I don’t want to because that’s not where my deeper interests lie. My interests are a step back, looking at the startup ecosystem as a whole. I believe the tech industry is the most innovative industry on the planet, and that is one reason why I’m interested in getting my hands dirty and learning as much as possible about and how and why it works, but being the most innovative industry on the planet gives it bigger implications…

While we should never trivialize the impact of the entrepreneur, from a wider perspective, solving ecosystem level problems has more impact than any B2B or B2C startup could, because while products make a big impact, I don’t think they deserve as much credit for changing the world as the underlying system that enabled the product to come to life. Given the right conditions and incentives, the existence of certain products can become almost inevitable. Whereas finding efficiencies in the larger ecosystem in which startups exist can create systemic impact, empowering more people, unlocking new pockets of potential wealth and allowing market forces to go work to bring them about.

(Aside: I don’t want to do a B2B or B2C startup but it’s possible the path I’m going down leads to me creating a S2S company; a startup for startups, which is fundamentally a different breed and therefore deserves a different letter. Startups are not large corporations because they solve new problems instead of milking old ones, and they aren’t small businesses because they create scalable impact.)

Furthermore, I believe the importance of the opportunities that arise from an increasingly efficient startup ecosystem extends beyond the tech ecosystem itself, to the future of innovation in an information economy. And the organizational principles of the startup ecosystem, as well as the operating principles of the information economy that the startup ecosystem has given birth to, will ripple across emerging industries in sectors diverse as social change, health, biotech, molecular manufacturing and government, as soon as these industries begin their transition into the information age.

It’s important to see the information age as the latest epochal shift of organized society. The world has progressed through tribal, agrarian and industrial societies and now we are on the cusp of transitioning to an information society. And because the tech industry is pioneering the movement toward the information economy, many of the organizational principles being discovered will be universal to this entire age.

WHAT THE STARTUP ECOSYSTEM IS GOOD AT NOW

Google, Facebook and Twitter are three of the most dominant Silicon Valley companies today, and each practically owns a category: Search, Social Networks and Microblogging, respectively. Once these categories are identified the startup ecosystem is effective enough to allow many teams to form, which each set out to dominate this field. The team that executes best wins. This a tremendous accomplishment for this industry and for the world, and it is what makes tech the most innovative industry on the planet.

But once there are lots of teams executing on a new opportunity, most of the battle from a macroeconomic perspective has already been won, it’s just a matter of which individual player will earn the spoils (and how long they can maintain relevance before a competitor overtakes them or the market becomes commoditized). Fact is, there were many search engines and social networks before Google and Facebook. The markets they operate in were big enough that inevitably an industry giant would emerge who would be able to use the lucrativeness of the market to generate a runaway positive feedback loop up until saturation. Though not inevitable, it would be very hard for Facebook and Google to screw up and concede supremacy in their primary markets. But it is probable a new company will beat them to the new markets they try to extend to. For more on the power of markets see Marc Andressen’s post, the founder of Netscape and now Ning, on why the market is the only thing that matters and when it is big enough it will practically drag companies to a solution.

Once the timing and conditions are ripe there will be enough people trying to tackle the clear billion dollar markets that somebody will get the execution right. The startup ecosystem is that good at providing all the puzzle pieces!

Future billion dollar companies will ride trends such as the move to the cloud, mobile information, personalization utilizing our preferences and social graph, and new data capture enabled by the falling cost and size of sensors.

The tech industry has cracked the nut for how to tackle billion dollar market opportunities, therefore I believe the two most important tasks now are to:

1. Continue to optimize the industry and find further efficiencies, in the wealth of 10-400 million dollar “niches” available.

2. Transfer the operating principles of the startup ecosystem to new industries.

THE STARTUP ECOSYSTEM AS A HARBINGER OF THE INNOVATION LANDSCAPE IN A INFORMATION SOCIETY

We’ve established that the tech industry is better at producing innovation than any other, but I think we need to find more efficiencies and make the tech ecosystem even better.

Why streamline the ecosystem further you ask, when it already works so well?

I believe the tech industry is at the forefront of our global transition from an industrial economy to an information economy.  (For more on this transition see Arthur Brock’s fantastic Prezi on the new economy) And as the industry leading this upheaval, the organizational structure of the startup ecosystem will be replicated to emerging game changing industries. This is because the tech industry broke open the information age and therefore is the first to inhabit space in the information economy. The startup ecosystem is literally laying the foundation, and the blueprint, for the future of the information economy. Efficiencies realized now in the tech ecosystem will cascade over to emerging informational industries in social change, health, biotech and government.

Every increase of efficiency in the startup eocsystem will be amplified enormously, and echo for generations, because emerging industries will be modeled heavily on the startup ecosystem, due to it being the first information age innovation ecosystem. The cheapest and therefore by definition, best place to experiment in improving information age innovation ecosystems is right here, right now in startup world. We must attempt to make our information age innovation ecosystems as robust as possible, because they represent the foundation the future of the world’s economy, and therefore the world.

These emerging industries will not only model their ecosystems heavily on the design of the startup ecosystem, if  companies within these emerging ecosystems want to maximize the scalability and impact of their products and solutions they will need to draw heavily on the rules of the information economy startups have uncovered. They must utilize tools and methods of organization such as: social networks, crowdsourcing, the cloud, virtual collaboration, lean methodology, metrics and conversion funnels, relentless customer focus, and everything else startups have spawned.

