Why empowr (Part 4)
Hello everyone,
Together, we've been reading the Why empowr book, written by one of the empowr founders. If you're just joining us, if you like you can first read the earlier parts here: Part 1
Part 2
Part 3 As always, many thanks for your thoughtful comments that you left in the earlier parts. Each and every comment, each and every word that you leave is being carefully, read and digested by empowr's team and management, the founders and myself. Thank you! I'll try and post a new part every day when there's not another announcement. And for the benefit of readers, I promise to do a better job at removing all garbage and unrelated comments, such as "Why does PayPal not support Pakistan" and "Where's my cash out?" and "I would like more money", which have nothing to do with the topic of this blog post. SMS.ac SMS.ac was the very first laboratory stage—or pre-alpha stage—of the project that would grow into empowr. That phase had only two purposes, the first of which was to enable the “economy” part of the Democratic Social Economy by inventing a way for people to pay for things electronically over the web. At that time, most web users were “cash and carry”: they didn’t have credit cards or any other way to pay for things electronically. So, if we couldn’t first solve that challenge, there could be no economy or DSE—or empowr.com. One of our many ideas was to convince the world’s mobile phone carriers to allow our software to talk to their billing systems, so that people could use their ten-digit phone numbers as if they were credit card numbers. The idea was that charges would show up on their phone bills or be deducted from their pre-paid mobile credit accounts. The phone companies would not play along, so we needed to find a way to get their attention. We searched endlessly for opportunities or flaws in their business models and technologies, avenues that we might (legally) exploit to get their attention—and grab a seat at their tables. What we learned was that, when one mobile phone company’s customers sent text messages to another phone company’s customers, both companies lacked the ability to track and quantify those messages. In other words, if, during any day, the customers of France Telecom sent 100 million text messages to the customers of Deutsche Telekom in Germany, but Deutsche Telekom’s customers sent only 95 million text messages back to France Telecom’s customers, the phone companies ignored the 5 million difference, and no money changed hands between them because of their inability to successfully track and report that difference to each other. Once we discovered this flaw, we set out to find a way to gain (legal) access to any one phone carrier’s text messaging platform and to use that gateway to send text messages to the customers of other carriers around the world. The idea was that, if we could do that, we could open up a website and allow users to send text messages from the web to anyone in the world without paying for those messages. The theory was that offering free text messaging to consumers might bring millions of them to our platform via word-of-mouth—since we had no money for marketing—AND might give us leverage with the phone companies (in our quest to gain access to their billing systems), because we could show them that we had their customers’ attention; attention that we could utilize to help or harm their business objectives. We spent over two years pursuing this strategy, and, despite our best efforts traveling around the world to meet with phone companies, we always returned home empty-handed. Having exhausted all our resources, we were on the ropes. In a last gasp attempt, we decided to stop flying out to meet with directors and vice-presidents of phone companies and instead started to dial directly into the offices of the presidents of phone companies around the world, hoping to convince them to board a plane and visit us. That strategy worked! The president of a phone company in South Africa agreed to visit our offices in San Diego, California. There was only one problem. We had no “offices.” We were thirty-five engineers and product professionals working out of my apartment, because we couldn’t afford to pay the rent for an office. Surely if that president saw our poor working conditions, there wasn’t a chance in hell that he would want any affiliation with our company, much less agree to allow us to connect into his proprietary network. So we pooled our dollars together and rented a fancy hotel room overlooking the beach, at the famous Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego. When I picked up the president at the airport, I told him that our company was such a big customer of the grand hotel that they were eager to throw rooms at us anytime we needed one, free of charge. So, I said, he and I might as well stop there for discussions before heading over to “our offices.” For our meeting, we had mocked up the designs for a product and made it look like it was almost ready to launch. We discussed our vision for mobile data and the future, and time passed by quickly. At one point, he informed us that he would need to get back to the airport soon and regretted that he wouldn’t be able to visit our offices. When I dropped him off at the airport, we agreed with a handshake that his company would allow us to send unlimited text messages, via their platform, to the customers of almost all mobile phone companies around the world. Within a couple of weeks, we both signed a contract to that effect. A few weeks later, we launched www.SMS.ac—a simple website that allowed people to send free text messages to the mobile phones of their friends anywhere in the world. Given that text messaging was something people were accustomed to paying for, word of mouth exploded instantly, and within six months, over six million mobile customers had signed