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Building a Better Entrepreneur; Google 10^100

by Dan Robles on September 27, 2009

supergoogleGoogle 10^100 award voting is Launched.  There are two sectors that we believe would have the greatest impact on the greatest amount of people; building a better banking system and funding social entrepreneurs.  You can’t have one without the other – if Google funds these two sectors in concert, the outcome would be incredible.

Build A Better Bank

In the old banking system we assume that we have the knowledge to execute a business plan and we go to the bank to borrow the money.  In the new banking system, we will assume we have the money and we go off in search of the knowledge.  Social Media is an excellent “public accounting system” for knowledge assets.

Our current banking system has gotten it backwards.

Technological change must always precede economic growth. The supranational currency may be backed by productivity and not debt.  Social media provides an excellent platform upon which to design such a banking system. People trade “social currency” at a tremendous rate.  This is evidenced by the amount of destructive innovation is occurring in many legacy sectors due to social media.

Better Banking Tools for everyone

“Partner with banks and technology companies to increase the reach of financial services across the world. Users submitted numerous ideas that seek to improve the quality of people’s lives by offering new, more convenient and more sophisticated banking services. Specific suggestions include inexpensive village-based banking kiosks for developing countries; an SMS solution geared toward mobile networks; and ideas for implementing banking services into school curriculums”.

Suggestions that inspired this idea

1.    Enable prepaid cell phone bank accounts for millions of people working in the informal economy
2.    Create a community-level electronic banking system for rural areas
3.    Build IT-enabled kiosks which provide access to financial services
4.    Create a single world bank or supra-national currency, uniform rules and transparent public accounting

Fund Social Entrepreneurs

Venture Capital is ridiculously expensive. Corporate innovation serves shareholders value over social priorities.  Some say that the financial risk of funding innovation is too high. The top ten reasons why start-ups fail are due to knowledge deficits, not money deficits.  A new banking system that trades knowledge as currency would solve this problem.

The key is to match most worthy knowledge surplus to most worthy knowledge deficit.  Google is perfectly able to build a search app for knowledge assets if there were an inventory of knowledge assets.  With the most worthy match, Risk can be reduced and new financial instruments can be developed such as the innovation bond, innovation insurance, tangential innovation markets, and destructive innovation transition contingency options, etc.

Help social entrepreneurs drive change

Create a fund to support social entrepreneurship. This idea was inspired by a number of user proposals focused on “social entrepreneurs” — individuals and organizations who use entrepreneurial techniques to build ventures focused on attacking social problems and fomenting change. Specific relevant ideas include establishing schools that teach entrepreneurial skills in rural areas; supporting entrepreneurs in underdeveloped communities; and creating an entity to provide capital and training to help entrepreneurs build viable businesses and catalyze sustained community change.

Suggestions that inspired this idea

1.    Provide targeted capital and business training to help young entrepreneurs build viable businesses and catalyze sustained community change
2.    Create a non-profit, venture capital-like revolving fund to invest in high-impact local entrepreneurs
3.    Send young American entrepreneurs to underdeveloped communities to help create small businesses that would economically benefit those communities
4.    Create schools in rural areas to teach local people how to become entrepreneurs
5.    Create a private equity fund to help immigrants in developed countries finance business development in their countries of origin

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Is the Corporate Structure Obsolete?

by Dan Robles on June 24, 2009

The Social Media Production System

Social Media has demonstrated in many ways capable of meeting or exceeding the deliverable output of many traditional industries such as advertising, marketing, journalism, human resources, design, community organizing, education, and social vetting.

We have also seen social media form communities that increase productivity in manufacturing processes, software development, and project management.  We have seen people self manage in social media to segregate and elevate good information away from bad information.  We have seen communities act with logic, tact, and precision previously thought to be the province of top management guidance.

In short, we have seen social media replace or duplicate almost every structural element of the traditional corporation outside of the construct of corporations.  Can social media provide a corporate structure in and among itself?

General Accounting Practices:

Corporations have an internal accounting system, internal processes, internal procedures, and often their own lexicon and unique job descriptions relative to their product.  This is how a corporation stores knowledge and trades value internally and defends itself from external influence.  The common thread is that each department is accounted, assessed, and compared in terms of money.  Standard balance sheets are compared by banks and investors.

Social media uses the exchange of information, knowledge and new ideas to store value.  Processes, procedures, job descriptions, and accounting are done in a public lexicon that everyone develops collectively.  People share, trade, and exchange information, knowledge, and new ideas like tangible property; and they trade options on futures in the same.  Increasingly, access to the community knowledge inventory is becoming a means be which people can convert productivity to money.

Standard Balance Sheet for Social Media

Most elements of a corporation can be duplicated in social media.  For those parts that cannot, the entrepreneur will soon figure out how they can.   The entrepreneur does not worry about money, they worry about productivity and the money always follows.  The next paradigm of economic development will reside almost entirely on a statistical game of managing risk and return, matching surplus to deficit, and increasing human productivity in the operating system of Social Media.  Every Newspaper that falls to Social Media is simply transferring its value to the new paradigm.  That value is still in play.  This trend will continue until a new currency representing that value is introduced.

Business Plans of the Future:

As you witness the progression of Social Media unfold, look for innovations that contain incentives for people to reorganize themselves.  Look for similarities between new social media developments and traditional corporate departments.  Look for businesses and institutions that support social vetting mechanisms, knowledge exchanges, and groups bringing together strategic combination of diverse knowledge assets, not just similar knowledge assets.  Most importantly; look for the “Last Mile of Social Media”; diverse groups of 5-10 people living within a few miles of each other forming new enterprise.

Threats:

Finally, look for the threats that can corrupt an innovation economy.  Social Media is currently responsible for trillions of dollars of productivity gains – all this money is still on the table for social entrepreneurs to monetize once the integration reaches a tipping point.  Be watchful for attempts at censorship, attempts to monopolize information nodes, and the corporatizations of social networks.   Wall Street was corrupted when the value of the currency became divorced from human productivity.  Don’t let the same happen to Social Media.

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Collateralized Innovation Obligations

June 9, 2009

The underlying asset that supports both the Collateralized Debt Obligation and the Collateralized Innovation Obligation is a person and their ideas; one is an asset and the other is a liability. Both types of people go to work every day to interact with other people. They both share ideas and create better ways of doing things. People increase human productivity through fault tolerant networks and support systems. They transform information into knowledge and innovation – and both pay their mortgage.

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