Interview with Martin Reeves: Innovation and Imagination

Summary

Motley Fool Money: Interview with Martin Reeves – "Innovation and Imagination"

Release Date: August 10, 2025
Host: The Motley Fool
Guest: Martin Reeves, Business Strategist, Advisor, and Author

---

Introduction

In this engaging episode of Motley Fool Money, host Matt Grier welcomes business strategist Martin Reeves to discuss his latest work, Like the Button that Changed the World. Reeves delves into the seemingly simple yet profoundly impactful invention of the "like" button, exploring its origins, societal implications, and the broader nature of innovation.

---

The Genesis of "Like the Button that Changed the World"

Martin Reeves opens the conversation by sharing the unconventional inspiration behind his book. Initially intrigued by the simplicity of the "like" button, Reeves pondered its significant influence on digital interactions.

Martin Reeves [00:05]:
"I mean, I was fascinated by the elegance and the simplicity of the like button in terms of, you know, 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?"

Reeves recounts a pivotal coffee conversation with his co-author, Bob Goodson, a medieval literature scholar turned Silicon Valley entrepreneur. This discussion led to the discovery of a sketch depicting the "like" button, sparking the idea for their collaborative book.

Martin Reeves [01:12]:
"...we had a plan to write a book about the fascinating and winding story of the invention of the like button. That's amazing."

---

Broader Consequences of Binary Approval

Rich Lumelo, a Motley Fool contributor, probes into the broader societal impacts of the binary nature of the "like" button—where interactions are reduced to simple approvals or disapprovals.

Rich Lumelo [03:07]:
"Let's just jump in with... the like button... what sparked the idea for the book?"

Reeves elaborates on how this binary system has flattened human nuance, influencing everything from personal interactions to business models.

Martin Reeves [03:23]:
"What does it tell us about the nature of invention as, like, a second layer?..."

---

The Nature of Innovation: A Community Effort

A significant portion of the discussion centers on the collaborative nature of technological innovation. Reeves challenges the traditional "lone genius" narrative, emphasizing that inventions like the "like" button often emerge from a community of parallel innovators rather than a single visionary.

Martin Reeves [09:24]:
"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."

Reeves highlights that despite extensive research, pinpointing a single inventor of the "like" button proved elusive due to simultaneous developments across various Web 2.0 platforms.

---

Philosophy of Naming and Adoption

The conversation shifts to the strategic importance of naming innovations. Reeves discusses how the simplicity and familiarity of a name can influence an invention's adoption and success.

Martin Reeves [14:20]:
"What you have to do is, you can, you can adopt the right mental model. So if you say, okay, I buy it, basically innovation is serendipitous."

Using the "like" button as a case study, Reeves illustrates how opting for a familiar gesture facilitated its rapid global adoption without the need for extensive promotion or training.

Martin Reeves [09:59]:
"We have a Like button... the de facto standard globally is the thumbs up."

---

Predicting the Next "Like" Button: Challenges and Insights

When asked about the possibility of foreseeing the next groundbreaking innovation akin to the "like" button, Reeves shares insights from his collaboration with the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences. They explored the concept of serendipity in innovation, concluding that while specific breakthroughs are unpredictable, fostering environments that encourage chance encounters and idea recombinations can enhance the likelihood of significant innovations.

Martin Reeves [17:07]:
"Innovation is mostly the recombination of existing elements. And some of those combinations turn out to have incredible utility and some of them don't. And it's very hard to predict."

He emphasizes strategies to promote serendipity, such as increasing the number of idea collisions, reducing the costs of experimentation, and embracing external collaborations.

---

Concluding Thoughts

Martin Reeves wraps up by reflecting on the unexpected yet profound impact of the "like" button, reinforcing the idea that simple innovations can drive substantial societal shifts. He underscores the importance of a collaborative approach to innovation and the role of strategic naming in fostering widespread adoption.

Martin Reeves [21:03]:
"We need to surprise ourselves... look out the window to be entirely introverted."

---

Key Takeaways

• Simplicity Matters: The "like" button's elegance lies in its simplicity, demonstrating how minimal code can lead to significant behavioral changes.

• Community Over Individual: Innovations often result from collective efforts rather than solitary genius, highlighting the importance of collaborative environments.

• Strategic Naming: Choosing familiar and intuitive names can accelerate the adoption and integration of new technologies.

• Serendipity in Innovation: While specific breakthroughs are unpredictable, fostering environments that encourage idea recombination and external collaborations can enhance innovative outcomes.

Martin Reeves' exploration of the "like" button offers valuable lessons on the dynamics of modern innovation, the power of simple design, and the intricate interplay between technology and human behavior.

Transcript

[Martin Reeves]

I mean, I was fascinated by the elegance and the simplicity of the like button in terms of, you know, 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?

