The Internet is a Room
I find it useful to think about digital things in analog terms because it is ultimately in the analog world that they have their impact.
With this in mind, I often think about the internet as a massive room. In it are mountains of documents and billions of home videos stacked miles high. Written letters fly through the air like flocks of birds around towers of photos.
Amid all this stuff, there are people in this room. People from all over the world divided into small clusters like cliques at a high school dance. For the most part, these clusters are pretty exclusive, avoiding eye contact with each other.
When a person in this room needs help with something, it’s no surprise that they tend to consult the familiar faces standing next to them. That, or they try finding something relevant in one of those document mountains or photo towers.
This is a real shame given the amount of knowledge and experience among those less familiar people in the room. It’s also a shame because I believe that there is a fundamental kindness and willingness among them too.
For the last year, our team has been working on a way to tap into the knowledge and experience of everyone in the room to help you solve problems you’re facing. We call it Volley, and we think of it as a friendly way to ask for help and help others online.
It turns out that something really magical happens when you ask the room for help. People in the far corners of the room raise their hands and shout “Hey, I have experience with that problem!” and “I can help with that!” Others chime in in different ways by connecting you to their friends, saying, “You have to meet my friend Jessica; she has experience with exactly what you’re looking for!” Under the right conditions, the room becomes a problem-solving machine, powered by people.
Since last year, we’ve seen this problem solving potential firsthand in Volley’s private community of 2,000 people. We watched people like Alessia ask for advice on her transition from a career as a political staffer to one as a web developer and be flooded by helpful responses from experienced engineers. (One of those, by the way, ended up landing her her first full-time development job.) We saw others like Jean who turned to Volley to get help from payment aggregation experts because of a difficult problem his fintech startup was facing. He got technical help from four people with expertise in exactly what he needed. And we heard from lots of people like Mike who told us how awesome it feels to so easily help others with the things he’s good at.
These examples we witnessed, and the many others like them, have given us confidence that what has worked on a small scale can work on a massive one. That’s why today I’m excited to announce that Volley is launching publicly, open to everyone in the room.
Motivating us is a vision of the room and its mountains of documents, towers of photos, and clusters of people, that is different from what it looks like today. A future where people’s relationships are democratized so that anybody can benefit from everyone else’s knowledge, where the paying-it-forward culture of Silicon Valley is commonplace, and ultimately, where the room is a more human, helpful, place.
I’d love for to you to be a part of it.
