How do you face down cancer? Get told you can’t get life-saving organ transplants, and go about getting them anyway? And in the middle of that mental and physical storm, how do you find the thing that you and only you were meant to do -- and start building it? One person with answers is Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, because that is what he had to do -- all of it. It’s given Gilliam a clear philosophy on life, and on being a leader. And what he’s learned along the way, he says, is something everyone can tap into. Gilliam first told his story in a break-the-Internet video, “The Internet is My Religion,” he’s gone deeper with his recently published book of the same title. a16z's Ben Horowitz sat down with Gilliam on the occasion of his book launch, to hear more about his philosophy on life, religion, leadership and what we all can do to move this world forward.
Clearly disruption plays out not just in business but also in politics. Whether it was the Scottish national party, recent election campaigns, or local school boards, people grew and organized communities online all last year through NationBuilder -- which provided a software platform for those otherwise underserved from an established technology perspective (hence the disruption theory reference). Harnessing the energy of communities goes beyond politics though, to all kinds of movements. But what happens when people remain in filter bubbles on the internet -- the very internet that NationBuilder CEO Jim Gilliam famously called his "religion"? What happens when that religious fervor or energy can be... "rabid"-like? Especially in a context where money, media, and other traditional institutions might not have the same impact or control they once did? "The internet can reflect back whatever it is that we want it to -- and we need more leaders to step up and say, 'Look, this is the way that I want it to be'," argues Gilliam in this episode of the a16z Podcast in conversation with Ben Horowitz (based on a session recorded at our recent a16z Summit event). Movements, it seems, are really about leadership, and the future is not written yet as people create new models of voice and choice.
For Jim Gilliam, the founder of NationBuilder, community is everything. When he needed a double lung transplant, Gilliam turned to the Internet and to his online community to make it happen. He's organized political campaigns, made documentary films, and built his company NationBuilder by tapping into the power that large scale communities on the internet provide. Community at internet scale is a deep reservoir of people, ideas and yes, money, that Gilliam believes changes how we do almost everything - and makes almost anything possible.