Mighty Networks, With Silicon Valley Entrepreneur and CEO Gina Bianchini

The Sydcast

Episode Summary

Gina Bianchini is a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and founder of Mighty Networks, a platform for creators (of anything) to build out and monetize their content. As a past business partner with legendary entrepreneur and investor Marc Andreessen, Gina has deep roots in startup culture. Who is Gina Bianchini, what is Mighty Networks, and what’s it like to be a female entrepreneur in Silicon Valley in the age of Elizabeth Holmes?

Sydney Finkelstein

Syd Finkelstein is the Steven Roth Professor of Management at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. He holds a Master’s degree from the London School of Economics and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. Professor Finkelstein has published 25 books and 90 articles, including the bestsellers Why Smart Executives Fail and Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent, which LinkedIn Chairman Reid Hoffman calls the “leadership guide for the Networked Age.” He is also a Fellow of the Academy of Management, a consultant and speaker to leading companies around the world, and a top 25 on the Global Thinkers 50 list of top management gurus. Professor Finkelstein’s research and consulting work often relies on in-depth and personal interviews with hundreds of people, an experience that led him to create and host his own podcast, The Sydcast, to uncover and share the stories of all sorts of fascinating people in business, sports, entertainment, politics, academia, and everyday life.

Gina Bianchini

Gina Bianchini is the Founder & CEO of Mighty Networks. Her mission at Mighty Networks is to usher in a new era of creative business built on community. Mighty serves “creators with a purpose,” selling experiences, relationships, and expertise to their members via community, content, online courses, and subscription commerce–all offered in one place under the creator’s brand.

Before Mighty Networks, Gina and Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen launched Ning, a pioneering global platform for creating niche social networks. Under her leadership, Ning grew to ~100 million people in 300,000 active social networks across subcultures, professional networks, entertainment, politics, and education.

In addition to Mighty Networks, Gina serves as a board director of TEGNA (NYSE: TGNA), a $3 billion dollar broadcast and digital media company, and served as a board director of Scripps Networks (NASDAQ: SNI), a $12 billion dollar public company which owns HGTV, The Food Network, and The Travel Channel that merged with Discovery Communications in 2018.

Gina and Mighty Networks have been featured in Fast Company, Wired, Vanity Fair, Bloomberg, and The New York Times. She has appeared on Charlie Rose, CNBC, and CNN. She grew up in Cupertino, California, graduated with honors from Stanford University, started her career in the nascent High Technology Group at Goldman Sachs & Co., and received her M.B.A from Stanford Business School.

Insights from this episode:

• Details about Mighty Networks
• Why it is important to bring communities together
• Details on how private communities can help build connections
• How creators build their communities
• The importance of creating valuable communities
• How Gina created online courses on Mighty Networks
• Where Gina’s initial idea for Mighty Networks came from
• How Gina’s childhood shaped her into building communities
• Insights into building sustainable relationships
• Lessons Gina learned from Mark Anderson
• Gina’s experience as a female entrepreneur in Silicon Valley

Quotes from the show:

• “The world needs community innovation, and specifically software that makes each and every one of us better” –Gina Bianchini [8:06]
• “What motivates me as an entrepreneur and a human being is there is all sorts of things that software can do that we have not built yet” –Gina Bianchini [10:02]
• “The things that make us human are our interests, our passions, and our goals. The things that we are curious about, following that curiosity and doing it alongside people because that is the single best way to build relationships ” –Gina Bianchini [23:55]
• “We are social animals that are meant to live in communities with other people, and communities are the single best path to us being able to realize our full potential and live the lives we wanna live” –Gina Bianchini [25:53]
• “When I started Mighty, it was all about how do we continue the mission of unlocking a host ability to create not just an innovative community, but an innovative online business as well” –Gina Bianchini [29:53]
• “Innovation comes from the blending and bringing together teams of people that represent science and art” –Gina Bianchini [36:19]
• “Life’s not fair and winning matters. Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but winning matters, and the winners get to define what the culture is” –Gina Bianchini [39:41]
• “I fundamentally believe that each and every one of us as human beings are multifaceted, and that the happiest most fulfilling life is one where we have our core values and that we can then experiment and try new things and evolve and live out different parts of our lives in different ways” –Gina Bianchini [42:51]

Stay connected:

Sydney Finkelstein

Website: http://thesydcast.com

LinkedIn: Sydney Finkelstein

Twitter: @sydfinkelstein

Facebook: The Sydcast

Instagram: The Sydcast

Gina Bianchini

LinkedIn: Gina Bianchini

Instagram: Gina Bianchini

Twitter: Gina Bianchini

Mighty Networks’ website: Mighty Networks

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This episode was produced and managed by Podcast Laundry.