The Obama campaign changed political campaigns forever with their revolutionary level of citizen engagement, achieved by drawing heavily on Silicon Valley credo. Kiva blew open the significance of microfinance to the masses and has raised and distributed in an unprecedented amount of money by bridging the social sector with the operating principles of Silicon Valley.

Government 2.0 is essentially an experiment asking the question, what happens if we mix Sillicon Valley with Government on a larger scale, not just campaigns? Health Care, Biotech and a slew of other industries are asking the same question. Hello Health is attempting to turn one aspect of the health care industry upside down by cutting insurance companies out of the doctor-patient relationship simply by applying Silicon Valley Startup principles to health care.

The tech industry has already changed the world, but as these industries adopt similar organizational principles society will experience multiplicative networks effects that will be utterly mind blowing. When people talk about accelerating change and the singularity and you don’t know what to expect, this it: when Silicon Valley leaves the valley and sweeps across the other industries of the world and transforms them into information age innovation ecosystems.

INFORMATION AGE INNOVATION ECOSYSTEMS

Innovation ecosystems require large numbers of people experimenting. What enabled the startup ecosystem to become so rich, was the mass amateurization of computing triggered by the advent of the personal computer. When using a computer was incredibly complex and expensive the industry had a huge bottle neck. When that barrier was broken down and costs fell far enough that anyone could experiment in their bedroom or garage, the creativity of the masses was unleashed and amazing breakthroughs began to happen. That was the birth of the startup ecosystem.

I believe the birth of any innovation ecosystem, occurs the moment it becomes a garage industry.  Currently the startup ecosystem is the only scalable garage industry around, but imagine the creativity that will be unleashed as the costs fall far enough to allow other industries to enter garage territory. The moment biotech becomes a fully functioning garage industry, with an efficient supporting ecosystem, the world is in for a crazy ride. Imagine people playing with atoms just as easily as they play with bits. Imagine biotech companies being born out of bedrooms and garages.

As soon as the garage threshold for biotech is crossed, an ecosystem similar to the startup ecosystem will begin to emerge. There will be firms dedicated to investing capital at various stages of the lifecycle of the company, communities of practice will emerge, formal conferences and informal meetups will spring up everywhere, databases of knowledge will be abundant, and open source infrastructure will be created that gives people even more leverage.

The 4 pillars of any innovation ecosystem I believe are Capital, Community, Information, and Tools.

THE CHANGING STARTUP ECOSYSTEM

If we could make the startup ecosystem better that would be a tremendous victory, but where is the startup ecosystem now, where is it going and how can we make it even better?

The tech ecosystem is now well tuned to hit the home run in billion dollar markets, but there is a shift happening as people began to realize there’s more opportunity and less risk to be had in aiming for singles and doubles, and hitting them consistently. The home runs of the previous era have created a new playing field and there is now a wealth of long tail opportunities to fill all kinds of business and consumer needs.

As the information economy has developed and become more complex, an increasing number of lucrative niches now make market sense to pursue. Whereas previously the opportunities either weren’t there (you couldn’t have a million dollar facebook app before facebook) or the costs were too high to have certain opportunities make sense (startups needed venture capitalists and VC’s only wanted to play in markets bigger than 100 million). But in recent years startups have become disentangled from their dependence on VC’s as the costs of starting a startup have continued to fall due to cheaper hardware and services moving to the cloud. This is driving a growing seed stage ecology where the primary actors are startup accelerators, angel investors and seed stage venture capitalists.

The focus now is on startups attacking smaller opportunities (though still in the 10’s of millions) with less investment capital. There will be an abundance of lucrative, unserved niches for startups to tackle, far more that the number of quality teams, which will drive many things:

- Science will be injected into the art of running a startup. Structure and methodology will be experimented with to increase the success rate of startups. Even though more investments of smaller quantity will be made, the haphazard petri dish approach of throwing money around will not provide as high a return when the upside potential is capped. Being able to hit the 10-100 million dollar markets with great consistency will be a far superior strategy. Home run hitters can afford to strike out a lot, singles hitters can’t. Niche markets have a more certain demand, so they are not prone to the same winner take all effects and startups that lose will find it makes more sense to pivot than pack it in and start from scratch. Creating a startup where the goal is to make something people want will still be a chaotic, iterative process but it’s possible to induce predictability and stability into chaotic systems.

- More collaboration horizontally and vertically across markets to create a more seamless experiences for the customer and more leverage for the startup. (I’ve started exploring this process, naming it the lego model)

- An increased demand for entrepreneurs due to clear ~10 million dollar opportunities just waiting to be tackled. This demand in the ecosystem for entrepreneurs coincides perfectly with changing cultural values about work, which will drive huge increase in the number of people pursuing entrepreneurship.  And that in combination with a more entrepreneur friendly ecosystem evolving, will unleash a new golden age of entrepreneurship.

Here are two good posts on the changing seed stage ecology. See Dave Mcclure presentation on startup 2.0 here and Nathaniel Whittemore’s take on social seed stage ecology on change.org.

