uberlife at SxSW
Last week the uberlife team hit the road to Austin to officially launch our Iphone app Stateside and help connect people during SxSW festival. To say the least, It’s been a hectic few months in the run up and we were all really excited to get over there shout about uberlife, and check out some of the other apps being launched.
After a particularly wet and windy start (we most definitely took the London weather out there with us), it was looking like uberlife cagoules might of been the way forward and we mentally prepared ourselves for a week of pounding the rain soaked pavements.
But alas, just as the trench foot was setting in on SxSW Saturday the clouds parted then sun came out and the conference go’ers went mad for our uberlife slushies’ to take the edge off the heat. Spirits rose and the team were out in force on the streets of Austin handing out free swag, educating the masses on uberlife and breaking through the South-by-noise.
Our popup hangout spot was one of the highlights as we set up camp on the corner of 6th and offered attendees a chance to relax in the shade, enjoy some tunes and take the weight off – Amongst those hanging out with us were the guys from Digital Lab who stopped by to chat to Sanchita, you can catch the video here
The uberlife party bus was THE only place to start your nights out in Texas. Once all the speakers were done and you’d packed the laptop away. The big branded uber bus was on hand to coax (I use the word lightly) you on board to hang out and party. The bus was literally bouncing between 7 –11 and the queues down 6th of revellers wanting to get on board ensured it was one of the hottest tickets in town.
We had so much fun hanging out with all of the SxSW attendees and meeting so many great guys at the hangouts we arranged. A special shout out to the Tech Zulu guys who we did a great interview with and to the Violet Lights who absolutely rocked our Band and Fans hangout, which was one of the favourites at HQ. A chilled out afternoon listening to great music over a few beers in Rainy Street – Bliss.
Conferece attendees, festival go-ers and locals alike were all so friendly and interested to hear what uberlife is all about. We were delighted with the number of people downloading the app and creating their own SxSW hangouts, including Journalists, bands and some of the industries biggest influencers.
We spent the whole week talking to as many people as we could and it seems our efforts weren’t in vain as we had some great articles, tweets and emails from fans of uberlife. We’ve picked just a few of our favourite quotes below:
“Services like Uberlife could potentially be invaluable in helping to filter out the noise and connect with the right people.“ Street Fight Magazine
“Hottest new apps out of SxSW ” Cnet
uberlife will be officially launching at SXSW and “while social apps today are for sharing moments of our lives with our network, uberlife is about making those moments happen.” The Tech Scoop
”Now I think I may have found potentially my Nirvana: uberlife” TechCrunch
“makes hanging out with likeminded people easier, faster and more fun” Mashable
“Other apps, like Uberlife, which helps organize pop-up hangouts are also crucial for keeping up with the tide of events at SxSW” The New York Times
“Highlight, Glancee, uberlife & Sonar apps are the ’Highlight’ of SXSW Interactive” Today Show
So now we’re back in (surprisingly sunny) London and we’re feeling hyped about the people we’ve got on board and the future of uberlife. Thanks to everyone we met out there you made it an unforgettable experience and we hope to be along to one of your hangouts soon (all the better if it’s in Austin!)
uberlife Real Champions Series: Hanging out with David Pakman
This week uberlife are talking to the digital media entrepreneur David Pakman. David co-founded the Apple Music Group in 1995, worked at N2K (one of the first online music companies), co-founded MyPlay (pioneer of digital music locker), and was COO/CEO of eMusic for five years. Currently He’s a Partner at Venrock in NYC, investing in early stage internet and digital media companies
Sanchita Saha (SS): So David Thanks very much for taking the time out to talk to us today. So, you have had a varied career. You’ve been an entrepreneur, you’ve joined companies as CEO, you’re obviously now a VC. When you first started out what was it that first inspired you and motivated you into tech specifically?
David Pakman (DP): It was really Apple, the Macintosh which was this emerging incredible computer platform when I was younger and it was so different than every other electronics product and certainly very different than every other computer and I had an artistic passion around music and it was very conducive to creative types so I just fell in love with the product and then wanted to work for the company.
So I found my way to Apple and one thing led to another. I was a computer science engineer so I knew I was going to do something in technology but I think being at Apple gave me an appreciation for 2 things that have been kind of themes of my career - one is great, great products can do great things, and it is hard to build great products so you can get a great advantage if you are at a company that builds great products that are easy to use and 2) great products can really disrupt very large markets where there are incumbents that move slowly or are sleepy or aren’t as focussed on their customers.
And that led me through a career of doing a lot of things in technology that were focussed on those 2 things - making great products that are easy to use and ones that disrupted the incumbents so I have to thank mostly Apple for it and that’s what launched me into my whole career.
SS: If you think about your journey, can you name a person or people that you’ve hung out with along the way that inspired you in your career or professional life?
DP: I think so many - one of the best things about life is having a lot of mentors whether they are people you know well or not and I’ve had countless mentors.
