Motley Fool Interview With Martin Reeves: Innovation and Imagination | The Motley Fool

In this podcast, Motley Fool Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross and contributor Rich Lumelleau chat with Martin Reeves about:

• The like button’s invention and implications.
• Innovation in the digital age.
• The role of imagination in business strategy.

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A full transcript is below.

This podcast was recorded on August 10, 2025.

Martin Reeves: I was fascinated by the elegance and the simplicity of the Like button in terms of how could a dozen lines of JavaScript code, which is the Like button change so much about how we transact, how we communicate, how we relate?

Mac Greer: That was Martin Reeves, business strategist, advisor, and author of several books, including Your Strategy Needs a Strategy, The Imagination Machine, and his most recent, Like The Button that Changed the World. I’m Motley Fool Producer Mac Greer. Now, recently, Motley Fool contributor Rich Lumelleau and Motley Fool Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross caught up with Reeves and talked business, Imagination, and, yes, the Like button.

Andy Cross: Let’s just jump in with very recently, you and Bob Goodson released a book called, Like The Button that Changed the World, which looks at how digital systems have reshaped human behavior, identity, society, all catalyzed by quite simply the Like button. What sparked the idea for the book? I have to say, I love this comment from you. It was brilliant in its simplicity. Let’s talk a little bit about it.

Martin Reeves: Now you’ve answered the question. It is an unusual thing to write a book about it, I think, because it’s an apparently trivial object that we maybe don’t pay much attention to, but I was fascinated by the the elegance and the simplicity of the Like button in terms of how could a dozen lines of JavaScript code, which is the Like button change so much about how we transact, how we communicate, how we relate? Then, of course, all of the negative social side effects and the revolution in advertising and social media. It’s just incredible that such a small thing could trigger so many changes. But the more proximal reason is, I was actually getting to know Bob Goodson, my co author, who originally was a medieval literature scholar who show I ended up as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and CEO. We were just getting to know each other, and I discovered in our coffee conversation that he was a bit of an avid collector.

You couldn’t even say hoarder. He’s collected every train receipt since he was 10-years-old, and he was moving. To make conversation, I said to him, you must be finding interesting things in your boxes, Bob. He said, yes, and he pulled out a sketchbook. There was a dated sketch of the Like button that I immediately recognized was about five years before I’d known Facebook to have rolled out the button. I said to Bob, are you telling me you invented the Like button, Bob? He gave me a very strange response. He didn’t say yes or no. He said, no, of course, not. Maybe, I’m not sure. I thought how could you not be sure whether you invented for Like button or not? This 30 minute conversation we had extended to a whole day until we thrown out of the last closing restaurant in Mill Valley. Essentially, by the end of it, we had a plan to write a book about the fascinating and winding story of the invention of the Like button.

Andy Cross: It’s amazing. That’s a great background. I love how you explore how it basically flattened human nuance into binary approval, like or not like. What would you say your takeaway as you wrote the book are some of the broader consequences of this binary outcome?

Martin Reeves: Well, the actual story like, why the thumbs up and who invented the Like button is fascinating enough. Then what does it tell us about the nature of inventions like a second layer. The surface story is essentially, that it’s very hard to say, even after three years of research who invented the Like button because a whole community of pioneers and early Web 2.0 companies were looking at similar challenges at roughly the same time, and they all had different versions of things that contributed to the Like button. The essential problem was that in the nuclear winter following the dot com bust, this idea of Web 2.0 emerged, but there are a couple of problems with Web 2.0, the idea of the web where users generate the content. One of them principally being that the users were not generating any content. That was one problem to solve. The second problem to solve was that this was pre broadband. This is around the year 2000, this was pre broadband. Anything you did to communicate with anyone, like displaying a Like button or whatever, would likely trigger a page refresh.

The last thing you wanted to do in a conversation was trigger a page refresh because you would lose 20 seconds. You’d probably lose whatever person was doing, what they were doing on your website. That was a technical problem, and many businesses were facing different versions of this. Bob Goodson was one of the people that came up with this dated sketch of the Like button. The problem he was trying to solve as the employee number 1 of Yelp was that the people were not submitting restaurant reviews for Yelp’s business model. They didn’t have a lot of money. It was a start-up. What other currency? There’s a currency of recognition. What happens if we allow people to complement the reviews of others? But you couldn’t trigger a page refresh. The answer was, do the computation locally in the browser in JavaScript. But that was not why JavaScript was designed. This was like an unintended feature of JavaScript. Then other people were doing at the same time, like I’m not sure whether you remember a site called Hot or Not or rather salacious site voted on the appearance of your colleagues and your friends. It was a voting. Voting is the same problem which is, how do I display my vote? How do I vote on things and how do I get a counter on my vote and page refresh the same problem. Community of people innovated. Why the thumbs up gesture? That’s also pretty interesting. I presume you’re both American. Ask anyone American, what is the very origin of the Like button? They’re likely to say the colosseum of ancient Rome, where people voted on the fate of the fallen gladiators.

