Ev's New Company

As I learned during my stint at the Research Board, large companies with many different working parts and subsidiaries spend millions oscillating back and forth periodically from centralized to decentralized and back.

Nobody has cornered the market on knowing how to keep the organization and practicality of a centralized structure while still benefiting from the speed, innovation, and flexibility of a decentralized organization.  The downsides of bureacracy (centralized) and rogue behavior (decentralized) haven't been conquered either.

Evan Williams proposes to change all that, with a new company he's forming called Obvious.  Obvious will be formed the way a social network is formed, so it will have a networked corporate organization rather than decentralized or centralized.  The idea is based on a concept those of us working in Internetland for the past 10 years have come to know well: software development and content are becoming commoditized and traffic (users/customers) is the really difficult asset to build.

All subsidiaries, or divisions, units, or companies, or whatever they are to be called, will get their basic sustenance -- technology and infrastructure -- off the same teat.  Each subsidiary brand can leverage the traffic of the whole. The difference between Obvious and an incubator is that not all the new initiatives will be expected to become companies.  (Presumably the difference between Odeo and a company like P&G is that value will be placed on entrepreneurship and the occasional big win as opposed to careful R&D followed by big, targeted market plays).

Ev's instincts have obviously been honed by his experiences at Pyra Labs -- a small start-up that created Blogger -- and Google, a large start-up that acquired Pyra.  It's enough to make anyone want to sell their Google stock, since it's clearly an indictment of Google's inability to spread their traffic purposefully to any of their subsidiary groups.  Hopefully he'll be joined by folks with experience from large and small companies that aren't start-ups.  He'll need that background to make sure this one will work, since it is more about successfully remaking broken corporate structure than building any product in particular. 

Based on his description, there's a lot that still needs to be thought through, but knowing Evan, he's on it.  It's certain that lots of entrepreneurs will find his idea appealing -- I certainly do.  At the very least, it's a graceful way to remake Odeo.  Theoretically, Obvious's new "networked" organizational structure will, organically, show a more thorough understanding of the market than Odeo did on its own.

Comments

[ventureblogalist]

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http://www.ventureblogalist.com/?p=266

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Best Regards,
Rob Finn