Category / events

by Diane Tate

Being Open about Being Open

Last year WebFWD (the accelerator program I run for Mozilla) had the privilege of hosting a few events with Black Founders, a fantastic organization doing great things for tech entrepreneurs. At one of the events I had the pleasure of meeting Chad Whitacre, chief promulgator of Gittip, a radically open organization seeking to change how value is exchanged. Gittip brought along their partner Balanced, a payments processing, escrow and payouts service.

Fast forward a few (or maybe 9) months or so and we all reconnected when Balanced came up with the idea of exploring how “open” extends not only to code, but to business practices. Balanced help us frame the topic with a quote from Eric Raymond, author of the classic work The Cathedral and the Bazaar:

“I expect the open-source movement to have essentially won its point about software within three to five years (that is, by 2003–2005). Once that is accomplished, and the results have been manifest for a while, they will become part of the background culture of non-programmers. At that point it will become more appropriate to try to leverage open-source insights in wider domains.”

I then had the pleasure of moderating a discussion of this with our 4 panelists:

  • Chase Adam, Co-Founder/Vision, Watsi
  • Jaisen Mathai, Co-Founder, Trovebox
  • Matin Tamizi, Co-Founder/CEO, Balanced
  • Chad Whitacre, Founder, Gittip

    • The ensuing discussion was rich, partly due to the broad range of perspectives of these panelists. For example, where Chad shared how he does not pay his staff, Matin stated that he embraces open as simply “good business practice” with a focus is to maximize revenue, margins and shareholder value. For Jaisen, operating in the open is a key vehicle to gain users’ trust: “It’s impossible to stab our customers in the back.”

    What ‘open’ looks like also varied among the panelists. Matin was careful to point out that many people hesitate operating openly out of a misunderstanding of their core value proposition and competitive advantage is. Typically this is NOT the product roadmap (which Balanced publishes), but it IS the brand, customer relationships and the culture.

    Most did agree that operating in the open – sharing product plans, rationale for making key business decisions, etc. – takes a lot of work. It takes energy, time and focus to ensure that these things are communicated in the proper channels, and questions are addressed. Nonetheless, “we’ve never had a debate that was not worth having,” says Chase. However, “it is a challenge to build mechanisms for ingesting all of the information” he adds. Example: Watsi exports all o ftheir quickbooks information (with key user information anonymized) onto their website – before it is audited. This means they got lots of feedback on what is not correct or needs fixing. The benefits of corrected accounting offset the cost of managing all of the feedback.

    Jaisen also shared that his definition of “Free Open Software” is less about offering software at no cost and more about offering a range of choice for software. Trovvebox has over 100 contributors to its source code and many offer strong opinions that help the team continually consider its choices in direction.

    What in summary would these panelists advise others considering running their businesses more openly?

  • Do it early. This was a common theme. It’s harder to open up elements of your business later on, when more stakeholders need to be managed.
  • Be committed. As mentioned earlier, it’s a lot of work to manage an open community and it will take a lot of energy. So be committed to supporting this at the outset, knowing the investment pays off later.

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    by Diane Tate

    The Yin-Yang Bang

    It’s that time of year again. Yes, the decorations and trees and sales abound…but what I really mean is…it’s that time of year when we hear 2 familiar ballads.

    Of course, I’m talking about “Happy XMas (War Is Over)” and “Wonderful Christmastime.” Both Christmas songs, both written in the 70s, both written by Beatles, and both tunes that stick to you like a snowflake on a Chrysler.

    That’s where all the similarity stops. As a die-hard Beatles maniac growing up, I became enamored myself with the characters behind the music, and if anything could describe Lennon-McCartney, it would be “yin/yang.” The former raised largely by a single parent and a rebellious child of social services; the latter formed by prestigious education and organized religion. The former cheating on his first wife to marry a modern artist, the latter living 30 monogamous (so we think) years married to an establishment debutante.

    For me, however, their differences are most poignantly illustrated by these two songs. The first is brooding, political, and social in significance and unpleasant to ponder (as was its writer in 1971, the year it was written). And the second? A jingle: catchy, light and easy on the ears…precisely like its writer the year it was written.

