1. What are you doing and how did you get there?

I first got started with search engines in 2005, after dropping out of law school. I decided I needed a career that would allow my creativity to flourish, so I started my own business, a college consulting company. The problem was, no traffic was coming to the site. I spent the next year and a half reading everything the web had to offer on SEO and trying it all out on my own site. After months of trial and error, one day I typed in my keyword, “college admission essay”, into Google, and it was #1. Cracking Google’s code launched my career as an entrepreneur, allowing me to start 8 businesses, including Cartoon Doll Emporium, which was one of the largest kids websites online last year. I have since sold 5 of my businesses. In 2010, I started First Page Sage. We do SEO and social media marketing for Fortune 500 companies, celebrities, and politicians. I was also recently contacted by Pearson Education and asked to write my first book, Outsmarting Google.

2.Tell us the story of your latest project / occupation.

Having built large audiences for many companies, I realized that I would enjoy what I am doing even more if I could focus specifically on good causes. That’s how Good Media was born. It is a social media and SEO company for good causes. Our clients include Alcoa, Electronic Recyclers International, and many others.

3. Tell us about the biggest successes and failures in your life. What worked, what didn’t, and what did you learn?

One memorable failure of mine is Goodpeoplestories.com. It was a website where anyone could publicly thank the people who had done something nice for them. It could be something as big as saving your life in a war, or as small as holding the door for you. Writing a quick “Good People Story” about this person – who you may not have ever gotten the chance to thank – would generate a page about them on our site, which would rank highly on Google, thus conferring on this person a really positive story whenever anyone Googled their name. I thought it would catch on but it did not. It definitely dashed my hopes that people could get really into the idea of spreading positivity online. But I will try again.

My biggest successes include Cartoon Doll Emporium, which, as I mentioned, was one of the largest kids sites in the world. In 2009, it had almost 70 million unique visitors, and it was on the front cover of the business section of the New York Times, and was featured on Fox News, ABC News, and The Today Show. From its success I learned the principles of social gaming and the unique challenges of marketing to a young audience. I also learned the pros and cons of the advertising, subscription, and micro-transaction business models.

4. What do you want to achieve in a) the next week, b) the next year, c) the next 10 years?

a) I would like to finish the next 25% of my book.

b) I would like to grow my business to $12 million annually.

I would like to fund 15 projects that support emotional awareness through the Evan Bailyn Foundation

c) I would like to start work on a progressive school that combines initiatives in emotional learning with universally important skills like math, writing, science, and history.

I would also like to begin planning a theme park in the spirit of Walt Disney World, but based around role play.

5. What was your most inspiring moment during the last two weeks?

My most inspiring moment during the last two weeks was helping myself and my girlfriend evolve into more self-aware people through understanding our pasts and the way that those pasts impact our present behavior.

6. How could other Sandboxers and the outside world support you and why would that be exciting for them.

The projects I am working on, beginning with the Evan Bailyn Foundation, and very much supported by First Page Sage and Good Media, will expose behaviors that cause harm to this world and block the natural kinship that naturally exist among all people. I believe the Evan Bailyn Foundation has identified a common thread in violence, neglect, and abuse, and I know that my marketing skills will help to create substantial awareness about these causes. I welcome other Sandboxers to collaborate with me, to learn from me, and to teach me with the goal of making the world a more enjoyable place to live.

Evan’s favourites:

-book: The Giver by Lois Lowry and The Drama of the Gifted Child by Alice Miller
-movie: Shawshank Redemption
-place on earth: My old living room in my home in Great Neck, NY
-travel destination during last year: Lausanne, Switzerland
-food: NY pizza
-drink: Hot chocolate with whipped cream
-quote: “Success is a matter of preparation meeting opportunity.” – Oprah Winfrey

By Sandboxer Axelle Tessandier:

48 hours to make a magazine. Nothing less, nothing more… That was the bet LongshotMag team (previously the 48hours project) made in May 2010. 24 hours for anyone on the Internet to submit their work around the topic chosen by the team, 24 hours for them to edit.

They did it. Issue Zero was released, people loved it and bought it. The New-York Times and other big names talked about it. The team even received a Knight-Batten Award for “innovation in journalism”. The bet was won.