When I first started at Apple I was just out of college and I didn’t appreciate at the time how brilliant the people around me were. I guess I knew they were brilliant, but I guess I thought maybe every company had great, smart people around and it wasn’t until I left Apple and started to work at a few other companies that I realised how special a place that was.
The company had such a high bar for hiring and brought in superstars in every vertical whether it was programming or package design or industrial design or human interface or even architecture - you know they just had the best people so I was lucky enough to be in a cohort of people in Apple that went on to do really good things, founding great companies and being brilliant employers at Ebay, Netscape, Web TV and Google and you know all the companies that have come after it. I am fortunate to meet a lot of those folks who started companies and inspired me and many went on to be VCs and that also sort of helped lay a path for me.
SS: What was it that made you decide to cross the bridge to become a VC from being an entrepreneur?
One of the blessings and curses of being an entrepreneur is you’re sort of singularly focussed on one problem. Solving one problem. Hopefully it’s a big problem and you have a lot of different shots at it. But you really have to be maniacally focussed on one effort and that’s really fun but it’s all consuming.
I did that 2 or 3 times. After having done that a few times, just about 3 or 4 years ago I started thinking about becoming a VC. There is so much innovation happening across so many sectors many of which I didn’t know all that much about. I didn’t know nearly enough about advertising technology, I didn’t know enough about what was happening with mobile ,I didn’t know enough about social, I didn’t appreciate how quickly the web was becoming a real time communication medium.
There was so much other stuff out there that I really wanted to learn besides digital music and digital media and being a VC gives you an opportunity to really do that. If you are intellectually curious, it’s the greatest job on earth because I have gotten much wiser about all those verticals so I think being able to be more involved in where the innovation is happening across many sectors is the thing that drew me the most to it.
SS: We spend so much of our time on online social networks, where do you see the value in taking the time to engage offline whether that’s with your followers, whether that’s with your peers, with your friends?
DP: Sometimes when we talk about this topic we can sound like fuddy-duddies sort of saying these physical offline relationships are more important than our loose connections online. But I do feel that way so I am a very social person, I like to spend a lot of time face to face with people.
Entrepreneurship is very much a face to face mechanism. To accomplish great things you need teams that are incredibly aligned so I am a big advocate for a lot of face to face interaction.
We do a lot of events in New York with the tech community. We host round tables where we bring 20 of the most thoughtful and accomplished CEOs about any particular topic. We bring them together for several hours in a room physically. They come from all over the world. We host the innovators’ date nights series which are just a way to get a bunch of young innovators together and face to face so we are not sitting at our computers. So I’m a believer in your mission, I think it’s crucial.
SS: And David, if you could hang out anywhere in the world where would you be hanging out and what would you be doing?
DP: I think if I could do anything all day long it would be making music. I certainly enjoy that the most but I would still be starved for staying close to the advances of technology.
I am really inspired with the pace of technological change and the invention that goes along with it. One of my partners, we were recently asking each other at dinner why do you do what you do and his answer was the best answer I’ve ever heard.
His motivation for being a VC is that he really, really likes to help people to accomplish things that everyone else says cannot be done. That really is the mark of a great entrepreneurship is doing something that people are convinced is an impossible problem to solve and of course unless someone tries to solve it, it won’t ever get solved right so that inspired me to really think more about why it is that I love VC so much.
It’s not just being around great entrepreneurs but I do a rush out of seeing their accomplishments have a great impact on lots of people or make things more efficient. I don’t know if you find yourself having these conversations in your head but from time to time I’ll see something in the room and ask myself why is that that way, it just doesn’t make any sense to be that way.
I’ll give you two examples that happened to me this week. One was I was on the treadmill and CNBC was on and you know they broadcast from the floor of the NY stock exchange and I just thought its 2012 and there are men running around the floor of the NYSE in funny looking coloured coats making hand gestures at each other. It just doesn’t make any sense any more. Why are we doing it that way? Probably because somebody, I dont know…
SS: Tradition?
DP: Right sure. The other was I was parking in San Francisco yesterday and parking my car at a meter in the street and the parking regulations signs in San Francisco are abominable - there are 4 different signs you have to look at plus the colour of the curb. But the parking meter knows what time it is and what day it is and it should just be green or red - can I park here or not, I don’t know what all these signs are. It’s Tuesday from 10-12 there’s street cleaning and like really? It’s San Francisco. It’s the most technological advanced city…, that happens a couple of times a week and I just say that problem needs to be solved. And what’s nice about entrepreneurship you don’t just sit back and say why, you say oh ok I think I’ll go try to solve it.
SS: Sounds like you still have a couple of businesses left to …
DP: I’d sure love to fund people solving those problems!
SS: For people starting out, tech entrepreneurs what advice would you give them?
DP: I think building successful companies is very hard, the numbers speak for themselves but the press tends to glamourize the successes and doesn’t really talk much about the failures and there is a really low rate of success here in this space.
