Kevin Koym

Entrepreneur Town Hall Meeting in Austin March 3, 6 pm

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We will be holding an Entrepreneur Town Hall Meeting in Austin on March 3rd at 6 pm as part of RiseAustin‘s entrepreneurship week. More details can be found about the event at this link.

To take advantage of the conceptual shifts that I have written about my forthcoming book, a number of Austin entrepreneur support organizations are meeting together at the University of Texas’ IC2 Institute. I will be facilitating the session, following the design of some of the meetings that we used while I was in Chile- focused on facilitating dialogue between entrepreneurs. Here is a map to the location.

Please sign up here and join us in making Austin’s community of entrepreneurs stronger.

Urgent focus: Small Business Growth and Tightened Credit

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Recently there has been a bunch of press about the growing threat of recession coming to the US.  Today’s front page article of the New York Times tells a story that all of us as entrepreneurs need to start preparing for called “As Lenders Tighten Flow of Credit, Growth at Risk“

From the article there are two important paragraphs to note:
Credit flowing to American companies is drying up at a pace not seen in decades, threatening the creation of jobs and the expansion of businesses, while intensifying worries that the economy may be headed for recession.

The article goes on to focus on small business, and how small business is getting hit the worst.  So why is this important? Small business is where all of our growth and job creation is coming from. From the NY Times article:

In recent months, smaller companies have been adding jobs even as larger firms have been shedding workers, according to the ADP National Employment Report, which tracks changes at companies with payrolls overseen by ADP. From May to October, 276,000 of the 378,000 jobs added were at companies with fewer than 50 employees, the report found.

It is the entrepreneurs that are building startup and small businesses that are contributing to the greatest growth of the US economy.  Programs that are being structured by the government should take this in account- and support small business- versus focusing on solutions for large, slow moving corporations that typically are the benefactors of the pork coming out of Washington DC.

So what can entrepreneurs do in lieu of dealing with a drying up of financial capital other than make sure that they voice their vote strongly in the coming election?  Although I will go over this in a coming blog post and also in my forthcoming book, given today’s news, it is worth mentioning here sooner as well.  Even though financial capital might not be as available, social capital can be utilized to continue to build businesses.  Social capital, called “human capital” in Paul Hawkin’s book called Natural Capitalism can be a somewhat replacement in lieu of financial capital.  Creating social capital is what we have been doing in Bootstrap Austin and other entrepreneurial social networks that I have been building.  To get an idea of how this is happening…  think back to times when farmers helped each other raise barns together… these farmers were creating social capital with each other (“I help you, you help me”).  As many stories from my family members can attest, they had no access to financial capital… but they could help each other, and survive the worst of recessions.  It appears that the US is entering into a time that once again that entrepreneurs building social capital together will be the way that we are going to be building our businesses, as financial capital runs and hides during the storm.  Thanks goes to David Armistead for one of the conversations that helped me clarify some of the distinctions in this capital transformation.

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!

Social networks: public thoroughfares or private tollroads?

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The following is an email that I sent out to a number of friends and collegues, some of whom I know through Bootstrap Austin’s Web Group.  Given that there are a number of people that I would like input on this, (many that are not in Austin, much less not in the web group) I am posting this note here.

Bootstrap Web and a few bcc’ed friends,

As some of you know I have been working on a book over the last six weeks. I have been pretty silent during that time.  I am back.  (Imagine hearing Jack Nicholson say “Here’s Johnny!” when I say this). After all of the writing, I am getting prepared to set out implementing some of the ideas that have been bouncing around in my head…. and I have a question that I would like to pose to the community at large to get your input on this… both on choices of technology and philosophy.

In the time that I was away, I received numerous invites to a number of social networks.  Eight in total, with 6 of them being from this continent, and most of them being from the Austin and Dallas areas.  What I find striking about each one of these new sites is they are all walled gardens– sites that are private “toll roads”, but at least at this time, do not have any notion of being publicly connected.  Even Facebook, which is a favorite of mine because of its API, is still a walled garden.

My concern is that some of these walled gardens will fail. Some of the owners of these walled gardens will eventually charge rents- or might take their networks in directions that do not align with the work that I am doing and or perhaps with my values.  I too, want to have a social network, but I too, see the problem with having Kevin’s walled garden.  It will be really pretty, and I am certain that great value will be afforded to the entrepreneurs that interact in this social network… but I feel that right now as a community builder that I should be talking with you guys to see what you think- what can we do together to build public thoroughfares?  Is it possible with the technologies that are out there?  I have looked at OpenID, and I am a fan… I do not see yet how to build the network on it…. only how to create single source logins. I have also looked briefly at Plaxo’s Pulse network.  I don’t see yet it really connecting people, but it feels like it could be interesting.  But doesn’t it all feel like there is something missing on these sites?  Doesn’t this all feel like sites like the very limited sites like Tripod.com or Angelfire.com of 1997?  Doesn’t this feel like those friends that have AOL.com addresses (back then, and especially today) that are kinda stuck- dependent on some company that might change their policies, making those addresses a servere liability?

My questions to you are this- what is the proper way to go forward building public thoroughfares, but still having “my corner” of the internet where I conduct my business, and where you and other entrepreneurs can conduct your affairs… Just like down on 2nd Street here in Austin.  How do we make sure that there are not ten gazzilion freaking logins, limited connectivity to the different sites?  Or should I just forget about it right now, and build out my own private Idaho (my own private social network) and connect into other sites at some point in the future when the technology is here?

What are your thoughts?

I am going to post this as well at my blog. Given that this is going to Bootstrap-Web, we can interact there, although some of you will be bcc’ed on this conversation.  If you want, please come make public comment on this on my website. I intend to be out in the open on this, for this is how I think that we can together build a stronger community.  Here is the url where this is being posted: (this blog post)

Thank you for your thoughts.  Now let’s go build our community together.

Kevin

It’s What’s on the Outside that Counts – TIME

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As many of you know I am in the process of writing a book- a field manual of how social networks can be used to facilitate getting real work done, with my personal focus being about how to support fields of entrepreneurs build their businesses together. Well… the great thing from having y’all help me out is the great leads on research that supports my thesis. Thanks to Ken and Robin for forwarding this link to me.

One of my premises of my work is for a business to be truly successful (in a climate of increasing competition) it needs to be well connected to the outside world. In fact, I write about being “open, but not vulnerable” in the book. The following article published in Time Magazine verifies this. In this article, they say:

The idea that the power of the group comes primarily from the group itself is as outdated as the rotary dial

Deborah Ancona from MIT has recently written a book called X-Teams: Teams get extroverted which goes further into the premise that I have been talking about for the last four years- to build robust ventures we need to get “the experts” out of the way, and get our organizations (and entrepreneurs) better connected. Deborah Ancona’s work verifies this.

Oh… and one note to MIT… thank you for the research you guys do. Whether Peter Senge, Deborah Ancona, Rosalin Picard, Nicholas Negroponte, or one of the many other researchers and educators that I read at MIT that shares their cutting edge insight, thank you.

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