People Are Inherently Weird. Everyone Wants To Be Normal But We Should Embrace Our Weirdness Cheezburger CEO Ben Huh’s VEF Talk

I went to a great talk last night by the CEO of I Can Haz Cheezburger Ben Huh. Twitter  @benhuh  His blog. It was sponsored by VEF Momentum Twitter @VEFMomentum

VEF Momentum was founded under the Vancouver Enterprise Forum with the purpose of connecting, inspiring and mentoring aspiring and emerging technology entrepreneurs in Vancouver.

Many entrepreneurs have ADHD I coach quite a few. Also quite a few people in high tech have ADHD it’s a competitive edge if you manage it properly. When I sold Apple computers, it seemed a lot more than 5% of my customers had ADHD.

I found it very useful, Ben was very open, honest, direct and helpful. He gave me a few suggestions for ADHD advocacy. Here are my notes from Ben Huh’s talk in tweet format.

Life is never what it’s supposed to be

Weird doesn’t mean you’re alone. Thx internet

You can fuck up, lose $250k, work for $8.50/hr & create a business where investors give you $30 million

More people will experience the internet on the phone then the laptop. The laptop is an anomoly

The internet isn’t something we can take for granted i.e. #sopa #tellviceverything

Internet culture will produce the rockstars of tomorrow

Users create more media in one day than mainstream media creates in a year

In the world of the blind men, the one who gropes better wins

Within 2 weeks of joining the WordPress VIP program, I Can Haz Cheezburger was their largest customer

Crap is now gold

People are inherently weird. Everyone wants to be normal but we should embrace our weirdness

Before mass media, all humour was personal. People’s natural connections are individual

Google Twitter and Facebook are 3 of the would’s most powerful media companies. They don’t create their own content

Cheezburger doesn’t create the content. They facilitate the content

I consume therefore I Internet

I participate therefore I Internet

Running a startup is really hard. If you lie about your failures it’s even harder

Money is only useful if you let it leverage your dreams
The world has too many people who follow money. Too few people who follow their dreams

If you follow money, you’ll die with nothing. If you follow your dreams, you’ll live the world a gift.

There is no proper path with entrepreneurship. As long as it’s legal and ethical it’s fine

Best advice Ben Huh got from an entrepreneur was you’re not as good as you think you are & you’re not as bad as others say you are
Here’s a video of Ben Huh rope jumping off Corona Arch in Utah

More videos on his blog post Cheezburger owns 60 sites and 2,000 domains.

We hire people who want to listen to our audience

My question to him about how Cheezburger filters. We match what machines to very well with what humans do very well. He elaborated a bit more but I wasn’t able to write down those details, if you remember please let me know in the comments.

Memes are native formats to the internet

Eventually you won’t be able to tell the difference between internet culture and mainstream culture

We want to connect to people like us

The Chuck Norris Facts guy wrote several books on it, he got in the NYT bestseller list in part because Chuck Norris sued him.

We figure out how to connect you with the content you love

Ben Huh started Cheezburger in 2007 bought it from a guy who built it, became profitable in the first 3 months.

We call failure a pivot. A pivot means someone fucked up and you did something different.  Twitter and TurntableFM were pivots

Our business model is advertising. We do merchandising but it’s more more our fans, not a big revenue generator.

Make the world happy for 5 minutes a day. That’s our company mission but it’s not written down anywhere at the office but every employee knows it before they show up.

I love cats but I’m allergic to cats. I live vicarously through the site.

We hire people who want to listen to our audience.