You have to be prepared for making a lot of mistakes and failing and getting back up on the horse and trying again and again and again and I don’t know that our culture or the tech community is spreading the word enough that when you try you probably won’t be successful.
It shouldn’t be a reason to discourage you it should be built into the process of succeeding so I would remind people that coming into the tech industry if your first or second idea or first or second company you join is not successful, don’t turn and run away and that’s part of the process, it’s part of getting good and being successful.
I would also say trying to be part of companies that are succeeding is the best way to learn because then you get around a group of people that seem to be making the right decisions - sometimes there is some dumb luck involved!
If you are with a team that is faced with making a bunch of decisions and keep making the right ones that’s a great way to learn about decision process - about how to hire and build good teams and how to structure internal groups to make the right decisions and be incentivised to do great things so probably similar adage our parents told us a while ago - be around smart people who are being successful and you will learn from them.
uberlife Real Champions Series: Hanging out with Alex Ljung
uberlife’s Real Champions Series has seen us hanging out with inspirational individuals who have worked hard, smart and with passion to achieve great things to inspire and motivate those starting out.
This time we talk with Alexander Ljung, the CEO and founder of SoundCloud, the audio platform that enables anyone, anywhere to create and share their sounds on the web. Prior to SoundCloud, Alexander worked in sound design for feature films, co-authored a book on online sociology and co-founded a consultancy network. Alex was born in the UK, grew up in Sweden and the Middle East and now splits his time between Berlin, Germany and San Francisco, US.
Sanchita Saha (SS): Who, in the last 12 month, is the most inspiring person or people you have hung out with and how did they inspire you?
Alex Ljung (AL): My co-founder Eric. We started Soundcloud together and before that we were working on a lot of projects as well and we work very closely we are super good friends and we work together all the time. We inspire each other a lot. Whenever I say something silly he is my toughest challenger and he’s also sort of the biggest inspiration as well when I am dry on ideas
SS: If you could choose anywhere in the world to hang out where would it be and what would you be doing?
AL: That’s easy - Berlin. Berlin is the best place in the world. I’m been lucky enough to travel quite a lot and I’ve been to a lot of great cities in the world they’ve got a lot of great places but Berlin is just phenomenal - there is nothing like it at the moment. There is so much art and creativity and there is such an edge to everything that is going on. We kind of joke about it - the underground is mainstream in Berlin. There is no general mainstream. Everybody is doing things their own way and being very innovative and not just following the stream. So Berlin is really like my number one place in the world.
The last 12 months have been pretty meteoric really for you guys. If you could pin one moment down can you name what your highest has been in the last 12 months?
AL: That’s hard there has been so many great things over the last year. The team has just been on fire. Our users have been awesome because they are starting to use Soundcloud in so many new ways. We have done a bunch of integrations.
SS: Any fist punching in the air moments?
AL: One of the KPIs that we track is the number of high 5s per day at the office that we track on a chart and that one is growing so that’s a good thing. The single moment, that’s really tough - I think it’s a little bit from last year but more reconfirmed this year - we always hoped that Soundcloud would be a platform for all types of sound. We believe that everybody is potentially the creator of sound whether it is music or a voice diary or a parent recording their kid’s first words, Russell Brand reporting from his new book. I think we’ve really been able to see that very prominently this year with a lot of people who are using Soundcloud in a really broad range of ways. I think even if it wasn’t a specific moment just having the realisation that that’s actually happening, that sound is becoming a key part of the web and we were part of making that happen, that feels good.
SS: On the converse, it’s challenging for any start up whatever the stage but the bigger you get, the bigger the challenges become. What moment in the last 12 months would you say has been the worst or the hardest and how did you recover from it?
You can have specific moments where you are having for example an infrastructure challenge and it’s very intense or you have a moment before launch and something goes wrong but I think those are sort of bearable. I think the toughest thing is when the team grows, expands, and as a founder and CEO you spend a lot more time really working with your team and making sure the whole organisation works and whenever there’s some person who has a problem around something like that those are the moments that are the toughest. But the whole team has been amazing this year. We have grown from about 30 people to almost 80 people now and everybody is being super responsible and made sure that we have managed to grow so we can build way more stuff but we still have the same kind of vibe we had when we were like 5 or 10 people.
SS: It’s amazing that you have been able to keep that with that kind of growth
AL: Yes it’s because everyone on the team is committed to keeping that spirit as well so it is an effort that everyone has to be a part of
SS: Offline networking versus online networking in a boxing ring - Who wins?
AL: I don’t think there is a winner. I think they are different and some people ask us what’s best - photos or videos or sound. It’s the wrong question in a way - they are different things and they are good for different things. I think online is never going to replace off line completely and offline obviously we wont revert back to only being offline and they are both very powerful by themselves
SS: Let me rephrase - where do you think the value of offline networking over online networking and vice versa.
AL: It’s a huge community and engagement driver. Absolutely massive. If you have a social website which is about community and people interacting with each other, if you can bring that offline and have people meet each other in real life and re-establish that bond (I think there are a lot of companies who are saying we are doing local meet ups) I think you can get a tremendous increased passion, for users, for each other, for the community, for the product so I think there is a tremendous big area.
