In the summer of 2006, Gordon Gould didn’t spend much time worrying about how to split ThisNext’s winnings with volunteer workers. Far more pressing was the need to lure thousands of volunteer workers to his new site. Here, like most free-labor entrepreneurs, he faced a chicken-or-egg dilemma: how to entice people to perform for a crowd that doesn’t yet exist? His answer was to create one. He and his team went out and interviewed a few hundred people—fashion designers, athletes, and activists—and then seeded ThisNext with their thoughts and recommendations. “When the first visitors came, there was a there there,” Gould says. The content on the site, he adds, had to be good. “If people come and see it’s lowbrow and ghetto, it’s going to stay that way.”
