“Women challenge the status quo because we are never it.”
Cindy Gallop
From defining the term ‘sextech’ to creating the world’s first user-generated, human-curated social sex network, technology entrepreneur and business extraordinaire, Cindy Gallop has always been at the forefront of the industry. Known as a provocative woman, she has also been championing gender equality, diversity, and inclusion for many years.
In our interview with Cindy on Positivity Hack Delivered, she is going to disrupt everything by challenging society’s assumptions about sex, hacking a more profitable world by making a shit ton of money, and many more!
You can watch the full episode on Youtube: https://youtu.be/pvJWfbPAse8
Or these platforms:
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/womenOnIT/videos/433167095685236
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/video/event/urn:li:ugcPost:6993886115921313792/
Or read the transcript below. This has been edited for length and clarity.
Beata Young 00:26
Welcome to PHD with Women On IT hack the future.
My name is Beata Young and today’s PHD (Positivity Hack Delivered) will be our guest Cindy Gallop.
Topic: Hacking the Future with SexTech Legend Cindy Gallop.
Episode 81 starts here!
Let me remind you this is a grassroots community that focuses on Women On IT, an inclusive forum of women in technology, startups and female leaders who are supported by men as well. And I bring heart to that hustle because empathy is my mojo and empathy is critical when you are hacking the future with SexTech legend Cindy Gallop.
In today’s episode, we are going to learn from Cindy who is a legend. And I’m not going to introduce her because you should know her. And actually, she said she doesn’t care what you say about her because she’s going to prove her point tonight.
So let’s start Cindy, where in the world are you today?
Cindy Gallop 01:30
I’m in New York, where I live & work, and I’m in my apartment in midtown Manhattan.
Beata Young 01:39
Thank you very much! I’m joining from beautiful Valleta, it’s very dark here in Malta but we’ve got one hour to cover the topic.
“I hear a lot ‘I don’t want to be hired just because I’m a woman” says Cindy.
Why is that and why you believe it should be challenged?
Cindy Gallop 02:02
I’ve been championing gender equality, diversity inclusion for many years. I talked about the fact that I rarely hear from women “Oh God Cindy, I don’t want to get hired just because I’m a woman” and my response is always “Get over that and look around you all the mediocre men who got hired just because they were men”
Affirmative action has been operating in the wrong direction for many years. So my response is absolutely, totally take the job that’s being offered to you to demonstrate gender equality and diversity, and then do the bloody brilliant job in that role that will demonstrate to people clearly why they were so right to hire in the first place.
Beata Young 02:50
And you’re all about positivity. Today’s PHD (Positivity Hack Delivered) is focused on positivity but quite often, you have to stir a little bit this concept of white guys talking to white guys, about other white guys. How to disrupt and not upset them?
Cindy Gallop 03:13
I don’t give a shit about upsetting white guys and I highly recommend to every woman listening to this, that you don’t give a shit about upsetting white guys either.
I’m not remotely interested in doing anything that is about modifying or not upsetting. Don’t give a damn what anybody else thinks. Do what’s right for you, do what’s right for the occasion, do what’s right for society, do what’s right for the world and never worry about upsetting anybody.
Beata Young 03:41
Bravo! I love that although I have to say when I tried to disrupt the all men guys industry in Malta, I was told “this is now how things are done, this is not how you should behave, because this is a very different culture”
Can we change the culture?
Cindy Gallop 04:01
Absolutely! So what is interesting about that they are to is everybody, unfortunately, is driven by social conditioning, to have this dreadful dynamic, which is fear of what other people will think.
When people say that to you, they don’t mean that they don’t want to change the culture. They mean they are really terrified themselves of what other people think of them. I’m especially qualified to pronounce on this because for the past 13 years of working on Make Love Not Porn. I have seen this fear of what other people will think operate around the one area of universal human experience that most operates in which is sex.
I know perfectly well that beneath that veneer of social conditioning, everybody is dying to talk about sex. Everybody is a sexual being, everybody is dying to be set free. And so exactly the same point applies and what you’ve just asked me, which is, everybody is secretly dying to see the cultural challenge, to see the cultural change, to free everybody up. So absolutely disregard that, and absolutely carve your own path and take your own way.
Beata Young 05:29
Beautiful! Thank you, Cindy, for your great advice. That’s a great start and I welcome some of the community members:
Dr. Michelle Gialanze says “We’ll need to see the replay”
Nora DiNuzzo: “Can’t wait for this”
Bring your questions, ask Cindy. Tonight is your way into a new path with Cindy Gallop and hacking the future with her.
We started very strongly on the SexTech innovation and how you path the way. Tell us about your new startup. Well, it’s pretty old, isn’t it?
Cindy Gallop 06:10
Yeah, but unfortunately, it’s not new but it’s still a startup because of all the enormous battles I’ve had to fight.