SS: Thanks very much Alex for your time.
uberlife Real Champions series: Hanging out with Susan Orlean
Susan Orlean became a staff writer for The New Yorker in 1992. She has also written for Vogue, Rolling Stone and Esquire. Orlean has also written several books, including “The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup: My Encounters with Extraordinary People,” (2001), “Red Sox and Blue Fish,” (1987), “Saturday Night,” (1990) and “The Orchid Thief” (1998).
SS: So Susan you’ve had a very successful career, written for various publications including the New Yorker and books, and all sorts of stuff. If you think back to when you were first starting out, or were first inspired to write and follow the path of journalism, what was it that inspired or motivated you to start up on that journey?
SO: What inspired me initially?
SS: Yes
SO: What inspired me initially was reading. The experience of reading convinced me that words could be magical and that the experience of reading could be transformative. That has never really left me. I think that some kids want to learn how to do magic tricks, for me I think learning to be a writer was that same kind of impulse, wanting to do this thing that seemed like you could make magic happen. I always loved telling stories and I loved organising my experience of life into stories. It came very naturally to me from the time I was really a very little kid.
SS: When was your first writing role or position, whether that’s professionally or volunteering and how did you start out writing?
SO: My first professional writing experience was when I had just finished college and had moved out West. I lucked into a job at a small magazine that had just started up. Unlike most first jobs which usually involve being an assistant and making coffee and really not writing, this was actually a writing job. It was pure luck that I got it. I attribute it to nothing but incredible good fortune and enthusiasm because I wanted the job really badly, and I think that was pretty clear. I worked there for a year, which was about the amount of funding that the publication had, and then I got another writing job. I didn’t really know what or how I was doing it but I just learned by doing. I was lucky that I had opportunities to learn and make my mistakes in a professional setting with good editors around who were teaching me.
SS: Along your journey can you think of any person or people you’ve hung out with along the way that inspired you and what did you learn from them?
SO: I’ve always been really lucky to have been around a lot of writers senior to me, who were very generous, very willing to help young writers getting started. In some cases it was very specifically talking about writing, in others it was giving me an opportunity or entree to editors and magazines. I’ve got a long list of people who have been incredibly generous to me. That’s how the world works in the creative fields, because you don’t go and get certified as a writer: you make it happen by doing it. That comes about through people mentoring you and giving you a hand and help pulling you up the ladder.
SS: You’ve had a fairly prolific career, in the last 12 - 24 months can you think of a time when you had your highest moment professionally and conversely when you had one of your lowest moments professionally, and then how you picked yourself up and motivated yourself to continue?
SO: Probably the high point was having my new book reviewed and featured on the cover of the New York Times book review, Sunday section, which is a once in the lifetime experience for a writer. And it was immensely exciting, gratifying and hard to express how thrilling it was. Conversely there are always low points. The last 12 months I have a new book so it’s been a real high. But anytime you get a bad review, and no matter how well reviewed a book is there are always going to be bad reviews, and I got one for my book, in the first batch of early write ups….
SS: How do you get over it? How do you handle it?
SO: You have to first of all contextualise it and figure that this is one review out of many. You’ll get 30 or 40 reviews of a book and even the most prominent one isn’t the only one and this wasn’t especially prominent. I just reminded myself that I’ve gotten a ton of great reviews and that everybody gets bad reviews and not everyone needs to like my book. So I can’t feel bad about it personally; I have to think about it objectively and consider whether it is really meaningful or not. The bottom line always is that I am proud of my book, really proud.
The criticisms, I thought, were very foolish. If someone criticises you and it feels correct that hurts because then you sort of see your failure. In the case where you feel the criticism isn’t really legitimate you just have to brush it off and say ‘Hey, it’s opinion’. There are certain people who are not going to like my work and it doesn’t matter what I do: they are not going to like it. Then there are lots of people who really like it. That’s the nature of being a writer, that’s the nature of being a human. Not everybody likes you. If you feel good about your work then after a bad review you will feel a little stung and a little hurt, but you have to step back and just think ‘I’m proud of my book’. So that’s what matters, to feel proud of the job you’ve done and then move on. I try not to dwell or read negative reviews very closely because there’s no benefit in it.
SS: What advice would you give to young people starting out in journalism or people who have got a dream to write a book?
SO: My first piece of advice is to really fall in love with the idea of being a storyteller and think about what that means and what responsibility comes with it along with the pleasure and the opportunity. Secondly, read as much as you can because you learn the most about writing by reading. Thirdly, think about what it is that you want to say to the world and think about why you want to be a writer and what appeals to you, and try to focus on that. Fourthly be a hard worker. It’s not all art and magic, it also involves a lot of work and it’s important to take it very seriously and work really hard.
SS: That’s great advice, thank you Susan.
