| " After working as an investment banker for 20 years, I started to think of online opportunities back in 1998. Over the past 30 years I’ve lived in Stockholm, Washington, London, New York, Paris, Los Angeles, Kiev, and have traveled to many vacation hotspots around the world. These global experiences gave me some interesting insights into collective human behavior.
As a 19-year-old, I left Sweden after eight years of boarding school and a year in the army. I had the great privilege of moving into the Swedish Embassy in Washington, when my father was appointed Swedish ambassador to the United States in 1974. This gave me an early introduction to high-level networking among the community of diplomats and politicians in Washington, as well as business people and socialites in New York. I realized how networking is institutionalized in America, where positioning through networks is key, from college fraternities and sororities to country clubs, to political and social organizations. This drive to network seems to permeate society in the US, whereas in Sweden you have a widespread culture of societies but not with any particular focus on networking.
It was not until 1998 when I realized the existence of a loosely knit community of people who are strongly connected and continuously gravitating to each other. I refer to this community as “3 million people connected 3 degrees”. The more common notion is 6 billion people connected 6 degrees.
When well-connected people travel, they usually rely on their personal network of friends and peers to get reliable and inside information, details usually not found in directories or guidebooks. Another aspect of the loosely knit community is that it also gets increasingly difficult for us to keep track of one another. Many “urban dwellers” live increasingly more complex lives with ever-changing jobs, homes, business partners and contact details. I quickly recognized a business opportunity.
The idea of aSmallWorld was born.
The first thing to do was to define the market, an existing community of people with the following traits: Highly social, well-connected, well-educated, accomplished, highly mobile, influential, influenced, and a strong need to stay connected. They tend to travel to the same destinations and often at the same time. They seem to know the same people and keep saying to each other, “What a small world!”
The author Malcolm Gladwell pointed out the importance of ”connectors” and ”mavens” in his book the Tipping Point. Connectors have the local contacts and mavens have the local information. The supply and demand of trusted information comes from within this community. So why not create a platform where this information can be exchanged? The platform should be free from commercial bias and rely solely on user-generated information. Why not create a platform where trusted information could be exchanged among connectors and mavens?
Together with Peder Dinkelspiel and my wife Louise, we got the website going in March 2004. Since then, aSmallWorld has enabled members around the world to connect, reconnect, and find jobs, employees, business partners, homes and vehicles, business deals, and plenty of advice on everything ranging from travel and nightlife, to shopping and entertainment.
In the meantime, the online social networking area has been burgeoning with new entrants, including Microsoft, Google, Yahoo and others. Most leading venture-capital companies have helped fund many independent online social-networking communities.
Companies like MySpace, Friendster, Facebook and Google’s Orkut have received most of the attention, as they are mostly oriented to teenagers and young adults, where members can maximize quantity, but not necessarily the quality, of interaction. The thought of connecting to the entire universe can be fun, but the risk is that the noise of too many people can easily drown the signal of relevant information.
aSmallWorld has an entirely different approach: we try to follow a code of civilized behavior within our online community that emulates the real world, capture real-life relationships between people, not random contacts. Unlike other online communities, we are unique because we don’t allow aliases or false names, rude or aggressive behavior towards other members, and allow only genuine and quality content. Add to this the aggregation of our members’ collective intelligence and trusted information, enabling our members to gain from each other.
We are different from all the other networking sites and the approach of a SmallWorld can be summarized as follows:
• Adapt a code of civilized behavior to online communications.
• Capture real-life relationships between people, as opposed to random contacts.
• Aggregate the collective intelligence and trusted information from our members.
• Set policies, monitor behavior and enforce guidelines just like in the real world.
• Make the Internet intimate.
• Make the world smaller.
Today aSmallWorld has 150,000 members in 150 countries. Other social networks have a diminishing value as the novelty value wears off. We see increasing time spent as the user experience develops with network size, discovery of long-lost friends, and the richness of information provided by real-life friends and relevant contacts.
Our members typically are highly educated (over 50 percent have advanced degrees with over 2000 graduates from Harvard, 800 from INSEAD, and 800 from Stanford and Wharton). They are successful professionals (over 8,000 are company presidents and CEOs), and thousands more work in executive management, consulting, investment banking, media, athletes, artists, fashion, and people deemed to be global and local trend setters.
Traffic numbers are impressive, putting aSmallWorld among the world’s top 2,000 websites, ahead of many well-branded, high-traffic websites. Most of our members have been logged on in the past couple of days and 30,000 login every day. Most of our members are logged in at least a few times per week. Many are constantly logged in, making aSmallWorld their digital home.
Our goal is to become the “most trusted” online networking community. Ultimately, we would like to be the one-stop-shop for what is the best online and offline – making aSmallWorld the trusted place to connect, share and discover the world’s finest people, places and things. " | 