NEW EFFICIENCIES IN THE STARTUP ECOSYSTEM

The startup ecosystem is certainly past its infancy, but it is still evolving rapidly and there are many more efficiencies to be unlocked. Here’s my opinion on where some of the big ones are:

- Talent development

- Better conversion rate of people with ideas for companies, to entrepreneurs actually starting companies

- Pushing world’s brightest to choose entrepreneurship over other industries (college students starting companies instead of becoming an investment banker. Creating incentives for experienced execs to take risks starting something new instead of languishing in the rungs of the corporate ladder)

- Better “deal flow” for team formation

- Aggregating startup services and service providers in order to remove distractions and allow startup teams to focus fully on the new innovation they’re trying to create

- Networks becoming more efficient in sharing assets (knowledge, people, code, strategy)

- More fluid and less cumbersome funding rounds, all the way from idea to scalable profitability

- Collaboration amongst startups to attack new verticals and interlink their advances to create networked impact— where success exists behind an activation energy only realizable by coordinated efforts of multiple startups

- Connecting entrepreneurs to the people and information at the time they need to support maximization of potential— time and energy will consistently be put in highest leverage places

- Better filters by injecting personalization and social graph into many tools

- Systems that use psychology and persuasion to nudge people to act in their own long term self interest, mitigating human’s insidious propensity for short term thinking

And what I’m personally targeting right now with Founders First: accelerated just in time learning.

Finally, a few projects and trends I think are very important:

Rise of startup accelerators and therefore an emerging market for post-startup accelerators and pre-startup accelerators. Disclosure: Founders First is working on the post startup accelerator phase. (see all the new startup accelerators here and many of the companies here )

Venture Hacks Angel List and Startup List to reduce friction in the funding of startups.

Right Side Capital Management— A new kind of investment fund trying to dramatically increase deal flow to 100-200 investments a year. This will support faster expansion into niches.

The primary engine driving economic growth is innovation. And we are in the midst of transitioning to a new innovation landscape as corporations are dying and the startup ecosystem matures. The innovation landscape is the overlapping theme for most of what I’m thinking about and working on. I’m interested in how we can increase collaboration, access more capital, push the interconnectivity and support systems a step further and increase the overall size of the ecosystem by getting more aspiring entrepreneurs across the chasm of commitment.

The innovation landscape is intimately related to what I believe is the world’s biggest problem and the approach we need to solve it. I discuss that in the 5 stages post, linked below.

A few of my frameworks for thinking about the innovation space: (Posts will soon be written for all of these)

Pre-Accelerator. Accelerator. Post Accelerator.

5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey

Startups engaging collaboratively in complex value chains to achieve the scale of corporations, called the Lego Model and described here.

The 4 Pillars of Innovation Landscape: Community, Information, Tools, Capital. Most projects are different proportions of these 4 elements.

The innovation space is incredibly complex requiring a variety of different perspectives and knowledge on a wide array of subjects. This overarching theme connects my many interests: (I find the “I, it, we, its” a helpful organizing framework) I: talent development, psychology, learning, education, mental technologies; It: Personal productivity, food, athletic, health, energy management; We: community, social interaction, culture, collaboration; Its: geopolitics, interconnectedness, foresight, accelerating technological change, startups, behavioral economics, environmental sustainability, systems thinking;

(1) No Desire —intrinsic motivation suppressed (usually by the school system) (2) Desire to make an impact and be entrepreneurial, but uncertainty about how to channel that desire (3) Possess an idea for a project but lack the knowledge and ability to know how to begin (4) A prototype has been built but need help gaining traction (5) The project has succeeded on a small scale but needs support going mainstream.

I believe the world’s biggest problem is not one of the many challenges we face such as global warming or extreme poverty, but rather that we have too few people engaged in working on solutions. The root of this problem stems from the ineffectiveness of the world’s institutions to support people in finding their passions, and their inability to help people align their work with these passions. Entrepreneurship in its broadest sense can give people the intrinsic motivation to solve these problems. And the way to solve the world’s biggest problem is to support a greater percentage of the population through each of these 5 stages of the entrepreneurial journey.

Founders First, my current focus right now, is trying to support groups 4 and 5. In hindsight, I can see that what I’ve been working on has evolved through solving problems in each of these stages.

1- Technology Club — One major goal was to find exciting people, projects and companies and integrate into my uninspiring education

2- Youth Action Research Network — Bring together all the people inspired to do something more and actually start doing

3- Force For the Future stage 1 – targeting college students with ideas who are having trouble making waves

4, 5 – Force For the Future stage 2: Founders First — targeting founders who are alumni of start accelerators

I’m confident that the best way to approach solving the problem of liquidity through the 5 stages, is to start from stage 5 and work backwards.

It is actually the most doable, because by the time people are there, they are very motivated. And the ecosystem for people in that stage is the most developed, because enough people in this stage have been able to create profitable or impactful organizations.

Tackling the other stages is much more complicated, and requires a lot more infrastructure. To affect stages 1-3 where most of the world’s population resides, we requires resolving political conflicts, alleviating poverty, overhauling institutions, and overcoming pressures from peers, family and other lower level Maslovian needs. And while it’s important for work to be done there, I don’t think we can create any lasting change until the higher stages are more organized and developed, otherwise we’ll just have people temporarily reaching new levels and then falling back down to tell all their peers that it isn’t possible and isn’t worth trying.

