Where Am I?

On a birth­day post in 2007 (my, time flies!) I was defend­ing what I actu­ally do… and to save you the trou­ble read­ing it — the kicker was that it took me years to real­ize that my Grand­fa­ther “made stuff” whereas I really just “talk a lot”.

Today, it’s dif­fer­ent. I mean, I still talk a lot, but that non-profit I’m start­ing… A lawyer asked where we were based. Huh? Two of three founders are in NY, the other Wyoming. If we con­sider phone num­bers, we can add Nevada to that list. I’ll prob­a­bly use my home in NJ as the address, just because I’m mov­ing apart­ments in NY and at least that’s con­sis­tent. I thought about the loca­tion of the tech­nol­ogy infra­struc­ture we’re deploy­ing, but

where the heck is GoDaddy?

Mike Kavis just nabbed his startup’s first cus­tomer. He’s been talk­ing up how lit­tle his infra­struc­ture costs were to get started, and two years ago Guy Kawasaki waste­fully spent a bit over $12,000 to start his. This is dif­fer­ent. Break­ing the cou­pling between the “entre­pre­neur­ship” and the infra­struc­ture changes a lot of the typ­i­cal answers about how a com­pany does busi­ness and what mat­ters. It makes the ques­tion of what I do sound, well, so last year. It puts the focus right back on exe­cu­tion in the moment, rather the deriv­a­tive per­spec­tive of an estab­lished company’s momen­tum. Remov­ing the impor­tance of momen­tum evens the play­ing field between small and large com­pa­nies. Lots of things are com­ing together to help with this… the evo­lu­tion of stan­dards (of which I am not a huge fan), cloud com­put­ing, open source growth, severe dis­sat­is­fac­tion of soft­ware pric­ing, and the dis­mal suc­cess rate of large IT projects.

You might read this and think the impli­ca­tions are only for star­tups. Wrong! This affects big busi­ness in huge impor­tant ways. Big busi­ness has big infra­struc­ture. They’re beholden to a cost struc­ture that a vir­tual com­pany is not. But, the ben­e­fits… they don’t fol­low from being big with huge cost structures.

A vir­tual com­pany can tie together peo­ple around a shared idea with­out bor­ders. The idea, the value sys­tem, the shared beliefs… that brings the team together and changes the game. By tra­di­tional stan­dards, these com­pa­nies don’t even exist in space. Yet, they often cen­ter on a pas­sion that is infec­tious, and when applied to dis­sat­is­fied cus­tomers, the results are explo­sive. Big com­pa­nies need to style for speed, not momen­tum, in order to survive.

Why do I believe they can’t do it?

Because it requires let­ting go. It requires approach­ing the game as one of influ­ence rather than con­trol. Give up con­trol to influ­ence peo­ple, and while the truth may or may not set you free, it cer­tainly will reveal who to trust for long term relationships.

And, oddly, though my lawyer may have trou­ble fig­ur­ing out where to incor­po­rate us, our cus­tomers will know exactly where to find us.