up—strictly through word of mouth—providing SMS.ac with the fastest customer ramp-up of any company in history (or so we were told). We broke the world records set by Hotmail and Napster, according to Fast Company magazine and USA Today. More important than world records and cocktail party stories, we were able to go back to the mobile phone companies and tell them that we were quickly developing relationships with millions of their consumers. And, if they didn’t give us access to their billing systems, we would start to provide their competitors with advertising access to those customers. THAT got their attention. One after another, the mobile phone companies of the world began to give us access to their billing systems, starting in the United Kingdom. They allowed our/their customers to pay for things over the web using only their phone numbers. We were finally on our way to knocking down one of the major hurdles in attaining the “economy” part of the DSE (Democratic Social Economy). It’s worth mentioning that, in the process, we also generated many billions of dollars for the phone companies. But, thankfully, since we took the time to patent our invention of transactions over mobile devices, the mobile phone companies awarded us with $150 million (U.S. dollars) for our efforts. This meant that along with enabling global electronic payments—which was a must-have enabler for the DSE—our company also “got funded” without taking a dime from venture capitalists or Wall Street. This was the second objective of empowr’s first phase. Not taking any investor capital was important to us because of the “democratic” part of the DSE, which called for, among other objectives, returning most of the company’s revenues and profits to our users—whom we call “citizens”—instead of the typical model, where profits belong to, and are extracted out, for the benefit of the shareholders.
Working with the CIA to Save Lives
Within hours of the bombs going off, the CIA reached out to us for information. They wanted the now-dead suicide bombers’ text messaging history on our platform so that they could catch any other partners and perpetrators before they escaped or planned a next phase of their attacks. When the CIA approached us and asked us for help, I had significant reasons not to trust the U.S. government and what they were telling us. (I will explain these soon.) But it was hard to ignore the images on the television and the extreme circumstances of this event. If we didn’t cooperate and if those people ended up harming others, I knew we might regret that decision for the rest of our lives. It turned out that the information we gave to the CIA was critical in helping them detain several suspects quickly and stop future terrorist acts that those suspects had planned. To thank us, the CIA flew one of my co-founders and I out to their headquarters in Langley, Virginia and rolled out the red carpet for us. Along with a comprehensive all-day tour of their facilities plus meetings and dining with some high-ranking officials, we even saw President George H. W. Bush, who once headed up the CIA and just happened to be visiting that day to receive an honor in a special ceremony. While the end result of helping to stop more terror attacks was spectacular and memorable enough, there was another aspect of this experience that really stuck with me. Throughout all my interactions with the CIA, I noticed a common characteristic: the highest level of professionalism that I have encountered from any organization. For example, regardless of the topic we were discussing, they always had an attentive lawyer present to ensure that nothing they said nor the way that they said it might come off as threatening or intimidating to us. Every single discussion was passed through a filter of “is this appropriate or legal to ask or discuss,” which almost always slowed down the process but ensured that the rights of me and my colleagues, as U.S. citizens, were protected. It takes a lot of motivation, process, and organization to ensure that an effective and well-trained lawyer is present at all times. That was just one sign that these people were professionals. I have never witnessed people more focused on doing their job the right way and with the utmost integrity. After all of my meetings with various CIA staff members, I left with the distinct impression that virtually everyone working at the CIA really believed that they had a sacred responsibility to protect not just their fellow citizens but the other free citizens of the world, as well. It’s important to note that, following that experience, we have had no further interactions with the CIA. As I write this in mid-2015, the CIA and NSA aren’t exactly the most popular organizations in the world, partly as a result of the secrets revealed by Edward Snowden about extensive U.S. government monitoring of everyone’s communications. But, following my experience with these consummate professionals and the results that they produced, I was left with a new appreciation for the power of democratic governments to create highly efficient agencies able to reach across the world and cooperate with one another in order to save lives. In fact, one of the best things about democracy is that it fosters not only the national unity required to create intricate, complex organizations with global reach but also international cooperation, which makes that reach much more useful. It’s worth noting that no country with a democratically-elected government has ever gone to war against another democracy. Perhaps that’s one of the primary reasons democracies work so well together and have so many mutual interests. Additionally, democracy has been responsible for some of the most inspiring stories of national success ever told, which we'll discuss in the next part. (more) ►
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