Tag archives: fred wilson

Area of Interest for 2010

Posted by Shaun Abrahamson on Sunday, 3 January 2010

We were inspired Fred Wilson’s Areas of Interest post (and resulting comments) a few days ago

The areas themselves are interesting -

We are looking forward to the iPhone vs Android clash because of some of the technical differences as well as some of the different ways in which they work with their developer communities.

We also like the intersection of augmented reality and gaming and would venture to throw in work by people like 42  Entertainment immersive entertainment.

And we do like energy and education – we hope to announce investments and client projects in both of these areas shortly.

But most interesting to us, is the process of telling people what you are interested in and engaging in dialog about these areas. It is still very unusual to have such an open dialog about what areas look interesting and why.

We think Fred is demonstrating the trend we are most interested in: organizations that generate much of the value from the community around them, not just their full-time employees/partners. [update: last check there were almost 200 comments]

As an example, Craigslist has 32 full-time employees and because of the way they work with their community, they have fundamentally changed the economics of classifieds, killing off much larger organizations by completely changing the economics.

We are willing to bet the Fred and his team at Union Square will reap similar scale benefits as their community helps them do work that would be impossible to do if they only had internal resources.

Craigslist is relatively new, but old when compared with companies like Twitter that is benefitting substantially from innovations coming from its user and develop community. Less than 3-year-old Jovoto has found a new way to provide creatives services by enabling creatives to work compete and collaborate in design contests. Similarly young, Local Motors is redefining the way cars are designed, built and marketed.

The result is not just a large change in economics as tasks are shifted out of organizations but also a changing relationship from customer to collaborator. This changes fundamentally how organizations are structured and how they compete so we’d love to be working with people who are figuring this out (or want to figure this out).

What do you think?

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