The Culture of Collaboration

Venture Capitalists Investing in Semantic Web Deals, Enterprise Social Networking

As social networking permeates our collective culture, enterprises are demanding more business-oriented tools to support social networks.

At the Dow Jones VentureOne Summit in Redwood City, California on February 26 attended by venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, the sessions and cocktail hour hummed with talk about collaboration. One particularly compelling panel addressed “Consumerprise: Just How Will Consumer Technologies be Utilized by the Enterprise.” The panel, moderated by Emily Westhafer of Dow Jones,  included Antony Brydon, founder of Visible Path; J.B. Holston, CEO of Newsgator; Ajay Gandhi of BEA Systems and Peter Rip of Crosslink Capital. Participants discussed why many senior leaders of Fortune 1000 companies are interested in a “Facebook for the enterprise.”

Applications for enterprise-oriented social networking tools range from finding and collaborating with experts to increasing informal social interaction among colleagues. This, in turn, can break down barriers and enhance collaboration.

Despite their interest, many organizations are barring external social networking connections. This will evolve as the control paradigm wanes and organizational culture catches up with the tools.  Companies in many industries have found that collaborating with business partners can create incredible value.

Peter Rip noted that his venture capital firm is looking for investments beyond Web 2.0 and is interested in “semantic web” deals for startups that focus on intelligent structuring of information. The idea here is that machines rather than people should handle more mundane tasks involved in finding, organizing and sharing information and that Web-based applications should understand what individuals want to know.

In his book, Weaving the Web: the Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee describes his 2-part dream for the Web’s future. The first part is that the Web becomes a more powerful way for people to collaborate. This is clearly happening. The second part is that “machines become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’ which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy, and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines,” Berners-Lee writes.

However, semantic web start-ups, says venture capitalist Peter Rip, must fit their solutions into the economic problems of the enterprise. This may sound obvious, but too often start-ups push solutions to enterprises without considering how the tools fit work styles, culture and enterprise initiatives.

Reputation and Collaboration

I was having dinner with some venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley recently, and social commerce was on everybody’s mind. We discussed different business models and the prospects of some startups. Eventually, the conversation turned to blogging and, specifically, to why people blog.

At the top of the list is reputation. Pundits blog to build their visibility and ownership of a topic. CEO’s blog to build their reputations with team members, investors and customers. People at all levels of organizations blog to establish their expertise. Marketers use blogs to enhance the reputation of brands.

Within enterprises, blogging is becoming a knowledge and content management solution. Ideas can be captured, retained and repurposed. At its best, blogging is a collaborative rather than a solo pursuit. Collaborators can blog about each other’s posts or leave comments on the original posts. And team reputation can be a motivator for collaborative blogging.

Just as reputation is important for bloggers, reputation also plays a role more broadly in collaborative culture. Trust is one of the 10 Cultural Elements of Collaboration that I identify in The Culture of Collaboration book, and reputation plays a big role in trust. Reputation is based on work style, knowledge, team contributions, and integrity, among other factors. It’s becoming easier to connect and collaborate with people based on their reputations. As we establish our expertise and interests through blogging, vlogs, team sites, mashups, wikis, social networking sites and other modes, we can more easily collaborate and create value.

Reputation also plays a role in real-time, spontaneous collaboration. Using presence (see my March 7, 2007 post), we can connect in real-time via IM, audio or video with people reputed to have relevant skills, knowledge and expertise. Every organization has internal experts on everything from purchasing to intellectual property. Increasingly, their reputations are based on contributions through wikis, team sites, blogs and meetings (which can be captured, retained, indexed and searched based on keyword). Presence lets us see their availability status and connect with these experts on the fly to solve mission-critical issues and make faster, better decisions.

Yale Law School's Information Society Project is tackling reputation issues in its upcoming “Symposium on Reputation Economies in Cyberspace.” The conference, scheduled for December 8, 2007 in New Haven, will explore the shift towards the “wisdom of the crowd” and away from such traditional forms of reputation as educational background, institutional affiliations, and traditional business networks. Undoubtedly, this shift has wide-ranging implications for society. But the change in how we view reputation also impacts gatekeepers of every kind: publishers, studios, traditional media and elite universities and institutions. If reputation is based more on what we write, say and do online and less on affiliations, gatekeepers will play less of a role.

Venture Capital and Global Collaboration

Global collaboration is becoming a hot topic for venture capitalists whose US-based portfolio companies are expanding into China, India and other regions. I’m attending a gathering of venture capitalists this week, and the kick-off session was about how to expand winning companies globally.

One VC panelist commented that the biggest problem for portfolio companies expanding globally is time zones. He explained that the COO may be in Japan, the CEO in California and the CTO and engineering team in Israel. “It’s so difficult to keep the communication flow among the management team,” he noted. The moderator asked the VC if there were any special tools that help. His response was “getting up early and going to bed late.” Another VC insisted that a range of tools including videoconferencing could close the distance gap for his portfolio companies.

Paradoxically, distance can create value. In The Culture of Collaboration book, I describe how collaborative companies like Boeing, Toyota and BMW leverage time zones, collaborative culture and tools to compress product cycle time. Clearly, chopping many months off a car or airplane development program creates substantial value. In the book, I also discuss Boeing’s use of mirror zones (see my March 16 post).

Even early stage, venture-backed companies can turn time zone differences into assets. The key is for entrepreneurs (with guidance from VC’s) to integrate global collaboration into business models. Start-ups have an advantage over many later-stage enterprises, because they can bake collaborative culture into the company’s DNA right from the start.