The man printing our T-shirts
asked me a fair question.
“What exactly do you do?”
Viktor Grant · fractional CTOFair question. Here is the honest answer.
You are trying to get found.
On Google, and now inside the AI answers
that are quietly replacing Google.
Most people get stuck in one of three places:
their SEO, their AI,
or the grey area in between,
where nobody can tell you what is working.
That grey area is where I live.
I started building this in 1997,
the year before Google.
I have watched the rules change twice.
Both times, a few gatekeepers decided who gets seen,
and good websites went quiet overnight.
So here is what we do.
We help you get found by the machines,
without handing your business to the people who own them.
And we do it together.
Nobody ever got past a gatekeeper alone.
I didn't set out to build Earthgrid.
I think I was handed the job.
Oregon Country Fair, 1989.
A strange man named Wayne Gaydos
was selling a gold-plated pyramid. I wasn't buying.
Then he looked me straight in the eye.
You. You're the Earthgrid engineer.
You were sent to this planet to build the global information network.Me: “Huh? What’s an Earthgrid?” Wayne Gaydos · Oregon Country Fair · 1989
That question has driven me ever since.
Open the chapters to follow the thread.
Nobody had a web browser yet.
A "global information network" sounded like science fiction.
But the phrase stuck. So did the pyramid.
Maps cut the planet into squares.
Rows and columns. Boxes to sort people into.
We use triangles instead.
It's the strongest shape in engineering.
A triangle stands only when all three sides
hold each other up. So does a network.
In 1994, Microsoft invited me to become an ICP on MSN, The Microsoft Network.
I produced live events with Jack Canfield and more than 50 best-selling authors. Our chat community grew to between 50,000 and 60,000 members.
Then something strange happened.
During live chats with 2,000 people online, their questions started matching the ones I was about to ask. It was as if we were all thinking together.
One of those interviews was with Peter Russell, author of The Global Brain. I was not just interviewing him about the idea. I was watching it happen in real time.
Connected people think better together.
That chat was true community. People helped each other,
and nobody was selling their attention.
I never forgot how it worked. Years later,
that memory let me rebuild it for Earthgrid.
Eight years after the fair, I founded Earthgrid.
It was never one website. It was three parts,
working together like a triangle.
Earthgrid.com: cloud computing and web design.
Earthgrid.net: complimentary mini-sites and messaging for groups.
Earthgrid.org: resources for humanitarian work.
The mission still fits:
“We’re cleaning up the Web one Web site at a time.”
In 2003, we ran bulk text messaging
for a Hollywood Bowl event planning meeting.
The meeting was at a well-known
Italian restaurant in Santa Monica.
The keyword in the text?
“Free Food.”
That's why people came.
The right words move people.
By 2004, Earthgrid had its own messenger.
19,827 people signed up to write to each other on it.
Many of them are still out there.
We're inviting them back, one person at a time.
In 2011, the directory was busy.
233,505 clicks went through to member sites that year.
By 2014, 96.5% of that traffic was gone.
Nobody left. Nobody stopped caring.
The gates were still there. So were the guards.
But the guards had started deciding who got through.
In about three years, a whole generation
of good websites simply went quiet.
So we rebuilt the search around one idea:
no single company should decide what you see.
We draw results from Google and a dozen other sources.
We are not trying to beat any of them.
We just refuse to depend on one of them.
You choose. That was the whole point.
And it grew again, quietly, year after year.
Then the rules changed a second time.
The answers moved inside the machines.
People asked a question,
and something else answered for them.
Fewer and fewer clicked through to anyone.
Here is what the gatekeepers left us with.
70% of our original community's email
sits with just four companies.
Of the 19,827 people who built Earthgrid 1.0,
200 have found their way back so far.
That is about 1 in 99.
We did not lose them.
We lost the roads to them.
So what actually moves the people in charge?
Not asking nicely. Leverage.
They have to want what you have.
Scattered, a community has none.
A community that finds itself again has plenty.
That is why this is the age of disclosure.
Much of what we built stayed private for years,
because I did not think people were ready.
Now we are opening it up.
The global information network is real now,
and machines decide what people see on it.
So Wayne's question has a sharper edge:
Who is the network for?
Network health, counted every day · 67,305 valid members · 736 of 1,260 listed sites checked and still up · updated Nov 6, 2026 UTC
Every live number in this section is counted from our own database
once a day, and shown whether it flatters us or not.
That is what disclosure means.
Read more: my Insights Magazine interview (PDF) · About Viktor Grant