49: Changing the World (Wide Web) with Dan Tocchini founder of the Grid.io

Dan Tocchini wants to change how we use the web. His website design startup The Grid have had almost 50,000 founding members and they might just pull it off. For all of the advances in how we use the Internet in recent years, the options for the average person who needs to make a website can still be simultaneously dizzying and uninspiring. It usually comes down to either paying someone a bunch of money, learning to do it yourself, or buying a template. Dan Tocchini wants to change that. His startup The Grid poses the questions: What if having your own unique website was as easy as posting to Facebook? What if you could just supply the content, and a program just did the rest for you? The answer he and his team came up with is an automated alternative to services like Wordpress or Squarespace. And if Tocchini’s right, it might just change how people view the web. While the company hasn’t gone live yet, the team has racked up two hit Kickstarters, two rounds of funding, more than 31,000 preorders, and an offer from Facebook (they turned it down). So what’s all the fuss about? Well, the corners of the Internet that are thriving these days have developed fancy algorithms and design features that make it as simple as possible to connect and share information (think of the curated Facebook feed or Twitter’s 140 characters). They take the flurry of anxiety-inducing decisions away from the average person (see Barry Schwartz’s The Paradox of Choice). But website creation has been sort of left behind, Tocchini says, and relatively few Internet users have their own sites. For those who do, it’s kind of a pain. “Websites are like the atomic building block of the web, and they’ve been completely ignored by the big tech companies,” Tocchini says. He thinks the web can do better. His team has spent the past few years creating a platform that starts with content and uses software to automatically turn it into a website. Think of it as having your own web designer that makes all of the decisions for you, except that web designer is artificial intelligence. If you would like to becoming a founding member of the grid, make sure you go to https://thegrid.io/ to sign up now :) In this interview you will learn: - Why you would turn down a buyout offer from facebook - Leadership 101 - How to come up with an epic idea - How Dan's vision is going to revolutionize the web - The problem with websites right now and how the Grid plans to solve this massive problem - What it truly takes to become a successful entrepreneur - & So much more