Palomar5 — Palomar5 launched its first project this fall, an innovation camp on the future of work for 30 people under 30 sponsored by Deutsche Telekom. We lived in a factory for 6 weeks, bonding, brainstorming, prototyping and storytelling. We’re now building hubs to continue or work in Berlin and San Francisco. I created the initial hub concept for our continued interaction at the conclusion of the camp. I am one of the project leaders for Palomar5 Hub San Francisco

Ambassador for the Sandbox Network — I am working on growing and strengthening the Sandbox community both globally and in San Francisco. With other Sandbox Ambassadors I organize frequent dinners in the Bay Area. I am also designing a few entrepreneurship specific initiatives to strengethen Sandbox’s ability to support the creation of projects. Sandbox is an exclusive community that selects the most inspiring young achievers and innovators under 30 worldwide and connects them to each other. Sandbox offers its members a trusted environment (online and offline) where they can build meaningful relationships, learn from each other and get access to resources that help them realize their next big idea. The ultimate goal is to bring together amazing people and push already impressive initiatives to the next level.

I was so focused on making sure I continued to push my project forward that I wasn’t sure I wanted to go to Palomar5. I worried leaving the Bay Area for 6 weeks would cause me to lose all my momentum. I asked friends for advice and reflected. I knew it was a big decision. Fortunately I made the right one. I wrote two comprehensive blog posts about the camp here and here.

The weekend before the final summit of the camp we went to a incredible spa called the Liquidrom. I was floating in a large salted pool heated to body temperature. I rested my feet on a noodle and put my head back into the water, listening to the music drifing out of the underwater speakers. I sank into deep reflection, feeling the present warmth and everything that had happened the last few months. Fifteen minutes later, head still submerged, body still relaxed, I had a stroke of insight: for the first time in my life I’m exactly where I want to be. I’m not at a check point, I can’t stop and take vacation, I need to keep doing what I’m doing, but I’m finally at the place I want to be. For the last two years I’d been pushing myself to carve out a new path, continually fighting resistance, getting knocked down and getting back up with more resolve. My life was now on a trajectory I was completely satisfied with: personally, professionally, communally….It was appreciation not complacency. There’s a lot I still I wished I had my in life but I knew it was because I made a choice to place more importance on some things than others. And the things I didn’t have yet I knew I just needed to attack with the same tenacity I used to get here. Or I just needed to let time run its course. After I left the liquidrom hours later I could still feel a faint glow emanating from my body. In the last month or two when I’ve felt out of balance I just remind myself of that moment and how far I’ve come.

Three weeks later another one of my biggest goals was achieved. I was admitted to Stanford. But if you know me, you know I have radical views on education and getting into Stanford has not changed that. More later on my quest for an unconventional educational path.

Other gap year highlights include my first Burning Man, which will surely not be the last and a 5 day trip in the magical and fantastical city Prague, before returning back to America.

Aside from working on my primary projects, things upcoming that I’m excited about are: Attending the EG conference in Monterey, (founded by Richard Saul Wurman who founded TED —which I also have dreamt about attending one day), taking part in Jerry Michalski’s 4 day retreat with many fascinating people who have been involved in Silicon Valley since the early days, spending a few weeks in New York and Boston to visit friends, attend the Starting Bloc Institute, visit my sister at college with an intermediary trip to Austin for my first South by South West, and begin integrating with the Stanford community.

And that’s only the next 3 months I know about.

I tell people now, I’m not on a year off, I’m on a year on.

I’ve completely overhauled my about page on my site to reflect the changes of the past few months and  I will be releasing a number of reflective posts revealing my path and some of my theories that have guided.

In the T Model you alternate between a broad, horizontal phase and a deep, vertical phase, (though it’s actually an upside-down T because starting with the horizontal phase is a must) . In the broad, horizontal phase the goal is to try as many things as possible, and in small doses to maximize variety. You want to continue experimenting until you find many things you are passionate about and also accumulate many reference frames to better categorize and make sense of new experiences and information.

Once you have a huge pool of things that excite you, look to switch to the vertical phase, where you will hone in on a few specific passions and combine them, to do something tangible. (This tangible thing should be something you can point to quickly and say, “I did this” and the word “project” could be considered loosely accurate).

Going through this cycle is very simple conceptually, but rarely executed. But if you look at most successful people they’ve usually followed a path similar to this. This is because in order to be really successful at something you need to be passionate, you need to be able to focus, and increasingly you need to be interdisciplinary. Success without passion exists, but those people are usually severely unhappy and prone to burn out.

Often completing this cycle even once sets off a positive feedback loop, marking the start of a lifetime of engaged pursuit and contribution. On completion of the first cycle an internal flame is lit, that once ignited is very difficult to put out. John Seely Brown former head of Xerox Parc describes this phenomena as such, “Very often just going deeply into one or two topics that you really care about lets you appreciate the awe of the world … once you learn to honor the mysteries of the world, you’re kind of always willing to probe things … you can actually be joyful about discovering something you didn’t know … and you can expect always to need to keep probing. And so that sets the stage for lifelong inquiry.”

