Wired to Build
“In the age of information overload, the ultimate luxury is meaning and context.”
I love this. It’s from the co-founder of WIRED, Kevin Kelly, written back in 1993, in his letter from the editor introducing the magazine’s first issue. And WIRED became the most influential magazine in IT because of it.
This statement pushed the teams at WIRED to dig deep into the precise and wonky details of the engineering and technology they covered and also tell the daring stories about the rad people building it.
The magazine is like a fueling station for visionaries, a place to fill up with the swashbuckling entrepreneurial narratives they need to hear to help keep trucking.
Or maybe sometimes they just need a laugh.
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WIRED’s textured storytelling (the scope, the depth, all human) inspired the people we needed to build the future to go out and do it.
I think WIRED also sent subtle signals to the high-flying world builders, reminding them to do a little more.
Be curious. Get others excited. Share ideas. Learn from everyone. Help. Play nice.
And, for the most part, people listened.
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As long as history keeps proving the best ideas sprout in open spaces where creative minds get fed the stuff they need to grow, then WIRED magazine will be the best place for entrepreneurs to get it.
And they always have cool covers.
I’ve known the founders of BuildGroup for over 15 years. I’ve been lucky to work with them, and saw how they inspired a gang of scrappy upstarts to build a small hosting company into one of the world’s leading managed cloud service providers that blew past the 2B mark in revenue.
It struck me, similar to WIRED, their open-minded and energizing kind of leadership gave the people they worked with the stuff they needed to take on all comers.
The ecosystem they built triggered a stampede of hungry innovators from all over to Texas so they could get a taste of the sauce.
Along the way, the BuildGroup founders taught us how to be great people by demonstrating what great looks like. Be curious. Get others excited. Share ideas. Learn from everyone. Help.
And, depending on the sales run rate for the quarter, how to play nice most of the time.
This environment pushed us to dig deep and build something great. And we did.
But, when Builders look back, like any restless group of entrepreneurs, they see something different.
Because what haunts them now is knowing if today’s technology was fused to their collective need to collaborate and build, they could’ve created something unimaginable.
That’s why they formed BuildGroup. Now they’re partnering with entrepreneurs intent on creating something great and providing the things that will help them do much, much more.
Things like permanent capital. Battle-tested operator-led experience. And a hyper-focused commitment to bust open the full capacity of a company’s people and its assets using technology to modernize the business model, brick-by-brick, node-by-node, in a way that accelerates innovation, produces exponential value and creates a more meaningful expereince for everyone involved.
Heady stuff, right? It sure looks good on a conference room wall. Only the way I see it, if people have ideas that could help entrepreneuers build something unimaginable, but keep those ideas on the wall, then it’s easy to imagine these people never read WIRED.
That’s why BuildGroup is using Medium to talk shop. Look for riffs on economic theories and operational advice. Some real and measurable examples, ideally more good than bad. And plenty of individual takes on business and life that might spark a thought, trigger a knowing smile or start a lively debate.
Plus all the gritty company building war stories (and egregious mistakes) they lived through to talk about and might rather forget. (I just won’t let them).
We all have ideas about the future. Some will work. Some will become think pieces in WIRED: eToys Epitaph: “End of an Error”
But we’ll never know if they stay inside.
Of course, if Kevin Kelly thought information overload was bad 25 years ago, then maybe the ultimate luxury today lies somewhere between losing your phone and buying a timeshare in Siberia.
Whatever the case, the irony of pouring more words into the ocean has our full attention.
So we’re challenging ourselves to honor WIRED’s devotion to deliver meaning and context in the way we deep dive ideas, tell relevant stories, share quick tips, and, hopefully get better by hearing all of yours.
Besides, well before the information age, and on into the future, the only way ideas will ever see the stage is if they start by getting on the page.
Let’s build some pages.
