Incubators and CoWorking Spaces
Social Enterprise at Seedcamp?
Published September 11, 2009 @ 04:19PM PT
Tis the season for venture incubators, pitch days, and business plan competitions of all shapes and sizes. Seedcamp, a funding incubator for young startups in Europe has just announced it's 21 finalists. In the mix are a number of organizations that have, if not explicitly social missions, implications for the social sector. These write-ups come from VentureBeat.
"Patients Know Best (Cambridge, UK) — An online platform for patients to send secure messages to their doctors and nurses, receive information about their health, and get advice on preventative and followup care." It's pretty obvious how this one could improve the way that people accessed health care. I'd be interested to see how this aligns or doesn't with something like FrontlineSMS:Medic.
"Teachable (London) — A library of teacher-made resources in any academic subject that are easily adapted to curricula." Again, the social value here is pretty clear. The potential of the internet to democratize access to education is immense and as yet relatively untapped. I love the idea of teachers being able to contribute to a communal database.
"VouChaCha (London) — Platform that delivers coupons and discount vouchers straight to your smart phone." This may not seem profound, but with the economy as it is, people care more about collected small discounts than ever before. Being able to deliver offers direct to the phone could be wonderful.
I think these companies are good examples of a new ecosystem of web-driven platforms that, while not "social enterprises" in the way we define it in this sector, are still building infrastructure to help address people's problems in simpler, easier ways. It's important for us in the social entrepreneurship space to be connecting our conversations to the consumer web world and looking for ways to leverage the relationship.
(Photo: Leafar)
Could Y Combinator Save The World?
Published August 17, 2009 @ 07:30AM PT
(Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. Source.)
Expertise. Connections. Money. Time. All of the things any startup needs to succeed. And exactly the things that Y Combinator offers highly promising tech startups through their incubation programs. But as Y Combinator begins to experiment with a new funding model in which they issue a "Request For Startups" that are attempting to solve a particular problem, it seems to me they have a chance to extend their impact far beyond financial success.
For a while, I've been interested in the intersection between the web tech world and social entrepreneurship. There is an obvious financial relationship; the Skoll Foundation which has done as much as anyone to put this field on the map in the last few years is all money from Jeff Skoll's success at eBay, for example.
But there's more to it than that. There is a certain similarity (although often unrecognized by those who haven't been through both) in the experience of scraping together resources, identifying and cultivating supporters, and trying to create either software or programs that solve some specific problem in a way more impacting than previous solutions.
And if the experiences of starting an innovative nonprofit or an innovative web startup have similarities, there is also a fertile and growing conversation about how web startups have created or could create the infrastructure for more effective, citizen-driven social change. Jon Gosier is incubating talented web developers in Uganda. Gadget gurus from around the world are using collaboration tools to organize and host Maker Faire Africa's. Silicon Valley is soon to host it's second BarCamp Africa. Ushahidi, a crisis reporting platform that takes advantage of SMS, is being built by programmers literally around the world. And Twitter continues to astound with it's power to amplify common voices of the politically repressed around the world.
For all of these reasons, I think Y Combinator has an immensely exciting opportunity to use it's new "Request For Startups" (as reported by TechCrunch here) form of investment to call for companies that have a specific eye towards solving social problems.
So what type of themes might work well? Certainly digital education is both an immensely socially important and potentially financially lucrative field. Platforms and portals better equipped to help shift consumer behaviors towards more sustainable alternatives could become the new wave of e-commerce destinations. Sustainable outsourcing, well there are incredible possibilities. With ten minutes, a group of good people and a white board, I'm sure a dozen more ideas would come pouring out.
So will it happen? There's some evidence that it wouldn't be a totally foreign notion, at least not to Y Combinator founder Paul Graham. In his essay "Be Good," he wrote about how there is something valuable for a young about having a social or moral compass. In fact, he pointed out how many great startups - Craigslist, for example - began behaving more like a nonprofit dedicated to best serving their stakeholders than a company dedicated to extracting the most money from their users.
This matters now because web companies and social entrepreneurs aren't just starting interesting new ventures. They are, in some ways, reinventing capitalism for the 21st century. At least that's what they could be doing. Will we continue to view financial success as separable from social and environmental impact? Will we continue to separate value from meaning from money? Or will we assert a new vision?
One thing's for sure. If they're going to give it a shot, they're going to need help to develop the diverse array of supporters that can help their portfolio companies succeed. I can't offer much, but I can offer this written platform as a way to help evolve the conversation, and our community of readers as experts who can provide vital social expertise to compliment the business and technical acumen to which Y-Combinator already has access.
Whatdya say Paul?
