Rewards in exchange for problem solving, Christian Cotichini explains HeroX

Interview with Christian Cotichini | Co-founder & CEO | HeroX www.herox.com Bio who explains more about their Rewards initiative.

What is your background briefly?

My name is Christian Cotichini, I am a longtime entrepreneur. HeroX is my fourth startup, two were acquired, one went public. The last one, Make Technologies was acquired by Dell back when they were going private. After that I took some time off and went on sabbatical, including travel, conferences and a lot of reading – that’s when I met Peter Diamandis, co-founder of XPRIZE and author of Abundance and Bold. We started collaborating and that lead to us co-founding HeroX.

Entrepreneurial insights with Christian Cotichini, HeroX

How does it seem like a logical background to what you do now?

Logical in that my background has always been in disruptive innovation, helping organizations by bringing a brand new approach to solving a problem using new technology. Crowdsourcing is definitely a disruptive innovation in the marketplace. I had a lot of experience bringing technology solutions to businesses helping them solve problems in new ways, and adopting new technologies.

On the other hand, when I started HeroX I knew nothing about crowdsourcing and I had never run an online platform before. So, there was definitely a learning curve there but my background in serving customers and innovating has been very valuable.

1 min pitch for what you are doing now?

HeroX is the world’s problem solving platform. What we have created is a platform that lets any organization (be it a public sector, private sector, non-profit, startup, or even an individual) solve any problem, in any field, using the power of the crowd. The platform lets you tap into the collective knowledge of the global cognitive intelligence of all people. It’s really a social network model that will let organizations extend beyond their current team and their current resources to accelerate their rate of innovation and access talent.

Why did you get involved with this project?

The nice thing about taking time off after selling my third company was I got a chance to think. One of the products of that thinking was reflecting back and realizing that one of the best experiences I had in business was when I was in over my head, had lost sight of shore if you will, and had to figure out how to do things. So, part of that was wanting to do something really big, and not playing safe.

Another product of this thinking was realizing that the last company we did was kind of boring, it was a business solution but it didn’t really make a difference to the world. While it was a successful financial endeavour, it just didn’t really mean a lot to me at the time after all. So, I wanted to do something that was going to make a big difference in the world.

I started to look around and realized what we are seeing in the marketplace is that the internet is accelerating the rate of change, both innovation and disruption. We are getting more and more problems created, and organizations aren’t very well equipped to solve those problems. There’s this weird situation where, on the one hand, we live in the best times ever with some of the greatest innovations and progress. On the other hand, we are accumulating lots of big problems, in lots of key areas.

The other thing I realized is that there has never been more talent out there globally. There is a tremendous amount of talent, in other words there is a tremendous amount of problem solvers but most of them don’t have a seat at the table. They don’t have an opportunity to participate. There are big barriers to people being able to make a difference, yet we have all this talent. Crowdsourcing is a great approach because it creates an open call, it allows open innovation.

I realized finally that If we create a platform that lets everybody participate in problem solving, and acts as a middle ground between organizations who have these problems or are tasked to solve problems, and the power of the crowd… that would make a very big difference to the world.

Why do you think it is such a powerful idea?

With HeroX being my fourth startup I’ve learned a lot about how to make startups successful. One of the things I’ve learned is that you have got to discover the underlying dynamics of how your business works and if you really want to break through, you are going to be the one discovering that.

Peter Thiel in his book “Zero to One” calls this the “secret truth”, in his book he mentions that successful startups revolve around a secret truth – something that is true and not well known – and they leverage that secret truth to dominate their space and their industry.

When I looked at crowdsourcing, I went on crunchbase and looked at the ‘crowdsourcing’ keyword and there were over 700 venture-backed crowdsourcing startups. This is back when HeroX was being founded, in 2013.

What I realized was that nobody has figured out how to scale crowdsourcing. Most of these crowdsourcing companies, the ones that were successful, were niche players. What was really needed was a horizontal platform that was going to do what Amazon has done for ecommerce, what AirBNB has done for shared accommodations, etc. “Google it”, or “Amazon it” will soon be akin to “HeroX it”, in other words our aim is for HeroX to be to crowdsourcing as Amazon is to ecommerce.

The mainstream adoption of crowdsourcing on the internet requires a horizontal platform to bring social proof and the access that allows people to adopt it.

From day one we knew that we needed to find a completely different model than everybody else. And we found that, we call it Crowd 2.0 and it makes HeroX fundamentally different than any other platform that’s out there.

Why do you think it will get traction over other similar projects?

The standard model for a crowdsourcing platform is to think of themselves as a two-sided market, where they have the crowd on one side and they have the companies on the other side. The companies post projects and then the crowd solves those projects. It’s a transactional and monolithic model, we call that Crowd 1.0.

It works well in niches where you’ve got data science experts, coders or cyber security… but it doesn’t work well for companies or organizations who have their problems where they don’t even know what the answer is – they don’t know if it’s a data science or coding problem. So, we have reverse-engineered that model to basically create a platform that lets any company launch their problem, customized to their needs, they then recruit the crowd and it’s their own crowd.

Rather than having this 2-sided market, instead what we do is almost like a social network where companies launch projects. Those projects can be any mix of talent or technical skills etc. (by the way, most projectsinvolve multiple disciplines – which can’t work in the 2-sided model) and then they attract their crowd.

