VizThink Blog

The Story of VizThink

As you may have noticed in our earlier post today, June 25th is VizThink’s one-year anniversary. One of the questions we get most often is, “How did VizThink get started?”. So, we thought this might be a good time to re-tell that story:

The story begins quite a while before June 25th, 2007. Dave Gray, Chairman of Xplane, has been working with visual thinking professionally for over 15 years. During that time though, his work has been about more than just starting a company. He wanted to see visual thinking become a movement, a game changer, a community. If you’ve ever gotten an e-mail from Dave, you can see a sampling of some of those communities. One of the earliest web-based efforts was a lens on Squidoo from December 2005. As you might suspect, starting (and maintaining) a community is a lot more work than it seems. It takes both time and money.

In September of 2006, Ryan Coleman attended a small public workshop that Dave held in Toronto. Ryan had much experience in the Toronto community with BarCamps and other “un-conference” movements. in By February 2007, inspired by Dave’s idea for a Visual Thinking School, Ryan started a group he dubbed VizThink Toronto which now has 30-50 people for each gathering and covers a wide range of visual thinking topics.

Later in the Spring of 2007, Dave was in Spain launching the Xplane office in Madrid. During that time he worked with Rodolfo Carpintier, President of Digital Assets Deployment, a business incubator focused on companies whose competitive edge is based on powerful networks created by communities. In one of their many discussions, Dave shared his idea for a visual thinking community. Sharing a similar idea and passion, Rodolfo suggested a business that reached a global market and decided to fund what was to become VizThink. So, with the money in place, the search began to put the team in place.

Dave reached out to his extensive network, which happened to include Jay Cross, the Informal Learning guru from Berkeley, California. Jay made the connection with Tom Crawford who he had worked with in the e-Learning field. After several discussions with Dave and Rodolfo, Tom was hired as CEO of the fledgling company. On the morning of June 25th, 2007, Dave, Tom, and Rodolfo met in Portland to kick off the business. Nearly all of the first 3 days were spent in brainstorming, ideation, discussion, and sometimes debate: What constitutes visual thinking? What does the community look like? Who are visual thinkers? How do you grow a community? Can a community be sustainable? If so, how long does it take? What should the business model be? What kind of team needs to be in place? How much money is needed? By when? What are the possibilities when this is successful? What does success look like?

At the end of the third day, it seemed that they had lots of information, but were no closer to an answer. And then it happened, the spark of an idea. The answer was an association model…a membership and a series of events. That idea launched what became the business model for VizThink. Work began immediately on the first event, VizThink ‘08, by brainstorming facilitators, topics, sponsors, locations, logistics, and budgets.

Of course, as with any other start up, many other things had to be put in place…bank accounts, credit, business plan, budgets, strategic plans, logo, e-mail, website, blog, systems and all the other infrastructure that goes along with running a business. In August of 2007, while on a long weekend in upstate New York, Tom ran into Chris Pascucci, a former colleague with significant experience in technology infrastructure, event production, and event technology. Chris joined VizThink in October of that year and began immediate work on the technology needs of the company.

We ran our first (and only to date) print ad, in the October (final) issue of Business 2.0. The rest of our marketing was done virally through e-mail, blog posts, and word of mouth. In late December 2008, the future looked dark for VizThink, with only about 200 people signed up for the inaugural event, even breaking even seemed a distant possibility. But things were about to change dramatically. Right after the new year, registrations increased exponentially. By the time we arrived in San Francisco at the end of January, VizThink ‘08 had almost 400 people in attendance. We even had to have additional print runs done of the materials and several extra trips to the office supply store (conveniently located across the street). VizThink ‘08 wasn’t just a success in numbers, but also in content. With almost 40 facilitators, we pulled the best of the best from our industry, each volunteering their time because of their passion for visual thinking.

VizThink ‘08 was also where we ran into Ryan again. He had already agreed to help as a volunteer with starting up other communities like Toronto. He was even one of our facilitators for a very popular conference breakout session. Over the next few months and after several discussions, Ryan joined VizThink in May of 2008 to help us grow the community. He’s responsible for assisting the regional groups like Toronto, Austin, and London, adding more communities, growing the virtual community on our social network, and evangelizing visual thinking to the broader community.

We’re pretty excited, for sure, not only about making it to the one-year mark, but also all the things we have planned for the next year and beyond. In less than a week, just about 1 year to the day after the start of the company, we’ll be launching our next major phase…an online community of visual thinkers. This social network will be a place that visual thinkers from around the globe can go to find others like them, to share ideas, to find tools, to research companies, and to contribute to the growth of this industry. We’re also deep into planning both VizThink Europe ‘08, VizThink North America ‘09, multiple workshops, and several new regional communities. It’s a busy and exciting time at VizThink. We can’t wait to see what the future holds.

We believe that in today´s rush, companies need to move faster than in the past. The move from long memos and painful presentations to quick and easy visual explanations is a must. Our goal is to drive the revolution in the way people communicate, create understanding, and move to action. We want to create thousands of new professional jobs for visual thinkers worldwide, both as employees of large corporations and as independent producers. We look forward to partnering with each of you to grow the network and grow all of our skills.

We want to take this time to thank Dave, Rodolfo, our facilitators, our sponsors, our attendees, and especially you for your involvement in making VizThink and the visual thinking community a success. Without you, none of this would be possible. Here’s to another exciting year and many more after that!

Sincerely,

Your friends and colleagues at VizThink