People Worth Backing #3: Isaac Squires and Carly Gloge
Isaac Squires is one of the very best examples of what a software developer/entrepreneur should be. I’ve lost count of how many developers I’ve hired over the years, but only one in several hundred combine the ability to write brilliant, elegant code with the ability to imagine what code he or she ought to write, wrapped up in the ability to see the organizational/commercial implications of what they are writing. Seriously, as a mere self-taught and admittedly utilitarian coder myself, I can read Isaac’s code like it was English. He’s the only developer I ever let submit code without extensive documentation. His stuff is that good.
Isaac has what I wish more people would aspire to: The ablity to imagine great commercial ideas and then actually build them. And, if that weren’t enough, he also has the ability to marshal people. For three years, he convinced a whole community of top developers to help him build the first fully-functional 3d graphics engines in Microsoft’s emerging C#/.net standard…for free. For anyone who knows code, this is one of the most difficult projects one could take on.
If that weren’t enough, Isaac’s colleague, Carly Gloge is one of those rare graphics artist/Flash developers who has excellent design skills and the ability to write the code herself. And she is a terrific communicator and teacher for her clients. Between the two of them, they have everything they need to build anything they can imagine. And to quote Han Solo, They can imagine quite a bit.
Check out only a tiny slice of Isaac and Carly’s work at WarbWeb.com.
If you ever have a chance to back a Squires/Gloge project, do it.
Disintegration and Open Innovation #2 – Plug & Play Tech Center
Yesterday, I commented on Wired Magazine’s most recent feature story about the disintegration of industry.
My concern was for the prospects of cooperative or open innovation in a world of small, legally independent organizations. The most obvious issue is that sharing intentions and know-how is anathema to relatively weak small firms and startups. Even in the Wired article, Charles Mann mentions that one of the budding automobile industry startups in California he interviewed had offices strewn with non-disclosure agreements.
So many non-disclosure agreements have spewed from the printers on the tables that they must be capable of producing them without human intervention.
This is not the hallmark of “open innovation.”
But then I see places like Sunnyvale’s Plug and Play Tech Center. At any given time, there are over 200 startups living together in this huge, open space. It is getting to the point in Silicon Valley (not to mention many places around the world, like Germany, Australia and Spain) that if you have a startup to start, the first thing you do after incorporation is get a cube at Plug & Play.
Why? Because there is hardly a day spent inside Plug and Play that doesn’t have you bumping into someone who can help you – help you solve a problem, meet a potential stakeholder, find talent to hire, get funding. (The word on the street is that Plug & Play has been responsible for raising over $700 million for startups in the past three years.)
In such an environment, even potentially competitive startups can hardly help getting to know each other, building trust, and learning to be good neighbors. It reminds me of that Warner Brothers cartoon of Sam Sheepdog and Ralph Wolf who punch-in to “work,” fight all day, and then go home friends. Coopetition is easier when you grow up together in the same house.
So maybe a swarm of independent firms can work together in a collaborative way. If so, places like Plug & Play provide an important platform for establishing the trust needed to share intentions and know-how across company lines.
Disintegration and Open Innovation
In an obvious homage to Michael Lewis’ 1999 book, The New New Thing, Chris Anderson, Charles Mann, Kevin Kelly and Steven Levy collaborate to write Wired’s June 2009 feature story, “The New New Economy.”
I know, I know – we’ve heard this all before. The corporate dinosaurs are going to sink into the tar pit of history, and nimble, warm-blooded little companies are going to crawl out of their hiding holes and into the sun of a new age.
What struck me about the story was not whether 2008′s economic meltdown was the proverbial asteroid triggering this long-awaited transition, but whether more corporate disintegration would lead to an age of more open innovation.
On the surface, things look rosy: Imagine a world where many small, independent companies form organically around specific objectives to create ‘virtual flash firms’ that can just as quickly and easily reorganize in response to new opportunities. Sounds terrific, though the dinosaur analogy doesn’t seem quite right. There are, and have been, plenty of huge, lumbering mammals, many of which are also now extinct. No, these writers seem to be talking about a world not of elephants but of insects…or rather, a world of insects collaborating to pose as elephants.
No doubt, as Chris Anderson points out by quoting micro-investor, Paul Graham, “The rule, ‘large and disciplined organizations win,’ needs to have a qualification appended: ‘at games that change slowly.’” This speaks to the truth of how poorly large hierarchies of humans respond to rapid change.
