Kevin Koym

Entrepreneurs organizing- signs of the future

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Here is a small example of how entrepreneurs are organizing, leveraging social software and social networking to shift the previous power structures that venture capitalist have held over entrepreneurs.  It is a funny read, especially if you have ever been in a funded startup.  (Four of the seven startups in my career have been funded;  In two of them, I wish that we had had this type outlet for the general messiness that we dealt with.)  From Inc magazine, talking about the website TheFunded.com:

What effect will these sites have? Will they empower entrepreneurs at the expense of VCs? “I’m doubtful that the imbalance in power will ever disappear completely,” says Noam Wasserman, a Harvard Business School professor who studies the interactions between founders and investors. “But these kinds of efforts are shifting things.” The sites remind founders to investigate their potential investors thoroughly, he says.

Thank you to Jeff Sexton, copywriter extraordinaire, for sharing this link with me.  To all of you- please keep these links coming!  I greatly appreciate it!

Yes, Changing the World

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As I have recently come back to Austin after sequestering myself away for writing my forthcoming book, I have been out networking a lot again- and getting questions of “what are you up to”. Sometimes I just give short answers… but a number of y’all are asking, and so when Naomi asked for details earlier today, instead of just giving the short perhaps somewhat flippant answer that I might when processing emails, this is what I shared. Spoiler alert: this starts to speak to the grand vision that I see that I appreciate many of you listening to over the last four years. Thank you. I appreciate now and into the future your feedback. Below is the letter- I hope to share more through this blog and over drinks with y’all in the coming days, weeks, months. Please let me know what you think.
Naomi,

Good to see you too. I am just about to be out of town for a few days for a speaking engagement in Philadelphia and then in New York City- so let me quickly answer your question here, and then follow up with you as you have questions.

In 2003 I launched Enterprise Teaming, llc as an entrepreneur-focused organization to build networks of entrepreneurs who build their businesses through leveraging the network. I am applying my deep knowledge of social networking theory with my passion for being an entrepreneur, and supporting entrepreneurs. My 15 year goal, now in its fourth year, is that the network support/ drive 10,000 $1 million businesses to success…. with a model that at some point can be leveraged across multiple levels of entrepreneurs (into the poor, and also leveraged by large companies as well.) As I have led emerging trends in the past ( using the Internet in ’89, object-oriented programming since ’89, building Internet apps since ’94, building Dell’s eCommerce engine in my living room in ’96, building profile driven commerce in ’99, affective computing – computers that can read emotion in ’01, leveraging Linux as a platform in 2002, and now leveraging social networks to support a new style of doing work to support the US’s shift to being an Entrepreneurial Capitalistic society – from the Industrial Capitalistic society that we are leaving behind)… I am now focused on this emerging shift towards leveraging social networks to support entrepreneurs. It is all about having more entrepreneurs be successful in the ensuing chaos that the market is going to bring. Perhaps it is the 3.5 years of getting to work with Steve Jobs and amazing people at NeXT, but yes, I do believe that we can change the world.

In 2003, I had the opportunity to go to Chile to work with Chilean Senator Fernando Flores and others, building a network of entrepreneurs across Chile. Although I really love Chile, I went there first because they were receptive to trying out radically different models for working with entrepreneurs than is presently happening in Texas, even here in Austin. I left behind a group of entrepreneurs that I had started here… informally called the RDogs (referencing a counter-culture movie that several of us in the group particularly enjoyed). As an example, this is the group that founders Mason Hale and Matt Cohen met through, among other technologist and entrepreneurs. After a life changing experience in Chile, I came back to the US at the end of 2003, convinced that I was onto an idea about how the world was shifting towards entrepreneurship more than ever before… and how social networking software would be the underpinning of this tectonic shift. Because of the intensity that I came back with after having such a powerful experience, I quickly met Bijoy Goswami… and because of our shared passion for entrepreneurs, we combined the RDogs into Bootstrap Austin, and shared the work of building that organization from 20 people at the first meeting that I attended at the Gingerman, to the 650+ bootstrappers that are a part of the group today. (Bijoy recognized me for this with giving me the “Virtual Founder” award about a year and half later… Bootstrap Austin has always been a labor of love for us both, and I am certain will be into the future).

Often times, because of my focus on the theory and the philosophical groundings of how to make a network a network (and not just a pretty website with a list of people on it- as many of the networks out there are) I have often times been called the “Chief Architect” or sometimes “Chief Fire Starter” of the Bootstrap Network, that although informal as most things are in Bootstrap Austin, titles that I particularly enjoy… but these are not titles describing my technology background that many of y’all that have known me for in the past (being the CTO’s CTO… ) mainly because I now spend my time not focused on the bits and bytes of technology (like web servers, programming languages, etc) but more of how philosophically humans interact, and humans create… which ties quite nicely into my lifelong interest in innovation…. what is happening now, though, is that I am now focusing this interest at a level that can be taken to tens of thousands of people and companies, not just the one big client (e.g. Dell) at a time. The future is all about entrepreneurs. This link to Intuit’s work says it best about the Future of Business).

