6 Burst results for "Razorfish"
The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"razorfish" Discussed on The Defiant - DeFi Podcast
"Neil Garvick is the Chief Marketing Officer at ConsenSys, which drives Ethereum ecosystem development. ConsenSys is behind the key pieces of Ethereum infrastructure, including MetaMask and Infura. In today's podcast, Neil discusses his transition from Web2 marketing at Spotify to Web3 marketing. He goes into why ConsenSys is rebranding and provides insights into the strategic vision for the company. But first, we begin our conversation with an introduction on why Neil decided to make the jump to crypto. I've been with ConsenSys now for about a year and a half, and it's been really exciting to make the jump from Web2 to Web3. I'm a career marketer myself, and I have been in software from the beginning. I started at a committee called Razorfish, which is
Techmeme Ride Home
"razorfish" Discussed on Techmeme Ride Home
"Like, don't do that. It's two divisive. And Joanne Wilson's like, don't do that. It's to do massive. And I just didn't take anybody's advice at that time for better or worse. Sometimes it was for better like this situation for worse when I didn't take the money or go national, that Joanne Wilson also whilst his wife was also like, we should be national. It was a big mistake. I wouldn't cover things outside of New York. I just wanted to be focused on New York, big mistake. I could have built a $100 million business standard. Long story short, I make the list. And I start putting Esther Dyson was number one, because I thought, well, she kind of inspired me to do this with release one. That'd be a nice hat tip. Nobody can argue with that. Putting a woman at the top, angel investor, smart person. It's a very savvy move for me. Then I think I put double click number two, double click had like 50 people now that raised the most money. When I met Kevin Ryan and Kevin O'Connor, they were a poppy Tyson, which is where double click was born. It was like a little, you know, they became like they're figuring out how to make banner ads run. They're actually a rep firm too. They would represent the ads being sold on other people's websites because people had websites, but no answers to them. So I started doing that list. And then I said, I had gotten a phone call one day from Rolling Stone. And I was getting the press we're calling me in there. I was this crazy kid. And my assistant Linda Miller had said, did you call back beyond from Rolling Stone? I said, no. You really should call him back. Next day, did you call him backyard from Rolling Stone? I said, no, I'm kind of busy. I don't have time for like a journalist for Rolling Stone. I don't want to do any press right now. I got my own magazine. She goes to Jason. John wenner. I said, who's John wenner? Jan is the creator of Rolling Stone. What? Yeah, I was like, oh, I love Rolling Stone. So I immediately call him, he said, can you come watch my marriage? I was like, sure. What time? He's like, 2 o'clock. I run up to his office at 2 o'clock same day. He's got this incredible office. He's got my magazine on his desk. And he asked me questions. Hey, do you want to be the president of Rolling Stone or what are you doing here? And I just started asking for advice. And he started marking up the magazine and he taught me how to do a cover. And I said, hey, how do I do a cover on a budget or whatever? And he's like, well, what's your budget? I'm like, I think we're spending like 3000 an issue. He goes, okay, spend 2000 of it on the cover. All that matters is having a great cover. And he called some people on the phone and gave me references to photographers to help me and one of them was a guy named Frank michelada, who wound up doing my covers. And we did these amazing covers that were very themed, so we did agency dot com guys as Men in Black. We did razorfish. We had Jeff Josh is holding up a fish in a knife. Very iconic things. Because again, back to my obsession with power. I was like, well, I can get these themed things. I could be like raiden Carter or Kurt Anderson. You know, I was just looking at grade and card or Kurt Anderson and Jan winner saying, I got to be like, those are Martha Stewart. Just have to be powerful. Just have to be powerful. We're going to get that cover going. And so we did that. And the list then became incredibly divisive. Right, because and then everybody return my phone call. I was going to say, because then if you only have 60, then the strategy should be the other 40 should be people you want to know. You throw them on the list to maybe. Anyway, we figured it out. Because then I was like, everybody come to my house to my loft at the start Lee building. I was living illegally in my loft. And I said, we're having a photo shoot at noon. Everybody come there. And I gave people like ten days notice. They all showed up. Yeah. And they said, if you don't show up with a photo, you may or may not be in the 100. This is in the year two or whatever. So everybody came together. We took the photo. It was like, wow, this is powerful. And it was great because then for the rest of the year, PR people would be lobbying me for their client's position. In fact, I had one girl had gone on a couple of dates with. And then she started bringing up the silicon I 100 and I realized, oh my God, this girl's not into me. She's working me. To get her clients on this list. Well, and towards the end, I think the last one like Peter Jennings, no, Sam Donaldson, who puts them Donaldson on because he was doing a lot of stuff in the Internet. And we started getting all this kind of celebrities. I mean, my life became very surreal. I was hanging out with like, I was really into public enemy. When I was a kid, and then I got to meet chutney, the guys from Led Zeppelin came to one of the silicon reporters, Sergey brins, people, like lobbied to have Google at one of the Silicon Valley events. So I was like, fine, we'll have Sergey I did a fireside chat with him. Accounting crows, just like all these famous people. Everybody wanted to be involved in the Internet, so they would come by our shows, and hang out. I became friends with a guy named Jeffrey Epstein, who's a very notable, for horrible reasons now, but like he would hang out at our events with gillan, Maxwell, it was like the center of the world, right? I never met Donald, but it was truly the center of the world. We've been talking about how Miro lets you work closely with your team, but let me come at this from a different angle. What about the client, the customer, the end user? What if you could involve all stakeholders in the design process in