But looking closer, there are obvious problems with the notion that swarms of legally separate entities are better at quickly identifying new opportunities and cooperatively responding to them. Chief among these problems is that legally separate entities, especially very, very small ones, are skittish and not typically prone to trusting each other. While it might be difficult for a team in a large company to be open about its know-how and intentions (the two things that absolutely need to be shared in order to initiate open, collaborative innovation), vulnerable startups find it almost impossible to be so open. Startup entrepreneurs frequently refer to themselves as being in “stealth mode.” The only thing that will freak out a typical startup entrepreneur more than the sound of a big company stomping through the forest is the sight of another startup suddenly close to its nest.
People in big companies tend to have a hard time sharing. And people in small companies tend to have a hard time sharing. You see, whether we organize in hierarchies or swarms, the problem with collaborative innovation is not that we are insects or elephants, but that we are human.
Innovation’s shortest good definition:
Innovation = paradigm shift
Ray Kurzweil
I think that says it all.
Scribd, Kindle, Booksurge: Is the alphaWorks of Publishing Coming?
National Public Radio (NPR) reported on Scribd’s latest announcement yesterday. Scribd is a terrific young company that helped me get my first novel online in under four minutes: www.thehiddenstage.com
Their embeddable e-reader, well-designed service, and social network made it the obvious choice for me as an author trying to get the widest possible readership. I was frankly amazed at the quality of the reader, and four minutes beat the two months it took me to get my book on the Google reader system.
I also have the book on Kindle and published with Amazon’s Booksurge imprint (a leader in print-on-demand publishing). I believe print-on-demand is the future of publishing, even for famous authors. Why should anyone “kill tree” before someone buys the book? Even for larger runs to fill a Barnes & Noble order, only those books should be printed. The days of doing a 100,000 unit print run on the hope that 50,000 of them will actually sell are numbered. You don’t want to know how many unsold books wind up in landfill. Publishing today (specifically the focus on large runs of dumping ink on dead tree, instead of focusing on hiring great editors, great designers, and great talent promoters) is a ridiculous, antiquated system that only the most myopic Luddite could love.
I believe that Scribd, and possibly some Scribd partners, have an opportunity to change the game.
Here’s the idea: When I was at IBM, I ran a group called alphaWorks. The brilliant thing about alphaWorks was that it allowed IBM to put early-stage research technology on the web for download without harming the overall IBM brand for quality. The purpose was to get early adopters to tell us what they would do with the technology if we turned it into a product, and this was wildly successful. alphaWorks has been helping IBM accelerate and improve the path to market for new products for a decade. I have to think that using Scribd, Kindle, and Print-on-Demand, a major publisher could easily create the “alphaWorks” of new authors.
This “alpha” brand would say, “Hey, one of our editors likes this writer, but we aren’t ready to put all our muscle behind her on a big print run. So we are putting the author on our “alpha” list. Because they aren’t yet on our imprint, they haven’t gone through the rigorous editing and quality control process that have given us our great reputation in publishing, but we think this author might be a diamond in the rough, and we want you to vote. If we see lots of great comments and lots of people reading online at Scribd, buying copies through Scribd and Kindle and Print-on-Demand, then we may graduate that author to our official imprint.”
A publisher can afford to do this, because they have spent virtually nothing to do it. Scribd is free to use, and Print-on-Demand has only a minuscule set-up fee, and then costs only come when someone buys a book…no inventory! The publisher is just lending its “imprimatur” to get more readers paying attention to the writers on the “alpha” list.
If I were a publisher, I would embrace the inevitable. Publishing is going to be about finding, developing, and promoting talent…not about who can take massive capital risks on processing large quantities of dead tree in the hope a particular book will become a blockbuster. And Scribd, Kindle and Print-on-Demand will be the tools for reducing the search costs and risks associated with spotting the talent and getting a better sense in advance of whether or not they will resonate with real readers.
How to give your idea a fighting chance
First, be clear on this: Your idea is worth nothing, nothing at all…not unless you do something real with it. If someone steals your idea and makes millions on it, thank them and consider yourself lucky if they credit you with the original idea.
Money does not flow to ideas. It flows to people who intend to do something about it and who take the risks required to make it real – from the opportunity-cost risk of not doing other things that might have been more successful, the economic risk of spending time and resources on an uncertain return, to the social risk of being seen as a madman.
So while your idea might be a nice invention, the first question you have to ask yourself is not how do I patent my invention, but rather “what are my intentions?”
Whenever you have an “idea”, stop right there and assign a value from 1 to 100 to your intentions. If you are really good, you’ll have a list with your ideas and their associated intention value. The value is a priority ranking, with 1 = “I will probably forget this in an hour” to 100 = “I intend to pursue this to the exclusion of all else, including health, family and friends.”
