at about.me, and we are always working to improve the new user experience.

As our Community Manager, I’m especially proud of how quickly people can get into the groove of browsing, complimenting, and making new connections. Given the broad range of people on about.me, it’s amazing how quickly new community members get started interacting on the site.

Here, With Purpose.

The geographic, professional, and cultural diversity on about.me is amazing. But what is truly astounding is that we are all on about.me with a similar purpose.

There are many uses for about.me and infinite ways to interact with the platform and with other people. Yet we all use about.me to achieve a few core goals:

1. Present ourselves.
2. Discover new people.
3. Connect with people.

The simplicity sets…

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BAM. BOOM. AARGHH. F*&^. PHEW. SIGH. SMILE……….. Everyone’s Been There Before

At the end of yesterday, I connected with friends I hadn’t been in touch with for far too long.  I scheduled lunch with former CNET CEO Shelby Bonnie in a few weeks. My Twitter followers increased.  We added new about.me users.  Many of my friends logged in and sent me notes about how blown away they were with what we had built since buying back about.me.  Turns out I’ve got a lot of good friends who have our back.  I learned a lot about our team, marveled at their maturity and skill in the moment of crisis and fell in love with them all over again. But that’s not the way the day started……

It was a stunning, peaceful Saturday morning – the kind of morning when the heat is dry and the sound is very still (sorry to those of you who live in the brutally cold East Cost weather but this is San Francisco in late January).  After a morning run in the Presidio, I made myself some Blue Bottle Coffee in my Chemex, hit play on John Coltrane’s Giant Steps and settled in to play around with one of our newest features that enables about.me users to invite friends to join our service.

I clicked send.  Nothing happened.  So I clicked it one more time and it wasn’t clear anything happened. Hmm.  So I decided to send my team an email to see what was broken. When I opened my email, literally 2-3 minutes later, I had a crazy number of unread emails flowing in (like “I love you, man, but I’ve gotten ~30 of these so far….”). It’s just awesome to getting an email from someone you admire like Marc Andreessen letting you know you’ve sent them 20, oops, actually 24 emails in the past few minutes.

And then Twitter alerts started popping up on my screen (and each time I clicked, I had less followers than I had minutes before).  My phone rang.  It rang again.  And again. And then iMessage started popping up alerts (like “Please, like really please make it stop”).  And then I had that “aw f*&^” moment when I realized I’d jammed all my contacts with messages, more messages and even more messages.  I had triggered a weird bug because my email contact list is quite large and it would time-out, and then re-activate, creating a continuous loop.  It also somehow tied into my WordPress blog which was a separate issue (to be clear, not a WordPress issue but one on our end) that’s too complicated to explain.  NTL, I was on my way to sending 47,402 emails in a span of 4 minutes, an average of 23.6 emails per person. BAM. BOOM. AARGHH. F*&^.

 

I sent out an urgent note to our team.  My co-founder Ryan, calm as always, called and told me to 1) make my tweets private; 2) start deleting all the repetitive tweets; and 3) disconnect my WordPress blog from the automatic tweet feature.  On his end, he disconnected the feature we were testing.  I then spoke to Matt, Founder of WordPress, who calmly told me where to go to disconnect the automatic tweet feature.  Just in case you missed it, there’s a theme in there, they were calm, I wasn’t.

Afterward, it stopped.  Kinda.  I watched as my Twitter followers continue to melt away, I lost about 400 in a few hours.  I turned my attention back to email and oh my, so many messages, many from me :).  I wrote a simple acknowledgement and apology response, copied and started pasting it in reply after reply after reply.  Then I went back to Twitter, announced “It’s just a hunch but I think there are a lot of people who are going to delete me from their address book.”  Then I let everyone on Twitter know “oy, even my family deleted my account.”  And then, people on Twitter started interacting, retweeting and favoriting those tweets and voila, I started adding new followers. And people invited friends to join about.me and many of them logged in and updated their pages.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Meanwhile, the amazing about.me team started doing forensics around how many emails were sent to individual addresses in order to get a pattern to any duplicate sends.  We exchanged inputs in real time (exactly how did we do this before we had tools like Slack!?!) and figured out the root cause and, more importantly, how to make sure that didn’t happen again.

I read the hundreds of email replies to my apology and this is what was said more often than anything else “dude, don’t worry, everyone’s been there before.”  It reminded me how amazing our community can be in a moment of crisis. We are lucky.

And then we all went back to our beautiful, peaceful Saturday. BAM. BOOM. AARGHH. F*&^. PHEW. SIGH. SMILE.

Tips for Discovery

One of my favorite aspects of about.me is discovering people with whom I have things in common. I also love the serendipity of browsing profiles on our Discover button that displays featured and popular pages.

The about.me Blog

There is so much to gain from meeting new people. This should be obvious. But far too often we settle into a predictable rhythm at school or work and neglect the opportunity to learn about someone new. This post will outline a few simple ways to surface interesting people on about.me and make the most of our opportunities.

One benefit of modern connected life is interacting with people around the world. Because about.me is built to show off your who you are — your passions, profession and background — it’s a public, dynamic directory for millions of interesting people.

So how do you find the people who are most interesting to you?

A great place to start is by hitting the Discovery button in the top bar. From there, you can look through Popular to see trending pages, with new people joining every day. The Featured page showcases handpicked top pages…

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Future Forward

By now you’ve likely heard today’s announcement that Toni Schneider is stepping down as CEO and Matt Mullenweg is becoming CEO of Automattic. It’s an inspiring example of how one amazing person (Toni) passes the baton to another (Matt). Toni is taking on a product role within Automattic, it’s something he’s talked about for a few years. Matt, who founded Automattic in 2005, is stepping up to take on the role of CEO.  Together they’ve quietly done beautiful work, building Automattic into a billion dollar company in which over 20% of the worlds leading websites publish daily.

In events like this so many of us are searching for a newsworthy back story of what happened but in this case, it’s just a deeply talented entrepreneur/ CEO wanting to change their role and a Founder being ready to lead the company he started. It’s something that Toni and Matt have prepared for the past few years. It’s inspiring to see them proactively evolve their roles in a way that makes sense for them personally, for Automattic and for all of us that have been privileged to be a part of a magical partnership – just check out the above photo from the 2008 Crunchies when Automattic was named the Startup Most Likely to Succeed and Toni was named Best Startup CEO.

I first met Toni in Stinson Beach in the summer of 2003. He had just joined the uber hip team at Oddpost as their CEO and a few months later I led their first and only investment round. Oddpost was acquired shortly thereafter by Yahoo! but Toni and I kept exploring new ideas around self publishing that we could work on together. We eventually co-founded Sphere (acquired by AOL a few years later) and we simultaneously joined the founding team of True Ventures. He is an amazing friend, CEO and partner. Without Toni, I never would’ve had the courage to found Sphere but he made me believe I could do it and then we did. There is no one I trust and respect more in our community of entrepreneurs.

Around the same time, I met Matt via an email introduction from Om, he was 19 and living in Houston. He was the key person behind the open source community building WordPress. We had a number of phone calls and when he moved to SF in late 2004, we finally met in person. I was blown away by his intelligence, manner and vision for democratizing the world of publishing. My relationship with Matt is as meaningful as any in my life. In our 10 years of knowing each other, we’ve been each other’s partner, mentor and friend.

Little did I know how much meeting Matt & Toni would impact my life. Thank you fellas and congratulations on taking an important step into the future and for providing us all a powerful example of how to navigate change.

Here is a link to Toni’s post. Matt’s post is here. And Agent Zero’s (OM) post is here.

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,400 times in 2013. If it were a cable car, it would take about 57 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.