The Next Web NYC - Cindy Gallop, Makelovenotporn

Huge, very tall order. I'm very, very impressed with the work that she's done. She is, of course, the founder of MakeLoveNotPorn, and she's a big fan of taxidermy and has a lot of stuffed animals. Ladies and gentlemen, Cindy Gallop! My startup is an accident. By the way, can we get the timer set to 20 so I know what I'm doing, guys? Thanks. I date younger men, and about nine or ten years ago, I began realizing through dating younger men that I was encountering what happens when today's total freedom of access to hardcore porn online meets our society's equally total reluctance to talk openly and honestly about sex. Porn becomes, by default, sex education in not a good way. So, I decided to do something about this, and eight years ago, I put up on no money a tiny, clunky website at MakeLoveNotPorn.com that posts the myths of hardcore porn and balances them with reality. So the construct is porn world versus real world. I launched MakeLoveNotPorn at TED in 2009, where I'm the only TED speaker ever to utter the words, come on my face, on the TED stage, six times in succession. The talk went viral instantly, and it drove an extraordinary global response to my tiny, clunky site that I had never anticipated. I realized that I'd uncovered a huge global social issue, and I saw the opportunity to do something that I believe in very strongly, which is that the future of business is doing good and making money simultaneously. I saw the opportunity for a big business solution to a huge, untapped global social need. I should stress that MakeLoveNotPorn is not anti-porn because the issue isn't porn. The issue is that we don't talk about sex in the real world. If we did, among a host of other benefits, people would then bring a real world mindset to the viewing of what we're doing. To the viewing of what is artificial entertainment. Our tagline at MakeLoveNotPorn is pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-knowing the difference. And our mission is one thing only, which is to help the world more easily talk about sex. Talk about sex openly and honestly in the public domain. By that I mean parents to kids, teachers to schools, everyone to everyone. And equally importantly, talk about sex openly and honestly privately. In your intimate relationships. So I decided to take every dynamic that exists out there in social media and apply them to the one area no other social network or platform will go in order to socialize sex. And to make real world sex and talking about it socially acceptable and therefore ultimately just as socially shareable as anything else we share on Facebook, Tumblr, Twitter, Instagram. So four years ago, my team and I launched in public beta, MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. Which is an entirely user generated, crowd sourced video sharing platform that celebrates real world sex. Anybody from anywhere in the world can submit to us videos of themselves having real world sex. And we're very clear what we mean by this. We're not porn. We're not amateur. We're building a whole new category online that has never previously existed. Social sex. So our competition isn't porn. It's Facebook and YouTube. Or it would be. If Facebook and YouTube allowed sexual self-expression and self-identification, which they don't. Videos on MakeLoveNotPorn are not about performing for the camera. They're simply about doing what you do on every other social platform. Capturing what goes on in the real world as it happens spontaneously in all its funny, messy, glorious, silly, wonderful, beautiful humanness. We curate to make sure of that. Watch every video to make sure it's real. And we have a revenue sharing business model. I believe the business model of the future is shared values plus shared action equals shared profit. Financial profit and social profit. I designed MakeLoveNotPorn around that business model. So you pay to rent and stream real world sex videos. And then 50% of that income goes to our contributors or as we like to call them our MakeLoveNotPorn stars. Because we would like our MakeLoveNotPorn stars one day to be as famous and celebrated as YouTube stars for the same reasons. Realness, authenticity, individuality. And we would like them to make just as much money. We want to hit the kind of critical mass where one day your MakeLoveNotPorn video could hit a million rentals at five bucks per rental and we give you half of that income. We are the answer to the economy. We call ourselves the social sex revolution. With the emphasis on social. Because we are doing what every other social platform does. Connecting people. We connect people around the social sharing of sex. To get to better communication about sex. To get to better sex. To get to better relationships. To get to better lives. Now, the one thing I did not realize when I embarked on this venture was that my team and I would fight a battle every single day to build it. We are a piece of business infrastructure any other tech startup can take for granted. We can't because the small print always says no adult content. And this is all pervasive across every area of the business in ways that people outside this sphere don't realize. It's challenging getting funded. Getting banked. Putting payments in place. PayPal won't work with adult content. Stripe can't work with adult content. Mainstream credit card processors won't. We have to build the perfect service we want to use. Be it hosting, encoding, encrypting. The TOS always say no adult content. I have to go to the people at the top of the company, explain what we're doing, beg to be allowed to work with them. We had to build our entire video sharing streaming platform from scratch ourselves. Because off the shelf components, existing streaming services won't stream adult content. Our biggest obstacle, particularly when it comes to raising funding, is the social dynamic that I call the end of the world. Fear of what other people will think. Because it's never about what the person I'm talking to thinks. When you understand what we're doing and why we're doing it, nobody can argue with it. The business case is clear. It is always their fear of what they think other people will think which operates around sex more than any other area. And by the way, fear of what other people will think is the single most paralyzing dynamic in business and in life. You will never own the future if you care what other people think. So I realized very early on that I was going to have to