In 2020, we are advocating Digital Literacy for everyone with Humans of Tech & you can too!
We decided to open up Humans of Tech to become a global brand with global contributors.
2 years of HOT things
HOT started in 2017 in Ho Chi Minh City during a Sunday when I was chilling on my couch, watching Facebook after a night playing video games with friends. I saw these Humans of new york post and I found it authentic, unique and inspiring. At that time GetLinks was facing an issue: there are only a few people considering “working in tech”, most of the population were still considering going to work for banks or SMEs. So how could I help a generation shift towards going for jobs in technology which they supposedly didn’t graduate for and required a lot of self-learning and grit to acquire new skills? It was a hard problem to fix. But I thought Storytelling always win, so I created this FB page on my mobile and started to post some portraits and some stories of my friends from different backgrounds sharing how they got to work in the tech industry. HOT was born. 1 year later we had our first high-quality video making records shares, likes and organic views: we were finally on something!
Trying to scale the community ourselves: Failures
End 2018, we thought nothing could stop us, we were on fire really. With 100+ employees across 4 offices, one 12 people large digital marketing team with a dedicated head of brand, dedicated event manager and dedicated content writers we thought we could make anything successful. We then wanted to take Humans of Tech to the next level by creating a festival of a couple of thousands of people in Vietnam like the one we did successfully in 2016 in the early days of GetLinks with 5 team members and fifty volunteers. We thought with Alibaba, the new funding, the big international team and our big client base it would be 10 times easier to do such an event.
I was wrong. What I didn’t consider was that with scale and power come gravity and politics. Moving 100 internal people with their own job roles, KPIs, habits, and fears were so hard to move to support this side project that somehow we ended up no raising enough sponsorship for the festival to happen, having few people getting to fights and 3 months of planning lost.
GetLinks has lost a lot of money and momentum with this, instead of focusing on raising Series B, I focused on designing this event and our series B got delayed. A lot of damages happened in the company from this strategic mistake and we lost almost completely our Humans of Tech team internally. But a few learning points here, however...
Learning the community need to be served by the community.
Thinking GetLinks to own the community of Humans Of Tech was wrong. A company can never OWN people. That's dystopian and wrong. We might have forgotten this: Humans Of tech couldn't be effectively run by the internal GetLinks team, as GetLinks would always be incentivized to try to recruit or place these HOT people into jobs. Which was wrong.
We realized HOT should be a separate entity, run by a separate team of volunteers and contributors who want to own the brand and the activities. By the community, for the sake of the community. We started to realize tons of people were willing to write blogs or snap live videos related to tech in their own city and own language, we should simply empower them to do them instead of doing it by ourselves with limited passion and resources. This is what we decided to move towards: HOT will be a non-for profit initiative, mainly run by community time contributions to advocate digital literacy in emerging markets.
2020 and forward
Moving forward, Humans of Tech will be centered around 3 pillars :
Our — Tech People Only — Social Network app is live for people to download, we will accept people only after verifying that they have tech skills, no headhunters allowed! Check it out here
Our Digital literacy events platform will now be opened to the community to publish events. Anyone can create their own tech event and will be live in distributed to the community. Submit your event here
Our Blog becomes Humans Of Tech Media, a crowdsourced contributive digital media for anyone who is committed to publishing good content can own his content channel in front of our 500,000 tech talents database. Click here to open you channel
2020 will be bright for Humans of Tech as we finally moved towards becoming a media for geeks by geeks and by the community, for itself.
Wishing everyone a HOT 2020!