Three months later, they were back, same principles, same passion. This time, I had the chance to be involved in the process and helped organize the second office in San Francisco at pariSoma, the founding team and main office was being hosted at Good Magazine in Los Angeles this time.

As Good says, experimentation should be first and foremost “fun and festive”. Sometimes you just forget how much fun it can be to explore, dig, and try new things. It can be a real source of adrenaline.

In today’s chaotic times it is easier to be scared than curious. Indeed, debate and questions about “future of journalism’’ appear everywhere. Newspapers are dying, money is drying up and journalists have their doubts about initiatives like these.

But it runs in Silicon Valley’s blood to believe that change is opportunity, that challenges and hard times are just inspiration for innovation and an encouragement to imagine the future now. That is why I’m definitely not surprised that it was born in San Francisco. As many Sandboxers and entrepreneurs, the Longshot team just wanted to propose, with conviction and talent, something new.

As Clay Shirky affirms in his article Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable “experiments are only revealed in retrospect to be turning points.” Therefore the worst thing to do in troubled times is to persevere with the status quo.

The LongshotMag project isn’t trying to prove that they will be the new way to create and deliver content. Maybe, maybe not, who cares? We are in this soul searching phase for journalism where old institutions are collapsing while new ones are trying to break through. The only way to influence and partake in this information revolution is to jump in and to experiment.

Openness, crowd-sourced initiatives are values our generation respect a lot. But more than a gimmick, it actually means something. It means you can imagine better, you innovate more, you can think different.

Sometimes we talk so much about digital tribes and communities, that we forget to concretely visualize them. I saw an amazing one in action for 2 days, I saw commitment and focus, I felt that I was part of something special, hundreds of contributions flowing in using the power of social media tools. Search for “longshotmag” on Twitter, it will give you an idea. It was as powerful as inspiration can be.

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

Yes, most Definitely!

Axelle Tessandier is a Sandboxer, social media addict, writer, Internet explorer and an eternal learner. On a more conventional side, she did a masters in Audiovisual, Media Law and Communications at La Sorbonne in Paris. After different experiences in media, TV, press and foremost cinema, she helped green organizations to communicate using the digital environment. A few months later, she was chosen to go to the innovation program Palomar5 in Berlin. At the end of the innovation camp, together with some others she started a pilot collaborative hub in San Francisco with GAFFTA, where she was a resident artist. There Axelle fell in love with the Valley, where she wants to stay. In order to change the world.

We have over 100 top leaders and innovators attending and are almost sold out. It will be a great evening where young leaders from some of the world’s best communities come together.

Many thanks to our fabulous Ambassadors and Sandboxers Bjoern Herrmann, Zain Jaffer, Max Marmer, Christian Shelton and Mike del Ponte for making it happen. Please contact us if you’d be interested to join.

Every day, our community manager Katrin Winiarski, reads through her feed of all Sandboxers’ blog posts. Every Thursday, she chooses the most inspiring, funny or brilliant one and reposts it on this blog. This post has been written by Sandboxer Max Marmer. The original version can be found here.

Many things people strive for are actually byproducts of what the real goal should be. But by focusing on the byproduct instead of the goal, the desired byproduct is ever elusive.

Let’s look at a few examples:

Happiness

The real goal is finding activities you’re passionate about and consistently engaging in them.

That definition skews towards work, but consider spending time with people you enjoy being around an ‘activity’ and it can encompass romance and family time.

Becoming “Networked”

Lots of people want a big network, full of powerful influential people, but if you focus on that is the end goal it’s probably not going to work out very well and you’ll come off as very insincere.

Having a large, powerful network is the byproduct where the end goal is helping other people, building relationships or trying to make an important vision happen that others can get behind.

Making Money

Making money is a byproduct of focusing on creating value.

If you focus on making money, you might end up making a lot if you’re very driven, but if that drive was applied toward how you could create the most value, you’d make a lot more money.

The one caveat with making money is that it only captures the economic spectrum of “value”, but a lot of people are working on how we can measure other kinds of currencies and make them more fungible so that in addition to financial capital we can measure things like social capital and emotional capital.

Confidence

I can’t become more confident by saying to myself, “C’mon Max, be more confident”.

