Kevin Koym

Web 2.0 TV Interview

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Web2.0 TV interviewed me about what I thought about how “Web2.0” is shaping the Internet.  My interviewer was very nice- and you will see that I went ahead and prompted him a little bit about how the Web2.0 phenomena is not just about a new way of building web applications (which was the focus of many of the other interviews that had been done that day) … but is truly a revolution in the way work is being done, and the way that startup companies are being built. 

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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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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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