Startup Incubator TV
Published June 10, 2009 @ 07:53PM PT
(photo via andrewhyde.net)
Every time I watch a TED Talk or discover new information on Wikipedia, I'm once again reminded of the power of the internet for sharing information and democratizing education. Today I discovered that the Boulder (and now Boston) based TechStars incubator has started their very own behind the scenes reality show.
TechStars has really great mojo. It's a summer education and mentorship program for (generally) software/web tech startups through which 70% of the participating companies have either received funding or left the program profitable already. Similar to Y-Combinator, they provide $6,000 per founder for 6% equity, but the real value is in their unique mentorship program, and the access to institutional investors they provide.
Maybe their most impressive accomplishment though is that everytime someone talks about the program - from the founder and executive director David Cohen to their participants - there's a big smile on their face. Today, co-founder (not to mention one of my favorite venture bloggers) Brad Feld posted about their new, once a week five-minute segment about the program.
The videos (two of which have been released so far) are an incredibly cool behind the scenes look at the program. What's more, they led me to TechStars.tv where the group has just tons of awesome videos and content from their educational section. The absurd amount of information could keep any entrepreneur busy for weeks and that gives the program and the community around it even bigger ups in my book.
I'm going to be watching the TechStars show weekly, particularly since the very first company they feature in the very first video is the super-cool Northwestern University-started The Next Big Sound, which makes it easy for anyone to become a mogul and discover new musical talent.
For all the aspiring entrepreneurs out there, get over to TechStars.tv and soak up the knowledge.
Web 3.0 and the Emergence of Creative Community Hubs
Published May 09, 2009 @ 10:15AM PT
The awesome logo for the Big Omaha conferece, which combines an icon rooted in the distinct history of the place with a suggestion of movement, daring, and exploration.
The most exciting emergent trend on the internet actually isn't on the internet; it's about place, and the explosion of offline community hubs supercharged by online discovery.
In the early days, the internet was "cyberspace," an alternative and parallel world where people remained largely anonymous. Web 1.0 was about distributing information at a scale and pace never before seen. As web 2.0 has grown up, the internet has become increasingly more social. When we think of the internet, today, we increasingly think of the tools that allow people to become one-person content creators and distributors, and to receive a constantly update stream of information and ideas from people they care about.
But there is a ground swell happening. Rather than just sharing interesting news articles and pictures of funny cats, the increasingly public timeline of activity we produce is making it easier and easier for us to discover kindred spirits. Creatives, entrepreneurs, moms, creative-entrepreneur-moms and all variety of others are weaving together digital communities of common passion and complementary need.
And more than ever before, they're taking it offline.
Writing about Virgance last week, ecofirm Max Gladwell advanced a new definition for Web 3.0 that's not about cloud computing and semantic web, but instead about a phenomenon of human use:
Web 3.0 might also encompass the merging of the digital world with the actual world through Web and mobile technologies. Web 3.0 might include applications that integrate or necessarily include the actual worldwide web—the one in which we live, the tangible web of homes, streets, businesses, and government offices. If Web 2.0 is the Internet as a platform, then Web 3.0 might be the World as a platform.
In the new internet there is an increasing fluency between online and offline, and the direction of discovery flows both ways. Social networking technologies are no longer just the place where your offline connections live, but a doorway for relationships with new friends and colleagues.
The creatives are translating this emergent energy by building community hubs, rooted in place and designed to unleash the power of relationships to inspire innovation and ideas.
In the for-profit world, this is taking the shape of incubators. Y-Combinator is just the best known of an array of institutions designed to accelerate young companies by lavishing them with mentorship and connections. VentureBeat wrote yesterday about a new group, SproutBox based out of Bloomington, Indiana, and gave a shout to the growing field "a list that includes TechStars in Boulder, Colo., Launchbox Digital in Washington, D.C., Start@Spark in Boston, Mass., and Capital Factory in Austin, Texas."
In the social sector, there is an explosion around co-working spaces for social innovators. The Hub's global network is one of the leaders (and poised to come to the US for the first time this fall), but there are many others, such as NEDSpace in Portland, Oregon. Both the incubators and the co-working spaces share a common sensibility in attempting to draw out the unique composition of the communities in which they're rooted.
And everywhere, conferences are popping up to build momentum around new sensibilities. This post was inspired by Big Omaha, a truly awesome looking event wrapping up in Nebraska today that is designed to converge brilliant entrepreneurs around the leading city of the Silicon Prarie.
The potential here is truly immense. Imagine a network where every city you went to, there was a community hub that you could check in with, each with a feel it's own, but all connected by a passion for unleashing people's capacity by allowing them to inspire and collaborate with one another.
I believe that's happening, and I think the new social internet provides the plumbing. And smart companies are going to be flocking to provide tools to help accelerate the movement.
