And how effective re-positioning got $175 million from Mr Benioff.
Jigsaw.com lets biz-dev types share contact information with one another. And the more a participant shares, the more data they earn access to. It’s like “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” except with a whiff of privacy invasion. In the Summer of 2009, TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington branded Jigsaw as “amoral”, “a hyper-effective privacy destroying machine” and called for the government to shut them down. We looked under the hood and pointed out that Jigsaw wasn’t evil...they were just a new form of social media. Moreover, the organization had done a lot to pioneer new concepts of online community, sharing and privacy.
Jigsaw wasn’t giving out people’s home phone numbers. They were helping biz-dev types network. It’s business data. How is that worse than being listed in the Yellow Pages or LinkedIn? From then on, it was easy to position Jigsaw as Curators of the World’s First Free Exchange of Business Information.
Turns out, it's all about who you know.
