A Bit About Me

Thor Muller founds and advises startups that make a difference to real people. He’s a Web pioneer who bridges design and technology, and a true believer in social entrepreneurship.

Currently, Thor is CTO and co-founder of Get Satisfaction in San Francisco. Get Satisfaction is a platform for creating customer communities that bring people together around the products and brands they care about.

Since 1995 he has founded five companies, and launched over two dozen web applications and sites. His startups have criss-crossed genres, from online serial entertainment, to content syndication networks, to e-commerce as performance art, to reinventing the idea of customer service from the outside in. His businesses aim to use online networks to blur the line between work and play, explode the boundaries of organizations and conventional thinking. He pulls inspiration from everywhere: music and film, creating writing, evolutionary biology, world history, systems theory,

Over his career he and his companies have been featured in New York Times, TechCrunch, Wall St Journal, Mashable, ReadWriteWeb, San Francisco Chronicle, BusinessWeek, Business 2.0, CNET. Thor studied Film an English Literature at University of Iowa and University of London.

He is a regular invited speaker at conferences, Global 500 companies, and universities, where he talks about entrepreneurship, cooperative games, customer community, online identity and reputation, and how technology is changing us. You may have seen him present at SXSW Interactive, Webvisions, Future of Web Apps, Web 2.0 Expo, ETech, Gov 2.0, Startonomics, Freemium Summit, Google, Dreamforce, UCBerkeley, or University of Sydney. If you’d like him to speak at your event contact him at thor@thormuller.com.

Timeline (selected highlights)

  • Get Satisfaction (2007-ongoing) – Mom and pop shops, hot startups and some of the world’s largest brands use Get Satisfaction to connect their business to the social web. Founded in 2007, it now supports almost 50,000 customer communities from big brands like Tide, Microsoft and AMC Theatres to some of the hottest startups like Foursquare, Instagram and Flipboard.
  • Valleyschwag (2006) – Created the world’s first schwag-of-the-month club, which brought the excitement and hype around Web2.0 to fans around the world in the form of logo’d t-shirts, stickers and, ahem, condoms.
  • Rubyred Labs – One of the first Ruby-on-Rails-focused web app development companies. Rubyred was designed as a skunkworks for social software. Its unique blend of research, design and technology gave rise to the team and ideas that became Get Satisfaction.
  • WellspringRX (2003-2004) – An online price comparison engine for prescription meds. It aimed to disrupt the opaque pricing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry to help reduce health care costs by collecting prices from thousands of vendors.
  • iVirus (2002) – Screenwriter of this featurette, a 20-minute narrative film directed by Jay Goodman, following the madcap hyjinx of a startup collapsing on the Eve of the dot com bust.
  • Trapezo (1999-2002) – A web software company that enabled businesses to syndicate and manage content across an unlimited number of third party sites. Think of it as a first-generation widget company. Acquired by Perfect Commerce in 2002.
  • Frog Design (1997-1999) – Established and ran the Internet division of one of the world’s most successful product design firms.
  • Spectacle (1995-1997) – Co-created one of the first online entertainment hubs, launching games, episodic narratives and experimental interactive works. Most famous for the dystopian surveillance experience, Zoeye.
  • Prophet Communications (1995-1997) – Founder of first generation Web development agency, working with entertainment and technology firms like Intel, Fujitsu, Virgin Records, Sony Entertainment. Acquired by Frog Design in 1997.
  • The Argonaut (1993-1994) – Designer and managing director of this publisher of pop-culture, literary and politically-themed books, magazines and newspapers (Roger Black, design director; Warren Hinckle, editor)
  • Film reviewer for On the Town (1993-1994) – Writer of film criticism for this weekly newspaper in Grand Rapids Michigan.

Contact Me
You can reach me at thor [at] thormuller.com, where, alas, I am usually a few days behind in responding. Of course, you can ping me in real-time on Twitter, where my handle is @Tempo, or on Facebook. As a last resort, there’s always my phone: 415.205.0115, where you will almost surely end up in voicemail. Nothing personal :)

I look forward to talking!