Last week we got an illuminating insight into how entrepreneur Garrett Camp is going to develop the platform over the next year. This week we get up close and personal - Garrett tells us how success has changed his life, his advice for securing investment and we get a bird’s eye view of an average day at StumbleUpon.


Garrett, since you’re really at the forefront of web development what do you think is the next big online trend we should be looking out for?


Obviously I’m biased but I think personalization. This shift towards personalization based on like minded people and experts is something that is just starting to occur and I feel like that is going to be a really big trend in the future. You get personalization with everything you do online, but it won’t always be social.


If there was one other platform you wish you could have founded apart from StumbleUpon which one would it be and why?


Google! 


We thought you might say Facebook!


Well I like Facebook too but with Google I spend so much time on it - Google Maps, Gmail, Google Search, Google API’s – there’s a lot of good stuff they have… FB is a little more like entertainment. It tends to be a rolodex of all the people I have met but I don’t really spend a ton of time on FB chatting.


So you don’t ever get distracted at work?


I do a little. I mean everybody does! But if I didn’t have FB right now I could live without it but not having Gmail, Google Search and Google Maps that would be a bigger deal for me. The three I like a lot are Google, FB and Twitter – the ones I personally use the most. Twitter’s my news feed, Facebook is the way I stay in touch with people I don’t know quite as well.


We’d love to build up a bit of a picture of how you spend your day… Could you run us through your average day at StumbleUpon?


I wake up and walk to work. And then I come in and typically half my day is meetings; either with product managers or leads on things like marketing or PR, then external meetings, i.e. press interviews and maybe one or two interviews with potential employees per day. And in between those I try to pretty much see what’s happening on the web and go through my emails – read Techcrunch, check my Twitter feed. See if there’s anything interesting going on there, if someone’s just got funding or got acquired. Then I’ll respond to emails from investors or partners. I try to keep my day half structured and half unstructured, a lot of it is really thinking about new ideas based on what else is going on, reading and researching and brainstorming on what we should be doing to get to the next level.


What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced in the genesis of StumbleUpon and how did you overcome it?


We’re a pretty different system… I think the typical web site experience is you look at stuff, you click on links, you click back – that’s an interaction model that’s quite standard on the web. StumbleUpon’s interaction is very different, (unlike Google) it’s one at a time, it’s stumbling, and it learns what you like… You actually give feedback to improve your experience. 


I think the challenge is how you gracefully ease people into this new interaction metaphor because people are quite used to going to a search engine but they’re not used to clicking on something to see something they’re not expecting, saying whether they like it or don’t like it and then clicking again knowing that stream gets better and better over time. 


Getting people used to that idea of flipping and rating instead of searching and clicking. It’s kind of like a channel surfing experience that gets better and better.


On a more personal note… In terms of success how do you feel it has changed your life? Has it all been positive or are there any negative aspects?


The change has been I’ve got a lot busier. I think before I had responsibilities, it was just pretty easy… I had fewer meetings, less structured time; I had more time to hang out with friends, to travel. I used to be a musician, I used to play a lot of music - that was really fun - I do that a lot less now!


You talked in previous interviews about spending ‘years working from your bedroom before you saw any kind of growth’ – did you ever doubt the concept during this time? Did you ever doubt it would become successful?


I didn’t really think about how huge it would be, but I just kept thinking that whenever someone walks through a mall or looks through an aisle in a bookstore or channels on a television, they’re simply looking to find new stuff. They want to discover new content, people inherently want to discover stuff just as much as they want to search for specific things…


I was really thinking ‘how do you take what Google is and what television or the experience of a bookstore is, and how do you put those things together?’ I felt that was something most people would want to use… I felt that was a universal need. I thought that would be something interesting to work on and to try to build…


What’s you best piece of advice for budding entrepreneurs hoping to secure investment in a start up?


There are a couple; one would be try to have a prototype before you try to raise money. Obviously if you’re doing a bio medical or an energy start up you’re going to need some money to start, but if you’re doing a service or a virtual product then try to get a prototype built before you raise money because then people will actually see it in action…


If you’re already experienced and you’ve got a track record you can sell a vision, but if you’re a 23 year old kid you don’t really have the salesmanship and you haven’t built anything yet then its easier to show them something that you’ve done to impress them. With StumbleUpon we had half a million-registered users before we took advantage of any funding and because of that we had a lot of interest.


If you could have given yourself one piece of advice with the knowledge you have now what would you have said?


Maybe to subscribe to any new platform very early… With Firefox we got in with our platform right away – we got a million users on Firefox, just because we were one of the first extensions to have plug ins when Firefox came out.


You never know how big a platform will be, so if it’s taking off and you were one of the first big players then you can get a lot of traffic... If it doesn’t take off then you just don’t continue to work on it…


When you look back over your life - what would you most like to be remembered for?


Helping people travel between virtual or physical spaces – that’s really what I’ve spent most of my time on… How do you travel from one location (on the web) to another without having to know where to go? How do you get from point A to point B in a city efficiently? 


What’s the thing you most value about the success that StumbleUpon has brought you?


I’ve been able to meet a lot of interesting people, investors, entrepreneurs that I probably never would have met otherwise. If I would have been up in Canada and never started StumbleUpon, I’d probably be a researcher somewhere, but because I came to the US and started StumbleUpon I’ve definitely met people. Not just entrepreneurs but people in LA and people in New York who are in finance and film and who have very interesting personalities and I’m not sure I would have met them if StumbleUpon hadn’t got to be the size it has…


Some of the first press you had came out of the UK – does this mean you have a particular affinity with us Brits?


Well my mother’s British and my sister lives in London so I come to London fairly frequently. My mom was born in Gloucestershire. 


You really are an honorary Brit…


My grandfather was Welsh, my grandmother was English and my mom moved over when she was about five. I visit fairly frequently to see my sister. 


Read Part 1 here.

Interview by Alice Kahrmann


20th March 2012.