Tag: NewCo

This Is How We Pick A NewCo

Over on the NewCo site, I’ve updated our explanation of how we chose NewCos around the world (1,100 or so so far). Here’s that post for those readers at Searchblog who might be interested. 

Since we launched NewCo’s festivals in late 2012, tens of thousands of people have experienced the unique NewCo model of “getting out to get in.” Thousands of NewCos have opened their doors in cities as varied as London, Austin, San Francisco, Detroit, Palo Alto, New York, Cincinnati and Amsterdam. Upcoming cities include Istanbul, Los Angeles, Portland, Mexico City and Boulder.

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NewCo Cincinnati Is Next Week. Here Are The Companies I’m Getting Inside

NewCoCincyI know I rave about all the NewCo cities, but once again I am picking my companies from a new festival lineup – and once again, I’m blown away. Next week is NewCo Cincinnati, and wow – what a stellar group of companies to chose from. Our partner Cintrifuse has really killed it – an impressive list of sponsors (P&G, SnapChat, BuzzFeed, Google!) and an even more impressive list of host companies. From arts to private/public partnerships to tech startups to food (and beer!), who knew Cincinnati was such a hub of NewCo innovation? Check out my picks for NewCo Cincy:

Weds, July 22, 6:30 pm: VIP Kickoff – @84.51 – Ill be there with the Mayor and the founders, movers, and shakers behind Cincy’s more than 80 NewCos (as well as the conductor of Cincy’s own symphony!). The program also features Nestle bigwig Pete Blackshaw, who left P&G more than a decade ago to start a company in what was a pretty bad area of town (but is now a hotbed of NewCo activity).

Thursday, July 23

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Uber, The Rashomon.

Uber Women Promo

Our industry loves a rashomon, and in the past year or two, our collective subject of debate has been Uber. Perhaps the fastest growing company in history (its numbers aren’t public, but we’ll get to some estimates shortly), Uber has become a vector for some of the most wide-ranging arguments I’ve ever had regarding the tech industry’s impact on society at large.

It’s not that Google, Facebook, Apple, or Microsoft didn’t evoke great debate, but all those companies came of age in an era where tech was still relegated to a sideshow in the broader cultural conversation. Microsoft was taking over the computer industry in the 1990s, Google the Internet in the early 2000s, Facebook and Apple the mobile and social world in the late 2000s. But Uber? Uber is about a very real and entirely new approach to our economy, a stand in for the wealth divide festering in the US and beyond, an existential rorschach testing your values around the role of government, the social contract, and the kind of society we want to become.

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My Schedule For NewCo New York 2015

NYCNewCoGrabHave you ever been to a music festival, and found yourself overwhelmed by too many great choices? Look at Coachella, for example. There are six stages to chose from. On Friday, how are you supposed to pick between Alabama Shakes and Lykke Li? I love ’em both. There’s Alt-J playing at the same time as Glass Animals, and Fitz & the Tantrums going up against Florence & The Machine.

Not fair.

That’s exactly how I feel about picking my schedule for next month’s NewCo New York. The lineup is 125 companies strong, and I can only see a total of ten (five each day). Yet picking your schedule is part of the magic of NewCo – it’s a supremely individual set of choices, but once you commit, you know you’re going to get to hang with hundreds of like-minded souls who made the same choices you did.

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Integrations (and Metaservices) For The Win

GBoard
A GeckoBoard sample dashboard, integrating half a dozen separate data services.

What makes for a truly NewCo business? I’ve been giving this question a lot of thought the past six or so months, leading to posts like Maybe The Best Way To Change the World Is To Start a Company, Living Systems and The Information First Company, What Makes a NewCo, and posts on NewCos like MetroMile and Jack.

But lately I’ve noticed a strong theme running through a number of interesting and successful businesses: Integrations. From Acxiom and sovrn (where I am a board member) to Slack, Gecko and Zapier (where I am a happy customer), these companies are thriving because they have built a platform based on the integration of many different products and services. At NewCo, we call this “being platform’d” – an inelegant but apt descriptor.

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What’s NewCo? These Videos Will Help

The NewCo festival model is counter-intuitive, so we made these videos to help explain what the fuss is all about. I thought I’d share them here. The first one features folks talking about their experience attending festivals, and the second one features host company presentors doing the same. Enjoy! (Oh, and NewCo New York registration is open now, sign up before the best sessions fill – more than a dozen, including TED, NYT, Gimlet, VaynerMedia, and BuzzFeed, are nearly full!)

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Maybe The Best Way To Change the World Is To Start a Company

bethechange

 

(image) This piece from Smithsonian caught my eye today – Young People Mistrust Government So Much They Aren’t Running for Office. It covers a Rutgers professor who studies millennial attitudes towards politics, and concludes that the much-scrutinized generation abhors politics – logging a ten point decrease in sentiment toward government in just the past decade or so.

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Metromile: A FitBit for Your Car

MetroMile staff
The Metromile staff in front of their SF HQ (Preston is in the red shirt in the back right).

Ever since writing Living Systems and The Information First Company last Fall, I’ve been citing Earnest, the financial services startup, as a poster child for what I mean by an “information-first” company. But earlier this month I met with another perfect exemplar: Metromile, a company that is already upending industrial-age assumptions about what “insurance” should be.**

I’m fascinated by the idea of “potential information” – flows of information that are locked away and unused. Potential information flows live in the imagination of every NewCo – once tapped, they create all manner of new potential value. Metromile is a stellar example of a company that has found a vector into a treasure trove of potential information – the automobile – and is busy turning that information into a new kind of customer experience, one that has the potential to completely retool the utility and value of the insurance business.

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My Picks for NewCo Silicon Valley

We’re more than halfway through the NewCo festival season, with Amsterdam, San Francisco, Detroit, New York, and London/UK behind us, and Silicon Valley, Boulder, and Los Angeles coming up.

Next up is Silicon Valley, which goes off Oct. 21 – 23, centered on the axis of Palo Alto. This year’s Silicon Valley festival is a pilot – Silicon Valley is more of an idea than an actual *place* per se – and NewCo tends to thrive in city centers. But we’ve found a great partner this year in the city of Palo Alto, which really is as close to the beating heart of the Valley as any city in the south Bay. After all, it’s where Google, Facebook, and hundreds of other game-changing companies started. So this year we’re piloting NewCo Silicon Valley in two parts – first with visits to a small number of legendary Valley company campuses, and second, with a full day of 30 or so companies based in downtown Palo Alto. Here are the companies I plan to visit this year, and why, along with my “runners up” – companies I wish I could also visit, were there two of me.

Day One – October 21

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NewCo New York 2014: My Chairman’s Picks To Visit

newcony

Last week I created my schedule for NewCo San Francisco, and wrote about them here. What many folks don’t know is that there are now nine confirmed NewCo festivals around the world. Three weeks after San Francisco, nearly 100 New York companies will be opening their doors and welcoming festival goers in our second annual NewCo New York, Sept. 30th-Oct. 2nd. If you live in NY, or are going there for Advertising Week this Sept.29-October 3rd, please register and visit some of your favorites.

With that in mind, here are my picks for New York.

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