I woke up this morning, let the dogs out (we have a doberman and the world’s largest golden retriever — really — he’s 130lbs), and sat down to watch this talk that Brad gave at Stanford. If you know Brad, it’s a lot of stuff that you’ve heard him say before, but it’s a REALLY nice encapsulation of “the Tao of Brad.”
My personal Brad history is something I’ve recounted before (being turned down for funding, starting defrag with him via email, etc), so I won’t do that here. But the emphasis of Brad’s talk struck me today: It’s really not about the tactics of what you’re doing, it’s about being passionate about the learning process (I think I’m paraphrasing that in some adequate way).
And then it occurred to me: you know how they say that a founder’s DNA becomes the DNA of a company? This part of Brad (and me) is what I think we were both excited about around Defrag. Sure, we set out to explore a “topic,” but what really intrigues both of us is people that are passionate about the process of learning. And that turns out to be what is different about Defrag.
You can go to conferences about cloud computing, or social business, or enterprise 2.0, or mobile devices, or WHATEVER — and you’ll hear about benefits and case studies and tactics and feature sets. If that’s what you need for some project, great. But that’s not what you’ll get at Defrag. At Defrag, we’re really down to wanting to find amazing people that are passionate about something that they’re learning, and then giving them the room to tell everyone about their passion.
The result: amazing ideas, amazing people, amazing conversations — and a TON of passionate obsessions around what people are pursuing.
I don’t know how to explain it beyond that. It’s just different. You just won’t find it many other places (PopTech, TED, etc). I hope you’ll join us.