    And despite all these juxtapositions, when they collaborated, these two musicians penned perhaps some of the greatest tunes of all time. It’s a nice reminder to me when my yin is countered by a yang. Rather than dissect what is “wrong” with that yang, I have instead learned to intentionally study the strengths that can be had when these forces combine.

    All that said, don’t you think it’s sort of hard to take this dude seriously?

    by Diane Tate

    Killing The Network Effect

    “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

    Traditionally I’ve been a huge LinkedIn fan. I opened an account its first year, and my unique identifier attests that I was actually the 148th account (you’ll see “1348” buried in it, and the first 1200 were test accounts, my executive friend assured me).*  I felt so strongly about the value of the service that I agreed to participate in the “Friends of LinkedIn” group that the management uses to highlight testimonials of the success that the network has brought; they even featured me among 100 users when they reached 100 million members in 2011.

    My role has never been self-serving insofar as I don’t run a recruiting agency or a consulting firm advising people how to use the site (etc. etc.). I took up the LinkedIn banner because I’ve truly believed in the service’s ability to accelerate connections and transactions in unprecedented ways.

    Sadly, however, I think its value is rapidly diminishing as it fills the site with so much noise that the signal is being drowned out.

    It started with the ability to list Tweets in the feed, which itself was clearly a simple adaptation of Facebook’s feed, as are the ability to “Like” people’s developments and posts. In fact, I haven’t seen many features that were innovative by LinkedIn. Soon so many Tweets by hyperactive users of the service clogged my feed it became useless. Mercifully Twitter put an end to that this year — and while LinkedIn tried to put a happy face on it, it was a hardly a product or user experience decision initiated or made by LinkedIn. Additional ads, features and solicitations have been stuffed into the same UI. It’s a busy, crowded and quite unpleasant experience driven by the public markets rather than the users.

    Then this September, after years of simply cluttering up the same user interface (and by years, I mean 9…which by most brand standards is insanely long…and thus in the web world is an eternity) with features swiped from other services, came the coup de grace: “endorsements.”  They serve as the ultimate proof that LinkedIn is no longer about its users, but about patrons, real and potential. Rather than a true recommendation which requires thought and context on the part of the recommender, “endorsements” (quotes not to go away) consist of a series of pre-suggested categories placed in front of your contacts who are asked to react with a click and voila, you are “endorsed”! The result? An endless stream of clicks and “endorsements,” resembling a game of roulette which entails simply seeing, reactively clicking, and immediately getting more suggested categories from other contacts to reactively click through.

    So sadly, the LinkedIn experience has now degenerated into a meaningless, endless cacophony of “endorsements” (quotes will not go away). I now enter the site with trepidation, typically only in response to a “real” desire to connect and search for specific information I’ve pre-determined I need. In short, it’s become the same morass that I felt whenever I clicked on MySpace: go in quickly and surgically, and exit as quickly as possible.

    The motive, of course, is to “build your social capital” by touting the numbers of endorsements you have. Here’s the lamentable elaboration on this rationale I received when I raised my concerns in the Friends of LinkedIn group:

    Someone I would consider to be of “social media influence” brought up a good point regarding endorsements. She believes LinkedIn will eventually have data indicating who received the most endorsements for certain skills in specific industries industry and live in specific geographical areas.

    Do you see where I’m going with this? She thinks LinkedIn is building lots of data with our endoresement <sic> clicks that will be used in the future.

    If that’s the case, than I encourage everyone to endorse me for LinkedIn, as I am the most influential LinkedIn trainer in the hospitality industry, and I would love for the LinkedIn data to show just that.

    In short, this HR (surprise) professional advises us to react to this thoughtless and irritating experience by…using it MORE (and, of course, endorse his too ;). Not because it provides us value, but because we can feed some entity-to-be-named-later with “data” that somehow will serve to our advantage.

    Of course, this is ultimately unfortunate as the original intent and function of LinkedIn was quite good. But its decline makes me yearn for an alternative. I hope that soon its network effect power will be countered by real value.

    *2021 POSTSCRIPT: whoa my friend’s original URL that I’d linked to 8+yrs ago in the start of the above post now redirects to a person not even three degrees from me overseas. Unsettling.