Techmeme Ride Home
"razorfish" Discussed on Techmeme Ride Home
"It and putting a newsletter like release one, Esther Dyson, which was sort of my part of my inspiration, paper magazine, at least one Hollywood reporter, maybe because you're a trade, you want to be a little bit. I mean, certainly the reporter came from that, or I was thinking of that. And I said, I think if I put a full image on the cover, it will change it from a newsletter to the magazine. And so I started to switch the cover to have a full image on it. And I started going around telling people this is a magazine. And people would look at me and I look at it now and I realized at the time I was so delusional and clueless, I thought people were fascinated. But now I think they were Paul and or perplexed at this or felt sorry for you. Felt sorry for like this 24 year old kids running around with a little photocopy saying it's a magazine. Because we should say the way that you distribute this first issue is you go around by yourself go into lobbies and say, can I put this in the lobby? Yeah, so I went and I dropped it off at flatiron partners at razorfish at sonic net at pseudo. And I was known for walking around Manhattan with a luggage cart with two or 300 copies of it, literally handing it to people. The other trick I had for distribution was a pretty good growth act at the time was I had gone to Eureka Joe's, which was a cafe on 5th and 22nd. Hey, I remember it's like, this is a little bit pre Starbucks kind of taken over the city. There were a lot of small newsroom cafe. Eureka, there was always a cafe culture in New York. So I would put ten copies in there. I put 20 copies and you read the Joe's, I leave, and I look around and I look back to see if anybody reads it, and I see the guy come out from the take the 20 issues and throw it in the garbage. Which tweaked me, obviously. So I go back and I take the 20 out of the garbage. The guy looks at me, and I'm just like, it's just my magazine. I'm trying. It's like, I can't let you do it. I'll do it. I understand. I went back the next day. He wasn't there the manager. I took the 20 issues. It's a stack and village choices in there. And other magazines. I put it inside every village. Every other magazine that gets an insert. And the first issue we didn't have newspaper distribution. So I had my designer just scanned like home and garden or Vanity Fair's barcode. And put it on ours, because I didn't know how barcodes and magazine work, but I knew I needed to have a barcode so people could pay for it. So we copied somebody else's barcode, and then we would go into the magazine stores when nobody was looking and put them on the magazine shelves next to George magazine or spy. Whatever. We didn't want to get money. We just wanted people to read it. Because you got to remember there was a Zine movement at this time where 2600 and a bunch of zines from across the country were all on a little shelf at tower records tower records was the store where they sold CDC albums. But there was a little section where you can get 2600 other things. So there's a Zine culture where if you want to hit your words app before the web, you just would print up a photocopy and give it to people. I got lucky. I stumbled into the career that I love, but accidentally, I wanted to be a film director and instead I became a startup founder. If you're a software engineer and you're looking to make an impact, maybe you should do what I did and consider looking beyond the obvious path. Bloomberg is building the world's most trusted information network for financial professionals and they're looking for engineers to join them. I've never worked at Bloomberg personally, but there's no business or financial news source I trust more for this show. But also think
Techmeme Ride Home
"razorfish" Discussed on Techmeme Ride Home
"The web takes off. Sure. There's a lot of technical artistic people in New York because of the CD rom bubble is that. Yeah, so what happened was in the 80s, there were modems. And you could dial up to a bulletin board. So my first computer in 1983 was a PC junior, and I would dial up on a 300 baud modem eventually a 1200. It was a ventilation. And there were these BBS set up. A lot of them were rich kids in Manhattan. They're parents would get them an extra phone line. Some parents would get them three extra phone lines. And they'd run a bulletin board system was a fancy computer, a big PC XT AT, eventually bigger computers. And it would put one phone line in, and you would dial up, you'd post a message as you download some stolen software, then I would dial up. I would have my war dialer on waiting for you to hang up so I could be the next person to get busy. We talked about that on Joel's episode, right? Correct. And so then what happened was I became like a cis admin or a junior sis op on somebody else's. I had never met. Eventually I wound up meeting them. It was just a weird kid from Greenwich Village. But that was that was bubbling around in New York. The 2600 guys were hanging out in the city group lobby, doing what's called phone freaking. I got a little involved with phone freaking. I was involved with a lot of what I'll call questionable activities around technology in my earlier