So I have a business that started accidentally, andI think it’s worth saying that everything in my life and career has always happened by accident. I’ve never consciously intentionally planned anything. So my business Make Love Not Porn came about because I date younger men, they tend to men in their 20s. And about 14-15 years ago, I began realizing through my direct personal experience dating younger men, that when we don’t talk openly and honestly about sex in the real world, porn becomes sex education by default in not a good way.
I decided to do something about this, I put up as little side venture, a tiny clunky website at MakeLoveNotPorn.com that in its original version was just copy porn world versus real world, launched at TED in 2009. And the entire world responded. So I turned Make Love Not Porn into what it is today – the world’s first and only user generated, human curated social sex video sharing platform.
We’re kind of what Facebook would be, if it allowed you to socially sexually self expressed, which it clearly doesn’t. The way to think about Make Love Not Porn is if porn is the Hollywood blockbuster movie, Make Love Not Porn is the badly needed documentary.
We are a unique window onto the funny, messy, loving, wonderful, hilarious awkward sex we all have in the real world. We are socializing and normalizing sex, make it easier for everyone to talk about to promote consent, communication, good sexual values, and good sexual behavior.
We are literally sex education through real world demonstration. So we are pioneering the social sex revolution, the revelatory part is not the sex, it’s the fact we’re making it social.
Beata Young 08:11
Beautiful! Now, good sexual values. Why is it important? I think you’ve been to India, which is struggling with good sexual values. I mean, the rape rate is quite big numbers. What do you see needs to change in terms of regulation, in terms of education, to make it a better place for females?
Cindy Gallop 08:39
it’s very simple, India, like every other country in the world needs to fund Make Love Not Porn. So that we can scale across every single country, the world and by the way, we are already global, Make Love Not Porn gets traffic and members from 220 countries and territories. But what we need is funding and champions.
What we are doing is utterly unique because ultimately, our mission that Make Love Not Porn is to end rape culture. We have 10 years of proof of concept. We help to end rape culture by doing something incredibly simple but nevertheless, nobody else is doing anywhere. We end rape culture by showing you how wonderful, great consensual communicative sex is in the real world.
Our social sex videos at Make Love Not Porn role model, good sexual values and good sexual behavior. And here’s the important part, we make all of that aspirational versus what you see in porn and popular culture. So we are reinventing racial culture around sex.
In answer to your question, I designed Make Love Not Porn around all of my own beliefs and philosophies. One of which is that every thing in life starts with you and your values. So I rarely ask people this question, what are your sexual values? And nobody can ever answer me because we’re not taught to think like that. Our parents bring us up to have good manners, work ethic, a sense of responsibility, accountability. Nobody ever brings us up to behave well in bed but they should. Because in bed, values like empathy, sensitivity, generosity, kindness, honesty, trust, respect, are as important as those values are in every other area of life where we’re actively taught exercise them.
At Make Love Not Porn, we are building community around shared sexual values. Even I who had this idea and concept of the business, even I’m blown away at how strong community was built around good central values, and good sexual behavior.
Beata Young 11:05
Good sexual values, good sexual behavior was also part of our communication before with Jessica McQuoid & Cate Mentink long time ago, they were speaking to us from New Zealand, their new platform is launched in New Zealand. They said that very often when they went to schools to talk about sexuality, they were met with giggles and shyness.
Can we start very early? Or is it forbidden? Should we start to start talking about how to behave in bed from a young age?
Cindy Gallop 11:44
Absolutely. So first of all, I am working right now to raise a round of funding for Make Love Not Porn. ‘m doing that because I’ve managed to keep Make Love Not Porn operational for 10 years on just $3 million of funding. So the time has come to raise a serious round of funding, I’m working to raise $20 million to scale the core business, but also to build out what I’m calling the Make Love Not Porn Universe, which is a social sex ecosystem of a number of product expansions that are designed to be very compelling standalone businesses, but also to turbocharge the growth of the core business as growth engines.
The first one of these product expansions I’ve had in the pipeline for many years, I’ve not been able to raise the funding for it until I believe the time is now. And that is, in many ways a very obvious extension because parents and teachers began writing to me from day one of Make Love Not Porn. So I want to build out the 0 to 18 safe for work sex education, expansion of Make Love Not Porn – MakeLoveNotPorn.Academy. If you go to the URL, you’ll see a very old holding page there, the URL many years ago, but this will be what I characterize as the Khan Academy of sex education because Khan Academy tutors on every other topic under the sun, except this one. Ed Tech is exploding as a sector but not in this area. So the way this works is, I want to build out Make Love Not Porn Academy on the same principles as MakeLoveNotPorn.tv user generated, crowdsourced curated revenue share, because I’m not about reinventing the wheel. This is an aggregation hub for the world’s sex education content.
So the way it works is we will build out Make Love Not Porn Academy and by the way, it’s a very efficient build. We’re simply repurposing our existing human curation, content publishing infrastructure. We will then invite sex educators from all around the world to submit to us their own content, coursework, materials, videos, books, comic strips, whatever it may be. We will curate at the heart of everything we do lies human curation, we only publish what is Make Love Not Porn endorsed. And we will then publish all of this content, segmented by age appropriateness.
