Open Garden: Building the Internet of Us. Hello World, Part 1
Thursday, May 24th, 2018
Written by Paul Hainsworth, CEO of Open Garden
A lot of people have asked me to share a little about my background — where I’m from, what influenced me growing up, and how this guides me today as we are building Open Garden. Here are some thoughts about what makes me tick.
I grew up in Toronto, Canada — a city that influenced who I am in so many different ways. For those who don’t know, Toronto is the fourth largest city in North America after Los Angeles, New York and Mexico City. It’s just as urban as any of those other cities, too — but perhaps a bit more polite!
I wasn’t particularly sheltered as a kid and living in downtown Toronto exposes you to a wide swath of cultures and experiences. I took public transit by myself at age 9, which today might spur a phone call to the local police or child protective services. I loved riding my bike everywhere and didn’t even learn to drive until I was in my 30s. You can only pull this off in a small number of cities, and Toronto is definitely one of them.
But being at street level, whether walking or riding a bike, somehow makes you feel a lot more connected to your community. Serendipity happens there, too. I think this feeling of community and need for connection drew me to the world of communications in general, and mobile communications more specifically. In my 30s, I lived in places like Los Angeles, where people spend a lot of time in cars and many people feel pretty disconnected from any community. Mobile communications helped fill that community gap for many people, including me. Back in the mid-2000s, pre-iPhone, I worked in the early days of social media and then mobile communications in general while in LA. For better or worse, it seems I was ahead of the curve in using social media and mobile; now, the whole world is on social media, mostly on their mobile phones. In some small way, we’re all trying to recapture the sense of community that many of us grew up with in 1970s Toronto.
Toronto is by some measures the most multicultural city in the world. You’ll meet plenty of interesting and diverse groups of people. In contrast to the great melting pot of American culture, Canada’s cultural mosaic gave me an outward looking mindset. I realized early on that there’s a huge world out there to explore, full of interesting people and different ways of looking at things. It made me curious about the world, eager to explore and open to different (and sometimes uncomfortable) situations. Turns out this is helpful in running a startup, too, whether it’s striking up conversations with investors or stopping random people on the street for impromptu usability testing.
I’m lucky to have an older brother who was a hardcore computer geek when we were growing up. Had we lived in Silicon Valley, he might have become a software engineer or even a successful Internet entrepreneur during the the 1990s. He managed several bulletin board services (BBS), and coded his own RPG BBS from scratch.
Instead, he became a television broadcaster, culminating in a 17-year stint as the lead anchor on Canada’s Business News Network (BNN). My brother has taught me so many things, but one of the most important is that the medium is the message. In the world of television, presentation, clarity and succinctness are crucial. Turns out this is really important in business too.
I was fortunate to have a few role models growing up. One of them was my grandfather, Fred Beavis. His story was pretty remarkable: From poverty to becoming the Mayor of Toronto.
Born in 1914, Fred’s father was a roofer, a job that didn’t pay very well back then. His mother died when he was quite young, which left Fred to raise his siblings while his dad was working jobs. When his father passed away, Fred inherited the “business,” which is to say he was now a guy with a truck and a bunch of day laborer drunks, as he told me. Through a lot of very hard work and cold Toronto winters up on people’s roofs, he made it into a pretty successful business, with good people, employing many of his extended family members.
He was always a man of the people. So it made sense when he decided to run for city councillor, a position he held for 31 years, including president of city council and then briefly as Mayor. A guy from the working class, with a 6th grade education, shows up and brings a work ethic nobody can beat. He became one of the most influential people on city council, the rare politician who could actually get things done.
Toronto in the 1950s was not yet an international city, but Fred had a vision for the city: global, prosperous for all, always growing. He was instrumental to the development of Toronto’s skyline, pushing a pro-development agenda. “Construction creates jobs,” he said, “and jobs make the economy run.” He was right. While many US cities saw a donut effect, in which the downtown core was hollowed out, Toronto’s downtown thrived. Many of his contemporaries and successors credited him for shepherding Toronto onto the world stage.
As a kid growing up in Toronto, volunteering in two of his political campaigns, so much of my grandfather’s legacy left a big impression on me about what is possible in life.
I didn’t start seriously thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up until I was in high school. Back then, my parents liked to watch 60 Minutes, an investigative news program. I became transfixed by the ability of journalists to uncover injustice, confront it, and educate the world — sometimes even stimulating change that helped make people’s lives better. I became fascinated by the idea of living one’s life with a mission. I had already witnessed this in my own family, with a grandfather devoted to public service, and my mom working as a career nonprofit professional.
In college, I entered the journalism program at Concordia University, and joined The Link, my student newspaper, a proudly left wing liberal rag with a mission to change the world. I went in deep and by my 3rd year, I was the editor-in-chief. My college life was not some beer-soaked frat experience. It consisted of working 50 to 60 hours a week, publishing the paper twice a week, attending classes in between, and living this mission to change the world through journalism. I came away from college with a strong sense of the difference between just working a job and working on one’s life’s work. Later, this same mission-driven passion drove me to focus my energy on the intersection of the Internet and mobile communications, where I saw the seeds of potential to transform the world.
The moments in my career where I have worked the hardest, struggled the most, and been most invested are those in which I felt strongly attached to the mission. This is why I get up every day and build what we are doing at Open Garden. I believe we can fundamentally change how people connect to the Internet while making the process more affordable, faster and private. More on that mission and vision soon.
I’m going to take my brother’s advice and keep this post about me succinct. What I’m really excited to tell you about is our team at Open Garden and what we’re building here in Oakland, California. More on that in our next post!
In the meantime, find us on #Telegram, #Twitter and #Facebook, or sign up for email updates on opengarden.com.
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Open Garden is changing the way people connect to the Internet. By enabling anyone to securely share their own Internet connection and earn money, the Open Garden protocol empowers millions of people to create their own networks in their own communities, while making Internet access more affordable, faster and private.
