How to Fund Growth
July 2, 2015 § Leave a comment
Most organizations’ financial structures are designed for predictability rather than explosive growth.
To change that, we must:
Invest Constructively in Passion
Specifically:
1. Align Incentives
- Learn what people deeply want.
- Articulate how they can pursue that by contributing to the organization’s mission
2. Unleash Talent
- Learn where people are the happiest and most productive.
- Build support systems that allow them to maximize flow.
3. Virtualize Infrastructure
- Learn which essential tasks nobody is able to do efficiently and awesomely.
- Sell those to a business that sees the opportunity.
D.R.I.P.: Platform Thinking for Lean Startups
May 21, 2015 § Leave a comment
Define
Terms, flows, roles, success criteria, open questions
Research
Characterize and identify Customer Zero
Implement
Enable Customer Zero to deploy a minimally viable app
Productize
Deliver a coherent and sustainable ecosystem
Transforming the Bay with Christ: A Platform Analysis
February 24, 2015 § 5 Comments
My series of four articles (plus a postscript) analyzing the regional spiritual renewal initiative Transforming the Bay with Christ:
TBC Postscript: A Missional Creed
February 24, 2015 § 2 Comments
I close out my series with a personal proposal for the “sacred space” around which to organize Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC).
I believe the mission of Transforming the Bay with Christ is to:
- Mobilize, Unify, and Grow the Body of Christ
- To Bless the San Francisco Bay Area
- Through the Transforming Power of the Cross
TBC 4: The Process for Products
February 20, 2015 § 3 Comments
In this series I have been building a case that Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC) should consider reframing itself as a startup building a platform for governance. In this, our final installment, I will discuss the process necessary to build such a product.
One of the key insights about entrepreneurship in the last decade is that a startup is not just a small version of a established business. Rather, a startup is an organization formed to search for a business model, rather than execute one.
In particular, this implies that startups should be designed to maximize learning by exploiting surprises. This is the exact opposite of a traditional business, which attempts to increase predictability by avoiding surprises.
To get the optimal structure, we need to be clear on:
- Which things we need to learn (the problem)
- How we are going to learn them (the process)
- Who will own the learning (the people)
- What will prove we have learned the right lessons (the product)
TBC 3: Trading Control for Authority
February 16, 2015 § 4 Comments
In this series we have been exploring the hypothesis that Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC) would be most effective if structured as a platform designed for effective governance. Please note that these essays are purely an intellectual exercise on my part; I have no formal connection with or deep knowledge of TBC.
When designing systems of governance, the most important question is who holds which kinds of power. That is part of the genius of the American system of democracy: for all its flaws, the division of powers between the executive, legislative and judicial has produced a remarkably resilient (if horribly inefficient) system. In our last post, we focused on who holds the power. Now we will focus on which power is held. « Read the rest of this entry »
TBC 2: From Platforms to Governance
February 6, 2015 § 7 Comments
In our first installment of my series on Transforming the Bay with Christ (TBC), we talked about how platforms enable us to tackle problems and markets too big for any one entity to manage directly. Because of that, though, it is much harder to create a successful platform than it is to create a successful program. In this installment, we will talk about how to do that.
Characteristics of a Platform
The first thing to realize is that every platform is characterized by three distinct but interrelated factors:
- Policy (governance)
- Incentives (business)
- Infrastructure (engineering)
The health of a platform is determined by how well these three factors support each other and the overall purpose of the platform.
This has two interesting implications:
Wide Open (or, Are You In?)
November 10, 2014 § Leave a comment
He’s my hero. THIS is how I dream of running my own projects / company.
Earlier this year I confronted the painful realization that my baby framework grew into a mature ecosystem – one I no longer had the capacity to maintain on my own. It started with dragging open issues for more than a few days, to a growing pile of sticky notes on my monitor of ideas I’d like to try, to (and most problematic) no longer remembering how big chunks of the code work.
The problem is, how to successfully move from a one-man-show to a community driven project, without giving up on the stability, consistency, and philosophy of the framework.
Consensus-Dictator-Fork
I believe the only practical model for running a successful open source project is the Consensus-Dictator-Fork (CDF) model. It’s a fancy name for how most open source projects work. Decisions are made by consensus whenever possible. This usually covers 95% of the decisions by the simple mechanism of proposing a…
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Leaving Apple after 17 years to launch a startup
September 22, 2014 § Leave a comment
After arguably the most amazing 17 years in computing history — seeing UNIX spread from iMac to the Apple Watch — I’ve decided it is time to leave Apple and strike out on my own.
I’ll be taking a few months off to play with some ideas I’ve been working on for making programming more accessible, to see if there’s a viable business in there somewhere.
I’d love for you to stay in touch on this next phase of my journey. Recommendations always welcome. I may need them…
