Photo: Taylor Jones in the same meeting room where he took a call from a literary agent interested in Dear Photograph nearly five years ago. The room is now part of Aeryon Labs' newly expanded operations in north Waterloo, where Jones recently took up a content marketing role.
[dropcap size=small]I[/dropcap]n the upper reaches of Waterloo, at the end of a long road lined with low-rise industrial buildings, the latest expansion of drone-maker Aeryon Labs is well under way.
Inside the company’s newly acquired second facility, a former BlackBerry building at the end of Kumpf Drive, most Aeryon workers are just beginning to get to know their new surroundings, but not Taylor Jones.
At 26 and newly hired, Jones is one of the new space’s younger occupants, but he knows it better than any of his new colleagues.
After all, it was here, nearly five years ago, that he landed his first full-time job after college, as a social media co-ordinator for the company then known as Research In Motion.
And it was here in this small meeting room, a scant few weeks into his tenure with RIM, that the young Jones took a call from a literary agent after he’d unexpectedly hatched one of the Internet’s biggest viral successes of that time – a website called Dear Photograph, which invited users to take a new photo of an old photo held up to align with the original location where it was taken.
“It’s just very coincidental that I’m back, 20 feet away from where I was sitting five years ago, in the exact same building,” Jones told me this week, as he deftly assembled one of the unmanned aerial vehicles he’ll be promoting in his work as Aeryon’s new Content Marketing Manager.
“With Dear Photograph, you look back on life and kind of analyze everything and tell the story about that moment in time,” he said. “Here, I’m doing the exact same thing – I’m looking back on what I did at BlackBerry and kind of hitting the reset button.”
It’s the kind of coincidence that would give anyone pause for reflection, but Jones’s case is exceptional given what he has to look back on.
On May 24, 2011, the month after he joined RIM as a recent Conestoga College graduate, Jones was at home with his family in Kitchener’s Doon area, looking through old photos at the kitchen table. He found one of his brother, taken in the same kitchen years earlier, sitting in the same spot he was now. Jones, who was seated roughly where his mother had been when she took the picture, held it up to align with its original setting, and immediately knew he was onto something.
Jones threw the photo up on a blog page, shared it on Twitter and Facebook, and it wasn’t long before the traffic began to build.
“I came in and told my manager here at BlackBerry, ‘Hey, look at this little blog that I made. It’s something I made last night. If you have any photos, send them my way,’” Jones said. “Then the next day I came in and said, ‘Hey, my website got 500 hits last night,’ and he was, like, ‘Oh, yeah, cool, get back to work.’
“The next day, it was ‘the blog got 4,000 hits,’ and the following day, Mashable contacted me to do a feature on it. And then I think it was two weeks later when it hit the front page of Reddit, and got a quarter of a million hits.”
That was enough to grab the attention of someone at Paradigm Talent Agency, headquartered in Beverly Hills, who tracked Jones down at work.
“And that’s when I was sitting in this exact same spot in this meeting room where I had my literary agent contact me and say, ‘Hey, we want to turn your website into a book. Do you want to sign with us?’” he said. “And me being 21 and having no idea what the hell was going on, I said, ‘Yeah,’ and they got me the book deal with Harper Collins. And I quit my job here at BlackBerry in August and moved to L.A. in September.”
I first met Jones at the Communitech Hub on Sept. 15, 2011, a few days before he went to California. By that time, Dear Photograph had already been named the #1 website of 2011 by CBS News, #7 by Time Magazine and been profiled in the New Yorker, the Guardian and numerous other publications. Celebrities were sharing it, and the anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks that year unleashed a deluge of heart-rending submissions to the site.
As it turned out, Jones spent a few months in California, then moved back to Kitchener where he bought a loft and invested a chunk of the advance he received from his publisher. He spent much of 2012 travelling to promote the Dear Photograph book, which became a Canadian bestseller and earned a warm reception abroad.
It all sounds like a dream, and a pretty good one, for a kid just out of college. But Jones did not relish being thrust into the spotlight.
“I really didn’t like it,” he said this week. “It was weird. [Before Dear Photograph] I was never a person to be able to get up and speak in front of a room. I was always behind the camera; I was always videotaping the people who were doing something cool. I was never the person who was being filmed.”
What he did enjoy was knowing he had built something meaningful, and driven it to success using social platforms that many of his college friends had scorned as time-wasters with no real value.