So if you’re a parent freaking out going, Oh my God, my 6 year old just ask about this, what do I say? Here’s the section where you would go for entirely age appropriate tools and content to be able to have that conversation with a 6 year old. If you’re a teacher with a class of 14 year olds, here are your age appropriate teaching materials. If you’re an adult access all areas, adults are as desperate for this information as everybody else. But here’s the really important thing Make Love Not Porn Academy is designed to be accessed by children and young people without parental and teacher gatekeeping.
Here’s why that’s important. So I have a friend who is a mother of a couple of kids and his happened when her son was 8 years old. She monitors her children’s browsing history as you have to. She saw that her son had searched on the Family Computer for sex for children. So her son was 8 years old. She merely freaked out but she did the right thing stayed calm, sat him down and went, darling I’ve have seen on this, why is that?
And this anecdote is adorable and horrifying in equal measure, because her son wanted to learn about sex. He was a child, he wanted to learn about sex, that in a child appropriate way. So he Googled “Sex for children” and you can imagine the kind of thing that came back he was awfully traumatized. So that is why at Make Love Not Porn Academy, as a child, you can enter your age, and you will only be served age appropriate sex education content.
Now a lot of us will be free to access but will also charge to download subscribe, bulk buy, if you’re a school. We’re talking different revenue streams, different use cases and by the way, we’re talking a huge revenue generator. We will then split the income 50/50 with its creators, the educators the same way we do with our Make Love Not Porn stars at MakeLoveNotPorn.tv. Because right now, nobody goes into sex education to make money.
I have friends who are brilliant sex educators all around the world, they face all the same barriers we do at Make Love Not Porn. Their content gets blocked on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. They can’t make a living doing this, they’ve had to take other jobs to survive. I want to change that, because what they’re doing is enormously valuable work globally.
Beata Young 16:49
Well, I hope our video is not going to be blocked because we talk too much about sex. Hopefully, I won’t have to blur the words here but I would like to ask you Cindy as you’re a serial entrepreneur, you’ve hacked the future, you manage so many businesses, there is also another venture which is If We Ran The World and All The Sky. Talk to us about these.
Cindy Gallop 17:20
Sure! So, If We Ran The World was my first startup and it’s based on the fact that I’m all about redesigning business models. I do a lot of consulting and public business speaking on this topic. I live my own philosophies, so I absolutely designed what I believe is the business model of the future, which is shared values + shared action = shared profit. Financial profit and social profit.
What I mean by that is when brands and businesses come together with their audiences, and audiences can be consumers, employees, analysts, any stakeholders, when you come together with your audiences around values that you all share, which by the way, is the most important requirement for good relationship in life as much as business, you will never truly bond with someone if you don’t share the same values. When you come together around shared values and when you are then enabled, collectively and collaboratively to co-act on those values to walk the talk together, you can then make things happen in the real world that will benefit consumers, benefit society and benefit the brand and its business.
So If We Ran The World was co action software designed to help brands and businesses integrate this business model. And when Make Love Not Porn blew up and I had to back burner If We Ran The World, because even I superhuman as I am cannot run two startups simultaneously.
But A – I then designed Make Love Not Porn around precisely that business model. Shared values + shared action = shared profit.
And B – as when I can raise this funding, Make Love Not Porn, and get it on a stable forward course financially. I want to go back and reactivate If We Ran The World, because back when we launched If We Ran The World 12 years ago now, Harvard Business School reached out to me and said, this model is so innovative, we would like to teach it and write it up as a business case study.
We were only 12 months old in beta at the time. So I had this very surreal experience of going to Harvard, sitting at the back of a lecture theater, listening to my startup being taught and If We Ran The World exists as a Harvard Business School case study. So business students write to me from all around the world still going, oh my god, I love this character, will work for you because the world now gets the concept of a business model that’s designed to do good and make money simultaneously, much more than they did even when I launched it 12 years ago.
Then the other thing that I want to do as well, ultimately is I’ve really struggled to raise funding to Make Love Not Porn over the years. So about 8 or 9 years ago now, I’m a great believer that when you have a truly world changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around. So I deliberately began defining pioneering championing my own category, SexTech.
I literally wrote the definition of SexTech. If you Google SexTech on result one, page one, I coined the #SexTech. I didn’t invent the term but I’m directly responsible propagate the hashtag as widely as it’s used today. I began speaking at tech conferences all around the world on why the next big thing in tech is disrupting sets. I was doing this purely to legitimize my own category, in order to create a climate of receptivity amongst investors to get Make Love Not Porn funded. But then 2 further accidental things happened.
The first was that as I delineated and demarcated this category, I began seeing for myself the enormous potential within it, not least financially. The second thing was that I gained reputation as a global champion of sextech, and sextech founders began writing to me from all around the world. And they write because they face all the same barriers, I do, can’t get funding comp payments in place. But literally, every day, a sextech founder writes to me from somewhere in the world. I realized that I have extraordinary access to unique sextech deal flow. So that was the point of which I went, Okay, in order to get my own startup funded, I’m just gonna have to get the entire category funded.