You’re in LA and you’ve written for New Yorker as well. If you could hang out anywhere in the world where would you be and what would you be doing?
SO: Permanently?
SS: Just hanging out
SO: Oh gosh, that’s tough. Tokyo. I’d love to just be hanging out in Tokyo, browsing, window shopping and eating sushi.
SS: Have you been before or something you have always wanted to go to?
SO: I have been to Tokyo, but it’s been a while, and I have a real hankering to go back. It’s just a really exciting place — but I love so many places that it’s hard to pick one. I can picture one particular shopping area in Tokyo where it’s so much fun being a spectator and watching the world go round.
SS: I can only imagine. I would love to go out there. Our last question Susan. We spend so much of our time on online networks to sort of maintain relationships. Where do you see the value in taking the time to connect offline, whether it’s with your friends, followers or your peers?
SO: It’s important to remember that the world is full of subtlety and nuance. I’m online all the time and I value it and see tremendous opportunity and pleasure in it, but I think you have to remember that there is a texture to real life experience that is irreplaceable and important and refreshing. It’s very, very important to continue engaging with that, especially if you want to be a writer. I dread the idea of a world in which the writer does his or her work from a desk exclusively and is never out in the world, smelling the smells and hearing the sounds and bumping into things and having experiences, because that is what makes a story come alive.
SS: Thanks so much Susan, that was great.
SO: My pleasure.
uberlife Real Champions series: Hanging out with Ferry Corsten
uberlife’s Real World Champions series continues this week with a chat with Ferry Corsten, the world famous Dutch DJ, producer, remixer and trance music hero.
Matt:
WKND is your fourth full-length studio album. What was your goal for the album when you went into the studio to work on it?
Ferry:
Well I wanted to make an album that you can listen to everywhere, at home, as your pre-party before going out, in the car, at the office. But I also wanted to be able to play each individual track as a DJ so it needed to be suitable for the dance floors as well. So that’s why the album has ended up with a nice range of tracks, from more laid back listening tracks, all the way to full on dance floor fillers. The album also ranges from house tracks to that really trancey sound that people know me for. Having said that even the house tracks have a very, hands in the air, melodic feel to them.
Matt:
Cool, and did you record these tracks with the intention of them being on one cohesive album, or were these individual tracks you’d written and “kept on the shelf” over many years?
Ferry:
This album was made over the time span of about 1-1.5 years and I really aimed to create an album that does sound cohesive. If you listen to the album and the transitions between the beginning, middle and end of the album there are definitely some consistent and cohesive musical aspects all the way through so that It’s almost like listening to one big family of tracks.
Matt:
What has been your highest moment professionally in the last 12 months?
Ferry:
My highest moment in that last 12 month must be launching “Full on Ferry” in Ibiza, and because of all the hype surrounding that I was able to launch “Full on Ferry” worldwide, at Brixton Academy, for NYE in London, in Asia, America and all over Europe. That whole process is definitely one of my biggest highs.
Matt:
Great, who is the most inspirational person you’ve met along the way during your career, and what about them inspired you?
Ferry:
I don’t really think that there is one person who most inspired me. Along the way you meet so many people who tell you something that sticks with you, for example I have a friend who once told me that you can work as hard as is humanly possible but if you don’t reward yourself with something nice, like a nice boys toy or something, then what’s it all for? Advice like this taught me how to manage my work life balance and enjoy my life. There are also so many different things, like people in the studio who have a unique way of working and sometimes something from that process sticks and influences my songwriting and me. Overall al a LOT of different people influence me.
Matt:
If you could hang out anywhere in the world, where would you be and what would you be doing? Why?
Ferry:
Well it’s pretty hard to answer that because I just came back from a two week snowboarding trip so I’m definitely still on a high from the mountains (laughing), so asking me right now all I’m going to say is take me back to the snow! I would love to be snowboarding all year round but I also love Asia so it would have to be either somewhere with the sun or the snow. And what would I be doing? Definitely still making music because that is my life passion.
Matt:
Fantastic, and finally, we spend so much of our time on social networks. Where do you see the value in taking time to engage and hangout offline with friends, followers and your peers?
Ferry:
Well one thing that you will never be able to do online is read someone’s facial expression, that’s key to a relationship in my opinion. Hanging out offline with friends is very important for me because I don’t have as much time as I’d like to do it and social media, for me, is more like a fun thing with which I can share funny things I see or do on the road with my fans. I’m never going to fall in love with the social media or have it as my best friend, thank god!
Matt:
Thanks so much for your time, Ferry, that was great.
Ferry:
Thank-you too!
uberlife Real Champions series: Hanging out w/ Jo Elvin
uberlife’s Real World Champions series continues this week with a chat to Jo Elvin, the intelligent and inspiring editor of the UK’s leading magazine, Glamour.
(uberlife) Sanchita: What was it that inspired and motivated you to start out on the journey in writing that lead to you being editor?