The reason that they think that that is the case is that there was a famous painting in 1870 that was very popular with the rising American middle class that displayed the vestal virgins in the colosseum giving the thumbs down gesture. But we know for a fact that this was not what the Romans did. The Romans probably did more something like the sheath thumb and the downward pointing thumb. But for dramatic effect, this French painter actually had these gestures, and then it became a linguistic fact. In fact, it was reinforced in the very year that Bob drew his sketch by the gladiator movie, Gladiator I, which Ridley Scott originally intended to turn down because he didn’t want to do what he called a sandals and toga movie. [laughs] But he was shown the very same painting that created this myth of the Romans did this and this and he was persuaded by the drama of the painting to actually make the movie. The cultural history of the Like button is also interesting. That, if you like, is some of the story of how did the Like button come about? But I think it tells us a lot also about how does innovation really work out? Does technological innovation really work?

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Andy Cross: Well, Martin, not just innovation, but creativity, just the simple design of thumbs up or thumbs down has had really second order effects in lots of different ways. When you look at the arc of history of the Like button, the extent of that, does it surprise you the second order effects of such a simple design?

Martin Reeves: Yeah, and I’ve delved into why was that the case? What are the effects of this little invention, the Like button? It’s spread like wildfire. Nobody spent a penny on promoting it. We never needed an instruction manual. It just took off. It became a universal, you could call it, linguistic standard for the Web 2.0. It spread well beyond social media. Now every shopping site every B2B site, FedEx and customer analytics, your Netflix movies, everybody.

Andy Cross: The Motley Fool, we have a button on our sites.

Martin Reeves: You have a button? No if you look really hard, you can find some people have a heart or some people have a thumbs down but, but basically, the de facto standard globally is the thumbs up. What does it tell us about these things? It tells us a number of things, I think. I’m not sure how you were educated, but at my school, when we studied science, I heard heroic stories of individual creative geniuses like Sir Alexander Graham Bell and the telephone and Sir Humphry Davy and the miner safety lamp with great foresight in a moment, a flash of inspiration inventing something. One moment we didn’t have the thing they invented, and then the next moment we had the blueprint for the invention that would solve some major social problem. It tells us that, actually, innovation is not generally like that. Because this was absolutely a community of innovators and there’s good science that shows that this is the norm rather than the exception. Also, I interviewed all of these people, or my co author, Bob did, and one characteristic of all of these pioneering interviews is that not a single one of these pioneers of the Like button actually had any great foresight over the eventual impact of the Like button. In fact, something really strange happened when we tried to talk to these pioneers about the Like button.

They’d say what day are you talking about? Because there was not such a thing in their minds as the afternoon when they invented the Like button. How they thought about this was that particular day, I was just trying to solve a tactical challenge, just like every other day. It just so happened that this tactical challenge I solved may have contributed to something bigger. Absolutely, no one would say this will create the monetization model for the social media industry. This will create enormous social side effects. This will change how we interact. We only came across one person and we looked very hard that had the foresight of the end state, and it was not a technologist. Can you guess who it was? It was a science fiction author, Gary Steiner. Gary Steiner at the very beginning of the social media revolution, was writing a novel called The True Sad Love Story. That’s a great science fiction novel, and he foresaw how all of this would play out. We asked him how he could possibly do that. It turns out that he was asking a different question. The technologists were basically asking, how do I solve my tactical problem, or what can the technology do? He asked a different question. He said, well, assuming this thing, the Like button does what it’s purported to do, what will humans do with it? Of course, the answer, using his knowledge of humanity was, they’ll lie with it, they’ll steal with it, they’ll beg, steal, borrow, imitate, flatter. They will do all of the human things. If you factor that into the equation, you can see dimly then what might become of this. You might have this world where people are evaluating other over the social web, where kids are spending too much time on screens, where there’s this strange virtualization of reality, people prefer to comment on a video of a steak and a glass of wine rather than actually consume a physical one, and he foresaw all of that.

But he was the only person, not any of the technologists. The other big thing about the Like button is that there was an interesting philosophy going on, which was a bit unconventional. A book was published in 2000 that was very influential in Silicon Valley called Don’t Make Me Think. The idea was that if you have something innovative, do not make it look new. Do not talk about the Wiz Bang features, reduce friction, make it seem ordinary. What’s more ordinary than the thumbs up gesture? I don’t need to know about the JavaScript code or the advanced functionality. It’s like, great I can already do it. This became quite an influential philosophy, and I think it applies to the Apple Watch, if you think about it. The Apple Watch is not a watch. But by making it seem like a watch, it’s like, it’s no big deal. I’ll buy one of those. If I said, would you like to buy an advanced supercomputer on your wrist with extremely interesting programming, you’d probably say, well, I don’t think I understand that.

