Give your birthday to charity: water
This is a big milestone year for me… Threadless turns 10 and on August 19th, I’ll be turning 30. There goes my 20′s! I couldn’t think of a better way to end the decade than to raise some funds for a great cause – building wells for the billion people on earth who don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.
These folks are doing amazing work. Recently my friend Chuck Anderson traveled to Ethiopia with charity: water to see firsthand the work they have been doing. The photos from the trip are really incredible. And then I saw Seth Godin, who wrote a little piece for the upcoming Threadless book, give his birthday to charity: water. Here is a great quote from his post:
“In general, I think trade is better than aid, and creating scalable investments that engage the developing world is the best shortcut to bring us all out of poverty. But without a stable infrastructure, none of that works, and water is a key building block in that platform. The key is creating a dependable, long-term supply that communities can count on, and you can be part of that.”
If you want to get involved, send your birthday wishes to charity: water, not me. For anyone that donates $50 or more, I’d be happy to send a free Threadless book when it comes out in October. Just send me an email (jake@threadless.com) and I’ll hook you up. And when your birthday rolls around, I encourage you to also consider giving it away!
Thanks for an incredible decade everyone. Happy charity day :)
ps… I’m starting this a bit early because charity: water needs what they can get by September 30th for the next round of work they are doing.
Sometimes I wonder…
If I should stop and take a second to think about my life instead of just living it. But then I just keep on living it! Oh well. If the moment is good…
A joy in every possibility
This song means a lot to me.
Character flaw: I don’t listen to a ton of music. I have a few favorite bands and listen to them over and over again. Luckily my wife is way into music and introduces me to new stuff a lot… and controls our mix during parties :) But Against Me! has been my favorite band for the last 4 years. Recently, thanks to Lance, our warehouse manager at Threadless, I got to see them play a set of 6 songs in a room of like 50 people at JBTV (F*cking incredible place). I was standing right there up front, can’t wait to share the video when it comes out!
Anyway, before the show I got to listen to an interview with Tom Gabel, the lead singer. He said that he wrote the album that “Joy” is on (“Searching for a former clarity”) while in a state of mind where he was convinced that he was going to die within a year. So all of the songs were written about various things and how you would look at them if you knew you were going to die soon. Great concept for an album.
Whenever I listen to Against Me!, for some reason I get lost in my own thoughts and the lyrics to the songs just keep egging me on, and I get just snowballs of thought processes going on. It’s pretty great. Why would I want to listen to anything else? ;) I was listening to this album while driving from Chicago to Boulder last weekend with both the kids and my wife asleep in the back, and now knowing the thoughts behind the lyrics. It was awesome. And “Joy” is an incredible song.
I think the reason this song speaks to me so much is because I love the idea of not being in complete control, giving others chances for control and loving the outcomes. I think that’s pretty obvious with Threadless since we give so much control to our community. But also within the Threadless staff; I love giving people the freedom to run with the ideas that they are passionate about. As a manager, even if you would do things differently here or there, sometimes it’s best to keep your mouth shut or at least make clear that your opinion is just your opinion, not the way things have to be. Keep the idea their idea so it’s their work, not a service to you. There’s a joy in every possibility.
…
Don’t lose touch.
The two faces of crowdsourcing
I first learned about crowdsourcing in about 2004. This was four years after starting Threadless which has become kind of the poster child of crowdsourcing. As I learn more and more about what the word means and now see it getting a bad name from some people as spec work or cheap labor and such I’ve been thinking a lot about what is right and wrong about it.
I’ve found that there are two very different sides to the concept. On one side, you have outsourced labor to the crowd. Let’s call it labor crowdsourcing. On the other, you have productive things being done with people’s passions. Let’s call this passion crowdsourcing.
On the labor side you have businesses like crowdSPRING (logo labor), Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (general tasks) and Victors & Spoils (ad agency work). These are just a few examples. There are plenty more and they are not all bad! However, I’ve found that most of the companies that are creating a bad name for crowdsourcing fall into this category.
With the passion side you have places like Threadless (art on t-shirts), Etsy (selling handmade items) and Sellaband (music funding). Again, there are a ton more examples here but I do feel like there are a lot less than on the labor side. And it’s not all positive on this side either. There has been controversy with passion crowdsourcing projects like iStockphoto (stock photography) where professional photographers feel they have a hard time competing with $1 amateur photographs.
It seems like the key difference between these two sides is that on the labor side, people are generally making things and doing work specifically for the project. On the passion side, people are making these things anyway and are then given an opportunity to do something productive with those things. In turn, I feel the passion side is generally more about support and opportunity to the crowd while the labor side is about using a crowd to solve your own problems.
My view on the whole thing is that, personally, I hope to always stay on the passion side as that interests me far more. However, I do see plenty of opportunity and great things happening on the labor side.
Anyway, I think I could write about this forever and just wanted to outline my most basic thoughts here. I’d love to discuss further in the comments…
Around the Internets so far in 2010
What up everyone … just wanted to share a few links to some things I’ve been up to lately.
We just announced a huge partnership with Society6. Right now we are working with artists to build up content for the new Threadless Artist Shoppe that will be dropping early next week. So stoked for this and the new opportunities it brings artists on Threadless. Watch out, this will be huge.
Earlier this week I did a live interview on Inc.com. It was a pretty cool format, I just sat in my office and broadcasted live from my webcam while a moderator from Inc fed me questions that came in live from the community. You can watch highlights of it here.
I’ll be hosting a panel with 5 Threadless artists from around the world in Denver during the HOW Conference on June 9th. This is going to be incredible, so stoked to meet and hang out with all of these guys and to share their thoughts with the HOW attendees. It’s looking like I will be doing this again at Adobe MAX in October in LA.
If you read Women’s Wear Daily, I was interviewed for a piece in there last month. I found a link to a PDF of the article… check it out.
But wait there’s more!
- Tom does an interview with the Killswitch Collective on our 10 year anniversary.
- A blog on Trada recently written about Threadless that I really enjoyed.
- I have a little quote here in this BlackBook Magazine article.
- Bnet talks with me about vision as an entrepreneur.
- A super fun interview on the amazing Hide Your Arms t-shirt blog.
- An article on TechCrunch about bootstrapping your business.
- I am mentoring at the Founder Institute in Denver to a great crew of startups.
- A couple weeks ago I participated in the DC10 Summit Series. Amazing group of people.
Thanks y’all!
