At SxSW (South by Southwest Conference) Tom Brown, Bijoy, David Bluestein, and I (with other bootstrappers) announced the launch of the BootKarma system. BootKarma is a complementary currency system meant to allow bootstrapping entrepreneurs leverage their time, especially in the early stages of their venture where cash is short. Essentially this is a formalization of a barter system among bootstrapping entrepreneurs. Note that the yin and yang tags are incorrect- and should be reversed. What this napkin design shows is how a formalized currency (like the US dollar) is structured by hierarchy (therefor not allowing everyone to participate unless they already have dollars) while on the right side, we see a complementary currency that can include anyone in a community with skills to leverage.

This scan of this napkin in a way shows a high level of design of the currency… a complementary currency is about creating trust and recognizing the bartering that is going on among different members of the community- and allows the facility of trade between members of the community that might not know each other… the power of this is in comparison to a barter system that only allows bartering to happen between people that know each other well.

What I find particularly insightful on Tom Brown‘s part is his design of BootKarma in this post about complementary currency and the Wooly Mamoth:

However, the promise of interest on money creates an incentive for selfishness. School (Rushmore) further conditions us to be selfish and government approved media’s main function is to exploit that conditioned selfishness. It’s no surprise that we tend to forget about the value of the ancestral gift economy. (original post here)

Bootstrap Austin already is using Enterprise Teaming’s system for managing commitments that are made between individuals and each other… what this underlying currency system represents is the opportunity to scale this system to many, many other entrepreneurs that want to work together in building their companies.

This weekend I tested and received my blackbelt (“shodan”- “begining dan”) in Aikido.  I started Aikido back in August of 1997.  Almost ten years of practice three to five times a week have resulted in this accomplishment.   Aikido informs much of my life.  I greatly appreciate what I have learned along the way;  In a way, too, Aikido is the inspiration behind my startup Enterprise Teaming.  The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, also referred to as “Osensei” (great teacher) called Aikido “The Budo (martial art) of Love”.  The following quote from Osensei sums this up:

“Aiki is not a technique to fight with or defeat the enemy.  It is the way to reconcile the world and make human beings one family.”

I look to the future of a lifetime of Aikido practice.  Although it has been ten years brining me to this point of my training, I can see several decades of practice in front of me.  Thank you to all of my Aikido training partners  who have supported me to this point in my training.  I look forward to learning the way of Aikido and harmonizing our human family together.

Recently I was asked about my background, and what I had worked on- what the common theme had been across the many companies that I had been involved with.  My answer, that I ended up presenting in a power point slide as part of a longer response to the questions that had been asked was entrepreneurship, specifically focused on disruptive innovation.  That is, technologies, that when applied correctly, create a disruption in the market.  It seems, based on this graph, that that is what my whole career has been about- across a number of startup companies.

Here is a copy of that graph:

As you can see, I have been involved with a number of career changing, market different technologies… the reason that I present this is not to necessarily say something about my background as much as a recognition of what the market is continuing to embrace- constant change and chaos, over and over.

The disruptions that I have gotten to participate with:

1.  OOP- object oriented programming… What makes the programing languages of Java, Python, and Ruby so  valuable to software developers today?  Two things- first being able to run software written in these languages on a number of platforms.  Secondly, these languages are “object oriented” meaning that they support rapid assembly and high quality software development.

2.  Internet- I was using the internet for my work all the way back to 1989, and programming the internet by 1993, an artifact of working for NeXT Computer (now a part of Apple).

3.  eCommerce- a year before Business Week had written a front page article asking “Is eCommerce a passing fad” (in 1997) I had already built eCommerce engines for companies the likes of Dell Computer Corporation.

4.  Affective Computing- imagine computers that can read emotion.  Back in 2001, there were very few people thinking about how computers could read emotions of their users, and how this could be applied to business (imagine support reps at companies that learned how to be friendlier as they solved problems for us).  The MIT Media Lab was doing some of the coolest stuff in this area, as well as Carnegie Mellon University.  I was pulling technologies from CMU and the University of Texas to solve some of these problems in helping support and sales reps be more emotionally intelligent.

5. Linux as appliance. The operating system Linux, designed and programmed by thousands of developers around the world is one of the most disruptive technologies that the world has seen… why?  Because it allows entrepreneurs to experiment at multiple levels in building products for the world.  I specifically was a part of a startup that was using Linux to build VPNs and firewalls.

6.  Smartmobs.  What I am presently doing in my startup Enterprise Teaming  and in Bootstrap Austin (a group of 600+ Austin based bootstrapping entrepreneurs) is exploring on how mass collaboration can be used to unleash innovation across the enterprise (whether that is one corporation, or a number of loosely connected entrepreneurial startups).

What I will endevor to do in the coming days, weeks, and months is to illustrate the coming disruptions that I see on the horizon… especially with reguard to the massive opportunity of working together building companies (and social entrepreneurship organizations) at a scale that the world has never seen before.