And so because I was having trouble raising $2 million to scale Make Love Not Porn, I decided seemingly counterintuitively to raise $200 million to start the world’s first and only sextech fund. Because if no one else is going to do it, then I would. And I’m very frank about the fact that this was an act of desperation, a last resort. But as I began having dialogues with investors, I found that what I surmised was correct. There are many people interested in funding the category versus a single venture within it for a couple of reasons.
A – I do your due diligence for you. I am the OG domain expert.
B – when you fund a fund, it’s one removed from funding something I should do with sex. Now, I had to backburner my sextech fund and All The Sky Holdings as well, because I raised that $2 million, an unexpected source, which is my original angel investor. But as and when I raised the $20 million, I’m seeking to raise Make Love Not Porn now, I’m absolutely going back to reactivate my sextech fund because also investors keep writing to me saying, I’m interested in funding this. So the potential only gets greater. The more I break down all of these barriers for all of us who work in the sextech field. And so I will absolutely be raising that sextech fund one of these days once Make Love Not Porn is funded.
Beata Young 23:33
Beautiful. Thank you, Cindy. We are looking forward we are keeping our fingers crossed for you’re very much in line with empathy economy, startups. Now we have a couple of questions and comments coming.
Nora DiNuzzo: “If you are on your lunch break tune in now (or watch later) Cindy Gallop is legend and always share such valuable advice every woman on LinkedIn should follow her.”
Absolutely agree.
Ai Esmeralda: “Hi Beata, A very fabulous guest you have I love the spirit and conviction Cindy… and also the shirt looks nice.”
Make Love Not Porn is available.
Cindy Gallop 24:14
Yup, you can buy our merchandise on our website. Go to MakeLoveNotporn.tv and click on merch you too can have a Make Love Not porn t shirt like this.
Beata Young 24:22
Absolutely. You can do it as soon as we finish. Let’s run through a couple of more questions.
“Hi, Cindy. Thank you so much for telling everyone, Marianne says it’s okay to be single and to die alone. Tired of people neighbor telling me otherwise.”
I’m sorry, Marianne. You just have to deal with this shit, as Cindy would say.
“Now is there a guide or Cindy bolt? Make Love Not porn versions, especially to people without any experience” Marianne is asking.
Cindy Gallop 24:56
Sure. So Marianne Absolutely. Basically All of our videos on MakeLoveNotporn.tv Example of my philosophy of communication through demonstration. And so every one of our videos is sex education through real world demonstration. And we have a number of members that make love not porn, who said to us, you know, I’m not ready to have sex yet, haven’t had sex yet. But these videos are amazing at making me see the kind of sex life I want to have and we just get very, very moving comments. One young man commented on one of our videos saying, they were 28, they’re just aren’t having sex. They are so nervous about, oh, my god expectations. What if something awkward happens, and this was a comment on a video where this lovely couple of Make Love Not porn stars, as we call our contributors, I think that this is a video where, in fact, it was a straight couple. And the man suddenly came a great deal more quickly than he was expecting to, but because it’s Make Love Not porn, that’s where you get to see them. and this young gentleman left his comments saying, I love this video. He said, For so many more reasons than just the sex, for the communication, for the reassurance, accidents happen. And so we are absolutely an educational for anybody and everybody, including people without any experience. And you should know also that a lot of parents are buying their 18th and over children subscriptions to make love not porn, because as they tell us, I want my kids to see what happy healthy loving sex relationships look like.
Beata Young 26:55
Porn exists in a kind of parallel universe as shadowy, underground, when you force something, anything into the shadows and underground, you make it easier for bad things to happen, and you make it a lot harder for good things to happen. Cindy, that’s quotation from your interview.
Nora DiNuzzo “Ejaculate responsibly” is getting a ton of positive positive press now, Maybe the word is finally ready for a public discourse on sex ed, and more quality, honest content.