Confidence is a byproduct of being really good at something, which is only obtainable through practice and repetition.

Though often people can practice and practice and not improve. That’s why people will tell you, “practice doesn’t make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.” While that’s directionally correct, a better answer is “practice in pursuit of perfection will allow you to increasingly approach perfection and achieve excellence”

Conclusion

The list goes on and on of things that many people try to achieve directly but are actually byproducts: Enlightenment, Love, Creativity,  Status, Success, etc. etc.

It’s not wrong to want byproducts, but they are not things we can get, in the capacity we want, by focusing on achieving them directly. Byproducts are the rewards we get for living our lives the right way.

And by recognizing how byproducts break down into corresponding end goals it becomes clear there are no short cuts. When we care about other people, other people care about us. When we create value for others, we are rewarded financially. When we do amazing work, we gain respect. To live a rich life where we are happy, financially abundant, surrounded by amazing people and confident in our own abilities, requires cultivating curiosity, persistence, self-reflection, self-discipline, compassion, character, drive and many other esteemed traits.There is truth in the words that our external reality is a manifestation, or a byproduct, of our internal reality.

I encourage you to look at the things you want, and figure out what’s a byproduct and what’s the actual end goal that you should authentically commit to.

Max Marmer is a student at Stanford University, a young entrepreneur and Sandbox Ambassador in San Francisco, USA. He founded Force For the Future, a network that helps entrepreneurs with their first steps of the start-up life by mentoring, networking and more. Max is also resident of Palomar 5 and working for the Youth Noise Leadership Council.

Sandbox in San Francisco kicked off its second dinner at Specchio. Fresh Italian food was served in a warehouse setting with mannequins scattered around for flavor.

Carla, an Argentinean Sandboxer who is a PhD student at the LSE was in town from London for an information systems conference. She talked about her passion for introducing management innovation in the public sector.

Over a healthy 3 hour meal (in true Italian style), topics ranged from the future of education and the online space, the state of Argentine politics, the films of Wong Kar-wai, to cities around the world that have achieved a healthy balance of fostering culture and business.

Thanks to Christian Shelton for organizing this Dinner! We are looking forward to the next one!

Johanna is currently interning with Sandbox, she assists the team in various areas and is focusing on community management. Interested in becoming an intern for Sandbox as well? Check out our recent job postings.

12 potential and current Sandbox members joined us for our inaugural dinner at San Francisco’s Bissap Baobab restaurant, which features the cuisine of Senegal. Over couscous, kebabs, and ginger juice, dinner guests shared their startup experiences from a host of diverse backgrounds. Participants present were from Germany, Mexico, Russia, Switzerland, and the United States.

Some concepts and companies featured:

• Inviko: A social graph startup
• Startup School: An invite-only platform for outstanding and upcoming entrepreneurs
• Sparkseed: A nonprofit organization that invests in top college student social entrepreneurs through guidance, funding, and tools.

On my recent trip to San Francisco I spent time in Stanford (Sandbox paradise?), meeting up with friends and Alvin from BASE and ASES, two impressive entrepreneurs societies.

At one of the evenings we organized in good old Sandbox tradition a dinner with local people from the network. What started out as a spontaneous gathering organized just 2 days before had turned out to be an extremley inspring evening with great people.

Anjan Sundaram told us about the latest developments of this first book which he’s writing about his time as journalist in the Congo. Here are some examples of his writing from the Congo, I can’t wait to see the book in final form.

Susan Su, the blogger behind Ask-Entrepreneur joined us and I’m happy to hear that she has joined the guilde of the entrepreneurs in the meantime as well, GOOD LUCK SUSAN, IT’S THE RIGHT DECISION!

Christian Shelton, founder of the Young Politicians of America told us more about his new startup (still in stealth mode but hopefully we can publish soon more about it here…), James Rohrbach, founder of GulliverGo about the pains of finding good developers and Thianh Lu, cofounder of Holstee about the newest trends in sustainable fashion. Uffffff, what a GREAT EVENING!

There are so many great people in San Francisco, I hope I’ll be back soon. Many thanks to Anjan for picking the delicious Middle Eastern restaurant and to Thianh from Holstee for the wonderful hospitality!