Many people don’t complete the T cycle because they get stuck in one phase or the other. People who get stuck in the horizontal phases are people who are very creative and always have lots of little side projects going on, but they suffer from a lack of “big wins”, that provide the reputation and credibility that lead to greater opportunities and chances for financial sustainability— not to mention that gratification that comes from pulling off something big. People stuck in this mindset are resistant to focusing on a particular project because they can’t bear the possibility of turning down an interesting opportunity. They fear picking only one thing would put them in a box, vaporizing their multi-facted identity they associate so strongly with. The lives they lead are very unique, but by not reaping the rewards from alternating into cycles of focus, they strongly limit their ability to realize their potential.

Many people also jump into a focus phase prematurely, spending all their energy on something they aren’t passionate about. This is more dangerous than being stuck in the creative phase because the extrinsic reward will be there for focusing even if the activity is done without passion. This often fools people into believing they are headed in the right direction for themselves. But people who make this error frequently end up suffering from burn out, hitting midlife crises or working tirelessly to reach the top of their field only to be left wondering why they are so unfulfilled and whether all the sacrifice was really worth it.

There’s also a large sector of the population who isn’t in either the creative or focus phase and are resigned to getting by with whatever pays the bills. While the onus is on the individual to find their passion, trying to do so in our education system is like swimming upstream against a level 5 rapid. And most people just get swept away. (Even at the better public and private schools, you’re still swimming upstream, just against a lighter current).

If you can complete even one T cycle, the rewards will start rolling in. Executing a project you’re passionate about is rare, and separates you from a cacophony of wannabes. Everybody talks about things they want to do, but few people have the self-discipline and initiative to make projects come to life. This scarcity of executors, makes people pay close attention to you if you are one, and opens up a whole new set of opportunities unavailable before. Opportunities will start chasing you down instead of the other way around. When this happens the second T cycle has begun. You now have the chance to explore horizontally again, this time with more freedom and opportunity.

The exploration here is much richer. You’re a more developed person. You have access to more people. You have more financial freedom. You get flown places to speak and are invited to contribute to more interesting projects. You have more influence, and as a result, people listen to what you have say and want to support or join your cause. This more intensive exploratory phase should lead to a new point of focus, where you can again combine your rapidly growing pool of knowledge, experiences and passions to build something new, likely more ambitious than your last.

As you turn the corner towards your second focus project, true interdisciplinary thinking begins to emerge. You can combine your breadth of knowledge on many subjects with the depth of your previous focus, charting new territory from a variety of informed perspectives.

All in all, a cycle probably takes anywhere from 2 to 7 years, so you have the opportunity to pursue both learning and doing many times in your life. And the T cycles start linking up very naturally. When they do that they begin resembling something like a series of s curves— a natural evolutionary growth cycle with some intriguing implications (to be explored later). Strictly interpreting the analogy of the T implies alternating between stages of being 100% horizontal and 100% vertical. But it is probably not realistic nor optimal to be one phase 100% of the time. A good rule of thumb is to allocate 80% of your time to the designated phase and 20% of your time to the other phase, i.e. 80% Creative & 20% Focus or vice versa. This allocation will also give the T smoother curves if graphed, creating a more natural looking S curve.

This model can be used as framework for decision making and allocating priorities in almost any field of interest. I’ve shared this model with numerous friends the last few months and many have appreciated the insight and clarity it has produced.

I hope to explore more facets and implications of this model. A few areas I’ve mapped out: The emotional journey through different phases. Why the T Model Works. How School Follows the Exact Opposite of the T Model, which is why students hate it. My Personal Path Along the T. Complimentary Theories to the T Model from Stefan Sagmeister, Seth Godin, and IDEO’s Tim Brown.

There are two types of organizations that are driving a majority of our economic growth: the startup and the large corporation.

On one hand, we have startups, which are where the innovation is happening and on the other hand, we have corporations, which have the advantages of scale and abundant resources. We need a new kind of organizational structure that can bridge the gap, combining the strengths they each possess.

I’ve come up with a model that explains how startups can gain the advantages of scale and have access to greater resources while staying agile and preserving their penchant for innovation. This model is called the lego model.

In this model you can think of a startup like a rectangular block and a large corporation like a tower. Startups can create a tower by collaborating with other startups. When enough startups are seamlessly working together they have created a tower that is functionally equivalent to the towers of corporations that can take advantage of the efficiencies at scale. But the tower startups create is not a single indivisible entity, it’s more like a tower made of lego pieces. And that has a lot of advantages the indivisible tower doesn’t. It is more resilient, more flexible, more modular and can quickly be assembled and disassembled. This process incorporates principles from both evolution and nature selection. It enables unlimited experimentation and also fast replication for the stuff that works. (This is good that it mirrors nature, because we know nature works, because it created us). The modularity also gives much greater control over optimization, because it’s much easier to isolate and test particular variables. Best practices can easily move across the ecosystem because as things get increasingly quantized, they are easier to replicate. If one lego piece is shown to be particularly versatile or adaptive it can be plugged into many existing towers. If a particular lego piece is poorly constructed and not doing its job very well, there are plenty of pieces waiting in the wings that can replace this ineffective lego piece. That provides great resiliency because while you’re still only as strong as your weakest link, the chain isn’t fixed anymore.