Jo: I think I was about thirteen or fourteen when I knew that out of all my subjects at school I enjoyed English writing and creative writing, I grew up in Australia, and I was obsessed particularly with English magazines.
I loved things like Smash Hits and Number one. Interestingly not so much fashion, but fueling that hormonal teenage girlie thing of crushes on pop stars and stuff like that. It was another friend of mine to put the light bulb in my head that I could combine the two. I suppose nobody really thinks like that, at that age, that I can use writing to do what I want so once I put those two things together it was all I wanted to do.
I focused on becoming a journalist and I wasn’t really sure at that age what type, I think obviously magazines were an ideal, but I didn’t think that I could just step into magazines. I knew I would probably have to go work in newspapers and all that with the goal being magazines.
Sanchita: That was very astute of you..
Jo: Well, in the olden days before the Internet, you had to do a lot of research and asking around, I was lucky in that I went to a co-ed state school, which was a good school, but it was no frills. However we did have a good careers advisor so she really helped get people work experience in the right place and things like that. I ended up in a local newspaper where they were brilliant and they answered lots of questions, I ended up meeting a woman there who was a cadet journalist, as they’re called, who took me out on loads of assignments - garbage strikes, 50th anniversaries, you know, all that sort of thing, but it was really interesting.
Years later when I was eighteen or nineteen and I’d left school; I was at university studying a communications degree, which is basically a media course. You have really long holidays in university, I was really bored and I started cold calling magazines. I called Dolly Magazine which is the biggest teenage magazine in Australia and I read it through all my informative years and I figured I’m young maybe I’ll get the chance to do more there because it’s a young magazine.
As luck would have it the woman on the phone just sort of went; ‘Yes we’re pretty booked up for work experiences (as we all say)’ then ‘Oh, I don’t see why not, so do you want to come in next week?’ so I did.
Then I was just so keen so it must of been obvious, everything from opening the post to getting the tea and coffee was a thrill for me because I couldn’t believe I was at this magazine I had read all the time. One week led to them saying ‘Do you want to come in next week?’ then ‘Do you want to come in next week?’ and then the time came when the story that changed everything for me;
The editor at the time wanted a story to find a young girl who lived in the Aussie outback, and worked on a cattle station and she had to be a certain age, reasonably attractive and be living well away from home. As I say, as it was pre-internet, so it meant I was given the task because the two feature writers were grumpy about the amount of work. It was a week’s work to sit and got through the all the yellow pages. I mean this is Australia-every huge state has its own yellow pages, so it’s like phoning cattle ranch upon cattle ranch. It took days and days and days and finally I found someone. I think we gave them the choice of one or two girls and I think the editor was really impressed I had stuck at it and got it.
So then when I had to go back to university I was going in there a couple a days that I didn’t have classes, volunteering and doing all that sort of research and vox pops in the street and that sort of thing. That’s where it started and then I’d been doing that for four or five months and I walked in one day to find the two features writers furiously packing their desks with the editor standing over them. I think they’d gone to the managing director of the company and said we think she is doing a bad job of the magazine and you should fire her and that went as well as you’d expect it to, so they ended up getting fired. Then out of desperation, I was given more work to do, then that editor left because she didn’t enjoy it, it wasn’t the right fit, and the girl I’d been on work experience with at the local paper became the editor and gave me a job.
Sanchita: You mentioned luck earlier and I think that’s very modest of you. What advice would you give to people starting out other than having luck on their side?
Jo: Yes it was lucky, I didn’t know when she said come in for work experience that it would lead to A, B and C. But also I had spent so much time undeterred, with people going ‘No, No, write a letter No, we haven’t got anything’. I probably spent about 3 days just thinking there must be somebody else I can call.
In whatever you do, whether it’s in magazines, online or newspapers, you need to be resourceful. You need to have that ‘I’m not going to give up’ attitude. What still helps all of us here, particularly when dealing with the celebrities and trying to get covers and trying to get ideas, is that when one door shuts and something’s a no or not possible, that you’re like ‘There’s got to be another way to make this happen’. It’s that kind of resourcefulness, tenacity and thick skin that you need.
There is a fine line between tenacious and annoying and I think you’ve got to know when to draw the line. I certainly, even now, have times when publicists say ‘You know what, you’re really pissing me off now, I said no.’ So you have to kind of gage that. Rejection is a fact of anybody’s life, no matter what you choose to do for a living and, I genuinely think and I know it sounds like a cliché but I was very, very lucky to find a passion for something very early on and I think it’s so important to try and find something that you want to do.
I see a lot of people come in at various levels on the magazine and they are really frustrated because they are not yet the editor, but I didn’t start with ‘One day I’m going to be the editor of a magazine.’ I started with ‘Oh my god I’m working on a magazine! Yes, throw a bucket of shit over me and I’ll do it! Yes, thank you’.
I don’t see that in a lot of people now and I definitely think that real enthusiasm and wanting to know about everything on the magazine gives you the experience and to be able to do it. It’s also is the kind of thing that makes people want to give you more and more responsibility.
