Inviting a few curators to the Leade.rs platform

We’re getting close to a usable platform so I’m inviting a few people to become curators on the Leade.rs platform.

What’s the Leade.rs platform?

Our goal is to help find the next extraordinary leade.rs and help them succeed.

I got the idea curating the program of my conferences for more than ten years and needed a tool to save and collect data about people I found interesting and I could invite to speak or wanted to invest in their ventures.

We’re starting mostly with existing and future leaders in technology. We have curated about 2,000 leaders initially. We are of course missing many of them as those are mostly people I met.

What’s a leader?

Someone doing something amazing, crazy, surprising, world changing or with a huge impact. Someone with high influence or a “node” in a technology ecosystem. For example Roxanne Varza is building Station-F the largest startup center in the world and is definitely doing something amazing and at the center of the Paris tech ecosystem.

We’re following people, not their companies.

Who is the Leade.rs platform for?

Anyone that needs or interested to discover new amazing people to follow. Conference organizers, journalists, business angels and venture capitalists come to mind.

What’s a curator?

There is no way one or two people are capable of discovering most new interesting people in technology. Conferences such as TED or the World Economic Forum in Davos have tens of curators looking for amazing people. We hope TED and the World Economic Forum will find value in the platform too and even contribute.

Our approach is to have a network of hundreds of curators around the world contributing to the platform. We are inspired daily by Reddit, Product Hunt, Pinterest or Quora.

We are initially inviting a few conference organizers, journalists and investors to test and contribute. It’s very early days and we have many product improvements to make, this is why we are going very slow. Please do not be upset if we cannot add you as curator or leader yet. We do not want to be exclusive, we just want high quality and we are a very small team so we go slow.

You were just invited to become a curator, here is how it works. You should see a “Add a new Person” button

When you hit that button, a simple search shows-up. Make sure we do not know the leader yet to avoid duplicates. If we do, just recommend that leader instead of adding her or him.

If we don’t know that leader yet, add him using the form. I chose Donald Trump because I’m pretty sure he isn’t in the system :-)

First name and Last Name are compulsory, then a link to a LinkedIn profile is enough for us to start the curation.

Please add the email if you have it so we can invite that leader to the platform.

When you add someone, it goes straight to our research team that will google that person and find photos and videos and create her or his profile, like Roxanne below. We will add where we know they spoke, tags, languages and affiliations. There will be issues and updates but leaders can claim their profiles later.

Once we have her or his email address, we invite the leader to claim his profile and then add a check-mark. That means the leader is active on the platform and can receive requests in the future. See the example of Jeremiah.

The more curators are active in the system, the faster we will all discover new people.

Why would curators participate?

-it might be fun
-it’s interesting
-they are curious
-they need it for their work (ie. conference organizers).

Curators that contribute the most will be featured as well as their collections. Event organizers will be able to add their events and hopefully it will also help them get more speakers and sell more tickets.

One more thing you should try, create your own collections. They can be public or private. They are like Spotify playlists… of people!

Here are some of my collections

Thank you for your contribution if you are already a curator! I appreciate your patience as we finish the platform.

Loic