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Interview with Geoffrey Arone, Co-Founder Flock

Written by Allen Stern - September 27, 2006

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I recently had a chance to interview Geoffrey Arone from Flock. Geoffrey is one of the co-founders. He will speak about where Flock comes from, where it is today and where it is going. He also addresses the CEO leaving. You can listen to the interview in several ways listed below. The interview is about 30 minutes long.

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Click the start button below to begin the audio interview (or download the mp3):

Below is a text transcript of the audio interview.

Allen: How did you guys come up with the idea for Flock?
Geoffrey: At the time I was working at Real Networks as product manager for the real player and my cofounder was working for the Mozilla Foundation. This was in very late 04 to early 05. We were seeing a revolution on several fronts. The browser space was becoming reinvigorated thanks to Firefox. So 10 years of dormancy in the browser space was coming to an end. The other thing was that Microsoft was falling all over itself. There was also a revolution in user generated content, and this was anything from blogs to videos and photos. And other innovative things like delicious were starting to take off as well. So I talked to my cofounder and we were thinking about what we like about our jobs and what would we do differently. It quickly dawned on us that we like the consumer space and the internet space and wanted to be part of the participation revolution so looking at what tools were available to us it seemed clear to us that the Mozilla platform was a wonderful one to work from. It is open source, we both believe in open source. Users are passionate about it, we felt that Firefox was focusing on the right things at the time. We thought it was a great opportunity to look at extending the platform to address a different set of users.

Allen: What's the meaning behind the name Flock?
Geoffrey: We held group sessions and brainstorming sessions to figure out what would be the best name. The one thing that kept rising to the top was people kind of coming together and expressing themselves with some degree of organization. It was like formation, expression and so I was thinking of things that capture things like Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist wasn't very catchy for a browser and had already been used and I also wanted something kind of catchy and snazzy. My wife mentioned a few different words. Most were animal behaviours that didn't sound quite as good and then it just dawned on me, Flock. I think she said something like herd, hive. But when you think of a flock, groups of people flocking to something. Something that captures the essence of a hotspot that is capturing people's attention. There you have it. I came up with it and then went out and bought the domain name and the rest is history.

Allen: Did you start with funding or self-funded entity?
Geoffrey: We started mostly just working for free, just me and the co-founded. We worked in the off hours to build the business plan to see if this is a viable company or just an interesting project. Once we realized that this was something we wanted to dedicate our full-time to, we generated a small amount of seed funding, which was then added to by two other rounds of funding, an A round and a B round. Our last round of funding was last November (2005) where we got a full and proper C round.

Allen: What is the current revenue model look like for Flock?
Geoffrey: So it's going pretty much as we expected. Browsers are not a new business. Just like Firefox uses Google as its default search, we do something similar with our search partners. So basically that means the browser is free, we get a share of the revenue from searches directed to our search partners.

Allen: So are you still doing the Amazon affiliation?
Geoffrey: Yes, they are a partner.

Allen: What can you talk about in the technology behind Flock?
Geoffrey: The browser is built entirely upon the Mozilla platform. Essentially it is exactly the Firefox codebase under the hood. We license from Mozilla and share back to them whenever we have fixes. Anything beyond that is also developed on the same technology platform. We use XUL, which is the same language used to develop the browser, same rendering engine. Extensions to the platform are developed in C++.

Allen: Can you talk about the about:Duck project?
Geoffrey: Oh Duck project? If you go to flock.com/about/duck you will see all of the Flock employees on a Duck. It is really a top secret project that we don't talk about.

Allen: So if you share with me, you would have to kill me kind of thing?
Geoffrey: Yea, or just find a way to silence you. But I would prefer not to have to go down that path.

Allen: Can you talk about who your main competitors are?
Geoffrey: So the easiest way to explain it is that it really depends on which perspective you are looking at the browser from. Certainly if you view Flock as just a web browser, then any other web browser could be a good subsitute for Flock. But from my perspective we like to think about it as the first product that takes into consideration the full lifecycle of web content from finding it, sharing it, consuming it, and to creating new content. Those are the 4 aspects. I probably got them out of order. So when you look at the browser from that perspective there are individual companies or products that might be demand subsitutes for any one of our features but in terms of harnessing the overall lifecycle of web content there really no one that is doing it quite to the extent that we are. I joke sometimes when people ask me about who is our main competitior and sometimes I think that it is ourselves. We are always asking tough questions about what problems we are trying to solve and how we can solve these problems and make a fun experience for folks.

Allen: If you have a chance to make any friends since starting Flock. Other software companies, other projects that you meet with regularly?
Geoffrey: Absolutely, our biggest and earliest partner was Yahoo!. So we worked very closely with Yahoo! and they are e-products are well integrated into Flock. Outside of Yahoo! one of our absolute biggest and best partners is Photobucket. If you go to photobucket.com, you will see they actually distribute Flock. We have worked very nicely with them to get them integrated into the browser and it's interesting not to long ago few people in the valley heard of photobucket. They were based in Denver and they now have on the order of 26 million users. These users are very active in social networking and in the blogosphere and they seemed like a perfect fit. So for us, its been a perfect partnership and we meet with them once or twice a week. And there are an upcoming partnership that I can't talk about yet but there will be 1 or 2 major partnerships coming up that will share some light on where this is going.

