Cindy Gallop would like to be remembered as somebody who changed the world, or at least as somebody who tried.
Cindy Gallop is the founder of If We Ran the World (IWRTW), an online platform designed for people and businesses to make things happen quickly and easily. “If Facebook is the social graph and Twitter is the interest graph, then IWRTW is the action graph,” she says about her venture. “We’re for people who have an intention but don’t know how to act on it.”
Despite a successful career in advertising, Gallop is probably best known for her four-minute presentation at the TED2009 conference, where she launched “Make Love Not Porn” with the purpose of correcting some of the myths of hardcore pornography. Her TEDTalk was “one of the events most talked about” and it generated significant interest online.
Penang happens to be a particularly special place for Gallop, who is half Malaysian Chinese. She still has family here; in fact, her parents were married in St George’s Church. When Gallop is in town (mostly around Christmas), she makes sure she gets her fix of one thing: oyster omelette! “We had a big tragedy on Friday night when I came home because the oyster omelette stall had disappeared at Gurney Drive!” she recalls. “We had to drive to Macalister Road and go to the hawkers there.”
So it was apt that Gallop was at TEDxGurneyDrive, a local spinoff of the original, popular global conference series TEDTalks, in December 2012, where she spoke on the theme of the conference, “Be All You Can Be”. We talked to her about the five domains of her speech: youth, business, technology, entrepreneurship and women.
