Social Impact Tech: Vladimir Oane of Deepstash On How Their Technology Will Make An Important Positive Impact
An Interview With Jilea Hemmings
The goal of the app is to present a healthier alternative to social networks. We want to turn mindless scrolling into learning with a purpose: you can scroll through a feed, but making that feed a source of self-improvement articles creates a digital experience that guides people to good content.
In recent years, Big Tech has gotten a bad rep. But of course many tech companies are doing important work making monumental positive changes to society, health, and the environment. To highlight these, we started a new interview series about “Technology Making An Important Positive Social Impact”. We are interviewing leaders of tech companies who are creating or have created a tech product that is helping to make a positive change in people’s lives or the environment. As a part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Vladimir Oane.
Vladimir Oane is the co-founder and CEO of Deepstash. He served as one of Hootsuite’s product leads after the acquisition of uberVU, the company he previously co-founded. He is passionate about ed-tech and the power of social media to positively impact society.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a bit about your childhood backstory and how you grew up?
I grew up in Romania with my loving parents who were instrumental in teaching me about the world, and instilled in me a love for reading. When I first started school, my favorite books were on ancient civilizations and I loved to read science-fiction novels. You can say that I’ve always been interested in the emergence of new ideas, even from an early age. As I progressed through my education, my interests varied, but you can definitely say that the world of computers and technology gripped me. I went on to study computer science at the University of Bucharest and made some amazing friends there. In fact, these strong bonds I made in my childhood and adolescence became foundational to my success. It was my friendship with Dan Ciotu, CTO of Deepstash, that led to some great wins in my career. Being a serial entrepreneur was always in my sights, and this dream became reality when I went on to co-found uberVU with Dan. uberVU was acquired by Hootsuite, and along with another childhood friend, Cristian Mezei, we created a knowledge discovery social platform, Deepstash. This is my current passion project and my proudest work to date.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began your career?
I could share some wonderful stories about inspirational people, and being asked to do talks all over the world, but the one interesting story that first sprang to my mind was my dance with death. I was lucky enough to attend a business conference in Washington that had some amazing perks. The most exciting part of the trip for me was the team-building exercise. And it was no ordinary team-building event: definitely not one I would want to repeat in a hurry. The team-building exercise consisted of canoeing, and was hosted by a former US champion. During the event, my boat got stuck under some rocks, and I found myself in the cold white waters. I fought to breathe for what seemed like an eternity, until I got pulled out of the water. This escapade taught me a lot about how quickly life can change and how very fortunate we are to spend our time where it matters.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There have been so many influential people that have helped me by providing amazing guidance, mentoring me, or simply providing a new perspective. I’ve been lucky enough to have fantastic teachers, supportive school colleagues who also shared my passion for creating things from nothing, and above all, patient and kind family members and friends. Of course, I have to mention Dan Ciotu and Cristian Mezei, my co-founders. I am very lucky to partner with curious, ambitious people that put their hearts, souls, and often sleepless nights into the product. A story close to my heart is our own team-building events (no canoeing there!) where we spend our time playing football, board games and getting to know each other. At Deepstash, we are above all friends, then colleagues.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?
“What a man can be, he must be”. Short and sweet, but definitely powerful. This is Abraham Maslow’s quote from his 1954 book, Motivation and Personality. For me, self-actualization is highly important, as a father, husband, and an entrepreneur. The quote speaks to the constant devotion to growing yourself towards a heart-felt ideal. I don’t ever want to stop learning, and that’s why I founded Deepstash, because I genuinely believe that it can help everyone read more, create more, and learn every day.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
- Curiosity. Because nothing productive or original happens without it. I love to employ curious people who have new or quirky ideas. One of my favorite workplace stories is our recent hackathon, where our dedicated and talented computer programmers got together to work on their own projects. Why? Because they were curious to see whether new features and ideas could be coded and implemented at a super fast pace. Long story short: curiosity leads to amazing work.
- Rebellion. I’ve always been a fan of going against the grain and often the best work comes from the most interesting and rebellious ideas. For example, at Deepstash, we always invite our team to come up with new ideas for the app, and we create an atmosphere where challenging each other’s ideas is encouraged as this is the best way to foresee problems and to come up with innovative solutions.
- Love of reading. Reading provides me with the potential to create amazing ideas, to inspire me and to even aid productivity. For example, when I have unproductive days, I log on to the Deepstash app and read some cool facts and that always gets my motivation levels up.
Ok super. Let’s now shift to the main part of our discussion about the tech tools that you are helping to create that can make a positive social impact on our society. To begin, what problems are you aiming to solve?