pave my own way. Because despite all these obstacles, we have over four years grown to 400,000 members globally. We have over 100 MakeLoveNotPorn stars. We've had over 1,000 videos submitted. But imagine how much bigger we could have grown and how much more successful we could have been if we didn't have these barriers. So I have to break down the barriers in my own path if I want to scale MakeLoveNotPorn to be the billionth of a billion. I know it can be. And so I am doing what I tell other entrepreneurs to do. Which is when you have a truly world-changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around. I am in the Steve Jobs business of reality distortion. If reality tells me that I can't build MakeLoveNotPorn the way I want to, I'm going to change reality. So four years ago, I deliberately began defining, pioneering, and championing my own category, sex tech. I literally wrote the post on sex tech. If you Google what is sex tech, I am result number one on page one. This is my definition. Any form of technology or tech venture that enhances, innovates, and disrupts in any area of human sexuality and sexual experience. And I have set out to demonstrate. To demonstrate precisely why the next big thing in tech is disrupting sex. For a host of reasons, but here are the three primary ones. Sex tech delivers the biggest and most profound social benefit of any area of tech. The reason MakeLoveNotPorn exists is because today the average age at which a child is first exposed to hardcore porn online is eight. And a global study done by Bitdefender three years ago indicated that age is eight. The average age had in fact dropped to six. This is not because eight-year-old and six-year-old go looking for porn. They don't. It's a function of what in the digital world we live in today is utterly inevitable and cannot be prevented. They stumble across it. And so, we now live in a world where we cannot go on behaving around sex and porn the way we always have. The answer to everything that worries us about that is not to shut down, censor, clamp down, block, repress. It's to open up. Open up the dialogue in the way we're working too at MakeLoveNotPorn. Open up to welcoming, supporting, and funding entrepreneurs like me who want to disrupt all of this for the better. And open up to allowing us to do business in the same way everybody else does. And when you do that, you completely transform the business landscape of adult. I like in this context to repurpose Wayne LaPierre of the NRA's infamous gun control quote. The only thing that stops a bad guy with a business is a good guy with a better business. And I emphasize the business specifically because sex tech is the single biggest unicorn-making opportunity of them all. Peter Thiel writes in his book Zero to One, what valuable company is nobody else building? Secrets about people are relatively underappreciated. What are people not allowed to talk about? What is forbidden or taboo? The best problems to work on are often the ones that nobody else even tries to solve. Peter Thiel is not taking his own advice because he's not investing in sex tech, but he should be. Because, oh my god guys, the money there is to be made. But in two areas, the second one of which right now no one even thinks about because no one thinks it's possible. So the first area is obviously the money to be made out of sex. We all have it. We all enjoy it. Recession proof. Market never goes away. But the second area is, oh my god, the money there is to be made out of socially acceptable sex. When you do what we're doing at MakeLoveNotPorn, socialize sex, make it socially acceptable and shareable, you potentially double, triple, quadruple your returns when you normalize. People feeling really okay about publicly buying into your goods and services, publicly doing what they do with everything else. Advocate, share, recommend, review, and publicly badging themselves as brand ambassadors. That's the trillion dollar financial future we're going after, and the proof that that's achievable is out there right now. Because at this moment, the single highest income grossing author in the world is E.L. James. The author of Fifty Shades of Grey has out-earned every other blockbuster author. Fifty Shades of the Movie broke box office opening weekend records. That is the financial power of socially acceptable, socially shareable sex. Something that John Evans of TechCrunch realized when he covered MakeLoveNotPorn last year and wrote, socially acceptable sex is a huge market. More interestingly, it's a huge new market. And the third reason sex tech is so powerful is because everything is redeployable. Rule 34 of the internet, if it exists, there is porn of it. Gallup's rule, if tech exists, it's redeployable as sex tech. Every form of technology, every tech platform, every tech concept is entirely redeployable in a sex context. So, despite the enormous potential of this sector, I've been battling to raise $2 million to scale MakeLoveNotPorn. And so I realized I had to take things one step further. I not only have to define pioneer and champion my category, I now have to fund it. So I am now raising $10 million to fund the sex tech incubator, accelerator, fund and holding company of the future. Because nobody else is. Nobody is doing this anywhere in the world. Because of my profile as a champion of sex tech, sex tech entrepreneurs write to me every day. I have access to extraordinary sex tech deal flow. But these entrepreneurs have the same barriers I do. All of those go away with funding. So, I want to build this. And guys, I've saved a reveal for today because I've been talking about this for the past few months. But what I have not told anybody publicly is, what this company is called. And so I'm revealing that to you today. The name of my sex tech holding company and fund is derived from a quote by Chairman Mao, who said a long time ago, women hold up half the sky. He was making a statement about gender equality. I think that's unambitious. And so my company is called All The Sky Holdings. You can find us at alltheskyholdings.com where we have a very plonky landing page, rather much. But actually that name is deliberate. Because we plan to focus, not exclusively, but specifically on sex tech ventures founded by women. The most innovative and disruptive things in sex tech today are coming from female founders. Women challenge the status quo because we are never it. We are finally owning our sexuality and finding very unique ways to leverage and capitalize