Andy Cross: The same with our phones, I think, too. I was like, when are we going to stop calling our phones, actual phones considering the amount of time we talk on them, compared to the amount of times we hold them or I don’t know, 1%?

Martin Reeves: Well, it’s a really important issue for innovators, I think. I talk about this in one of my other books, The Imagination Machine. There is a critical moment when I call it the moment when a thing becomes a thing, the thing that didn’t have a name gets a name, the fax machine, the Apple Watch. I think you have three ways you can go in how you name things, and I think it’s very strategic how successful the invention is going to be. One of them is you can emphasize familiarity. You can say it’s not new, it’s just a watch. Or you can go functional. You can say, you will never guess what this thing is, this fax machine thing. I’m going to actually describe in the name. I call it a facsimile machine. Creates facsimiles of pieces of paper. I said, now I know what it does. Or you can go overboard in emphasizing novelty. Think about the French connection T shirt, the FCUK T shirt. You do the double take you think you read an obscene word, and there’s absolutely nothing new about a T shirt. But it grabs the attention to call it FCUK. Under what circumstances would you use one of these philosophies rather than another? That’s a really important decision. In the case of the Like button, the important thing was that it was familiar. It was quickly adoptable. It became a human linguistic currency. Compliments were given, compliments were received, and this enabled the social net. That probably didn’t even feel like a decision at the time, not an explicit decision to the innovators, but that’s what was going on.

Andy Cross: It’s interesting when you talk about how, like there was no Eureka moment where they said, that was the day I worked on the Like button. It’s like a rock band when they’re arguing should this song be on the album or not? Then it turns out, they throw it on at somebody’s insistence, and it becomes like a smash number 1 hit. They were like, really? That was the number 1 hit? It sounds a little bit like that when you describe the genesis of it. I have to ask the question. Is it possible to try to foresee that next Like button that has just such a huge impact, or is that just too good?

Martin Reeves: I’ve actually done some serious mathematical work with the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences on what I call the mathematical signature or serendipity. What is it? Is it randomness? Is it a pattern that is predictable, is it a pattern that we can understand but not predict? It seems to be a pattern that we can’t predict. It’s not randomness. If you look at how fields evolve in terms of innovations, and you can apply this to anything. You can apply this to jazz bands. What are the composition of successful rock and jazz bands? You can apply it to films. You can apply it to recipes. You can apply it to software stacks. We’ve done all of that, and it looks like innovation is mostly the recombination of existing elements. Some of those combinations turn out to have incredible utility, and some of them don’t it’s very hard to predict. We can’t predict it, I’d say, in general. But we can adopt the right mental model. If you say, I’d buy it basically, innovation is serendipitous. What can you do to promote serendipity? Serendipity is the technical definition is unanticipated favorable outcomes, unpredictable favorable outcomes. Well, you can increase the number of collisions which is the more recombinations you’ve done, the more shots on goal, the more likely one of them have a probability of going into the goal.

The trouble is that’s normally expensive. The second thing you can do is you can reduce the costs of playing around with ideas. Lego, the toy company has a philosophy of learning through play. It applies surely to its toys and its child customers or users, but it also applies actually to the management model. The idea is continuously experiment and informal experiment and discover new combinations. A third thing you can do is to go external. Is it more likely that you will invent something inside a company or outside a company? The famous Andy Grove quote, I think it was Andy Grove, wasn’t it, that said that, like most of the smart people are out there, not in here. The like story basically is a story of parallel loosely connected community of innovation. If you were entirely introverted as a company, you wouldn’t be accessing that you might call it collective intelligence. But you can do things like acqui-hire. You can look at who’s doing what, and you can hire them. There’s a lot of that going on right now with AI and the big AI players. They’re trying to steal the people with the ideas and the abilities. You can be very mentally flexible. Often the famous psychology experiment where somebody in like a gorilla suit runs across a basketball court, and because people are not expecting it, they actually don’t see it. We see what we expect to see. Some companies actually train their executives in close observation, the idea of thinking more like a novelist than an accountant to actually observe the details, because by definition, these unusual recombinations that turn out to be hit products, they’re an anomaly, they’re the needle in the haystack. Your mind has to be primed to, we may not have the best thing forever. There may be a needle in a haystack. You looking for pattern breaking and this is supported by psychological research that basically says that the human imagination is triggered by pattern breaking, by surprise. We’re extremely good at exception detection. We need to surprise ourselves, and the sure way of avoiding surprising yourself is not to look out the window to be entirely introverted, which is, by the way, what many large corporations are. They’re basically looking internally.

Mac Greer: That was Martin Reeves. The book is, Like The Button that Changed the World. As always, people on the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. Don’t buy or sell stock based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards, and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. For the Motley Fool Money Team, I’m Mac Greer. Thanks for listening, and we will see you tomorrow.