Towers only have to live as long as they are still creating increasing value for the customer. As the vertical the tower is operating in begins becoming saturated, essential pieces can shift their focus from growth, to becoming as lean as possible— doing the same job with many fewer employees and much greater efficiency. The pieces that are no longer essential  as the vertical matures can leave while still highly profitable, and move into an area where they are still adaptive or regroup and plan to start from scratch with the resources they’ve gained.

What we don’t want are companies trying to milk past innovations for all they are worth, through monopolies and legal manuerving. This is terrible for customers because it closes down the space and prevents further innovation. It’s terrible for companies too, because as soon as they stop innovating, a death knell has been sounded, and they are now fighting an uphill batter that will only get steeper. All utters have a limited amount of milk.

Why do large companies stop innovating? There are many reasons, a few are because: they become too large and innovation requires being flexible. The people in the organization age and become tired and complacent. It’s easier and more certain to incrementally improve existing products and services than venture into the uncertain waters of innovation.

What we want to have happen is to have successful organizations in a mature market release both their financial and human resources back into the ecosystem to begin creating more innovative lego pieces that will eventually be formed into more lego towers that serve new verticals.

But why can’t startups form these lego towers currently? Because currently they are just rectangular blocks without the knobs and holes. If the pieces are just flat rectangular blocks, the structure is more akin to a disjointed Jenga tower, which certainly isn’t adaptable or sustainable.

If theory is to be taken seriously, what does it mean practically for how we should be organizing startups?

In order to start building lego-like structures startups need to have greater interconnectivity and more standardization for interoperability. To achieve either requires a more mature startup ecosystem which will need to evolve to encompass many new things including: more transparency, more portable data, a more collaborative culture that focuses more on creating value than capturing it (meaning share more and worry less about protecting IP or being ripped off); a tighter community with more fluid relationships between first time entrepreneurs, entrepreneurial veterans and mentors. Startups also need better information including: roadmaps, templates, and organized, actionable guides. And the ecosystem needs more startups for startups—companies creating tools designed specifically to help other startups grow their businesses. We want to be one of them.

As these tools develop and the ecosystem matures achieving lego like startups will begin becoming feasible, but the culture must evolve in parallel, too.

What we’re trying to look at and understand is what the innovation landscape might look like in the future, I think the lego model is a step in the right direction. Let us know what you think. We’ll be sharing more implications of the lego model and complimentary ideas that could shape the innovation landscape.

This blog post is part 2 of the Sandbox Network ‘Palomar 5′ series: a six week innovation camp in Berlin from 9 October – 24 November 2009. To follow the progress of the conference, you can view the official Palomar 5 blog. Alternatively, if you are on twitter, follow hashtag #p5 for real-time updates. You can also check out one of our camp member’s daily video blog on Youtube. (Part 1 is here)

Two thirds of the Palomar5 Innovation Camp has already passed. Four weeks down, two to go until the 2 day Summit, when we will have the opportunity to present the fruits of our labour to an eminent group of thought leaders, politicians, scientists and investors.

Before we dive deep into the Palomar5 experience let me give you a quick overview of the last month:

Our first two weeks, focused on understanding the thought landscape we’re operating in, generating hundreds of ideas for projects mixed in with some intense bonding experiences. Two weeks of intensive prototyping ensued, and now we’re transitioning into storytelling mode for the summit.

The last 4 weeks have been amazing but I was hoping to get more done. But that’s probably just my restlessness to change the world talking. But it is strange how fast a month has flown by.

We had our second “reality check” yesterday, where we all presented what we’ve been working on to many highly respected professionals and received their feedback. Someone asked me how long ago the first reality check was, it felt like ages, a month at least, but in reality it was only two and half weeks.

As a rule of thumb, if you’re trying to describe a prolonged experience and it feels like time has passed incredibly quickly but when you reflect on things you did in the beginning and it feels like it happened a long time ago, it probably means you are doing something right.

The Final Stretch

I have spent a lot of time the last few years learning about frameworks that have supported me in developing visions for a better future, but it has taken time for my entrepreneurial skills to catch up to the size of what I’ve set out to accomplish. The last half a year I’ve become increasingly anxious about pontificating while building takes a back seat. With only two weeks left of the camp part of me wishes more had been accomplished while here. But I have to realize that while we’ve been here a month, real work only started two weeks ago and our last two weeks of focus have been incredibly productive. The end goal of the Palomar5 camp is not to create fully functional products for the summit. Of greater importance to Palomar5 is conveying the underlying vision behind our projects and validation of the experiment of bringing 30 diversely talented young people from around the world and forcing them to live and work together for 6 weeks. Fully functional projects that make an impact are definitely vital for the success of Palomar5, but we don’t want to be another idea factory producing theories and patents; we want our projects to make a mark on the world, but the purpose of the 6 week camp is just to create the gravitational core for these projects to continue to flourish once the camp is over.

The summit should play a huge role in jumpstarting this process, but it all depends on the quality of our storytelling and how well we convey the enveloping experience of Palomar5: the lifestyle, the passion, the big projects and all the little creative projects the flit in and out serving as creative fuel for our bigger initiatives. If we do this well, TED-esque as we all like to say, (it being our common inspiration and the height of sexy intellectualism), we’ll create a buzz around the camp that will accelerate the development of our projects.

The Malzfabrik and Beyond

While we’ve spent most of our days in our stylish cubes dreaming up the next big thing followed by nightly recharges in our sleeping boxes, the weeks have not been without some atypical extracurricular activity.