days. So my first business most people think it was silicon. I reported, it was actually Jason's hot tapes. My dad had won a copy of The Empire Strikes Back off of a mafiosa guy, guy and I'm like three grand playing. Back in and the guy said, I got a copy of The Empire Strikes Back for VHS. This is before the word VHS rental stores. But my dad had a VHS machine. And the guy who owned a money said, listen, take this Empire Strikes Back to it. I took it. And then I started charging kids to come up with my house and watch The Empire Strikes Back. It was out of theaters. There's no way to watch it. And then I started making copies of it. And it starts on copies for 20 bucks. I was like, my first one of my first businesses, but the other business was had a friend, Richard and Alfa tano, whose brother was into some other things. And then he had a friend, and it was all this craziness. But anyway, we used to copy and we'd hack copies of chess master. And we'd make copies of chess master, or other games, and there was instructions on these BBS's of how to hack it, just go in, you change some hacks. You have to crimp the floppy disk to open it because they would be sealed. Copy protected with a little, you could write over them. So we would do that and we'd sell them for ten bucks. So we basically, and we'd still floppy disks from stores. I mean, we're doing bad stuff. We're bad kids. But at that time, also CD roms had come out and computers started to have a CD player in them. And when that happened, you could put data on it and things like a company called Voyager was doing a hard day's night, and there were dial up services like prodigy and AOL, that were getting more and more sophisticated. And you didn't have to worry about busy signals that computers started to come with modems in them. They didn't have Internet cards yet. And in the early 90s, people like Jamie levy were running around and NYU had this ITP program, the interactive telecommunications program. And she had been making IPK is this is before the Internet and web pages IPK were interactive press kits. They were floppy disks that you put in your computer and you would see a little bit of video, a little bit of text, a little bit of words. So this idea that you could mix and have multimedia was going to be the future, and then you had dial up services. So everybody was kind of swarming around these things. And in fact, the first magazine I did was called cyber surfer lasted for 5 episodes where issues. For identify with the publisher star log over the trademark as I trademarked the name cyber surfer. That was my online handle in the 90s. And when I'm sourcing from, the title lose me right now, but there's this great oral history of the silicon LA times that you're anywhere a part of. And so the sense that I got from it was is that so everyone's around for this early nascent online stuff and the CD rom stuff. And then when the web comes everyone feels like, oh, we can do it. We can go off on our own and do this. Yeah, there was a dial up business that was prodigy and Josh Harris was doing chat rooms on prodigy while he would rent an hour on W EVD 50 or something in New York. It was like a local channel right by Esther place. He would rent midnight to 2 a.m.. It was a very innovative Josh Harris from later from sudo. He would get paid by the prodigy people to keep people in chat room because they were paying $3 per hour to be online. There was no flat rate yet. And then he would have people calling into his regular radio station. So he said, if you're, if you're on prodigy, turn on your radio in New York, if you're not on prodigy, call this number, get a disk, use this code. He would get paid a bounty for that. So it's very clever to mix audio and chat rooms. But that was happening. So yes, you had people who were in the online camp dial up services AOL, and then over here you had CD roms, Voyager, Jamie levy. People started to miss was a big hit and those packaged software. So really technology at that time was about going to stores and experiencing it and buying packaged software. So you go to a store you buy something. But when the Internet came out and we started to have web browsers, I was at Sony and I was working there and they didn't know what to make of the Internet. So they made a Sony website. With the Sony logo. And they brought me to some meetings and they said, hey, this person put up all the Billy Joel album covers. And they put the track listings. And we got to figure out what to do about this. And they went around the table and one person was like, well, we could sue them, or those persons were like, well, we can do this, and the president did this. And then I said, why don't we hire them? And everybody around the table got totally signed all the lawyers or whatever. And then all of a sudden they just like, ah, forget this kid. You know, and then of course years later, they started to embrace it. So yeah, you know, razorfish started doing little experiments online, the blue dot. And it bounced a blue dot around. That was notable because nobody had figured out how to make animation yet. And you got to remember the web browsers at the time, they didn't have background colors. It was one font. You could make text flash or do other stupid stuff. But it was very nascent. And then people started to build companies around that. Right. So let's set that also because it's New York because Madison avenues there. A lot of the early at least in Silicon Valley companies are essentially advertising, become advertising or creative companies like that. We had media companies, magazines, you had news organizations, newspapers. You had Madison Avenue at Wall Street. So those were the sort of primordial thing that you also had art. And the downtown art scene was very, very, you know, it was amazing at the time. And people forget this, but my first real job as a writer was writing for paper magazine. Paper magazine was very avant garde.
