Good Experience Live

Mark Hurst: What Better Place

Mark Hurst is founder of the Internet consulting firm Creative Good. Previously, Hurst was director of product development at Yoyodyne, an early Internet marketing firm founded by Seth Godin and later bought by Yahoo. Here is a rough transcript of his introduction to Good Experience Live:

I want to take a few minutes to explain why I came to this place, why I created Gel, and what it's all about. I created a slideshow to describe where I was following the dotcom. This is the office we were going to build out just before the peak. We were going to take this sweatshop in the Garment District and transform it into a professional services office. We did, but then we laid everyone off. So I took some time off to go on a road trip.

This is the tent I slept in. I sometimes stayed in Motel 6 when I needed some time off. After 911 I had some family business I needed to take care. Family business completed, I turned west. In Minneapolis at the Mall of America, I got to thinking about experience. At the Mall, there's a line between the experience and the commercial side. There's even a Chapel of Love at the Mall of America. And on the day I was there, a couple got married.

I kept heading west to the mountains. This is the Sitting Bull monument, one man's vision of building something. The Salt Flats were one of my favorite places. It was one of the quietest places I've ever been. One of my least favorite places was not New York, but the Las Vegas version of New York. And then I got home, one of my favorite places.

After traveling across the country and having all of these experiences, I realized that New York was the place I wanted to be. Now is a time to return to our values and want we want to work on. I came back to Good Experience. Experience is more than just fixing Web sites. I wanted to put a conference together that brought together a broad perspective of good experience. New York is the place to do it. New York is an experience in and of itself. What better place to hold this than the New-York Historical Society? I can't think of a more relevant place to hold this event.