After an intense first three weeks the Palomar5 team announced a mysterious weekend trip with few details except that we were supposed to bring our passport and pack warm. We speculated about trips to Poland or Holland.

On Halloween morning we piled on our bus unsure of our intended destination. A few hours later we found ourselves at the beginning of 8 kilometer canoeing expedition down a river somewhere in northeast Germany. We exited our canoes 3 hours later to find ourselves on the outskirts of a sparsely populated town with a nearby castle awaiting our presence. In the evening our creativity was out in full bloom as we showed off our elaborate characters including killer Mario, the bloody nurse and cross-dressing men.

Our favorite part of the weekend getaway at the castle was the sauna buried in the basement with plenty of half naked sandboxers to go around. We now request saunas wherever we go.

Other highlights included a Sunday afternoon project constructing an 8 meter mask out of branches and twigs, which was burned in it the evening. And I enjoyed my longest period of silence in a while during a solitary forest walk.

Atmosphere

Earlier this week we attended the ceremony for the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. On our walk back we noticed how this experience felt like the beginning of a new school. We’ve been living together for a month now and it feels like this is just the beginning of a new phase of our lives, which it is, but at the same time our concentrated camp experience is heading into the final stretch. The flight home will be very strange. The following weeks we’ll experience withdrawals as we return to reality, basically from the future. While we’ve been working on inventing the future of work, we’ve also been living it. This experience has seamlessly combined, friendship, fun, adventure and the birth of some really ambitious projects.

One thing I might change if I knew this could last beyond 6 weeks is not working as many hours during the day, I feel like life is cyclical, times where intense focus is required and other times where experimentalism is a better frame of mind. Making the most of my time here has been a higher priority for me. Trying to change the world takes sacrifice; again my restlessness talking.

How we maintain the community after the camp is an issue that looms large in all our heads, both for the continued success of our projects and the friendships we’ve built.

No matter what happens I think we can all say that the camp has inextricably altered our lives. And we’ll look back on our lives in a few years time categorizing our experiences with two denominations: BP and AP. Before Palomar5 and After Palomar5.

The pace of learning at this camp has been so high. I’ve often thought about what kind of person I’d become if every night I could go to bed completely mentally exhausted from the pushing my 3 pounds of grey matter continually past its limits. Palomar5 has given me four weeks of that dream. Everyday we discuss wide-ranging ideas, on many topics like learning, innovation, and culture.

One night Valentin and I were up late debating whether culture or technology was the stronger force driving society forward. While interesting, these conversations rarely lead to anything tangible, but Palomar5 begs to differ. The following day we were discussing how the iPhone achieved widespread cultural adoption so fast with technology so far ahead of what was previously available (normally a sticking point for products ahead of their time) and how our projects could succeed by similarly speeding up cultural adoption. The conversation immediately jumped to a new level as we drew on last night’s debate. Something in both our minds then clicked, “Wow that’s a first! Last night’s debate was enjoyable, but I never thought it would actually be productive.”

What We’ve Been Building At Palomar5

The theme of the camp of was the future of work, but that was just a starting point to sell the project. We’ve been given very little structure, and that’s the way like it. Lack of direction does not mean chaos, at least over the long term, our projects have naturally converged around big themes: Social consciousness, data and entrepreneurship.

These are incredibly important areas where a lot of growth will be made, and it’s even more notable that we were not told to pick 3 these topics, but our internal compasses driven by creative destruction, cycling through hundreds of projects over the last 4 weeks, led us here.

Our vision for redesigning society for digital age and generation is now more palpable with these themes guiding us. What’s notable is that while many of dreamed of redesigning society this kind of re-envisioning around our idyllic yearnings hasn’t always been possible. The industrial era required sacrificing creativity in the name of scalable efficiency, which was necessary to create the infrastructure to raise the quality of life to what is today. But while this era is long past its expiration date, it continues to live on like an infectious bacteria, contaminating our work and lives. So many of us realize it’s time to reinvent society and its organizations from the ground up, we now just need to commit to making it happen. Count Palomar5 in.

Magnifying Glass — Palomar5 Project Sneak Peak

Here’s a sneak peak into the vision of the project I’ve been most intensely involved in:

We’re postulating the future of work is going to have a lot more startups, because that’s where all the innovation is coming from.

The startup accelerator model is a big part of the future innovation landscape, think YCombinator, Techstars, Seedcamp, and now there are accelerators for more than web startups, using basically the same model like Palomar5 and the Unreasonable Institute. We think we’ll see a lot more of these.

The rise of accelerators means that there are now two big emerging markets: Pre and post accelerators.

We’re trying to build many of the tools needed to support startups post-accelerator: expert feedback systems, social network amplification in order to get connected to the right people, just in time learning to acquire skills to overcome new challenges, and repositories of best practices and eventually developing some kind of recommendation engine to streamline and automate the whole ecosystem.

Also, while startups are more innovative because they have freedom, flexibility and autonomy corporations still possess advantages of scale and greater resources.

