I was just about to hit the hay tonight and I came across this video featuring an interview that Loic LeMeur did with Rob Kalin, the founder of Etsy) at the World Economic Forum a couple of months ago. In it there was a line that particularly stood out to me. In talking about Etsy, Rob said “”Instead of a small number of large businesses there should be a large number of small businesses.”
Rob goes on to say more on the subject in this video.
This line crystallizes something I’ve been pondering for a long time and that’s this movement towards the edge that Umair has talked about for years. I’m probably mangling Umair’s definition a bit but I think there’s a strong common thread between what Umair has been blogging about all this time and what Rob is talking about in the videos above.
Let’s look at some examples:
eBay – By most accounts, at least one million people make their living (full-time or part-time) on eBay. That’s one million entrepreneurial opportunities that didn’t exist prior to eBay (although I’m sure there’s a bit of a substitution effect from offline craft sellers, etc.).
Etsy – Etsy is approaching $100 million in gross sales and what I love about Etsy is that essentially all the money on Etsy is made by individual entrepreneurs. As Kalin points out, Etsy is all about moving power from a small number of large producers to a large number of small producers. In some ways Etsy isn’t doing anything that eBay didn’t but in others it’s radically more subversive because of it’s rejection of corporate sellers.
craigslist – Few companies have done more to empower entrepreneurs than craigslist. It gives the power for people to buy and sell a whole host of things (some of it admittedly unsavory…check on this interesting article on cl drug lingo) without having to pay listing fee or transaction fees (in most cases).
Google – AdSense represents a huge movement to the edge. It empowered bloggers to make a full-time or part-time living from their writing. It allowed a one-man gang from Vancouver to make millions of dollars a year running a free dating service. Deeply, deeply disruptive.
And now a whole host of others are enabling this movement to the edge. A few of my favorites include Foodzie (artisan foods), Mahalo (with the PTG program and with Mahalo Answers) and what we’re doing with eduFire (disclosure: I’m the founder of eduFire).
The thought running through my head right now is maybe the economic crisis is not really due to sub-prime or to a whole host of other reasons that the news wonks are throwing at us. Maybe instead it’s about a fundamental restructuring of this little thing we call capitalism. Maybe it’s about the power shifting from the hands of a number of large Fortune 500 companies towards a vast sea of independent, ambitious and ready to rock entrepreneurs.
Outside of eBay there weren’t a lot of early stories of the Web empowering entrepreneurs with the obvious exceptions of the people who created the Yahoos, Amazons, Googles, etc. of the world. But lately we’ve had a ton of them. What Derek Sivers did with CDBaby. The crazy cult community at DeviantArt. The Facebook App platforms allowing developers to makes tens of thousands of dollars a day.
So that sucking sound you hear when you turn on CNBC tomorrow (or the next day or whatever) and hear the Dow at a new multi-year low…there’s a really good chance that could be the oxygen that’s being squeezed out of big monolithic companies. The ones that turned our landscapes in wastelands of strip malls and fast food joints. Maybe the tide has finally turned. And even though nobody can really figure out what the heck is going on right now (witness multi-year low Dow) maybe it’s just because something really big is actually going on and we haven’t figured out how to adjust to it yet.
The Edge, that movement from concentrated power in the hands of a relative few # of organizations to distributed power in the hands of many people, represents the biggest shift we may see in our lifetime. I think it’s time to get on the right side of the wave. To start companies that leverage The Edge. To invest in companies that get what it means to be at The Edge (Hi Twitter! What’s going on Thesixtyone?!) To leave your “safe job” and go work for an pioneering Edge company.
It’s not too late. In fact, it’s the perfect time.
Tue, Mar 10, 2009
Disruption