Thor Muller
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A Bit About Me
Thor Muller has been leading product innovation teams since 1995, combining the strategy and practice of design, technology and marketing. As a serial entrepreneur he founds and advises startups that make a difference to real people, a vocal advocate for harnessing business to enable meaningful social change. He’s passionate about self-organizing learning communities, open data, and the importance of investing in the commons (or, as Tim O'Reilly once put it, always “create more value than you capture”). He recognizes that all of these passions ultimately boil down to culture and values, not technology.
Thor is perhaps best known as the co-founder of Get Satisfaction in San Francisco, where he served as its original CEO (2007-2009) and later CTO (2009-2011). Get Satisfaction–billed as “people-powered customer service”–is a pioneering service which today enables over 70,000 customer communities, bringing people together around the products and brands they care about. As one of the first “social business” platforms, Get Satisfaction was founded to help make better businesses by hyper-empowering their customers.
In 2012, Thor and his Get Satisfaction co-founder, Lane Becker, published a New York Times bestselling book, Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business. Based on extensive research and interviews with leading scientists, inventors and entrepreneurs, the book demonstrates how eight principles of planned serendipity can be used to drive innovation by individuals and organizations. It was featured in dozens of media outlets, including New York Times, CBS radio, Bloomberg News, KNTV, and Techcrunch.
His current projects include developing Original, an open-source portfolio and community-of-practice for makers and creatives, as well as advising companies like Byliner (future of publishing), PacerPro (open legal data), WishPlz (comparison shopping), Get Satisfaction (customer community) and VentureBeat (business media). He is a mentor for Code For America (open government), and PCH Accelerator (hardware startups).
Prior to Get Satisfaction he founded four companies, and launched dozens of web/mobile applications and sites. His startups have criss-crossed genres, from online serial entertainment, to content syndication networks, to e-commerce as performance art, to reinventing the idea of customer service from the outside in. His businesses aim to use online networks to blur the line between work and play, explode the boundaries of organizations and conventional thinking. He pulls inspiration from everywhere: music and film, creating writing, evolutionary biology, world history, systems theory,
Over his career he and his companies have been featured in New York Times, TechCrunch, Wall St Journal, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, San Francisco Chronicle, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, CNET. Thor studied Film and English Literature at University of Iowa and University of London.
He is a regular invited speaker at conferences, Global 500 companies, and universities, where he talks about entrepreneurship, cooperative games, customer community, online identity and reputation, and how technology is changing us. You may have seen him present at TEDx Oxbridge, Ignite, The Feast, GE’s CMO Summit (2012), SXSW Interactive, Webvisions, Future of Web Apps, Web 2.0 Expo, ETech, Gov 2.0, Startonomics, Freemium Summit, Google, Dreamforce, UCBerkeley, or University of Sydney. If you’d like him to speak at your event contact him at thor@thormuller.com.
Timeline (selected highlights)
- Get Lucky: How to Put Planned Serendipity to Work for You and Your Business - NYTimes best-selling book on innovation and creative thinking
- Get Satisfaction (2007-2011) – Mom-and-pops, hot startups and some of the world’s largest brands use Get Satisfaction to connect their business to the social web.
- Valleyschwag (2006) – Created the world’s first schwag-of-the-month club, a tongue-in-cheek poke at the commercialization of open Web ideals. A surprise hit, it brought the excitement and hype around Web2.0 to fans around the world in the form of logo’d t-shirts, stickers and, ahem, condoms.
- Rubyred Labs – One of the first Ruby-on-Rails-focused web and mobile app development companies. Rubyred was designed as an agile skunkworks for social software. Its unique blend of research, design and technology gave rise to the team and ideas that became Get Satisfaction.
- WellspringRX (2003-2004) – An online price comparison engine for prescription medicine. It aimed to disrupt the opaque pricing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry to help reduce health care costs by collecting prices from thousands of vendors.
- iVirus (2002) – Screenwriter of this featurette, a 20-minute narrative film directed by Jay Goodman, following the madcap hyjinx of a startup collapsing on the Eve of the dot com bust.
- Trapezo (1999-2002) – A web software company that enabled organizations to syndicate and manage content across an unlimited number of third party sites. Think of it as a first-generation widget company. Acquired by Perfect Commerce in 2002.
- Frog Design (1997-1999) – Established and ran the Internet division of one of the world’s most successful product design firms.
- Spectacle (1995-1997) – Co-created one of the first online entertainment hubs, launching games, episodic narratives and experimental interactive works. Most famous for the dystopian surveillance experience, Zoeye.
- Prophet Communications (1995-1997) – Founder of first generation Web development agency, working with entertainment and technology firms like Intel, Fujitsu, Virgin Records, Sony Entertainment. Acquired by Frog Design in 1997.
- The Argonaut (1993-1994) – Designer and managing director of this publisher of pop-culture, literary and politically-themed books, magazines and newspapers (Roger Black, design director; Warren Hinckle, editor)
- Film reviewer for On the Town (1993-1994) – Writer of film criticism for this weekly newspaper in Grand Rapids Michigan.
Contact Me
You can reach me at thor [at] thormuller.com, where, alas, I am usually a few days behind in responding. Of course, you can ping me in real-time on Twitter, where my handle is @tempo, or on Facebook. As a last resort, there’s always my phone: 415.205.0115, where you will almost surely end up in voicemail. Nothing personal
I look forward to talking!
Read my NYTimes Bestseller!