Allen: Can you talk a little bit about your user demographics?
Geoffrey: This is always a tough question for me as I don't like to draw lines in the sand but I would say its primarily folks that are active in either "power consumption" or "power expression" online. And what I mean by that is some folks casual web users maybe use the web browser once a week and either end of the age demo then they are probably not in our target. What we are finding is the people who are using Flock the most are people are really keen that want to be in the know and keep up-to-date. And that can take various forms, it can take active bloggers, people that are participating in social networks, people who like to share photos online.

Allen: Since you are about a year old, do you believe you have accomplished what you set out to do?
Geoffrey: Absolutely, I am a lot more confident in Flock's potential for success now than I have ever been but I have a lot more understanding about how hard it is to build a quality product. A year ago I might have assumed that by now we would be out the door with a 1.0 product. You know it is still about a month and half off. Yea, I am confident but I realize now it is a lot more work than expected. The good news is that we have a great team in place. We just passed the 30 mark and have one of the best engineering teams assembled.

Allen: Do you see Flock becoming a mainstream browser?
Geoffrey: Absolutely and in fact our downloads outside of the tech and geek community have been skyrocketing and that's largely because folks are starting to realize that we are more than just focused on the blogosphere. When the project got some early recognition, it was mainly geeks like myself. The way we are designing the product is so that its useful and enjoyable for anyone who wants to do things like share photos online and that anyone that wants to participate can.

Allen: I was looking at Mashable and on September 13, 2006 they noted that the Flock CEO jumped ship and that Flock is an unnecessary product. They also noted that the Photobucket partnership is helping. Can you speak a little bit to this and about why Flock is necessary.

"When we started the company, Bart and the investor were like you will be CEO for a year but if this things starts to take off we will want some professional management and that's what happened."

Geoffrey: Let me draw a bit of color on both sides. When we started Flock, my partner and I sat around a table with our original investor and mapped out the future of the company would look like and how we would want to grow it and for starters Bart did not quit Flock. That was a big misstatement that was picked up by folks. When we started the company, Bart and the investor were like you will be CEO for a year but if this things starts to take off we will want some professional management and that's what happened. He was here for just over a year and just had a baby two weeks before the board made the decision and the board is actively seeking someone who has a lot of industry experience and can make the partnerships happen.

You know I am not in the business of telling people what they need. I think a lot of companies make that mistake. What we want to do is create something that we think is really useful and fun and people will vote with their downloads. What we have noticed of late is that we have to ask ourselves questions about what compels users. We do a lot of outreach and speak to Flock users. We have a lot of loyal users that submit feedback and help make it a product they will enjoy. We think we are speaking to the right group of people and they are voting and expressing their interest by continuing to use the product.

Allen: What are the top 2-3 things since you have started Flock?
Geoffrey: One thing that I have learned is that I find it very difficult to build successful products if you are not totally passionate about them or at least for me. I think with what Flock is trying to do we need to make sure we are always building a product that we passionately believe in and we believe will make an impact on the world.

The other thing I have discovered is that you really need to listen to what users are telling you. There are sometimes when others outside of the organization can really open your mind and we have gotten much better about it and in both getting feedback from users who love the tool but also those who hate it and uninstall it. It is important to speak to both sets of users.

The last thing I have learned is it is really difficult to build the right product. You have got to surround yourself with a great team. Hiring must be done well. My advice to anyone is that you grow your team with the right people. It is a lot more expensive to learn later on that you did not hire the right people.

Allen: What would you say is the top mistake since you started?
Geoffrey: I think the top mistake would be a combination of my 2nd point above (listening to users). When I was at MIT for grad school I took this class called Listening to the Consumer and it given all the math classes I was taking, I thought this would be a slam dunk. But 4 years later it really takes a lot of discipline to see what needs you are addressing. So what I have learned is that you don't build anything until you have a plan for what you are trying to accomplish and for whom you are trying to accomplish this mission.

Allen: Where do you see Flock going in the next 1-3 years?
Geoffrey: So where I see Flock going is I expect it will be a little more of a platform then it currently is today. When someone launches Flock we want it to enable interaction. Once these core interactions are understood, I want people to take advantage of the fact that it is open source and that they will work with it. We have done most of the integrations including Flickr, Photobucket and Webshots will be in soon, Yahoo! Photos is another one. In terms of one offs - we can integrate it with a variety of different products and services. I would love it if the architecture that you can integrate anything you want with the browser. I want it to be as open as possible so anyone can choose to integrate anything they want to.

Allen: Where do you see the Browser going in the next 1-3 years?
Geoffrey: I view the browser as a great facilitator of interaction. And right now we are just focusing on nailing these experiences on the PC but I would have to agreed with Ted that the browser will become more and more pervasive whether on computers or on consoles. The question is how can you make the experience consistent across all of these and using Flock on all of these devices allows for a seamless integration. I want to make sure whatever we build that we are always mindful of the fact that the intended interaction should never be subordinate to the technology delivered or consumed.

Allen: Do you have any other thoughts about Flock that you want to share?
Geoffrey: If there is a message to the world, I would like to say thank you to the users who have stuck around and really helped us evolve and grow. For those who have not tried us out, I really encourage you to check out the latest beta and keep your eyes and ears peeled on the upcoming news and releases. This is certainly going to be an exciting quarter for us.

Well we have reached the end of our interview with Geoffrey. Thanks to Geoffrey for participating and to Mike at Atomic PR for setting everything up.

If you would like to participate in a conversation on CenterNetworks, or if you have any comments or questions, you can contact me via e-mail at allen===at===centernetworks.com or visit CenterNetworks for all of our news, reviews, insights and conversations.

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