Startups need to achieve advantages of scale as well, but they will be able to do this modularly and collaboratively. Currently large organizations are organized like big towers, even Google operates like this. But startups will be able to achieve scale and preserve their autonomy by acting like lego pieces. Currently, startups don’t have lego functionality, they’re just rectangular blocks that don’t interface well with each other but we’re providing the knobs and the holes to assemble large towers for particular projects that can easily dissemble at the conclusion of the project and build a new tower.

The prototype for our skill acquisition platform for entrepreneurs has recently been launched. Currently we’re only offering it to alumni of startup accelerators. http://forceforthefuture.com/founders-first/

Conclusion

There’s a lot of uncertainty in many of our lives now, but I love it. Many of us have nothing to go back to, no work to return to, just the opportunity to take the projects and relationships built over the 6 weeks as springboard for the next few years of our lives. It’s easy to get scared by the uncertainty, I still fall victim to it from time to time, but I know it’s really just a sign I’m taking good risks. While it’s comforting to know what life has in store, the predictability is antithetical to impact and growth.

A few nights ago Eddie (Harran) was hopping around in the cube with typical exuberance saying, “I wish could just work with you guys for the rest of my life” “What’s stopping you?” “Well, nothing!”

]]> http://maxmarmer.com/2009/11/what-ive-been-up-to-at-palomar5/feed/ 0 http://maxmarmer.com/2009/11/what-ive-been-up-to-at-palomar5/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/maxmarmer/~3/rm6KLSsvsBY/ http://maxmarmer.com/2009/10/my-post-from-the-sandbox-blog/#comments Tue, 20 Oct 2009 16:34:45 +0000 max http://maxmarmer.com/?p=569 Me and my fellow Sandboxers and Palomar-ians Sagarika, Jyoti and Eddie wrote a post about our first week at Palomar5. Read the full post here. A few favorite quotes posted below.

The Palomar5 experience began with a warm welcome to a chilly Berlin at the Malzfabrik, a former giant brewery that is being transformed into a creative hub. However, we are its first full-time inhabitants. The indoctrination began when we donned identical blue jumpsuits which were worn for the duration of the first weekend while we consolidated our collective consciousness. However, we were able to keep slivers of our individuality by deciding the placement of the logo–which cleverly represents both the 5 and “lo” of “Palomar5″.

n our first week we ventured into central Berlin twice. The inaugural Sunday, we were invited for a private tour at one of the city’s avant garde art galleries housed in a restored bunker from the WWII–Bunker Berlin, Boros collection, have also a look at this link. We then caught the sights and sounds of the city on a boat ride down the river Spree, finishing our day with excellent pizza at a famous cult-like restaurant run by punks.

While some soaked up the city on our trip, Max, upon returning home realized his memories of the city were sparse as he spent most of the time in the inner caverns of his mind plotting world domination with his fellow campers. It’s a gift and a curse.

…We know we’ve left them with a gift: a break in their routine to expose the hidden assumptions that chain these transit-goers to their habits and thus their lives, precisely the same affliction that shields oversized companies from realising the ways of working in the future. Have no fear, their eyes will soon be pried open— and if not, they will awaken from their decadent slumber to find that the next generation holds the reins to the world they once held in the palm of their hand.

From my profile on the Palomar5 Blog

‘I try to make what I do and what I am passionate about as close together as possible. I believe that should be one of everyone’s major goals in life. I think passion almost always manifests itself as a desire to change or improve something, whether it’s the entrepreneur who wants to change an industry, the writer who wants to change public opinion, the artist who wants to change collective consciousness or the musician who just wants to change how people feel in the present moment.’
Max Marmer

Max Marmer from the US likes to make big ideas happen. He’s obsessed with learning and conversing about frameworks that give insight into where humanity is headed and why humans do what they do. As both an entrepreneur and a big picture thinker Max tries to pinpoint the biggest problems and opportunities that he can affect. He tries to clearly understand both present circumstances and future scenarios worth inhabiting and then start shaping the future by approximating ideal outcomes through iterations of entrepreneurial projects.

He’s currently involved in founding a very ambitious startup working to weave together converging trends in education, entrepreneurship and the future of work. The startup is called Force For the Future and is beginning by providing decentralized, local support networks for entrepreneurs. But the larger vision for the project is to evolve into a liaison for “Real World University”, the best learning environment of all, where passion, learning and work are all fluid and intimately related. The world’s major institutions in the corporate and educational sectors are failing to develop the talent of the next generation. And we need our institutions to prepare people to work effectively in the 21st century, and support people in finding the problems they are passionate about solving. And that is perhaps the world’s biggest challenge and opportunity right now: getting a greater percentage of the world’s population working on solving humanity’s biggest problems. Max believes entrepreneurship is the most effective way attack these problems and that life approached in an entrepreneurial manner is one of the best ways to create a life of personal fulfillment and greater contribution.

Max is honored to have the opportunity to immerse himself in a creative environment with 29 other amazing people all trying to implement their visions for a better world. It looks to be an incredibly stimulating atmosphere where the seeds of big projects will be sewn and lasting friendships begun. He expects the Palomar5 Camp to be an incredibly stimulating experience that will help shape the nascent project described above through conversation, experimentation, iteration and implementation. He expects an overstimulated but happy brain, a warm heart and cold skin. He’s ready for early mornings, late nights and sweet dreams.

But frankly, this will be a first experience for all involved (the organizers included) and we don’t really know what to expect what will come out of this six week experience except the unexpected.