We Live in Public

I was excited to be asked to speak at the 99U conference which took place a few weeks ago.  It is really an amazing conference.  Here is recap of what I spoke about including talking points from four other of my fellow speakers.  We all spoke under the Entrepreneurship leg of the conference.

The night before the event there was a dinner for the speakers.  It was nice to meet some new people and connect with some old friends from the industry too.   Our conversations ran the gamut but at one point I asked if anyone had seen We Live In Public.  Nobody except for one person had even heard of the film or for that matter Josh Harris.

Josh Harris was the entrepreneur behind Jupiter Media and Pseudo.  Pseudo was ahead of the curve being a live stream web video company that is standard stuff today.  Josh was always a man ahead of his time.  The company was more of an art project than it was a place where anyone was thinking about how to connect to mainstream America and make money doing it.  I talked to Josh about this when he tried to hire me to come in and be part of the company and head up revenues.  I was the only one who saw the future like that.  Josh was thinking a whole other direction which I appreciated but thought that bringing in real advertisers would have been like swimming up stream.

Then when the dot-com world went belly up in the late 90’s Pseudo closed its doors.  Josh had this idea that we would all eventually live in public (and we do now) and he would do something to start the movement.  He took over an under the ground bunker where people would live, drink, shoot guns, get stoned, have sex, go to the bathroom, eat meals, sleep and you name it while being filmed 24/7.  It lasted a month before the cops broke it up.

Fast forward there is a documentary that came out a few years ago on Josh and the subject.  We went to the premier at the MOMA.  It really brought us back.  For all you newbies in the second go around of the tech world, this is a movie worth watching.  Josh is a brilliant man….almost teetering on insanity as most genius entrepreneurs are.