Revision Path
"razorfish" Discussed on Revision Path
"Environment. Now, where do you think your life would have gone if you hadn't started working in the creative field? For me, it goes back to that point around exposure because I've always had kind of an interest in creativity and design, had I been exposed earlier to architecture as a field. I think candidly, I might have actually gone into that as a career. But growing up, you just didn't have that level of exposure to the wide range of fields that are available that tap on the creative side of the brain. I remember when I was at razorfish and we started to look at some of the other parts of the business and the media side of the business and you walk into these media agencies and you would see kind of a sea of white faces and in many cases the sea of white female phases and some of it it kind of was a result of people being exposed to things and recognizing that these are places that actually existed that you could have careers. And I think for a lot of African Americans and people of color, they don't necessarily have exposure to some of these different fields and areas of possible careers and as a result, we don't necessarily get a chance to develop as big of a body of leaders and representatives in those in those companies and in those industries. What do you want your legacy to be? For me, you know, I think it actually goes back to this question of purpose. And when I was at BCG, I was in a part of BCG called bright House. And we spent a lot of time with organizations talking about purpose. And I think, you know, when you first come out of school, a lot of your focus is on, what do I need to do to show that I can be successful and how can I achieve and show my achievements? And I think now where I am in my life, it's actually less about do things to prove what I can do versus actually, what can I do to actually help drive and leave a legacy behind? So when I was at bright House, we talked a lot about personal purpose. We went through some exercises and I ended up with my personal purpose being to live in to lead with optimism..
Revision Path
"razorfish" Discussed on Revision Path
"A lot of entertainment value. I know that there were brands that were starting to kind of figure it out because then also you've got technology like shockwave and real player that we're starting to bring media into this space. It's funny. When I do presentations, I have the slide and it shows, I think it's like a Pepsi world from 1999. And it shows the full matrix the experience, but then it has something on the bottom that's like to take the slow lane if you have less than a 56.6 modem or something like that. Take the slow lane and people were like, what does that mean? Because everything now is like the fast lane we broadband and stuff, but the Internet was just such an interesting place and companies were really trying to figure out how can I be a part of it in some sort of way? Oh, for sure. And I think that's where you started to see this, the birth of different kind of digital companies. A lot of them were really driven by who was actually footing the bill because you'd have kind of the very technical consultancies that we engage with the CIO or the CTO. And then you'd have like the advertising, the traditional advertising agencies that might be engaging with the CMO and as a result, you know, you started to see your usual suspects start to move into digital advertising and experience of the very minimal level. And then you also had kind of the C suite, you know, the CEO and the chief strategy officer who might be engaging with a consultancy like McKinsey or a BCG or a vein, and then starting to come into digital trying to determine, okay, with strategically, where's the value that digital can bring? And I think that's where you started to see this morphing of companies into kind of this patchwork of different types of digital entities that were all trying to figure out what's the right way to come at digital at that time. It was a really, really dynamic time to be watching it all kind of emerging unfold. Yeah, 'cause things just changed so quickly. And so your point, like you said, there were a lot of people really just trying to figure it out. This is something completely new. In a very nascent field, nobody is quote unquote an expert on it yet. Everyone's just trying to figure it out. Absolutely. So you've had such a storied career here in Atlanta. I'm not gonna go through all of the experiences, but I will list them out so people can get a sense of like, I'm gonna unfurl the scrolls so people can see what your pedigree is. So no, no, no, no. You've mentioned IBM. We talked about ixl, but you were at interland. You were at UPS, razorfish, sapien nitro, her styles, and then of course earlier we mentioned AK QA and bright House, when you look back.