By Jeremiah Owyang and Jaimy Szymanski
Blockchain technology has the potential to upend the way every industry manages its information and data, not only financial services.
Read MoreTag: Startup
Rebuilding Consumer Packaged Goods From the Ground Up
NewCo Shift Forum
Launching today, Brandless is rethinking everything about CPG, from its purpose to its pricing, distribution, and value proposition
Technology and mobility have redefined a huge swath of our lives, but when it comes to the brands we use every day — from laundry detergent to toilet paper — not much has changed. Sure, you can order online, but consumer packaged goods, or CPG as the category is called, are still run on a business model of mass media advertising and mass market distribution. Long time entrepreneur Tina Sharkey is on a mission to change that, and rethink CPG from the ground up. Her company Brandless launches today, but we had Sharkey at the NewCo Shift Forum back in February, where she gave an overview of her new company’s purpose.
Tina Sharkey: I’m going to give you an overview of what we’re doing and hopefully you’ll understand that we think we’re starting a revolution. Steve Jobs said in ’84 — I know he set the bar really low — he said mainframes, PCs, it’s all going to change. It absolutely did change, and we never looked back from that moment.
I don’t think they thought at that moment that this would happen. They thought merging music player and a phone was a great idea, but I don’t think they thought that you were going to hail taxis. I certainly don’t think they thought they were building a remote control for your life.
Read MoreWrite for 7,500 Hours, Then Hit Post
The Novel In The Digital Age
Why I’m Betting on Medium
Readers and authors deserve a great place to congregate online. Sure, the written word has many homes. But most fit poorly with the cadence of books. Authors write extremely long dispatches — so we’re mostly bad at Twitter. Facebook basically charges us to reach the readers who proactively seek us out and follow us, which is kind of evil (plus, we’re cheapskates). I love Goodreads and recommend it to everyone. But as its name avows, it’s geared more around readers than authors.
As for blogging, it’s more like an alternative to our main gig than a means to support it. Blog daily, and you’ll have no time to write books. Blog quarterly, and nobody — literally, nobody — will keep checking in to see if you have a pulse. Independent and emerging writers have many direct routes to readers (I’m especially enamored with WattPad). But publishers keep most of their output away from those channels. And so authors who work with publishers are still seeking a place to truly showcase our work and gather a following.
I think that place can be Medium.
Read MoreWhat’s In a Conference Room Name?
The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
Large corporations’ enthusiasm for giving conference rooms offbeat names can no longer be considered a mere fad. The practice has been around too long, and is now a fixture (Leah Fessler in Quartz). Labeling these often otherwise indistinguishable rooms has become a method for a firm to tell the world what it’s all about. As business scholar Sarah Brazaitis puts it in Quartz, “Companies that name their conference and meeting rooms according to themes are doing so to communicate their values and organizational culture to their employees, customers, clients, and all who enter.”
The Quartz piece offers a lengthy, though hardly exhaustive, catalog of some representative conference-room-naming practices today. Sometimes the schemes are straightforward: At Elon Musk’s SpaceX, the names are those of legendary space explorers. Twitter uses bird species and, since moving into its downtown San Francisco HQ, names related to the history of its home town.
Read MoreThe Future of Manufacturing
NewCo Shift Forum
Launch Forth represents a new approach to product development
You’ve probably seen Local Motors’ unique and arresting automobiles around the Internet (the company is credited with creating the first 3D printed car), but what you may not know is that Local Motors has birthed a maker community and platform, Launch Forth, that engages more than 70,000 “solvers” who engage with projects from companies as diverse as GE, Boeing, and many more. In this short talk at the NewCo Shift Forum earlier this year, Elle Shelley, lead at Launch Forth, walks us through an entirely new kind of innovation platform.
John Battelle: The next speaker, Elle Shelley from Launch Forth, a division of Local Motors. If you haven’t heard of Local Motors, you just got to go Google it because the cars that they make are insane.
Read MoreFall of the House of Uber: What Kalanick’s Exit Means
The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
It took a shareholder revolt on the part of investors representing roughly 40 percent control of Uber to force out its founding CEO, Travis Kalanick, (Mike Isaac in The New York Times). VC and Uber board member Bill Gurley led the effort to oust Kalanick, despite the CEO’s close grip on a majority of the company’s voting shares (The Washington Post has the details).
After a season of relentless scandal, Kalanick’s departure gives the company its first real chance to press “reset” and see how much can be rescued from his legacy: a wreckage of toxic management and ethical lapses — along, of course, with the creation of a transformational ride-hailing service that has begun to reshape our cities.
Read MoreCan AI Help Facebook Root Out “Terrorist” Posts?
The NewCo Daily: Today’s Top Stories
Facebook is giving its content-moderation effort a big injection of artificial intelligence to try to stem the flood of “extremist” material on the social network (The New York Times). For those who are outraged that Facebook and other online platforms haven’t done enough to counter terrorist recruiting materials and organizers, this will be welcome news. But it raises lots of dilemmas for Facebook that we fear the company isn’t ready to resolve, despite VP Elliot Schrage’s admission that this is one of the “hard questions” the company now confronts.
“We agree with those who say that social media should not be a place where terrorists have a voice,” two Facebook managers wrote, explaining company policy. Their post names ISIS and Al Qaeda as examples of groups they’re aiming to limit. But it barely acknowledges the larger issue of defining “terrorism” and “terrorist content” in a more rational, appropriate, and universal way than just “Muslims who bomb people,” or neatly distinguishing between posts that describe terrorist acts and those that promote them.
Read MoreCorporate Perks Fade. Purposeful Work Doesn’t.
Google is the pioneer of offering perks to attract top talent, and imitation has become the sincerest form of flattery. A friend of mine who works at Google HQ describes his situation as “too good to walk away from” — even when he gets bored. Free food, snacks, shuttle, laundry, etc have a way of doing that.
The startup scene has followed suit, and escalated to the point where if you don’t offer perks, you’re not considered relevant.
Read MoreAutomattic Closes Its Office That No One Uses
Automattic, the company that has built WordPress into the Web’s most popular publishing tool, is shutting down its office. The company itself, which is known for its far-flung, remote-work culture, is doing just fine. It’s only the physical office that Automattic has decided to ditch (Oliver Staley in Quartz).
As founder Matt Mullenweg explains it, the company leased the converted warehouse on San Francisco’s Hawthorne Street six or seven years ago as a hub for Bay Area-based workers to use as they wished. Not enough did. Automattic’s 550 employees are scattered around the globe and free to work where they choose. (The company’s novel practices are documented in Scott Berkun’s book The Year Without Pants.) The S.F. office looked lovely, but freedom is even more attractive.
Read MoreThe Intersection of Marketing & Product Management
Are your product & marketing teams creating resonance or dissonance?
When building products, one of our main goals is to make new users successful as quickly as possible. We build in-depth, contextual onboarding campaigns, complete with great first-run experiences, lifecycle emails, contextual tooltips, and the kitchen sink. We try to remove friction everywhere we can to ensure users see the value of our product right away, with hopes that it turns them into a highly engaged user.
But what if the user thought they were buying a motorcycle, but your product is actually a bicycle? Or even worse, your product is actually a bulldozer?