A talk about one entrepreneurs rediscovery of his successful business as a social/purpose-driven business, how to lead a company from purpose & core values, and how business can be about making the world better. Lots of domain examples.

1. Purpose-driven business
Doing good while doing well
By: Floyd Marinescu,
CEO of C4Media, producer of InfoQ.com & QCon
Presented at: Ryerson University, March 23rd, 2012

2. #$%ish people say about business
• You have to step over other people to get ahead
• You can't be soft or trusting to manage people
• Businesses ultimately is about greed and money
• You have to be selfish to run a business
• The bottom line rules over everything else
• A business will always put profit above everything
else
• Profit motive always leads to exploitation

3. Agenda
My story
From a passion to a ball and chain to a passion
again!
Social/purpose-driven Business Examples
Find your purpose and turn it into a business!

4. InfoQ.com: News & Community Site
• 600,000 unique visitors/month
• Published in 4 languages

5. QCon conferences
• 500-1200 attendees each
•7 cities worldwide

7. Ancient Historyncient History
• In 2nd year university, started
TheServerSide.com in 2000
• Symposium conference in
2003
• Graduated in 2002
• 2004 we end up at TechTarget
• 2005 quit super high paying
job to start InfoQ
• InfoQ.com Launches May 2006
• Vision realized around 2007

8. From passion to “ball and chain”
• 2005: Started C4Media in some ways to
prove to myself that good companies can win
o Tired of media companies with no community spirit,
driven by sales culture
o Tired of all the negative stereo types I was raised with
and saw all around
• 2007: Once vision was achieved, now what?
o Lacking skills to run a medium sized company
o Self-imposed pressure to be the type of CEO I thought
the world expected – about growth for growth’s
sake/money

9. From: Floyd Marinescu
Sent: Monday, January 14, 2008
To: <internal list>
Subject: InfoQ/C4Media: Why we're here,
where we're going
... A community backed by a company that
would recognize that it’s well being depended
on how well it served its readers, and not the
other way around. A company that judges itself
by the scale of its positive impact on its
community as well as revenue growth...

10. 2007-2010
• Twice tried to hire a GM/CEO but failed
• Couldn’t sell the business either
• Liked our work but also felt it a burden
• Felt a bit desperate around summer of
2010 after a CEO candidate backed out

11. 2011: And back to PASSION again!
• Learned tactics for growth
o Standups, quarterly & annual top 5 objectives,
metrics, one page plan, objectives dashboards,
yammer
• Peer Support
o Joined Entrepreneur organization
o Began attending entrepreneur conferences
• Found our purpose
• Learned business can be about purpose, culture
empowerment, and core values

12. C4Media’s Purpose
To facilitate the spread of knowledge and
innovation in enterprise software development

13. How we fulfill our purpose
• Organized as a practitioner-driven
community-service
• Massively outspending competition in content
and quality
• All content is free
• Filming and publishing dozens of hours of
community conference video for free
• Conferences with over 100 speakers
• Investing long term in international markets
• Investment in people and staff

14. Purposes Around the World
• Apple: To make a contribution to the world by making
tools for the mind that advance humankind
• Nike: To experience the emotion of competition, winning,
and crushing competitors
• Sony: To experience the joy of advancing and applying
technology for the benefit of the public
• Wal-Mart: To give ordinary folk the chance to buy the
same things as rich people
• Walt Disney: To make people happy

15. Communicating purpose
InfoQ.com’s “About page” before our purpose:
After:
Software is changing the world; InfoQ.com is an online news /
community site that aims to empower software developers by
facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the enterprise
software development community; to achieve this, InfoQ is
organized as a practitioner-driven community service providing
news, articles…

16. Communicating purpose
Description of a QCon, BEFORE:
QCon London is the sixth annual London enterprise software
development conference designed for developers, team leads,
architects and project management is back! There is no other event
in the UK with similar opportunities for learning, networking, and
tracking innovation occurring in the Java, .NET, Html5, Mobile ,
Agile, and Architecture communities.
QCon AFTER discovering our purpose:
Software is changing the world; QCon aims to empower software
development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation
in the enterprise software development community; to achieve this,
QCon is organized as a practitioner-driven conference designed for
people influencing innovation in their teams: team leads, architects,
project managers, engineering directors.

17. Using Purpose to Drive Strategy
Old-school business: Social Business:
Profit drives ideas Ideas drive profit
How do we make What can we disrupt
more money next or create and which
year? idea is the most
monetizable?