Cindy Gallop 27:29
Now if I can just respond to that Beata, absolutely. I’m a huge fan of Gabrielle Blair, who wrote a “Ejaculate responsibly” we follow each other on Twitter, and “Ejaculate responsibly” is a wonderful book that I highly recommend. But Nora, I completely agree with your point, because I’ve spent 13 years parallel passing two things, working to build, Make Love Not porn, and working to change the cultural context around it. Andas I said earlier, in the spirit of when you have a truly world changing startup, you have to change the world to fit it, not the other way around. I’ve spent 13 years taking Make Love Not porn to an unprecedented level of social and business acceptance. And I’m now seeing 13 years on all of that hard work paying off, because we are actually at a tipping point, in terms of people wanting more openness around all of this, especially by the way, Gen Z, who are a very different generation altogether. And so I really feel we’re at a Zeitgeist moment. And finally, that is indicated by the experience I’m having right now finding investors for Make Love Not porn. Because here’s my challenge. I’m looking for investors. I know that my investors are out there, there are a ton of them. And by the way, there are a ton of them in every single country in the world. My challenge is, they’re impossible to find by the usual means because they all have one thing in common. Your willingness to fund Make Love Not porn is entirely a function of your personal sexual journey. It’s a function of your personal lens on sex and sexuality, which has been shaped by your own experience. And I have no way to research and target for that. Not least because sex is the one area where you cannot tell from the outside what anybody thinks on the inside. The people look like they were totally get it. Don’t. The people look like complete prudes do and so my strategy of finding investors has been, I put what I’m doing out there all the time. I promote make up a point across all my social channels. I do every media interview and whilst I go on every podcast, because I have to rely on making synaptic connections happen that will attract those investors to me. Now, this is a very long, slow, painful process. highly inefficient. But the good news is every so often it works. And the even better news is in the past year, it’s been working more and more. I have to tell you, I am gobsnapped at how effective LinkedIn is at bringing me incoming investor interest. I mean, I unashamedly posted on LinkedIn about the fact that new funding, and investors write to me out of the blue and say, Cindy, I saw you’re raising funding, I’d like to talk Tell me more, I’m intrigued. And that is very different from when I began trying to raise funding seed funding coming up on 13 years ago. So I really think we are in a whole new era. That’s why I’m very optimistic about raising the funding I’m going for and this is a tipping point for Make Love Not porn, as well as all the rest of people trying to bring sex out into the open and the sunlight and normalize it and socialize it as we are.
Beata Young 30:54
Well, let me point to some of our listeners, the fact that it seems to be so obvious, so easy. You’ve got the community, you’ve got cashflow. You’ve got marketing strategy nailed down, you’ve got the roadmap.
Cindy Gallop 31:09
Steady on, Steady on, Steady on. Now, It’s not that easy. And I wouldn’t say we’ve got cashflow. Basically, I’ve fought a battle every single day for the past 13 years to keep this business alive. Just to keep it alive little and grow it. That’s because every single piece of business infrastructure, any other tech startup gets to take for granted. We can’t the small print always says no adult content. And this is all pervasive across every single area of the business in a way that people outside the sphere do not realize it’s not just that historic. I couldn’t get funded. I couldn’t get banked. It took me four years to find one bank here in America that would allow me to open a business bank accounts Make Love Not porn. Try doing business for four years without a business bank account. Long term dehydrated didn’t always I shouldn’t have but it makes your life extraordinarily difficult. My biggest operational challenges payments, PayPal won’t work with adult content, stripe can’t, mainstream credit card processors won’t. We have to work with adult friendly payment processors, who because anybody adult has nowhere else to go charge extortionate rates, I pay out 12% of my revenue every month in payment processing fees alone. That’s a massive business growth inhibitor. Every single text service only to used operator video platform hosting encoding and crypting the Terms of Service always say no adult content. In every single case, I have had to go to people at top of the company explain what I’m doing back to be allowed to use this service. Sometimes I let me send that out. It’s a very labor intensive process. I never get to work with best in class, or anything business partner wise. We had to build our entire video sharing platform from scratch ourselves as proprietary technology, because existing streaming services will not stream adult content. I’m so jealous of friends who built video startups on top of Vimeo, quick, easy, simple, cheap, I can’t do that. Even something as simple as sending our membership emails out, you know, MailChimp won’t work with adult content. You know, we were rejected by a ton of them. Only SendGrid would work with us. You know, this is how ridiculous it is. A few years ago, I needed a contract user experience designer. I put a perfectly standard UX design and job description up on Upwork 28 states Upwork took it down. They told us we’re not allowed to advertise jobs on up work because we all make love not porn. And the biggest business growth inhibitor of all is that we are banned from advertising anywhere. We are banned for advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, Reddit, I asked you Google YouTube Tiktok Snapchat and traditional media. Now one of the reasons I’m raising funding is because those advertising barriers for when I write a big enough check. When I have serious money I can advertise. But those are the obstacles I’ve battled every single day for the past 13 years. And so as I say, it’s a goddamn miracle Make Love Not porn is still here still operating. And that is why investors should fund me and make love not porn, because I and we have the persistence, the resilience, the determination, the grit and the proven traction that investors should be putting $20 million behind right now.
Beata Young 34:25
Absolutely fund Cindy should be a hashtag trending just like so ecstatic that Cindy developed. Now, do you think your life is going to be easier once you’re going to set up VC fund because it’s still going to be around sex?