I do get work experience people who come in and say ‘Jo, I’m loving it here, but I really think you’re wasting my talents, I’ve got a degree’ and I’m like ‘But everything I been asking you to do is something that if you weren’t here we would be doing - everything that we do plays a huge role on the magazine.’
It’s not all about meeting pop stars and going to the fashion shows. It’s about budget meetings, Monday evenings here, when at six o’clock someone comes in with a pile ‘this big’ of pages I’ve got to read before I go, but I love it, and you to have to love every bit of it.
Sanchita: So through your journey, is there one person or people that you have hung out with that have really inspired you?
Jo: Yes I mean tons! Marina Go who is still a big player in Australian media was the local papergirl who became the editor of Dolly magazine. She was just such a champion and so encouraging and nurturing, she gave me a really big break and started the whole thing, so she was really inspirational to me and taught me a lot. She was good at commerciality and how to appeal and speak to a huge audience.
Similarly in England Kath Brown, who until recently was executive editor of Marie Claire, launched Sugar magazine in this country and gave me the job as editor under her. She was also the deputy editor of Elle, launched Red magazine and I think she taught me how to be tough. I don’t think anybody had taught me how to be the one who has to make those unpopular decisions and go by your gut, because at the end of the day you’ve got to be happy with the decisions that you’ve made when facing your employers. She was brilliant at that and then there are lots more people who I have met.
I don’t really know Anna Wintour but I think she is just inspiring for the longevity of her career and the freshness that she still brings to that magazine and the resilience and the strength of that brand.
My US counterpart, the editor of US Glamour Cindi Leive who’s I think a little creative fireball and so lovely, and very community minded in helping and working with other Glamours when necessary. So there are tons of people.
Sanchita: Through your career or in the past 12 months there must have been highs and lows. Can you give us one pinnacle moment in your career, either in the journey or at Glamour and also a low point and how you picked yourself up, and motivated yourself to get over that.
Jo: Well let’s start with the low point, because that leads to the really high point. It was when I launched B magazine in 1997. Without dwelling on the details, less than 18 months late I got fired. It was selling pretty well but it was only selling about half of what Sugar – my previous magazine – had sold.
However Sugar was a phenomenon you know, not many people get a Sugar in their careers. It really wasn’t working between the management and me. At the time that was very devastating and for a long time I didn’t even admit that was what had happened. I’ve realised as I get older that it’s a real rite of passage and it’s actually amazing if you can learn from those lows and those failures. I remember really panicking and thinking ‘Oh god, am I actually ever going to get a job again?’ but actually I did pretty quickly, I ended up freelancing for another company EMAP who brought me in to do a bit of feature editing on that magazine and a bit of acting deputy on another magazine.’
I did that for about six months and then they offered me the editorship on New Woman magazine, that was a brilliant job as well and a really interesting magazine, in that it was really of its time and really trying to do the irreverent ladette thing and it was pretty successful at that. Had I not been kicked out the door on the younger magazine and then given the opportunities that led to a much older woman’s magazine, I wouldn’t have been on the radar to be offered Glamour. So I think that it’s really important to just try and be philosophical about those moments.
Sanchita: and roll with the punches…
Jo: Yes, It was really awful at the time and I think it’s really relevant advice in this climate. When it happened to me we weren’t looking down the barrel of the worst financial times any of us had ever known, but it’s important to remember that if you can keep strong and keep plugging away I think there is always a way to overcome those things.
The high has been wall to wall Glamour. Within I think days of it hitting the shelves we had to hurriedly print extra copies to keep up with demand. I must admit that I knew it would be successful, but I didn’t think it would be that successful and so that was a real pinch yourself moment, I mean unbelievable.
Sanchita: What do you think you nailed for that to happen?
Jo: Well, I think it was a few things, bitter competitors at the time pointed to the size…Obviously that was a real innovation, the handbag size gave us a real resting point of notice which I think was very important because it was a saturated market. But I do think that it was also it was just exactly the right time for the kind of launch we’d had.
The last big launch before Glamour was 12 years earlier in Marie Claire, and between Marie Claire and Glamour there hadn’t been a real powerhouse, glossy, commercial brand. There had been lots of women’s magazine launches like Nova, Frank, Bare, Eve, I think launched just before Glamour and they’re all really interesting and dynamic in their way but most of them were very much, sort of, anti woman’s magazine. They were trying to say ‘We want women to buy this but we’re embarrassed to be a women’s magazine so we are going to pretend. We’re going to have features about lipstick because we want the advertisers but we’re going to pretend we don’t care that much about lipsticks’ and actually I don’t think women approach woman’s magazines as their entire life view.
I think that women buy women’s magazine for a particular mood and a particular time and they want to love lipstick and shoes, so Glamour came along and we were shamelessly feminine, upbeat, happy, glossy and quite American in outlook in that way. It’s no coincidence that Sex In The City was the hugest show on the TV when we came out. I think that suddenly English women were embracing that spirit of real confidence and intelligence but with a pride in your appearance and unashamedly enjoying shoes as much as current affairs and I think we just tapped into that in a really glossy happy package.