Along the continuum, if I have an invention idea and I just want to file a patent in hopes of someone licensing it, I’d set the Intention value to 10 or 12…maybe 15 if you actually pay the thousands of dollars in fees to support the patent after the year-long provisional period.
Valuing an idea: A patented idea should be valued at the cost it would take for the inventor to actually build and start marketing the envisaged product or service herself. If you’ve really invented a novel way to make a nuclear reactor – well, ok, if your idea really is likely to work, will produce massive utility, is novel and not-obvious, then your patent should be worth a lot – nuclear reactors are expensive. But if you have described a software idea that could be implemented and put on the web by two fourteen-year-olds in three weeks, then in my view your idea (just the patent without you actually doing anything real with it) is worth three weeks of a teenager’s allowance…times 2.
Sure, this isn’t the way things work today in the patent world, but we can dream. We need to “get real” about making ideas real.
People Worth Backing #2: Tyron Stading
Tyron Stading was one of many terrific, multi-talented people that came out of IBM’s Extreme Blue program. He was a developer in our lab, but he had an uncanny head for leadership and business innovation. One of the very best cross-business-technology thinkers I’ve known.
Today, Ty is the founder of a startup called Innography, an IP due diligence firm with some serious technology under the covers. But what I believe gives this company the best chance of success is its sharp angle on the business model and the way they deliver services. They really know how to create value. Smart law firms are going to want to be using these guys.
Ty came to mind this Sunday when I was reflecting on the “People Worth Backing” thread. He is the real deal…and there are more where he came from.
If you ever have a chance to back a Stading project, do it.
David Lerner of Columbia University – On Angel Investing
David Lerner at Columbia talks about angel investing as a form of gambling in his blog.
The state of angel investing, however, has become more sophisticated in recent years. I’d say that either all investment in early-stage companies is gambling or angel investing today is just…investing: a calculation of risk versus reward.
I saw David’s leadership in action at the NCET2 conference last year. He is a really people-oriented guy, and so I have to wholeheartedly agree with his blog entry’s final point: as an angel, you can assess an investment like a “10 foot birdie putt from every angle,” but in the end, you are making a bet on people.
Sex Education for Enterprises – Going too Far?
During an interview with BusinessWeek, I made the comment that cooperative innovation between companies is a lot like reproduction, and companies know as much about managing these budding relationships as teenagers who never learned the facts of life.
As I thought about this metaphor over subsequent weeks, a lot of content came together into a book-length body of material I called, “Sex Ed for Enterprises.” Just a working title.
Now as I shop this idea around, I notice a lot of folks saying one thing in common: “Watch out for using the word ‘sex’ or going too far with this metaphor in a book…there are people out there who will feel uncomfortable about it.”
So I have one of those classic innovation dilemmas: Do I go with the provocative approach or tone it back?
Here is the summary of the book (and a little graphic I made just for fun). Let me know what you think…and if you have a punchy title that is less potentially offensive but conveys the core concept without watering it down, let me know and I’ll give you a credit in the manuscript.
Sex Ed for Enterprises
If you look at how companies today try to work together, particularly when it comes to innovation, it’s clear that they know as little about engaging in a budding relationship as a teenager who never learned the facts of life. It’s an apt analogy, comparing cooperative innovation to biological reproduction. Both involve creating something new together. Most species mix tiny molecules of DNA in the chromosomes of the parents to create new life. But when companies try to create new enterprises together, you see what amounts to one parent cutting off its arm and the other cutting off a leg, stitching them together with barbed wire, and hoping the creature will live. This is not only painful – sometimes life-threatening – for the parents, but it never results in healthy offspring.
Two thirds of companies world-wide believe that massive changes in the economy will force them to create fundamentally new businesses that can compete under radically new conditions. Eighty percent of these firms believe that working collaboratively with other companies to do this will mean the difference between success and failure. If that’s true, then companies big and small need a crash course in sex education now.
This book will take you step-by-step through the magical process of business reproduction, from how your own body-corporate creates the seeds of new innovative life, through the complicated mating rituals of collaborative innovation, and finally to consummation, birth, and the ongoing responsibilities of raising the young. Along the way, we’ll give you plenty of illustrations and stories of how to do it right – and cautionary tales of companies that got it wrong.
Written by [identity still secret] and John Wolpert, CEO of Team UpStart, Sex Ed for Enterprises draws on 20 years of experience helping both startups and some of the biggest companies in the world on their journey to reproductive health.
leave a comment