Cindy Gallop 34:46
Oh, no, no. The the huge opportunity and this is why I really want to get Make Love Not porn funded as quickly as possible. So I can then turn to raising my sex tech fund because I have a vision for sex tech, unlike anybody else. And I am the only person with 13 years of domain expertise who can make this vision happen. Because, oh my god, the money that I am going to be able to make for the investors who back me. And that’s money I’m gonna be able to make in two areas. The second one, which right now, nobody even thinks about because nobody thinks is possible. So the first error is obviously, oh my god, the money to be made out of sex. Generally. We all have it. We all enjoy it. And very importantly, in today’s economic downturn, sex, what I’m doing it Make Love Not porn and sex. Generally, we are recession proof, and the market never ever goes away. But the second area is, oh my god, the money made out of socially acceptable sex. Because I want to do for sex tech. What I’m already doing it Make Love Not porn, where it’s not just what we do. It’s the way that we do it. When you do what we’re doing a bit important, socialize and normalize all of this. You then socialize and normalize people feeling really okay, about publicly buying your goods, products and services, publicly then doing what we do with everything else, reviewing, recommending, sharing, advocating, and publicly badging themselves as brand ambassadors. That’s the trillion dollar financial future, I’m going after socially acceptable sex.
Beata Young 36:44
socially acceptable sex. And also you are talking about building a community. Now we’ve seen some hate speech, involving communities, it wasn’t really social platforms. I mean, they were anti social, how is your platform approaching hate speech?
Cindy Gallop 37:08
So this is where the rest of the internet should be learning from me and make love not porn. And I want to contextualize our approach within the framework of the tech landscape as a whole. The young white male founders of the giant tech platforms that dominate our lives today, they are not the primary targets, online or offline of harassment, abuse, racism, sexual assault, violence, rape, revenge porn, therefore, they did not. And they do not proactively design for the prevention of any of those things on their platforms. And we see the results around us every single day. Those of us who are most at risk every single day, women, people of color, black people, LGBTQ, the disabled, we design safe spaces and safe experiences. I and my tiny team spent literally years concept in designing Make Love Not porn before we ever built it. Because we knew that if we were going to invite people to do something they’ve never done before socially share their real world sex, we had to think through every possible ramification of that to create a completely safe and trustworthy space. As a result, not only does Make Love Not porn operate, unlike anybody else in the adult sphere. We operate unlike anybody else on the internet period. And that’s because I designed Make Love Not porn through the female lens to be the safest place on the internet. Because I design it around what everybody else should have. Nobody else did human curation. There is no self publishing of anything on Make Love Not porn. Our curators watch every frame of every video submitted from beginning to end, before we approve or reject and we publish it. No one else does that. Our curators review every post on every member profile, photos, text illustration. And by the way on Make Love Not porn, your profile posts can be as safe work or not safe work as you like, but we review them. We approve or reject we publish them. Nobody else does that. We review every single comment on every single video. Before we approve or reject. We publish it nobody else does that. We can vouch for every single piece of content on our platform. And that is why we are the safest place on the internet. But for us human curation starts even further back before you even get to our platform. We make it crystal clear. What Make Love Not porn is all about. We are pro sex pro porn printing the difference? We make it clear what kind of content we want social sex, not just in our FAQs, but in every media interview on all our social channels. Guess what? When you make it clear what kind of content you want good sexual values good sexual behavior. That is the only kind of content you get. We have no hate speech on Make Love Not porn. Because when you design through the female lens, you design the ability to hate speak out. And that is why it is criminal. I use the term literally, it’s criminal that I have struggled for funding. It’s criminal that female founders struggle with funding. Only 2% of all venture capital last year went to female founders 98% went to predominately white men, because we design a different internet. And we design a different future for humanity. And investors who want to do a huge amount of good and make a huge amount of money. You need to put your money into us.
Beata Young 40:51
How can we support Cindy apart from buying T shirts?
Cindy Gallop 40:56
Well, obviously, you know, if you like what I’m saying, I would love everyone listening. Please go to Make Love Not porn.tv It’s free to sign up. And then it’s only I mean subscriptions start at $10 a month. So please subscribe. Please do consider becoming a Make Love Not porn star. You know, you can be anonymous wear masks faces and shadow. And by the way, another thing we do that no one else does is the moment you want your videos down the down immediately, no process, no application form. You tell us email us message us we take them down instantly. But equally you know anybody out there who is an investor or knows an investor who would get it hit you know, hook a sister up Cindy MakeLoveNotporn.com Equally, we’re looking for paying brand partners who get that we are the opportunity to demonstrate products the way that never get to be demonstrated. So equally, we’re looking for brand partnerships. And you know, please just tell everybody about us and send people to make love not porn.
Beata Young 41:59
That’s exactly what we are doing tonight. We are talking about Make Love Not Porn, Cindy Gallop and her manufacturers and how she redesign the system to fit her needs and community needs.
We have IN LOVE AND IN PAIN. I hope she’s enjoying tonight. There’s always another interesting topic. Thanks for sharing your thoughts Cindy, you really got a nice shirt.
IN LOVE AND IN PAIN you can buy it as Cindy is encouraging us.
And we have Patrick Young personally my biggest supporter, and I’m not going to share a what we are going to do next probably some present is going to happen for this Christmas. Phenomenal, inspiring and magnificent. We’re all Pro Cindy Gallop now. Thank you Beata for such an inspiring guest once again. We are not over yet. It is not over yet. Cindy, I wantto ask you, you said there is no questions of limit. And you talk about your all about action, not talking about also walking the talk, are you is your videos available on your platform?