So what is happening right now? With Bijoy and Bootstrap Austin, with my colleagues in Chile, with an entrepreneur network that we created in Mexico, with the DCI board that I was elected to earlier this year, with a handful of colleagues that have been doing innovative economic development across Texas, and with a book that I have written (coming out Jan 2008) called Exponential Entrepreneurship, and other collaborators as they come, I mean to build a network that shifts how work is done and how entrepreneurs succeed in their work, shifting the dynamics of what to this point has been the status quo. I will be building a larger network that will include many other communities in it- and of course this will be tied into Bootstrap Austin, and the Prueba el Mundo (network in Mexico), and the network in Chile. My focus for the next year will be more on the central Texas area, but there are a couple of knock-them-out-of-the-park projects that are happening that I expect to get to announce in the next 6 months that will profoundly effect entrepreneurship in general.

I will be blogging about this at my blog which is http://www.exponentialentrepreneurship.com/blog
If you are interested, please follow it via RSS or you can sign up on the lower right hand side- and get emails. In fact, given that your question has been asked a lot of me recently, I will post my portion of this email. Thank you for the question- it is about time that I share this information.

It was good to see you. I am certain that there are opportunities in our work together. Please do let me know as you have comments on this- please feel free to also comment on the blog as many of the things that I am learning now from the feedback that I am getting on the blog are going straight into the book and the design of the entrepreneurial networks that we are building.

Please do keep me in the loop- thanks for the update on your work, and I look forward to catching up with you again soon.

Take care,
Kevin

Social Networking IS NOT for Sharing Your Photos!

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A recent set of articles from some of my favorite publications- the Wall Street Journal and from the Economist have me scratching my head and saying- how is it that such brilliant writers are totally missing the point of the phenomena happening with social networking…  WAKE UP!  First let’s see what they are saying… The Economist’s article “There’s less to Facebook and other social networks than meets the eye” states:

The first was its decision to let outsiders write programs and keep all the advertising revenues these might earn. This has led to all kinds of widgets, from the useful (comparing Facebookers’ music and film tastes, say) to the inane (biting each other to become virtual zombies). The entire internet industry reckons this was clever and is planning to copy it. This week MySpace said it would open its site to outside programmers. Google, which owns Orkut, a social network extremely popular in Brazil and parts of Asia, is expected to do the same soon. Facebook’s second masterstroke is its “mini-feed”, an event stream on user pages that keeps users abreast of what their friends are doing—uploading photos, adding a widget and so on.

Well they are half correct… but please wake up… although it might be “socially” helpful to “compare music and film taste” organizations and entrepreneurs AND THE BUSINESS PRESS needs to wake up to the real power of what is happening- social networking is allowing for completely new production models- ways of getting work done- to emerge.  I am surprised that as of yet business leading (and some of my favorite) publications don’t get it yet.  Here is a link to the Wall Street Journal, where they too, miss the point, comparing Geocities to Facebook.  Although the cautionary tale of Geocities getting bought by Yahoo might be helpful to understanding a bit of how a startup with promising technology was limited by the acquiring company (Yahoo), directly comparing Geocities to Facebook misses the big points of how Facebook is creating a new innovation opportunity- a new way of getting work done.  There is a parallel- but the parallel stops with an actual feature comparison, which Marc Andreeson points out on his blog.  Yet, Marc Andreeson misses the point that I am pointing to- that the real opportunity is not a feature by feature comparison- but that Facebook has opened up a whole new opportunity- that I am certain entrepreneurs will exploit in the future- Social networking, with the invention of the social graph- (a way to be connected to your contacts and friends) and the “mini-feed” is going to open up a whole new way of working together.  Individuals will be able to coordinate with each other much more deftly than they can today with limited project management tools and email.  Watch as this new future, based around social networking technology, disrupts much larger organizations, where “packs” of entrepreneurs are able to take on much larger bureaucratic organizations, coordinate their actions, innovate faster.  At Enterprise Teaming, we and our business partners are building the social architecture (not just software!) to usher in these new ways of entrepreneurs working together.

Please do let me know how you are using social networking technology to innovate in your startups and organizations… but please, stretch the technology beyond just sharing photos!

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Escape the “labor-mentality” Matrix

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The world is shifting too quick to try to keep up with the labor-mentality of the past. It is time to escape the matrix.