on that in business. And by the way, New York is a particular hub for female sex tech founders. So much so that we formed the Women of Sex Tech group. You can find us on Twitter and on Facebook. And that network comprises amazing women like Polly Rodriguez, the founder of Unbound, a sex subscription service. Janet Lieberman and Alex Fine of Dame Products, who created the Ava vibrator that a woman can wear during sex to ensure she orgasms. Tina Gong, who created Happy Playtime, which is an app that destigmatizes and gamifies female masturbation. What we all recognize is that there is a huge amount of money to be made out of taking women seriously, especially in this area. There is an enormous market in women's needs, wants, and desires that have historically been deemed to embarrassing, shameful, taboo, or sensitive to be addressed in business. And by the way, when you tap into that huge primary market of women, you also tap into a huge secondary market of extremely happy men. But what I want to create with All The Sky is a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts. Here's what I mean by that. First of all, every infrastructure challenge, every obstacle sex tech founders face, is a huge disruptive business opportunity in itself. The first bank that banks honestly, honest, legal sex tech companies will clean up. The first payment processor that processes payments for honest, legal sex tech companies will clean up. The three huge disruption opportunities in tech today are sex, cannabis, and the blockchain. And ironically, investors are flooding into the other two more than they are the first. Which means that VCs and startups in cannabis and the blockchain can afford to fund lobbyists, regulation change, public education initiatives, foundations. We need all that in sex tech because we need a new legal definition of adult content. But while we're working towards that, the ability of a fund like All The Sky to actually make those problems go away with its own infrastructure, which can then be used by many, many companies outside its own portfolio, is colossal. Secondly, when you bring together a portfolio of the kind of sex tech ventures I want to fund with All The Sky, you have phenomenal opportunities for cross-selling, cross-traffic, cross-promotion, and, very importantly, cross-data. We have the potential to be the Kinsey of today. Real world, real time, real life human sexual behavior, captured and aggregated in a way that nobody else is doing. In an era that is notoriously research and data free. Because for all the reasons I battle, nobody is funding the comm score of sex and porn. And by the way, that's a billion dollar idea in itself. And also in the area of research and data, where there's the widest possible gap between what people say and what people actually do. And we are all about what people actually do. And thirdly, there is far greater and broader business applicability and financial returns when you open up around sex. A lot of people have a lot of sex in cars. Especially in markets where young people live at home with their parents until they get married. Where premarital sex is frowned upon. Where whole households live together so that husbands and wives can't even find privacy themselves to be intimate. A lot of people are having a lot of sex in cars all around the world. And yet the automotive industry is spectacularly failing to factor this into product design and marketing. Even more fundamentally, people have sex in bed. And yet the mattress industry focuses all of its R&D on sleep. People have sex on kitchen counters. The kitchen counter industry is failing to take account of this. There are far wider business money-making opportunities to take advantage of when you acknowledge that. The first automotive brand that actually designs and markets a car specifically to have sex in will clean up. What do you think people are going to be doing in self-driving cars? I'll rest my case. And so, you know, I think the takeaway, guys, that I want to give you coming out of all of this is that, you know, in order to build my own startup, I had to build a category. In order to make my own startup successful, I have to make the category successful. Whatever industry you work in currently, it's a safe bet that all around you, you see the business syndrome. It's a business syndrome that I call collaborative competition. Collaborative competition is when everybody in a sector competes with others in the sector by doing exactly the same thing everyone else in the sector is doing. I believe instead the future is what I call competitive collaboration. When all of us in the sector come together and collaborate in order to make things better for all of us on the premise of a rising tide floats all boats. That's what then allows each of us to be uniquely competitive off the top of that wave, leveraging our own individual skills and talents. Fast Company contacted me a couple of years ago to say, we want to write a feature about all the obstacles you face building MakeLoveNotPorn. I went, great, I'd love to do that, but I will only agree to be interviewed on one condition. I want you to interview these five other sex tech founders I'm going to introduce you to. I don't care if my and MakeLoveNotPorn's column inches go down to this much. I want the world to know there's an entire movement of us out there and we cannot be stopped. And so. You know, I want to ask every single one of you to do something nobody else has ever asked you to. I want you to consider starting a sex tech venture, supporting a sex tech venture, working for a sex tech venture and funding a sex tech venture. Because building this category, I've realized every other big bet ever made in the history of tech pales against sex tech. And I would love you to help make that real and also to take advantage of that yourself. Because trust me again, nobody else in the world currently is. So anybody who wants to talk to me about sex tech, MakeLoveNotPorn or all the sky, and particularly, by the way, interested investors who want to clean up in the next trillion dollar industry, please email cindymakelovenotporn.com. I'm around for the rest of the day. Find me and come and talk to me. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Cindy. I really hope this this industry explodes. We're going into a break right now. The break's up until 20 past 11. There's still some startups doing pitch battles in the business area. Go and get yourself some coffee and be back here in a bit. Enjoy.