Cindy Gallop
43:12
So we get asked this all the time. So before we launched Make Love Not Porn, we sat down as a team. And we had the conversation about as entrepreneurs, we should be using our own platform. Now there are different views within the team, some people are keener than others. But what we did all agree was, every one of us on my tiny team fights the same battle every day, dealing with business partners in our different disciplines and capacities.
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t help us to create any more barriers than we already have. And so that is why neither myself nor my team members on Make Love Not Porn ourselves. I very much hope that one day, we can break down these hypocritical business barriers in order to change that, but right now, it’s a business decision.
Beata Young 44:09
Thank you for your honesty, Cindy. I was hoping you’re going to be there because I’m sure you would have more subscribers.
Cindy Gallop
44:20
I have to tell you a lot of our male members write all the time asking this.
Beata Young 44:28
There you go, you’re the one who said “come on my face” on TEDx floor, so I’m sure it was inspiring. Now, we talked also about sexual harassment. You’ve been in social media, marketing world which was very much macho world and you’ve experienced some sexual harassment. What would be your number one advice to those who experience it for the first time?
Cindy Gallop
45:04
Well, first of all, it is enormously important especially today that anybody who experiences sexual harassment speaks up about it. You may think that your job is at risk if you do, I’m here to tell you, your job is at risk if you don’t, so absolutely speak up because today, the climate is better than it ever was before for enabling you to do that.
But honestly, the more important message is to business leaders everywhere, because sexual harassment magically disappears completely in any working environment, where you either have staff that are 50/50 male/female, or ideally more female than male, the moment you have a fully gender equal working environment, no more sexual harassment for two reasons. The first is that in a work environment that is 50/50, male/ female, I do not see more female than male, there is not the implicit bro endorsement around the men, it’s okay to behave like that. And secondly, in a gender equal or more female than male work environment, where men every single day are therefore interacting with and working with women as professional equals, exposed to women’s brilliance, talents, skills, insights, working equally with them as part of the team, men cease to see women in one of only two roles girlfriend or secretary. So it’s very simple. corporate leaders everywhere. Get your company at every single level to 50/50, male/ female or more female than male, no more sexual harassment?
Beata Young 47:05
Absolutely. Now we are based in Malta. I’ve met many women who talked to me about what they heard and they never spoke up. I mean, you’re the predecessor of speak up, you have to challenge the status quo. And men far outnumber women in politics with a blanket ban on abortion. I’m sorry about that. I’m really upset about that. And no exceptions made for incest, rape, or when the mother’s life is at risk. And until 2011 in Malta was one of the only three countries in the world who did not allow divorces. So now, how do we change that? Do we speak up? Do we go to regulators because Helena Dalli, who’s politician here in Malta said it’s so easy to change the regulation, but it’s so difficult to change the mindset.
Cindy Gallop
48:13
So what I would say to that Beata is what I say to women everywhere, which is start your own industry. And what I mean by that is, I encourage every woman to start your own business. But I deliberately articulate it like that. Because when you start your own business, you can design it to work exactly the way you want it to. And when you do that, you are starting the industry we all want to live and work in.
And the reason why that is my response to you is because again, I’m all about communication through demonstration. First of all, when women start businesses, and grow them successfully, they can then hire other women and other women then get the kind of working environment devoid of sexual harassment that we all want to be able to work in.
When women start businesses that hire other women and succeed and make money, you demonstrate to the men that there is a completely different way of working and that you need to take women seriously in that context. I say we don’t get taken seriously until we get taken seriously financially. But also because at the end of the day, and again, I’ve been saying this for decades, I want every single woman’s unashamedly set out to make an absolute God and Fucking shit ton of money. And I articulate that delivery because that is how much money I want all of us to meet. And I want you to do that not just for you, but because when all of us make an absolute got fucking shit ton of money. We can then use that money to fund other women to support other women, help other women to donate to other women.
We need to build our own financial ecosystem because the white male one is not working for us. And in that context, money is power. When we make money, we can hire lobbyists, we can affect regulation change, we can do all sorts of things to change exactly what you’re talking about. When we get taken seriously, financially, the men have to listen, and we have the money and the power to make shit happen.
Beata Young 50:22
Absolutely. I have seen so many females so happy to be included in the panel. And I remember you saying that you support yourself financially, you bootstrap your ideas, and you always ask for reimbursement in order to do that. I’ve seen so many females just eager to be on that panel and not asking for reimbursement, what would be your number one advice, how to change that mentality?
Cindy Gallop
50:51
So it’s very straightforward. And just to explain to our listeners, what Beata is referencing is the fact that I have to support myself alongside Make Love Not Porn, until I raise the kind of funding where I can pay myself the kind of salary, I don’t have to do that anymore.
And so I support myself through paid coaching. And by the way, I do personal coaching, if anyone is interested, paid business consulting and paid public speaking. And there are two very important points about that latter, which is what Beata is asking about. First of all, people value you at the value you seem to put on yourself, never give anything away for free because nobody appreciates anything they get for free. And secondly, the only way to get to speak paid is to refuse to speak unpaid. And so I simply do not speak at events that will not pay me.
