Linking, knowledge and a collective consciousness
https://www.linkedin.com/in/cwhitesullivan/
- Conor White-Sullivan
CEO/Founder at Roam Research
- San Francisco, California
- 500+ connections
- Contact info
Experience
Built and managed a global team of volunteers and contractors to explore opportunities in learning and community organizing space. Prototyped products. Developed experimental online and offline communities for peer to peer research.
Experiments included:
- Learnathon — weekly events in San Francisco, where participants would try to learn as much as they could about a new subject in 8 hours (using help from each other and short workshop on rapid learning techniques) ending with lightning talks where participants would provide elegant explanations to powerful ideas they learned.
- Clojure Research Club — a listserve of Clojure Programmers who shared research questions and helped each other push the limits of their capabilities, with commitments to push the frontiers of their knowledge, inspired by Richard Hamming quote — “In Science, if you know what you’re doing, you shouldn’t be doing it…”
- Junto Maps
- Facilitated 7 groups, who each held weekly meetings where each participant would read a different book in the same field and present material to the group summarizing learnings, structure based on Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book.
- Sunday Junto
- Weekly meetings of a community to celebrate peer to peer learning. Authentic relating type exercises plus intellectual salon.…Research and development. Reported to Arianna Huffington and the HuffPost CTO.
Special projects at HuffPost included
- Development, launch, and evangelism to sales team of “Great Debates blogging feature” to measure whether blogs actually changed readers mind about the topic discussed
- Initiative to crowdsource demands from Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement
- Formed first independent product team outside of established engineering and design silos (HuffPost Labs) which lead to creation of
- HuffPost Highlights — an initiative to measure copy/paste events from the site, and allow users to share those quotes to social media, or to a dedicated section which showed worthwhile quotes.
- Representing Tech Team in partnership meetings with Oprah Winfrey and her executive team, as well as with leaders from Walmart and Qualcomm
- CTO selection committeeNorthstar is an education network where students decide for themselves what they want to learn, and are connected with volunteer teachers and community mentors who can accelerate their growth. No curriculum, only principles. While at UMass I taught small a class on Stoicism and practical philosophy, and eventually joined to board to work on strategies for financial self sufficiency and national replication. While on the board I recruited a relevant Alexa top 100 blogger to join the advisory board and connected North Star with a broader education reform movement.
Responsible for voter registration and get out the vote across Western Massachusetts for the Yes on Question 2 ballot campaign. Managed distribution of lawn signs, used traditional strategies and social media for outreach and for developing strategic relationships with collegiate groups. Campaign won with 65% of the vote. Decriminalized possession of up to one ounce of Marijuana.
Moved to Virginia to open with two co-directors an office of the Community Voters Project which assisted low income and minority voters in registering to vote. Recruited, hired, and trained canvassing staff. Identified and secured permission from more than a dozen local businesses and NGOs to allow us to canvass on their property.
Worked directly with the SVP of Marketing to manage focus groups and brand development for college market. Convinced University Food Services to let me use loading docks to receive shipments, convinced dorm mates to let me store 2,000 bottles in their various rooms. Managed local distribution, had the product selling in 3 local stores and at 2 major events in under 6 months.…
Recommendations
- I met Michael at a beachfront bar somewhere in the Bahamas, on a trip none of my team initially believed could be work related. After only about 5 minutes of talking, Mike gave some of the most rock solid, specific, actionable sales advice I've heard in a long time. The advice was the first thing I shared with my team when I got back to Boston, and even before they heard about the rest of the trip, they knew it had been worthwhile. See less
- In the product concept phase, whether a company lives or dies is generally more based on the caliber of the people involved than on the initial idea. In our most tense moments, where failure could have ended us, Kwong was there with a level head, sharp insights, and enough humor to help me work through pressure and conflict and get the job done. With a keen sense for market applications of early ideas, Kwong's assistance in identifying developer talent, developing a rigorous business plan and building the first product concept were instrumental in gaining Localocracy's first round of seed funding. See less
- Localocracy would not exist if it hadn't been for Cristo's belief and early support. He is an incredible communicator, an excellent user interface designer, and a calm and collected strategist under pressure. The best recommendation is a story: In January of 2009, Localocracy was in the early idea stages, I was a student at UMass, Cristos was working at another local start-up. It was the last night of a three day "Invention to Venture" workshop, and the next day we had to present to a panel of local investors and entrepreneurs, many of whom could help us move the idea forward. Near midnight we discovered a competitor who was essentially doing exactly what we had been talking about, and had largely cornered the market. Feeling defeated I nearly gave up. But every calm, Cristos called me back to the drawing board, and by four am we had reimagined the company and designed the product that would later win over $10,000 in prize funding. I slept, Cristos pulled together financial assumptions and graphics, then he slept, and I put together the presentation. The judges who watched us present the next day were some of the same judges who would later award Localocracy the start-up funding in the Innovation Challenge. See less
Accomplishments
3
Languages
- Arabic
- English
- German
posted by nige @ 9:55 PM
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