Much has been said about Web2.0 about being a “conversation” between parties on the Internet- shifting from the “broadcast” model of radio and TV where listeners were passive receivers of information to listeners being actively engaged in conversation.  Web 2.0 conversations are happening many places, have been enabled by many service providers, including Austin’s own [...]

I am back from a three week blogging hiatus- during which I traveled to five different cities across Mexico and the US.  Part of this time was for catching up with friends and family, part of this time was for professional opportunity in connecting other groups into the tribe, and part of this time was [...]

As I have been writing a section of my book over the last few days, I thought that the following insight was too valuable to hold for the book… and wanted to share it here with an immediate wider audience. The Four Conceptual Shifts that social networks are bringing are going to have profound [...]

Here’s evidence of Conceptual Shift #2- Shifting towards a Knowledge Ecology. Clay Shirky’s recently released book, called Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, is making a big splash, and for all of the right reasons. In this video from the Berkman Center, Clay talks about how “ridiculously easy group [...]

Despite the recent news about layoffs in Austin, Americans are still thinking about owning their own businesses… Why?  “The most popular was individuals’ desire to be passionate about what they’re doing.” Yahoo Small Business commissioned a national poll showing that “nearly two-thirds of the adults surveyed have thought about owning their own business in the [...]

Tuesday’s blog post has created a number of questions around Austin saying essentially
“O.K., but how are loosely organized workers going to replace and compete with companies like Dell? Can hundreds of I-build/support-PCs-in-my-bedroom companies make it in Austin? What other things are these people going to do?”
This is a good question, and there is [...]

Today’s news in Austin bemoans the restructuring of the American economy… The following clipping from today’s Austin American Statesman tries to put a happy face on a cold hard fact: 900 people just lost their jobs at Dell. Furthermore, I have heard an early rumor that more jobs are being cut today across [...]

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 [...]

At the Bootstrap Austin blog I have just posted an article about how businesses in Austin are organizing, helping each other build their businesses together- despite whether or not the government steps in to help out startup and small business in the present looming financial downturn.  The secret, which you have heard here before at [...]

As you have heard here before- there is an attitudinal shift that is occurring towards work, largely driven by the Millennial Generation. Here is what Seth said recently on this blog about this new class of jobs and workers:
A new class of jobs (and workers) is creating a different sort of worker, though. This [...]

Over the holiday weekend, I had the honor of meeting a man that has catalyzed an economic miracle for a part of Chihuahua, Mexico. Spencer MacCallum discovered the work of Juan Quezada, and over 30 years took the little town of Mata Ortiz, Chihuahua, Mexico creating “the fairy tale [...]

In the following article in the NY Times, the rapid development of knowledge ecologies can be seen happening between industry and academia.  Large corporate labs are on the way out.  University research is being brought closer to industry through new relationships- that are looking much more like the ecologies that we have been talking about.
In [...]

Several friends have asked me “What do I mean by a shift between a Knowledge Economy to a Knowledge Ecology?”  In the Knowledge Economy the Internet was being used to just make labor more efficient.  In an Knowledge Ecology the best ideas come from many different places… and when they are implemented, they can dominate [...]

I about fell out of my seat laughing when I saw the following billboard, as I was surfing across the net, checking out John Erik Metcalf’s blog.  As Roy Williams, the Wizard of Ads predicted back in 2003, older generations just don’t get this younger generation, the Millennials, just yet.  Roy states:
AOL and Yahoo.com are [...]

A friend of mine that I use to work with at NeXT, Inc. just forwarded the following Youtube video. Working with Steve Jobs at the start of my career has forever positively warped my sense of what is possible in the world. Steve says “Follow your heart, even when it leads you off of the [...]

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 [...]

The following New York Times article “Personal Assistants on Call, Just Not in the Next Office” is further evidence of a growing trend of entrepreneurs hiring, at a few hours at a time, personal assistants to lower the “80 percent of their time on the trivial 20 percent of tasks”. As I mentioned in [...]

Here are signs of the Attitudinal Shift that I mentioned in this previous post:
Meet Your Future Employee
And the up-and-coming generation puts a premium on work/life balance, having seen firsthand the toll working around-the-clock took on its parents. As a result, they tend to shy away from jobs that demand the 40-hour-plus workweeks typical of IT.
The [...]

Here is a quick preview of the conceptual shifts that I am wring about in my forthcoming book Exponential Entrepreneurship: Building Business Ecologies for the 21st Century.  Marla my editor has been kicking butt (mainly mine and taking names  as we refine the trends that I see shifting the way work is being done.  [...]

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 [...]

Dee Copland recently posted a question on the Bootstrap-Austin mailing list asking about the implications of Google’s OpenSocial to social networking and small and medium size business. Following is my reply to her and the network.
The implication for small and medium (and large!) business of platforms like Google’s OpenSocial are going to be quite profound.  [...]

Here is a small example of how entrepreneurs are organizing, leveraging social software and social networking to shift the previous power structures that venture capitalist have held over entrepreneurs.  It is a funny read, especially if you have ever been in a funded startup.  (Four of the seven startups in my career have been funded;  [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

The world is shifting too quick to try to keep up with the labor-mentality of the past. It is time to escape the matrix.
Let me try to explain… When I mentioned “Superempowerment of the Individual” in my blog recently, several collegues immediately were drawn to think of the lower cost of production being what I [...]