- Information overload: the excessive amount of content that is competing for our attention every day.
- The lack of digital experiences which help with guiding people to valuable and healthy content.
- The negative mental health effects caused by bad/sad news on social networks.
- Mindless scrolling. Enough said.
How do you think your technology can address this?
At Deepstash, we are introducing a new way to discover and interact with the content that matters to us. We are doing it through a format that matches our current consumption habits. Shorter, faster, better. Our focus on knowledge (and we can define knowledge loosely as any information that has intrinsic value) gives us the ability to connect ourselves around common interests and offer us the tools to find, save and share ideas in a positive way.
Overall, the goal of the app is to present a healthier alternative to social networks. We want to turn mindless scrolling into learning with a purpose: you can scroll through a feed, but making that feed a source of self-improvement articles creates a digital experience that guides people to good content.
Can you tell us the backstory about what inspired you to originally feel passionate about this cause?
As a child, I was privileged to always be surrounded by books. I realised early on that every problem is fixable only by being understood. Solving a problem and understanding the problem is the same thing. That’s what we’re doing with Deepstash. We are creating micro experiences that might inspire you, make you smarter or connect with others who share your passions.
How do you think this might change the world?
If more people would discuss ideas instead of the politics of the day we would be living in a utopia. Our goal is to educate, inspire, and get people to learn more about ideas. And it’s working. We know from the tens of thousands of people we talked to or those who left us a review that our product makes a positive impact in their lives.
Keeping “Black Mirror” and the “Law of Unintended Consequences” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks about this technology that people should think more deeply about?
We think access to ideas and free discussion of every idea is ultimately positive. The spread of misinformation is highly worrying, but our app is here to combat that.
Here is the main question for our discussion. Based on your experience and success, can you please share “Five things you need to know to successfully create technology that can make a positive social impact”? (Please share a story or an example, for each.)
1. Don’t assume you know everything about your product: creating social tech is a learning curve. In our weekly meetings, we encourage everyone to share their ideas about what they like about the product or how to improve certain aspects. It’s humbling to learn how everyone sees the product in their own way, and how to learn from everyone’s opinions.
2. Stop thinking about macro-impact and focus on micro-problems. We found that it’s much more effective to focus on the smaller bugs or discrepancies in the app and fine-tune them rather than the macro-impact of the product. After all, your users are the most important to you. Make sure to keep them satisfied. Don’t just listen to their problems, actively try and correct them, and make their experience the best they can be. They don’t like the newest version of the app? Ask why. Get involved. They are finding a feature too difficult to navigate? Try it yourself, make sure you know exactly what they find difficult, and ease the process.
3. Everyone is amazing the way they are. Don’t assume you can change anybody. This is a huge part of our work at Deepstash. You can’t force people to believe that your technology will change their life. You have to cater to your users and make sure again, that you listen to all their feedback, not just the positive ones. Even as the CEO, I love to be present in user research work, and make sure that I have hands-on experience with how people are using the app.
4. Automate what you understand. Don’t spend too much time doing something you already know how to do. You should be spending as much time as you can on learning and innovating. Your priority is to find faster, more efficient ways to do your work. From the operations team, to our PR department, all the way to our coders, learning and professional development is key.
5. Measure everything. For example, in the early days of Deepstash we needed to ensure our content spoke to our audience. We therefore actively measured what content performed best, and made sure to personally create content that spoke to our audience.
If you could tell other young people one thing about why they should consider making a positive impact on our environment or society, like you, what would you tell them?
I know it must sound strange and counterintuitive at first, but in my personal opinion, the best way to improve society is to first ignore it. Society is an abstract concept unifying individuals, all following their own selfish reasons in an attempt to cope with the tragedy or beauty of life.
I would advise people to focus on themselves first. Fix the problem they have in their lives. Those are very tangible, easier to understand and easier to act on problems. The more capable you are in managing yourself, the more you can focus on complex problems. Those problems will involve other people and you will impact the lives of others from a place of competence and authenticity.
Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would like to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. 🙂
Maxi Jazz from Faithless, my favorite band of all time. I would love to get a chance to talk to him around a table and talk about music, life, and the secret to writing great lyrics. I may even ask him if my interpretation of some of his lyrics are anywhere close to what he wanted to depict.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
I share my thoughts and ideas on my deepstash profile @vladimiroane and on my blog vladimirsays.com
Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational, and we wish you continued success in your important work.
Social Impact Tech: Vladimir Oane of Deepstash On How Their Technology Will Make An Important… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.