Social Entrepeneurship Graham Hill | Big Think

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Graham Hill recalls his trajectory before becoming a social entrepreneur.

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Graham Hill:

Hill is the founder of TreeHugger, an online hub for news and information related to environmental sustainability.Hailed as a "green CNN," TreeHugger hosts a constantly updated blog, newsletters, video and radio segments and a user-generated Graham site, Hugg. In the three years since its inception, TreeHugger has become one of the most high-profile and highly-trafficked sites on the internet.

Recently, Hill his been hard at work developing Planet Green with Discovery Communications. Hill has also worked in a variety of industries prior to starting TreeHugger, including fashion, web-development, and plant-based air filters. He is also a designer, and his New York souvenir coffee mug is sold in over 150 stores. Hill was educated at Carleton University in Ottawa and Emily Carr Institute of ArtDesign in Vancouver.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: When did you become a social entrepreneur?

Graham Hill: I think I made a transition in the last five years or so. Before I would have just called myself a serial entrepreneur. Now I think I’m a serial entrepreneur that’s going to forever do “do gooder” things.

I’m very excited by change and by building something from nothing. And at this point, on top of that, I’m really want to do good. I think there’s a lot of suffering in the world, and I’d like to see what I can do to reduce it.

Question: Why did you make the change?

Graham Hill: My cousin and I built this great company of around 60 people. We started in ’95 – pre-Netscape – so very early on. And we just did great work programming; project management sort of stuff.

There were a lot of acquisitions going on at that point, and we got a lot of interest. And so we ended up selling to a New York company. And I finagled my way here via running an office for them for a little bit in Boston, and with the promise I’d be able to come out of the New York office--because I was very attracted to New York. So that’s sort of how I got here.

And after a while, it wasn’t the right fit for me, with the company. And I think I was really ready for something new. And so I tried a couple of things and really got my first D. It just didn’t go so well. Which I think was really great because it sort of let off a lot of pressure. And I think it also focused me because that first thing wasn’t particularly positive. It was more of a benign project – an Internet based thing.

It actually got me focused on; I really wanted to do something that matters to me and was in sync with my values. And I think I was really affected by reading. And I think books are; their power is underestimated. I think something about, you pick it up, you have to remember where you’re at, what the whole overall concept is, you get into it. You provide energy to it. It’s not just fed to you. And then you put it down, and you pick it up, and you put it down. It’s hundreds of pages, often, and it goes over the same stuff in various ways. And so it syncs in in a way that I think a lot of things don’t. So books are really powerful. I think that really helps. A lot of my reading on evolution and on green and just on social entrepreneurship.

This sort of stuff just got me very turned on. I was just very excited about the whole prospect.

Question: What inspired you to start an environmentally sound business?

Graham Hill: Really the way it started was I just said, “Why? What’s happening here? Why isn’t green mainstream?”

It seemed to me that a lot of people really cared about it, but it just hadn’t made that move. So why was that? And so I started looking at myself and trying to answer that question.

First of all, to me, aesthetics matter. I’m a shallow person, and so I care about; not that you can tell; I care about how I get my hair cut, and I care about the clothes that I wear, and I care about what my apartment’s like. And if I drove a car, I would care about that.

And so all these things, I wish they didn’t matter to me. I wish I didn’t care, but they do. And so one of the issues, the first one I highlighted, was that the hippies had really owned this area for 30, 40 years. They were the real backbone. And I had clearly come from there, and so I love the hippies. But I really felt like they were really a very small segment of the market. And the rest of the market – 95 percent plus of the people – it just wasn’t so appealing to them.

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