[Matt Grier]

That was Martin Reeves, business strategist, advisor, and author of several books, including youg Strategy Needs a Strategy, the Imagination Machine, and his most recent like the Button that Changed the World. I'm Motley fool producer Matt Grier now. Recently, Motley fool contributor Rich Lumelo and Motley Fool Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross caught up with Reeves and talked business imagination and yes, the like button.

[Rich Lumelo]

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 kind of reshaped human behavior, identity, society, all catalyzed by, quite simply, the like button. What sparked the idea for the book? And 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. I mean, it is an unusual thing to write a book about it, I think, because it's an apparently trivial object that we. We maybe don't pay much attention to. But I was fascinated by the elegance and the simplicity of the like button in terms of, you know, 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? And then, of course, all of the, you know, 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 somehow 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 could even say hoarder. He's collected every train receipt since he was 10 years old and he was moving. So to make conversation, I said to him, you must be finding interesting things in your boxes, Bob. And he said, yes. And he pulled out a sketchbook and 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 like button. So I said to Bob, are you telling me you invented the like button, Bob? And he said, 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. And I thought, how could you not be sure whether you invented the like button or not? So this 30 minute conversation we had extended to a whole day until we were thrown out at the last closing restaurant in Mill Valley. And 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. That's amazing.

[Rich Lumelo]

That's a great background. I love how you kind of explore how it basically flattened human nuance right into, you know, kind of binary approval. Like or not like, what would you say your takeaway as you wrote the book are kind of some of the broader consequences of this binary outcome?

[Martin Reeves]

Well, the actual story, why the thumbs up and who invented the like button is fascinating enough. And then what does it tell us about the nature of invention as, like, a second layer? But, you know, so the surface story is essentially that it's very, 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 light 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. So that was one problem to solve. The second problem to solve was that this was pre broadband. This is 2000, around the year 2000, this was pre broadband. So anything you did to communicate with anyone, like displaying a like button or whatever, would likely trigger a page refresh. And 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. So 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 one of Yelp was that the people were not submitting restaurant reviews for Yelp's business model. And they didn't have a lot of money. It was a startup. So. So what other currency is there? 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, so 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. And then other people were doing things at the same time. Like, not sure whether you remember a site called hot or not, or rather salacious site where you voted on the appearance of your colleagues and your friends. And so the voting. Right. So voting is the same problem, right? Which is how do I display my vote and how do I vote on things and how do I get a counter on my vote and page refresh? You know, the same problem. So a community of people innovated. Why the like button? Sorry, why the thumbs up gesture? That's also pretty interesting. So you ask, I presume you're both American. Ask anyone American, what is the very origin of the light button. They're likely to say the Coliseum 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 sheathed thumb and the downward pointing thumb, but for dramatic effect. This French painter actually had these gestures. And then it became a linguistic fact. And in fact it was reinforced in the very year that Bob drew his sketch by the gladiator movie, Gladiator 1, which Ridley Scott originally intended to turn down because he didn't want to do what he called a sandals and toga movie. But he was shown the very same painting that created this myth that the Romans did this and this. And he was persuaded by the drama of the painting to actually make the movie. So the cultural history of the light button is also interesting. So 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? How does technological innovation really work?

[Andy Cross]

Wish you could lock in rates without locking out liquidity? Meet lddr, a Lifex treasury bond ladder ETF built to simplify your cash flow plan for the next 10 years. With LDDR, you can lock in today's interest rates for a decade. It's built to deliver predictable monthly cash flow that boosts interest income by including tax free return of principal. That means the potential for higher, more stable cash flow without worrying about rate cuts, reinvestment risk or Market Swings LDDR Take the guesswork out of your cash flow plan. Learn [e-mail] the LIFX ETFs return principal over the life of an ETF and therefore expected to have little or no assets remaining to distribute at the time of liquidation. Individual bonds carry an obligation to fully return the principal to shareholders at maturity. However, ETFs have no such obligation. The net asset value of the ETFs will decline over time as income payments are made to shareholders. The tax discussion herein is general in nature. Investors should consult with their tax advisor about the effect that an investment in Lifex ETFs could have on their tax situation. Investors should consider the investment objectives, risks and charges and expenses of LDDR carefully before investing. The prospectus contains this and other information about the investment company and can be obtained by visiting www.lifexfunds.com or by calling 1-888-331-5558. The prospectus should be read carefully before investing. Investing in The Life EX ETFs involve risk principal loss is possible. The LIFX Income ETFs are distributed by.

[Martin Reeves]

Foresight Financial Services, LLC and Martin Not.

