Written by Michael Simmons for Forbes. Originally published on August 11, 2014.
“I date younger men… Predominantly men in their twenties… And when I date younger men, I have sex with younger men,” Cindy Gallop shared matter-of-factly.
Except this wasn’t a private conversation with a close friend. It was on the stage of TED’s main conference talking to hundreds of the smartest people in the world and the 800,000+ people that would go on to watch her video. It certainly wasn’t what you’d expect from a former senior advertising executive (49 at the time) and the former chair of the board at international advertising agency, BBH.
Cindy Gallop wasn’t being spontaneous. She was making one of the most calculated decisions of her career as a way to launch her new company, MakeLoveNotPorn.
Many of today’s top entrepreneurial leaders are making similar decisions to Cindy’s. They are deeply sharing who they are and what they believe with the world. Everyone from Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos), Gary Vaynerchuk (co-founder of Vayner Media), Sheryl Sandberg (COO of Facebook), Jacqueline Novogratz (founder of Acumen Fund), Richard Branson, Jason Fried (co-founder of 37 signals), to Arianna Huffington (co-founder of the Huffington Post) are using books, blogs, social media, and speaking engagements to share their inside world while building their companies as the same time.
To understand why this increasingly makes sense in the digital age, we need to understand the explosion of online reputation platforms.
The Explosion Of Online Reputation Platforms
Online reputation platforms help others understand who we are, what we do, and what we own by organizing and publicly displaying related word-of-mouth. They help individuals make better decisions and facilitate exchanges that would never happen otherwise. How crazy was renting our most sacred space, our home, to a complete stranger before Airbnb!”
Read the rest here.