Sanchita: Excellent and so, I don’t know if you have much time to relax but if you could be hanging out anywhere in the world, where would you be hanging out and what would you be doing?
Jo: I am pretty happy in a lot of places actually, you know the more I travel, I realise I left the best city in the world. Sydney is just so beautiful, and so easy to have that mix. You go to work in an office and then at 6 o’clock in the evening you can be down at the beach, it’s absolutely lovely. I love the food and the lifestyle and the people in Sydney. Similarly LA I think gets a divided press but I really love going to LA because I so appreciate great weather now. Where else do I love? Italy, Sicily is one of my favourite places to come on holiday and Mexico.
What I really like doing is just the really dull stuff to be honest, because I don’t get a lot of free time. It’s literally just dinners with friends and hanging around on the couch with my husband and my daughter and it’s just really simple things.
Sanchita: Final question, we spend so much of our time on online social networks where do you see the value in offline face to face networking over communicating and keeping in touch with your followers and peers by say Twitter for example?
Jo: I think that building relationships is so key to what I do. You know, email and Twitter can get you so far. The entertainment director and I are going to LA in about three weeks and we do that quite regularly because it’s really important, we feel it makes a difference to meet those publicists rather than just talk on email or the phone all the time because they have a lot of noise being bombarded at them all the time.
There is pretty much only a handful of famous people who we all want on our covers. It’s ferociously competitive. So to have that relationship where you have talked about your kids and found some commonality, which you don’t get to do unless you are having lunch or a face-to-face meeting, really does help, if they know you. It doesn’t mean you are going to get everything but if somebody knows you I find it can quite often make the difference between them giving something to you or a different magazine.
So for me, relationships are key to what I do. I chat to people all the time on email but I also make sure I have a drink with this person, or that person, or a lunch. It’s hard to quantify but it definitely makes a difference.
Sanchita: Thank you so much Jo for taking the time. It’s been really insightful
Keeping it real with offline networking
We here at uberlife are on a mission to knock down social barriers to make the real world a more connected place.
There’s nothing quite like getting to know someone new. It’s amazing how much you can learn about and from that person within such a short amount of face time. We humans are social animals and interacting up close and personally with each other is something we were born to do, not only to learn and collaborate efficiently but also for the survival of our race.
This potential of connecting with others encourages us to get out there, do new things and build up a group of friends and people around us that make our lives richer.
However oddly the last 4-5 years of compulsive online social networking has made it commonplace to spend more time talking to people via a screen online rather than face-to-face offline. Whilst your “network” of friends might be getting bigger the actual real life social connections between you and these friends might just be getting weaker.
The main difference has to lie in how genuine the connection between two people is when interacting online and offline. An online connection has certain limitations when compared to an offline connection, there’s a sense of anonymity behind the online connection due to the fact that social networks allow people to hide behind their profiles. Remember that the average person’s profile is made up of information that they’re happy for a stranger/acquaintance to see.
A recent Cornell University study found that Facebook allows users to put their best faces forward in their online profiles and compared the revolutionary social networking site to a mirror image of ourselves, only better. By editing and filtering what information the virtual world sees, users can portray an enhanced version of themselves.
In stark contrast, there is a genuine nature to real life social situations: the unique aspects of people’s personalities are plain to see and it’s these tiny bits of information that are what make us, as people, so wonderfully complex and interesting to each other with our defining character traits and intricacies. As a result, real world connections between 2 or more people is where the deepest value lies, this is how solid friendships and relationships are cemented, and this cannot be achieved online.
So for us at uberlife, we believe that we cannot live truly rich lives by prioritizing our online relationships over offline. It is our mission to use the power of our online networks however to spark more real world interactions and relationship building so we can enjoy the best of both worlds.
uberlife lands in Silicon Roundabout
Last week the team behind uberlife packed up our Macs, post-its, and tea bags and descended on Shoreditch to set up camp in our new home at the heart of the tech sector.
We’re really excited to have moved to one of London’s most creative postcodes and to be in the presence of some of the most innovative startups around. In fact almost as excited, as we are to discover our new surroundings and find which of the abundance of pubs we’re going to christen as our ‘local’.
With the last of the boxes unpacked and the flat pack furniture assembled (we’re assured that ‘building stuff’ is hidden in the small print of our contracts) our new home is proving to be the creative hub we’d dreamt of – amazing how much inspiration can come from an assortment of jazzy Ikea cushions, really.
Away from the office we’re looking forward to getting to know our new neighbours and will be arranging some lunchtime and after work hangouts so that we can introduce ourselves and meet up with some of the best talent in London.
Hopefully you’ll soon be able to out some faces to the name uberlife and fill us in on the hidden gems in the area, where’s best to grab lunch and the places to while away our Friday nights. Can’t wait to meet up with you all!