Because I am enormously worth being paid to speak as I’m hoping everyone listening to me now gets a good sense of. And so it’s very simple, when you are asked to speak as a keynote speaker on a panel, you simply go great, I’d love to, this is my speaking fee. That’s it.
Beata Young 52:13
As easy as that. I remember another story. Cindy, you were saying that you wanted to get division from the management and you ask, where is this company taking me? Right. Tell us about that story.
Cindy Gallop
52:31
Sure. So, basically, this is how I came to be in New York because many, many years ago I was working for a Bartle Bogle Hegarty (BBH) in London, I was a young, thrusting, ambitious account director. And so I did what young thrusting ambitious account directors do, which is I pinned my boss, Nigel Bogle up against the wall, I went, what am I doing in this agency? And Nigel did the very good management tactic of turning the question back on me. He went, Cindy, you tell us what you want to do and we’ll make it happen. And he said, Don’t be bounded by the realms of the possible.
If you want a job at BBH, that doesn’t exist yet. Tell us what it is. So I thought, gosh, that’s a good offer, went a thought about it, came back and said, okay, my dream job would be running BBH North America in New York. And by the way, this is at a time when we only had one office in London. And so Nigel said, okay well, interestingly, we’ve begun talking about New York about the US, so your request is locked. Now we actually opened an office in Asia Pacific first because that’s what we had clients asking for a presence. So I went out to help start and run BBH in Asia Pacific as the number two. But then two years later, I got my opportunity to come to New York here in 1998 to start up BBH New York. And so absolutely in your career, feel free to ask the management where they see your future and even better have an idea of what you want that future to be and ask for it.
Beata Young 54:07
Absolutely. Now Cindy, we are reaching the full hour Can you please give us your favorite life lesson quote and how did it change you?
Cindy Gallop
54:18
Honestly, whenever people ask me my favorite piece of business advice I come up with was it was a person who said to me, get more sleep. I’m a huge fan of sleep. It’s a little known business advantage because when you when you are very well rested, you get all the sleep you want. You’re in fighting form, s get more sleep.
Beata Young 54:41
Get more sleep, and I’m not even sure who is the source of the quotation because we’ve got so many quotations we could run the whole show around Cindy Gallop’s quotations, the single largest pool of untapped resource in this world is human good intentions that never translate into actions.
We have a couple of comments, Nora says, Cindy, you were a major inspiration to me when leaving the ad agency world to start my own growth consultancy – Pitcher – for small businesses last year. I just celebrated my first anniversary in October. Thank you for lighting a fire in me. And I’m sure so many other women entrepreneurs!
Absolutely. Cindy, you are a trailblazer. And Patrick says here, here Cindy, don’t speak for free. I entirely agree. And yes, you are worth it (to coin an ad phrase). Now Cindy, we always ask this question. Imagine the pandemic is over. It’s nearly over, you could invite any person in the world to have private practice anywhere in the world. Who would you invite and where would you go to?
Cindy Gallop
55:51
Well, honestly, the answer is just very straightforward. And to be frank, I’ve been doing this since the lockdown ended, I would just spend time with my mother, anywhere. I mean, I go back to London, every four to six weeks to see my mother who’s 89 years old about to turn 90, lives in London. And so I would do what I am doing anyway, I would just spend time with my mother.
Beata Young 56:16
Well, it’s amazing that your mother is a mother of four daughters, are all your sisters like you?
Cindy Gallop
56:26
We’re all very different and we all do very different things.
Beata Young 56:29
Absolutely great. Cindy, thank you so much. She’s actually from Malaysia, as I remember. Is that a mixture of different cultures that made Cindy the person she is today or who made Cindy?
Cindy Gallop
56:48
My father was English. He’s no longer with us. My mother is Malaysian Chinese. I was born in the UK but I grew up in Brunei and Borneo. And so I consider myself very much a global citizen.
Beata Young 57:01
Out of this comfort comes greatness as Cindy likes to say. And that’s it from Episode 81 of PHD livestream thanks to our guest Cindy Gallop to stay updated and ensure you never miss a Positivity Hack Delivered, follow Women On IT and turn on notifications to be alerted once the video is released.
Thank you so much for our great commentators. We’ve got Dr. Michelle Gialanze, Nora DiNuzzo, Ai Esmeralda, Marianne Madera, In Love and In Pain, IPO-Vid In Patrick’s Opinion, thank you for listening.
Next week we are going to talk about Women In Manufacturing, trailblazing in the manufacturing work. Thank you, Cindy. That’s great. We are always reminding you, think if you don’t like something changes, if you can’t change it, change your attitude as Maya Angelou says, Today is your day to hack the futurem hack the positivity you want. Thank you.
Cindy Gallop
58:02
It’s been a pleasure Beata, take care. Bye.
Beata Young 58:05
You too. Bye