#126 - Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks - On how we can enable our customers to reach much bigger goals

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to enable us to achieve results and grow in ways we’d not be able to achieve on our own. My guest is Gina Bianchini, CEO of Mighty Networks.

Gina Bianchini is an American entrepreneur and investor. Before Mighty Networks, she was CEO of Ning, which she co-founded with Marc Andreessen. Under her leadership, Ning grew to 100 million people in 300,000 active social networks across subcultures, professional networks, entertainment, politics, and education.

In addition to Mighty Networks, Gina serves as a board director of TEGNA, a $3 billion broadcast and digital media company, and served as a board director of Scripps Networks, an $12 billion public company which owns HGTV, The Food Network, and The Travel Channel, which merged with Discovery Communications in 2018.

Gina has been featured on the cover of Fortune and Fast Company and in Wired, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. She has appeared on Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN.

She grew up in Cupertino, California, graduated with honors from Stanford University, started her career in the nascent High Technology Group at Goldman, Sachs & Co., and received her M.B.A. from Stanford Business School.

Her mission at Mighty Networks is to usher in a new era of creative business built on community.

And that inspired me, and hence I invited her to my podcast. We explore the challenge in the market where the world seems to be more targeting audiences, rather than creating communities. We dig deeper into the opportunity for any business to enable your customers to reach much bigger goals and stretch in ways that just are not possible operating on their own.

Here are some of her quotes:

When we see people who are successful in bringing people together and creating just an important experience in their lives, mastering something interesting, mastering something important together, it's incredibly gratifying.

What makes what we do so much fun is that it really is who we are as people to want to come together and software and digital technologies have such power to connect. But you know, so far they've been used in many cases to create even more isolation.

The best way to navigate uncertainty and rapidly changing environments is through being a member of a community, but again, not an audience, a community. That we're all sharing and contributing our stories, our experiences, and our ideas. And when we can do that, we get to make the rules together.

During this interview, you will learn three things:

1. That people don’t really need more stuff – but absolutely need more connection, and more opportunities to learn and get better.
2. How, by creating an online community you not only help your customers, but it also enables you to be much more tuned in with them to get feedback, learn,… and ideas
3. How building communities as a software business enables you to be more ambitious