The Reason I Get Scared Sometimes
My teammates are probably annoyed that I keep making them watch this video of Groupon founder and CEO Andrew Mason back at his previous company, The Point. But it’s interesting enough to me that I’ve been hitting play on it like a song, once or twice a day. (Yea, I’m a dork like that. :-))
A couple of weeks ago, when the 18th-ish-month-old Groupon turned down a 6 BILLION dollar buyout offer from Google, I finally got around to looking at what they actually did. I was shocked when I discovered that the fastest growing company in history(tm) had emerged from a sort of Kickstarter for social causes. That hit me like a ton of bricks.
In this presentation Andrew plays the role of scientist and evangelist for new and near-future “rational”, repeatable systems for generating massive collective action, fundraising, and group buying over the internet. Groupon exploded using these exact same principles, just hyper focused on retail. That’s amazing. I can’t believe this video has less than 2,000 views.
For a while now, LOVELAND’s been quietly connecting some dots between the gameness and mapness of Sim City, the micro payments and crowdfunding of Kickstarter, and the industrial-strength realness, challenges, and opportunities of Detroit. This open-ended part-art part-startup approach has given us nearly full freedom to evolve at our own pace of discovery.
Last week I wrote about our evolution and how we’re beginning to scale up to city size. Sometimes this scares the crap out of me for a funny reason: The reason I get scared sometimes is that I think it will work, I think it will have huge impact, and it’s growing from a bunch of inches in vacant lots! Eesh!
Excuse the quick photoshopping, but maybe someday before toooo long you’ll see something like this?
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