Taking Max Gladwell into the real world with a social networking event for business ideas and entrepreneurs.
You are cordially invited to attend the first Max Gladwell networking event on Monday April 13th, at 7 pm PT in Santa Monica, California. This first offline gathering will be in conjunction with BlobLive LA. The event will take place at Westside Eclectic, a theater space located on the 3rd Street Promenade.
Please feel free to RSVP via Facebook.
BlobLive is a specific type of networking event that encourages entrepreneurs to share their business ideas with their peers in an “open mic” format and potentially gain valuable feedback, insights, and connections. BlobLive LA, which was recently featured in the L.A. Times, takes place every week somewhere in Los Angeles. In the spirit of Max Gladwell, this will be the first themed event with an emphasis on social entrepreneurship and social media. In other words, the first to seek and discuss ideas that can change the world.
You might wonder why someone would share their brilliant business idea with a room full of fellow entrepreneurs. After all, we’re supposed to keep our ideas under wraps and make everyone sign non-disclosure agreements, right? Not quite.
Thanks to the Web, we’ve entered a new era of business. Information is free. It’s freely available and freely exchanged. If you’ve thought of it, chances are it’s already been thought of. With a few rare exceptions, it makes more sense to share your idea and garner input from as many people as possible–to crowdsource your feedback–than to keep it to yourself. Because ideas themselves are cheap. The ability to execute on those ideas, however, is a rare and precious commodity.
For example, take the social networking space. Let’s suppose the founders of Friendster pitched their idea, and the feedback went something like this: focus on Hollywood, music, and being cool; let people create profiles for any and everything and let them design their pages however they’d like; and make sure your servers can handle rapid scaling because load time is everything. Despite being one of the early leaders in social networking, that advice might have kept MySpace from eating Friendster’s lunch.
Then imagine if MySpace pitched its idea, and the feedback went something like this: limit people’s profiles to their real names and keep the design simple and consistent; open the platform to third-party developers to help scale the network and provide added value, and above all keep innovating and pushing the envelope. Despite being the king of social networking, that advice might have kept Facebook from eating MySpace’s lunch.
Being first to market does not guarantee success. In many cases, it can give your competitors a lesson in what not to do. The greatest advantages in today’s world consist of having the most information, the best data, and the brightest people.
The blogging ethos is another example. It’s cooperative by design. Despite the hundreds of the blogs in the green and social media space, we don’t consider any of them to be competitors and we’re pretty certain the feeling is mutual. It’s no longer about building walls and hoarding traffic. We link to our “competitors” in our blogroll, and they link back. We sink or swim by the quality of our content, and we promote our “competitors” every chance we get. In part because collaboration is the new competition.
This isn’t to say that companies don’t have competitors or that competition doesn’t exist. It does, and a thorough competitive analysis is still essential to any business plan. What has changed, though, is the approach. The first instinct is no longer, “How are they competition?” but rather, “How can we collaborate?” Are we frenemies? Are we coopetition? Can we work together in some way, possibly to strengthen our collective position against a larger competitor?
At the risk of sounding far too new-agey, competition is what’s left when the avenues of cooperation have been explored.
We attended an Enterprise 2.0 workshop at the recent Web 2.0 Expo that highlighted these and other principles of Economics 2.0. In many ways, the most open companies are the ones that will prevail. The presentation deck (below) is fairly self-explanatory.
As co-host of Monday’s networking event, Max Gladwell founder Rob Reed will kick off the idea portion with a brief case study on a world-changing business idea. He’ll then join the audience in offering feedback on subsequent ideas. Some of those may find their way into a blog post.
The event is also broadcast live via Ustream.tv at BlobLive.com/watch, and you can join via Twitter using the hashtag #bloblive. We’re also told that the event is BYOB.
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