Michael Porter was coming, and somebody needed a battery. In the early days of Big Think, Victoria Montgomery-Brown found herself facing a problem considerably smaller than the future of education and considerably more urgent. An interview was about to begin. The team was setting up on location in Boston. A battery appeared to be missing.
She knew where the Staples was, roughly half a mile away. She had lived in Cambridge. So she ran there in boots, bought the batteries, and ran back. Porter had arrived. Montgomery-Brown, now thoroughly overheated, still had another job: doing his makeup.
She later admitted she could barely remember what the battery was for. It turned out not to matter. The errand stayed with her anyway. There is something pleasingly exact about this introduction to the co-founder of a company called Big Think. The thinking could be ambitious. The errands remained stubbornly literal.
An invitation to a bigger conversation
Montgomery-Brown graduated from McGill University in 1997 and received her Harvard MBA in 2003. Television production became part of her education in getting people into a room. It was also where she worked with Peter Hopkins, the person with whom she would build Big Think.
There had been an earlier ambition to run a Hollywood studio. Working in Los Angeles before business school gave her a closer look at that prospect. She recalled reading a Scooby-Doo project and questioning whether she wanted a career organized around that sort of material. She remained interested in content. She wanted a different conversation.
The first plan she and Hopkins pitched was an online university. The response was that it was too broad. That objection gave them a useful limit. They began working toward a more focused proposition: thoughtful material for people looking for something to learn on the internet, with a chance to participate in the conversation.
In January 2008, describing the idea on camera, Montgomery-Brown talked about discussions that happened behind closed doors. People outside those rooms lived with the issues under discussion, too. Why should they be confined to watching from a distance?
The pitch had a social problem tucked inside a media problem. Experts were already talking. Audiences were already online. The founders wanted to connect them in a form that could travel. A short interview could leave the room in which it was recorded and reach somebody with no invitation, expense account, or institutional affiliation.
“I’m an entrepreneur at heart.”
Victoria Montgomery-Brown
Somebody has to go first
Big Think was founded in 2007. The initial conversations with investors had the familiar circularity of early fundraising: a person liked the idea, then wanted to know who else liked it enough to invest.
Montgomery-Brown drew on her Harvard network. David Frankel was interested. Larry Summers became involved. Frankel became the lead investor, and the group of early backers included Tom Scott and Peter Thiel. Each commitment made the next conversation less abstract. An idea with another person’s money behind it was easier to take seriously.
There was a similar pattern in recruiting guests. Montgomery-Brown said the first five participants came through personal friends and favors from friends of friends. Once recognizable people had agreed, the founders could point to their participation. Richard Branson’s name was useful in a request to somebody else. A guest list became part of the invitation.
She has described figuring out how to reach Branson by reasoning from a nickname. It is a small, rather cheeky example of the work involved. A founder could possess a Harvard MBA and still have to puzzle out how to get a message in front of the right person.
These stories give the glamorous names a practical function. They reduced uncertainty for the next person being asked. The achievement lay partly in making the requests, partly in understanding what made agreement easier. Somebody still had to be first, without the comfort of a long list.
The business behind the white backdrop
The finished Big Think interview had a spare visual language. A speaker appeared against white. The room and its distractions receded. The attention stayed on the person explaining an idea. Early participants included business leaders and musicians; the cast could accommodate Richard Branson, Moby, and Henry Rollins.
That apparent simplicity required preparation. The battery run belongs to the same story as the clean backdrop. A viewer could encounter a few minutes of coherent thought because somebody had dealt with the booking, the equipment, and the practical business of making the guest comfortable.
Montgomery-Brown also had to help answer a less photogenic question: how would it pay? The company began with sponsorships, using an approach she compared to public broadcasting. Organizations could support material Big Think wanted to make. They could associate their names with the work. She maintained a distinction between that arrangement and making an advertisement for a sponsor.
Subscriptions became another part of the business. Big Think Edge brought educational content into professional development. The move offered a way to sell something with a clearer recurring use inside an organization, alongside the public-facing interviews.
The detail that interests Montgomery-Brown is often the design of the transaction. She has described changing Edge’s early pricing because charging by the number of users discouraged broad access. The alternative charged for content. The mission had consequences for the invoice.
The trouble with the glass doors
Inside the company, access presented a different problem. Montgomery-Brown and Hopkins occupied a conference room separated from the team by glass doors. They were visible. Approaching them nevertheless felt more formal. Employees also found it awkward to ask to use a room the co-founders were already occupying.
The arrangement is almost too tidy a metaphor for a knowledge company. The people were close enough to see each other, yet an ordinary conversation acquired an unnecessary threshold. Montgomery-Brown initially resisted the suggestion that she join the wider team. She came to recognize its value.
She has written about the trap of adopting a command-and-control style because it seems to belong to the job. Becoming a CEO can tempt a founder to perform an idea of authority. Her later account favors communication, availability, and helping employees grow within a shared purpose.
“Creating silos will kill you,” she wrote. For a business built around communicating useful knowledge, the warning had an immediate application at home. A leader’s position in the room could affect what the leader heard.
A goddess with a working draft
By 2020, Montgomery-Brown had enough experience to publish Digital Goddess: The Unfiltered Lessons of a Female Entrepreneur. The title has a wink in it. The subject matter includes raising money, choosing colleagues, working with a co-founder, and making the transition from having an idea to running its company.
The book was published by HarperCollins Leadership on October 6. It appeared among Good Morning America’s book selections that month. Its opening puts an uncomfortable disclosure to investors near the center of the founding story. The broader question is recognizable: what do you do when the truth might make the people backing you reconsider?
Montgomery-Brown’s answer has been to tell them quickly. “Transparency is a must as an entrepreneur,” she said. Her account of difficult news emphasizes the trust created by bringing it to investors directly, before they could encounter it elsewhere.
She has also spoken about learning to say no sooner, after allowing an unwanted potential adviser to linger around the business. Directness could save everyone time. The same person who needed people to say yes had to learn when a clear refusal was part of her own job.
“Transparency is a must as an entrepreneur.”
Victoria Montgomery-Brown
Her reason for writing had an audience attached. Young women had been contacting her to ask how she had become an entrepreneur. Hopkins encouraged her to put the experience into a book. A private answer to a recurring question could become something available to many more people.
That is a familiar move in her career. Take knowledge held inside one relationship and give it a form that other people can use. This time the person being asked to explain herself was the founder.
The partnership after the platform
Montgomery-Brown’s work now includes Trust Collaborative, which she co-founded with Hopkins. Their current firm says they built and led Big Think for thirteen years, through 2020. The partnership has carried into another kind of work with ideas.
Trust Collaborative describes working with founders, senior operators, and researchers on public positioning, ongoing counsel, introductions, and institution building. A client’s idea might need an argument, a carefully chosen conversation, or an organization of its own. The firm offers to help decide what is needed and carry the work through.
There is continuity here without requiring the two ventures to be identical. Big Think developed an audience for expert knowledge. Trust Collaborative works alongside people deciding how and where to contribute their own. Montgomery-Brown’s experience of securing backing, building relationships, and running an organization sits behind that proposition.
Her story keeps returning to the practical terms on which an idea becomes available to somebody else. An introduction. An interview. A subscription. A book. A working partnership that outlasts the original platform.
And, on one hot day in Boston, batteries. The public gets the explanation. Somebody has to make sure the equipment is ready.