18. Dan Pink: What really motives
employees
• Purpose
• Mastery
• Autonomy

19. C4Media’s Core Values
Transparency – Be transparent about process, status, expectations, your
feelings, successes and failures.
Integrity - We do what we say, and we say what we do. We publish content our
readers can trust. We fulfill our commitments to readers, customers, and each
other. We act in the best interests of the company.
Mastery- We never stop learning and we strive to continual improve our selves,
our processes, and our company.
Service – The joy of serving others, we go above and beyond for our customers,
for our readers, and for each other.
Accountability - Take ownership for results. We'll do what it takes to get things
done and are very serious about our commitments
Resourcefulness - Find creative solutions to get things done, have a “can do”
attitude.

20. • In 1990, Bruce Poon Tip founded G Adventures with
nothing more than two credit cards and a burning desire
to create an authentic, sustainable travel experience like
nothing the world had ever seen.
• Now serves over 100,000 travelers a year
Bruce refers to G-adventures
impact on the world:
• facilitating wealth
redistribution from the
rich to poor
• creating sustainable jobs,
connecting people with
authentic

21. 6 Core Values of
• Safety
• Positivity and passion
• Appreciative
• Fun and friendly
• To align customer and corporate interests
• Honesty and openness

22. • In 2006, American traveler Blake Mycoskie befriended
children in Argentina and found they had no shoes to
protect their feet.
• He created TOMS, a company that would match every pair
of shoes purchased with a pair of new shoes given to a
child in need.
• One for One.

23. Different Ways of
Thinking
About business

24. Business as the ultimate social experience
• Comment I made in 2004:
“What’s the point putting so much energy into this
business, I want to do something that has meaning in
the world”
• My bosses’ response:
o Starting a business is the “greatest social experience”

25. CEO as Community Experience Officer?
Concerned with the experience of the:
• Employee community
• Customer community
• Investor community
Alignment of strategy to our purpose
Servant Leadership
Manages culture, motivation, purpose

26. Be the Change You Want to
See in the World
• A great reason to start a business
• Great management philosophy
• Grow leaders by holding your team
to the possibilities they can become
• Recent example:
o Just hired someone, should they go to the company
meeting in Spain next month?
Be the change approach old-school approach
Yes, because the change I am cultivating is No, because they might not succeed so why
of them being successful in the company so waste the money. Wait until they prove
they must come and meet everyone. themselves.
Themes: trust, abundance, becoming Themes: mistrust, fear, scarcity

27. Myths about social businesses
• Are management softies?
• Does it mean being naïve or
overpaying?
• Do you have to be saving whales
and feeding the hungry?
o Zappos sells shoes, but is the most famous culture
example and they sold for $1B to Amazon
o “We decided to focus on customer service,” Hsieh
says of Zappos, “which is all about making customers
happy and then over time we put more and more
emphasis on company culture, which is all about
making employees happy.”

28. Entrepreneurs are artists— their
business is the canvas – CEO of Freshbooks
• Entrepreneurs create something out of
nothing
• Focus is a key to success
• Be true to your vision
• Starving artists…
• Style of their own
• CEO Mike Dermot made no money for 2
years, but had a sincere desire to make
billing and invoicing easier for small business

29. Rod Johnson and
• Created Spring: free open source software that
competed with $20K/license software sold by
billion dollar companies
• Sold SpringSource in 2008 for hundreds of
millions of dollars
“I think the biggest thing that keeps you going is
conviction, the fact that you believe that what you
are doing is not only eventually going to hopefully
be profitable, but is actually worth doing, that it’s
something that is really going in some little
way to make the world a better place.” - Rod
Johnson

30. Companies That Are Growing
Rapidly While Doing Good
• 6 REVOLUTION FOODS
o serves healthy school lunches to kids
o reached $50 million in revenue in 2011--increasing its revenue by 100
times over the past five years
• SUSTAINABLE HARVEST
o A coffee importer that emphasizes transparency across the entire supply
chain,Sustainable Harvest reached $76 million in revenue in 2011 (a rate of five
times growth in the last five years). It has also brought over $200 million to rural
coffee farming communities over the past 15 years
• SUNGEVITY
o Sungevity is part of a growing group of companies--including SunRun and
SolarCity--that lease solar systems to customers, instead of forcing them to
purchase the often-quite-expensive panels. In the past year, the company has
tripled its staff to 300 employees. It has also installed solar panels on over 3,500
homes (generating 8,500 kW of power) since its founding in 2007.

31. Emerging trends
• 1% companies
o donate 1% of profits
• Not just for profit
• 1 for 1 model – Toms Shoes
o Buy one, one gets donated
• Triple bottom line companies
o "People, planet and profit"
• Social business
o have a social rather than financial objective, investors make no profit
• 1-1-1 model – salesforce.com
o 1% Equity - 1% Time - 1% Product

32. Mark Zuckerberg
"you need to do stuff you are passionate about.
The companies that work are the ones that
people really care about and have a vision for
the world so do something you like...
…a company is the best vehicle in
the world to align a lot of people to
achieve a mission"