Capitalize On Your Strengths

Col Needham started the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) in 1990 with some friends who were film buffs. At the time he was working as an engineer in Bristol, England at Hewlett-Packard.

Since this was before the first publicly available web browser, Needham and others communicated with each other via Usenet, a series of bulletin/discussion boards shared across various networks and the internet. On one of the newsgroups (a Usenet bulletin board) called rec.arts.movies, movie fans would gather to discuss movies and share knowledge. In October, 1990, these lists contained over 23,000 entries, covering nearly 10,000 movies and television series.

Playing to his strengths, Needham looked upon the 23,000 entries and posted set of Unix shell scripts that allowed these lists to be searched in combination and have meaningful results returned. These four lists and the scripts to search them were the Internet Movie Database: Episode I - The Text-Only Unix Version, known at that time as the "rec.arts.movies movie database."

These first scripts created a lot of excitement among the early users of the database. The excitement led to both new data and new categories. Writers, composers and cinematographers were the next additions, then came support in the database software for recording people's votes on films on a scale from 1-10.

Within four years, the name was changed from the rec.arts.movies movie database to the Internet Movie Database. Additionally the growing popularity and use of the database web was beginning to outpace the capacity of the equipment and internet bandwidth its supporters were willing/able to donate. n late 1995 the decision was made to incorporate and in January of 1996 the IMDb was incorporated and became Internet Movie Database, Ltd.

Rather than go to venture capitalists for millions and open up a big, glossy office in Silicon Valley, the shareholders of the Internet Movie Database were the people who helped create it and the database would have to survive on its income from advertising, licensing, and partnership deals. The team continued to work from their homes, with most continuing to hold their "day jobs" while working on the IMDb evenings and weekends, and a couple taking on full-time responsibility for the day to day management and operations.

By the summer of 1996, thanks to IMDb's first film-related advertising campaign (for Independence Day), Needham had quit HP to work on IMDb full-time as a paid employee.

Questions To Ask Yourself

• Needleman chose not to hide this talent and instead played to his strengths by helping organize data in a unique way.  Are you hiding your talent?  If so why? 
• What talent do you have? What are your strengths? 
• How can you use your strengths to fulfill your dream? 
• Do you know what strengths you have and what strengths you would like to have?
• Are you capitalizing on your strengths or are you wasting them on efforts not associated with the life you want to create? 
• How does your organization capitalize on the strengths of its people?