James Currier came up with the idea for Tickle
(founded in 1999 and originally called Emode) after
taking a personality test in one of his Harvard
Business School classes.
A former venture capitalist with a passion for digital
media and social sciences, Currier believed that
the Internet could be used to help people learn more
about themselves. People could visit www.tickle.com
to take several different kinds of personality and selfassessment
tests, most backed by scientific research,
to understand areas of human behavior (and also to
find out what breed...

basketball court. I watched this and thought, “I’ve never seen anyone talk about
a movie for this long. That’s powerful media. Why?”
So I discussed this with my family, who were involved in psychology, and
asked, “Are we our own favorite subjects?” We’re very concerned about ourselves
and the people we know. I realized that no other technology allowed us
to get media about ourselves. All the other media technologies allow us to learn
only about people we will never know. Tom Cruise, Tom Brokaw—we know a
ton about those people and yet...

the back of this thing. So I was relatively paranoid about that and only talked to
people that I trusted.
But what I got back was, “I don’t understand what the heck you’re talking
about.” All the people that I had been talking with about digital media, selfhelp,
and psychology with, they still didn’t understand what the hell I was trying
to do. I couldn’t find the words to describe the vision.
Livingston: Why did they not get it? What did they misunderstand?
Currier: I think there are very few people who have...

“Do you have an office?”
James Currier 389
And you go sign a lease somewhere.
“Do you have business cards?”
“No, let me go get business cards.”
“Do you have a website?”
“We just launched it.”
“Well, is anyone coming?”
“No one’s coming yet, but I’ll get back to you when people are coming.”
“When you hit this level, then I’ll be interested.”
Everyone is looking for the next step. And so as you go along with each of
these confidence steps, you can pick up more and more...

we arranged for a marshal to be ready to create peace once we let this guy go if
he really blew up and went crazy.
Livingston: Could you have recognized that this employee was bad news from
the beginning?
Currier: You might have, but I wasn’t experienced enough at the time, since I
had never done one of these before. I was 30 and I knew a lot about the industry
and the technology, but I was very green on people. And that is a painful way
to start a company.
I...