Of The Online and The Earthly: Pixels and Poop
I’ve been crushing on this TechCrunch guest article by Redfin CEO Glenn Kellman: Take The Red Pill: The Rise Of The Hybrid Startup. It’s about the incredible opportunities for innovative internet businesses to merge with boots-on-the-ground in-person operations. A best of both worlds approach that’s especially relavent in Detroit where there’s a big digital divide to cross and lots of physical work to be done.
Now there’s a … trend emerging in 2011…: the hybrid business, with one foot in the virtual world and one foot in the real world. This isn’t the old “clicks-and-mortar” concept from the 1990s, which put web glitter on an old-school business, building Walmart.com for Walmart. A hybrid business is built entirely from scratch, to be innovative in its online technology and its real-world operations.
LOVELAND’s been building an online framework connected to the real world, but it still sorta sucks at it largely because it’s missing those boots on the ground interacting with the real world on a daily basis. Sure, it connects to real land and real people and real places and real projects in real Detroit, but it still feels >99% virtual, so it’s <%1 as powerful as it should be. Our 2011 will be largely dedicated to getting that closer to 50/50.
Awww, but the real world is HARD! The Plymouth microhood became the world’s weirdest crime scene earlier this year when someone chopped down our solar panels:
The desire to get hybrid was foundational to starting LOVELAND, as it was to helping start the Imagination Station creative campus. When Jeff DeBruyn first approached us to work together on transforming a couple of long-abandoned houses into something amazing, he didn’t know a lick about the online side of things, but he could intuitively sense the power of combining the online and the earthly, and saw that’s what LOVELAND was working towards. We were pretty much in the exact same vice verse position (if you can say that), which made it a natural fit to partner.
Last month the Imagination Station submitted a $500,000 grant application to the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge to fund a hybrid initiative called Living In The Map (read it here). Imagination Station will hit the streets and knock on doors and do the community work that can only happen through face-to-face personal meetings and relationships, and LOVELAND will provide the online platform in the form of a map with all the features needed for people to better understand and interact with their neighborhood and city, share news, report problems, develop projects, fundraise, etc. You can see phase 1 of the parcel-based map at inchernet.com.
The Imagination Station houses. One baby foot in the real world, one baby foot in the virtual world:
From the application:
The Motor City is undergoing massive necessary change, and as it evolves it needs to cross the digital divide, get online, become transparent, and listen to the voices of the community. Our project has two essential elements: authentic community engagement and an online social map.
That’s hybrid, baby! Kellman’s article goes on about why there haven’t been that many truly hybrid businesses yet:
The real objection many entrepreneurs have to hybrid businesses isn’t quantitative but qualitative. A friend of mind in technology used to love asking me, “So how do you like being a realtor now?” as if this were a horrible fate. A would-be competitor to Redfin abandoned the idea of selling houses directly after the co-founder found himself hanging a yard sign in a rain storm.
You see the same attitude in other industries: who in technology wants to work with retail bankers, teachers, doctors, restauranteurs? As a result, hybrid businesses have little or no competition: technology companies want nothing to do with the real world, and real-world companies struggle to develop competitive technology.
Ceci n’est pas une website. Pulling the arsoned rubble off the back of one of the Imagination Station houses. No javascript library can do this yet:
The part about the entrepreneur backing off when he had to hang a sign in the rain totally cracks me up. We eat red pills like that on a daily basis. A not uncommon hybrid occurrence, which I rather enjoy: last week we were having a LOVELAND product meeting and got a call prompting us to check on one of the Imagination Station houses and make sure snow hadn’t gotten in. I put down the markers and Larry put down the code and we drove over there, unscrewed the boarded up door in the freezing cold, fixed a few small openings, and then got back to the online side of things in one continuous flow.
And a bit more graphic (apologies to the squeamish), just last night we met up with project architect Catie Newell who reported that someone had just pooped in her Salvaged Landscape installation and scattered magazines around the house. Now I’m not saying we like cleaning up poop, but it’s a great example of why web ventures would prefer releasing software from temperature-controlled and sanitized offices, and making people come to their sites rather than directly intertwining with the gnarly atomic mess we call reality.
Anyway, the moral of the story is I’m super excited about where things are going, and it’s nice to see more confirmation of the direction (and more efforts to give it a name). We definitely need to raise funds so that we can take a deep breath and start hiring more people, and I’m sure there will be more poop in our future, but it’s going to work. When I stare at the pixels of the map I can see the people and projects and problems of the real world waiting to pop through, which will bring things to life for those who are only tuning in from the internet, and both sides of the hybrid will enhance each other, closer to 50/50 than 99/1.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to find my rubber gloves and take care of some business.
A detail of the map in progress, waiting to come to life:
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