Women In Media: It’s CEO of ‘If We Ran The World’ Cindy Gallop

Today’s B&T Women In Media Profile sees none other than Cindy Gallop, founder and CEO of If We Ran The World and her new venture Make Love Not Porn, profiled. Here, Ms Gallop reveals the value in doing good, why people constantly tell her about their sex lives, and why fear equals failure…

I believe the business model of the future is shared values + shared actions = shared financial and social profits…
My 30-year-career has led me to believe that the future of doing business is doing good and making money simultaneously.

Superhuman as I am, I cannot run two start-up companies…
So I had to put If We Ran The World on the backburner in order to focus on Make Love Not Porn but I really want to hire a full time team to work on it. I’m keen to find business and brand partners for both.

I’m turning things I passionately believe in into businesses…
If We Ran The World is my attempt to redesign the future of business and Make Love Not Porn is my attempt to redesign the future of sex. And if I can have any impact at all on any of those things, I’ll be very happy.

I’d never say never to uploading myself having sex to the site…
We’ve discussed this at great length and what we all agreed as a team is that we already have a very controversial business. Each one of us has to interact with different business entities every day and so, it would not help us to be on our platform at this point in our life cycle, but further down the road who knows – if we can get huge amounts of funding, build the business how we want to, then bloody hell, you bet.

Great sex is born out of great communication…
Makelovenotporn.com, the original tiny, clunky website I launched with no money six-and-a-half years ago still gets an extraordinary response. I think a lot of that is because makelovenotporn.com is a manifestation of me – it’s very simple, straightforward, honest, down to earth, utterly non-judgmental and has a sense of humour. We never get to have conversations about sex within those parameters and when we do, the floodgates open. So my team and I are socialising sex.

People tell me things about their sex lives they’ve never told anyone else before…
They pour their hearts out to me on email; 15-year-old boys, women, men and it was the sheer cumulative impact of those emails arriving, day after day after day that made me realise I have uncovered a huge global social issue and it made me see that I now had a personal responsibility to take this initiative forward in a way that would make it much more far reaching, helpful and effective.

You will never own the future if you care what other people think…
My biggest obstacle trying to raise funding for Make Love Not Porn at the moment is the social dynamic that I call ‘fear of what other people will think’. It’s never about what the person I’m talking to thinks. And this operates around sex more than any other area. And, by the way, fear of what other people will think is the single most paralysing dynamic in business and in life.

My life and my career are accidents…
I’m doing things I passionately believe in but I never consciously, intentionally set out to do anything I’ve ended up doing. Everything kind of happened through serendipity and synchronicity.

It doesn’t matter what motivation is…
If you’re actually acting and you’re doing good and you’re creating a benefit, that’s fine by me.

Cindy is speaking at the preview for Wired For Wonder, held in Sydney’s Commbank Innovation Lab on Friday, and will be a keynote speaker at Wired for Wonder in Sydney on August 26-27 and in Melbourne on August 28. See www.wiredforwonder.com for more details.

Make sure you grab some tickets to the event here! B&T’s proud Women in Media sponsors include…

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