“I still call them out all the time,” he said. “I guess I knew the trend before it actually happened. For that, I was proud of myself.”
Looking back, Jones also takes satisfaction in that Dear Photograph marked the culmination of passions that had been building throughout his childhood and adolescence on Richwood Court in Doon, a sleepy cul-de-sac of seven houses with big backyards and plenty of room for adventure.
It was there that Jones and his friends learned not only to snowboard and skateboard, but to document their exploits in pictures and on video. His best friend’s younger sister, Jenna Blasman, is now an Olympic snowboarder who traces her success back to time spent careening down the hill behind the Jones house.
When Jones’ parents bought the family a computer for Christmas in the late 1990s, young Taylor couldn’t wait to get online and, being a sports buff, visit TSN.ca.
“I didn’t think you could make money or anything off the Internet, and I don’t think a lot of people did at the time,” he said. But by the mid-2000s, along came YouTube, where he and his friends could now share the videos they shot.
As an advertising student at college, Jones honed his social media skills, often to the annoyance of his teachers; these days, schools invite him to speak on the value of social media.
As accidental as the birth of Dear Photograph might have been, this confluence of skills and passions put Jones in a prime position to turn it into something.
“Dear Photograph was exactly who I was,” he said. “I was an old-soul kind of guy who enjoyed looking back, and I made memories throughout my whole life, whether it was with photography or with video. I was always documenting my life.”
What Jones lacked, he sees now, was the wherewithal to push harder for a bigger payoff from his viral success.
“Looking back, there are a lot of things I would have done differently,” he said. “I would have asked for a lot more. That’s one thing I’ve learned in the past few years, that if you don’t ask for something, you’re not going to get it.”
As his 2012 book tour wrapped up and the Dear Photograph fire died down, Jones tried his hand as a startup co-founder, launching The Dandy Co. with Matt Scobel and Karl Allen-Muncey. Tearing a page from Reddit’s playbook, they aimed to build a platform where people could submit app ideas that could be voted up or down, and get the most popular ones built.
When it didn’t pan out, Jones found himself back in the job market for the first time since he’d quit BlackBerry to pursue Dear Photograph.
True to form, he turned his skills to getting hired, by putting together a Hire Taylor Jones cover letter on Tumblr. It quickly made the rounds, fuelled by social sharing.
“That got a lot of attention; I was in deep interviews with a company in Copenhagen and some companies in the U.S. just because there were blogs that were posting links,” Jones said. “And on Reddit, there were postings about ‘this is how you make a Tumblr cover letter in 2014,’ so it got around a little bit, which was really cool.”
When the Lake Louise Ski Resort in Alberta’s Rocky Mountains reached out to offer a marketing and social media role, the avid snowboarder jumped at the opportunity, and spent a year working, and playing, out west.
“It was neat being there, because I had the chance to meet a lot of really influential people on the Internet, in a way that I wouldn’t here,” he said. “People with a lot of followers and a lot of clout within the travel industry, like daily vloggers and Instagram photographers, they were coming to the resort and I would take them out every day.”
Jones is now happy to be back in Waterloo Region, applying his skills at a technology company with major growth potential. Last October, Aeryon raised $60 million in new investment and announced plans to double its workforce to about 200 by next fall.
When Jones met the people at Aeryon, “we just hit it off. It just seemed like the right fit.”
He looks forward to being able to tell the company's ever-growing stack of stories – its drones are often deployed in high-profile situations, including natural disasters, around the world – and find new outlets for his personal storytelling outside of work.
“I want to tell the story of the rich history that K-W has and the people who work and live in K-W now,” he said, adding that he’s also thinking about “a Dear Photograph book based on popular landmarks and locations around K-W,” with help from a local archivist.
“As for the people working and living in K-W now, I have a plan in place to dive deeper with photographs and interviews to learn more about the people in the region who are working at making this one of Canada’s best places to live.”
Having spent time away and returned, Jones feels more strongly than ever about Waterloo Region’s potential, given the strong growth of companies such as Aeryon and the deepening local presence of global giants like Google.
“I think that we see it, and I think it’s just our nature here in town that we’re not embellishing it, but I think we need to be more proud,” he said. “I’ll always be an advocate for what’s happening here, because I think we know what we’re doing.”