Let me try to explain… When I mentioned “Superempowerment of the Individual” in my blog recently, several collegues immediately were drawn to think of the lower cost of production being what I was saying- that because cost are now so low, anyone can start a venture or make a business happen… but that is only part of the picture… To recognize the superempowerment of the individual, we must also see that our world is shifting out of the “labor tradition” to the “knowledge tradition”. By the labor tradition, I mean the idea that man’s body is just an extension of the machines that he used, all prompted by the Industrial Revolution, and that we must work harder to be more productive…. We have moved on beyond that. Ideas are what the world is made up now… yet it sickens me to see many of my brilliant friends still stuck in this old mentality… “If I work really hard around the clock somehow I will make it all happen”… resulting in over worked, over stressed individuals that can not use most of their brains to be creative and create solutions that uniquely solve the issues that their companies are facing. Do you really think that cranking on that spreadsheet is really going to produce blockbuster results if you did not sleep the night before? I doubt it.

We must escape the matrix of this historical thinking, and recognize that the tectonic shift towards knowledge work has begun, and is accelerating…. and if you are not finding ways to relax so that you can leverage your whole mind, you are going to get run over by this shift. Superempowered individuals take advantage of the lowered cost of production, and they escape the “extension of a machine” mentality.

The following image is part of a class that I present on this; To give credit where it is due, my this is a concept that I originally learned from Fernando Flores:


The problem that many of us, especially us Generation X’ers (and I would argue even more so for the Baby Boomers before us) is that work has changed, and we are just now learning about it… but emotionally, down deep, something just does not feel right about what the Milliennials (or Generation Y’ers if you prefer) are teaching us… which happens to be Conceptual Shift #3 from my forthcoming book… work is being restructured by the Attitudinal Shift of the Millennials… They might be younger than us all, they might not have the power that we have, but their ideas and desires are shifting all of us towards their way of thinking.  To ground this point, let’s look to Richard Florida, author of the Creative Class who recently stated on his blog:

The workplace is being re-organized radically away from the old bureaucratic corporation Alfred Chandler wrote about. The relationship between workers and their managers and tasks is changing. What people expect at work is changing too. Work and production organization are being reshaped; design and creativity have entered the picture in a big way. Production increasingly takes the form of globe straddling networks. Cities and communities are being reshaped, becoming more specialized economically, occupationally and demographically. We are in the midst of a great migration. Our culture is being radically reshaped.

Or, if you prefer, listen to one of the Milliennials directly.  Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Workweek (book and blog) tells us this directly with his concept of the four hour work week… His subtitle by the way is “Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich”.  This book describes how to de-engineer (not just re-engineer) your job, and focus on your life.  And for those of you who know me, yes, this is the book that I read this past June that had me cut back on my “work” (read that as “busy work”) and start producing real results while taking much more time off.  Thank you Tim.

The world that is coming is going to require you to learn how to superempower yourself.  Taking advantage of the lower cost of starting and running your business  is only a start.  Escape the labor-mentality Matrix, and free your mind up to create the ideas that truly innovate… or get run over while slaving it out in old-style thinking.

Thousands of bloggers unite

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Today is Blog Action Day– where thousands of bloggers unite in blitzing green tips across the Internet. What is happening is a small group of bloggers have started a veritable movement of social action asking the question What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? Today’s issue:

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. Our aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

The issue I would like to raise in terms of the environment is to show further evidence how a group of people are becoming “super-empowered” to put important issues into the minds of the world- Issues that have previously languished. No matter where you stand on the environment- one thing is for certain- the issue will cross your desk today one way or another…. and for the purposes of what I am pointing out- recognize that this is happening outside the sphere of the “traditional media” of TV, radio, and newspapers. Some group of concerned citizens put together a website, promoted the event, and now have tens of thousands of bloggers writing about it, and even more reading about it.

So what is the environmental issue that I am promoting on this blog? I say that it is the most fundamental one- that you, the reader, are empowered to change the world… See something that does not make sense- wasted energy, pollution, an innovative product, or something that just is not right? You can take action on it in a way that never was possible before, for the dynamics of social software are shifting the tides that one person can engage a few thousand others, and make a difference.
But that is not all… Given that this blog is about entrepreneurship, not just community organizing, recognize the sheer amount of awareness that is being built today around green issues… Opportunities abound for starting up companies, whether they are large or small, bootstrapped or venture capital financed. the amount of press and awareness driven by this day of “doing good” is also creating a great customer appetite… whether your business and your passion be about alternative fuels, green roofs, buying a efficient car (like the Prius that we have that gets 54 miles to the gallon!), or saving energy with LED lights, opportunities abound in nascent green markets – opportunities that entrepreneurs are uniquely suited to target- for entrepreneurs create the new businesses that reshape the existing marketplace with their disruptive innovations.  So… do something for the environment- and have your voice heard on this Blog Action Day- build a green business! Don’t just make a difference, make a profit while making a difference!

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