[Unknown]

Just Innovation, But Creativity Just the simple design of a thumbs up or thumbs down has had really second order effects in lots of different ways. When you look at this, the history of the arc of history of the like button, does that surprise 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. I mean this, this. What are the effects of this little invention? The like button, it 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. Like everybody has the Motley Fool.

[Unknown]

We have a Like button.

[Martin Reeves]

On our site we have a Like button. Now, you know if you look really hard, you can find some people have a heart or some people have a thumbs down button. But basically the de facto standard globally is the thumbs up. And so what does it tell us about these things? It tells us a number of things. I think one of them is that so. 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. And also I interviewed all of these people and, 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, you know, what day are you talking about? What? Because it wasn't. There was not such a thing in the afternoon in their minds as the afternoon when I 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. And it just so happened that this tactical challenge I solved may have contributed to something bigger. Absolutely no one was saying, 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 Steingart. So Gary Steingart, at the very beginning of the social media revolution, was writing a novel called the True Sad Love Story. That's a great novel, a great science fiction novel. And he foresaw how all of this would play out. And we asked him how he could possibly do that. And it turns out that he was asking a different question. So the technologists were basically asking, how do I solve my tactical problem? 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? And 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. And if you factor that into the equation, you can see dimly then what. 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 sort of big thing about the like button is, is that there was an interesting philosophy going on which was a bit unconventional. So a book was published in 2000 that was very influential in Silicon Valley called Don't Make Me Think. And the idea was that if you have something innovative, do not make it look new. Do not talk about the whiz bang features, reduce friction, make it seem ordinary. And 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. And 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, oh, 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.

[Unknown]

Well, it's the same with our phones, I think too. I was like, when are we going to stop calling our phones actual phones?

[Martin Reeves]

Yes.

[Unknown]

Considering the amount of time we talk on them compared to the amount of times we hold them are, 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. I think 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 in how you name things and I think it's very strategic to 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, yeah, you will never guess what this thing is, this fax machine thing. So I'm going to actually describe in the name. I call it a facsimile machine. It creates facsimiles of pieces of paper. I say, okay, now I know what it does. Or you can go overboard in emphasizing novelty. So think about the French Connection T shirt, the FC UK T shirt. You do the double Take because 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. And so under what circumstances would you use one of these philosophies rather than another? That's a really important decision. So 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. So that probably didn't even feel like a decision at the time. Not an explicit decision to the innovators, but that's sort of what was going on.

[Unknown]

Growing your e commerce business comes with plenty of hurdles, but shipping shouldn't be one of them. Well, here's some good news. Powerful e commerce shipping software called Ship Excel from Pitney Bowes. With Ship Excel, you can generate discounted shipping labels for both online and offline orders. That saves time and money. With everything right at your fingertips, start your free trial of Ship Excel from Pitney Bowes today.

[Rich Lumelo]

It's interesting when you talk about how, like, you know, there was no eureka moment where they kind of said, oh, that was the day I worked on the like button. It's kind of like one of the, you know, a rock band when they're, you know, kind of arguing, should this song be on the album or not? And then it turns out, yeah, they kind of throw it on at somebody's insistence and it becomes like, you know, a smash number one hit. And they're like, really? That was the number one hit? It sounds a little bit like that when you describe, you know, kind of 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.

[Martin Reeves]

To, you know, I think innovation? So I've actually done some serious mathematical work with the London Institute of Mathematical Sciences on what I call the mathematical signature of serendipity. Like, what is it? Is it randomness? Is it a pattern that is predictable? Is it a pattern that we can understand but not predict and seems to be a pattern that we can't predict? It's not randomness. So 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. And we've done all of that. It looks like innovation is mostly the Recombination of existing elements. And some of those combinations turn out to have incredible utility and some of them don't. And it's very hard to predict. So we can't predict it, I'd say in general, sure, but we can, we can adopt the right mental model. So if you say, okay, I 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 is have a probability of going into the goal. The trouble is that's normally expensive. So the second thing you can do is you can reduce the costs of playing around with ideas. So 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 informally experiment and discover new combinations. A third thing you can do is, is to go external. I mean, who invented. Is it more likely that you will invent something inside a company or outside a company? The famous Andy Groves quote. I think it was Andy Grove, wasn't it, that said that 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. So 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 hires, right? 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 IA players. They're trying to steal the people with the ideas and the abilities. You can be very mentally flexible. So often, you know the famous psychology experiment where somebody in 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. So 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 sort of are an anomaly, right? They're the needle in the haystack. And so you have to be, your mind has to be primed to. We may not have the best thing forever. There may be a needle in a haystack. So 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, and you know that. So 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.

[Matt Grier]

That was Martin Reeves. The book is like the button that changed the world. As always, people in the program may have interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks 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 Matt Grier. Thanks for listening and we will see you tomorrow.