The crowd might be 30 people for a small project, or it might be 3,000 or 300,000… but they are people who have self-selected. They have read what the company needs and they have signed up to solve that problem. And that social network model is just fundamentally different than traditional crowdsourcing, so that’s why we call it Crowd 2.0.

HeroX creates a one-stop shop for companies. Rather than having to go to all these different markets for the different talent, they can just post challenges on HeroX and then they get their own version of network effect. Ultimately that is what will work for a business; to have this one-stop shop.

How do people get cash / how much / how do you ensure it is an original insight?

Our customers can use HeroX to do any form of crowdsourcing, as long as it’s ethical, legal and safe. We have a basic toolkit that allows them to do that.

By far, the most common model is the innovation prize model where they post a bounty… “10,000 for the best design that solves this problem” for example. But we have the ability to launch a broad range of models and we’ve done projects where millions of dollars are awarded, and we’ve done projects where there’s hundreds or thousands of dollars.

For nonprofits and for social sectors we’ve done projects where people are just solving a problem that they want solved. That’s the power of the Crowd 2.0 model, is that ability for each company or individual to customize their incentives.

In terms of how we ensure that it’s an individual insight, it’s up to the company to evaluate and select from the submissions the ones that they pick. They are not obligated to pick one, so if they don’t find a solution that’s suitable, they don’t pay… it’s a pay for success model. What we have found that it is very successful and rewarding for both sides.

Worth pointing out – we are not positioning HeroX as a gig economy platform where solvers can make a regular income from doing this. It is more about hobbies, moon-lighting, people who want to develop skills or pivot their career into a new market, or students who are working on a PhD go ‘look at that, a company is actually asking for my solution in a crowdsourcing project!’ …

This is really about magnetizing the existing ideas and innovations (and innovators) that are out there and essentially leveraging the spare cycles of human ingenuity and ‘organic’ intelligence for the areas that still only a human can do. Clay Shirky wrote a book called ‘Cognitive Surplus’, and the whole point is that he estimated that there is a buildup of free time among the world’s educated population – maybe a trillion hours per year, it’s just out there, not being tapped.

As we scale, companies will naturally want to use the platform more and more and that will start looking like more traditional gigs, where the crowdsourcing is really about selecting the best resource to do a project, and that will start getting into using the crowd as an extended labour pool.

The digital workforce out there, they tend to be highly curious and interested, highly educated… and underemployed. You’ve got people who have a degree in biology and they are a bank teller. They’re bored and their work is not engaging them 100%. And so, HeroX gives them an opportunity to weaponize their interest, and it makes a meaningful difference to people.

Even if you don’t win let’s say a challenge, by participating you are developing your resume and your work experience that is going to be useful and valuable in the field of your choice. Which is why we call it HeroX, because our platform for the crowd, is the platform for each person to find their hero’s journey.

I would even go so far as to say that the real value we are creating is that we are really creating the missing social network for work, because there is no social network for work. We are using crowdsourcing and open innovation as bait to bring companies on the platform, and as we scale it will start looking like a social network for people to participate in their vocation because they are not going to want to use Facebook for that.

How can people find out more about you personally & your work?

The best place to start is through my LinkedIn page.

More about Christian here ->

With over 20 years of experience leading startup and high growth technology companies, Christian Cotichini is an active angel investor and mentor to startup entrepreneurs. In the mid-1990s, Christian founded Absolute Software, a leader in computer security and asset management. After going public, Absolute continues to grow and has diversified into a solution for organizations to manage the massive proliferation of Internet devices.

Christian then went on to found MAKE Technologies, a platform for the transformation and modernization of its clients’ legacy and mission-critical software systems. While remaining on the Board of MAKE, Christian left day-to-day activities to join co-founder Shannon Susko on a new startup, Subserveo. A SaaS company, Subserveo targeted the post-2008 compliance and regulatory challenges faced by the banking sector. Subserveo was acquired by DST Systems in 2011. MAKE was then also sold to Dell Computers in 2012.

In 2013, Christian joined HeroX as co-founder and CEO. He is also focused on angel/seed financing, hands-on entrepreneurship, mentoring, M&A, and anti-consulting to startups and emerging disruptive companies.

More information about Irish Tech News and the Business Showcase, see more stories here.

FYI the ROI for you is => Irish Tech News now gets over 1.5 million monthly views, and up to 900k monthly unique visitors, from over 160 countries. We have over 860,000 relevant followers on Twitter on our various accounts & were recently described as Ireland’s leading online tech news site and Ireland’s answer to TechCrunch, so we can offer you a good audience!

Since introducing desktop notifications a short time ago, which notify readers directly in their browser of new articles being published, over 16000 people have now signed up to receive them ensuring they are instantly kept up to date on all our latest content. Desktop notifications offer a unique method of serving content directly to verified readers and bypass the issue of content getting lost in people’s crowded news feeds.

Drop us a line if you want to be featured, guest post, suggest a possible interview, or just let us know what you would like to see more of in our future articles. We’re always open to new and interesting suggestions for informative and different articles. Contact us, by email, twitter or whatever social media works for you and hopefully we can share your story too and reach our global audience.

Irish Tech News

---

If you would like to have your company featured in the Irish Tech News Business Showcase, get in contact with us at Simon@IrishTechNews.ie or on Twitter: @SimonCocking