I visited Facebook last week. I’ve gotten a lot of emails asking me about how my visit was so I promised everyone that I’d do a blog post about it.
It was a very interesting experience. I went there to see a friend who is working in the R&D group. What I saw there was a great feeling of team, bright individuals, innovation, energy, and openness.
It reminded me of EDA in the late 80’s — at least my experience in VLSI’s software group. VLSI was a renegade semiconductor company which started the ASIC model along with LSI Logic. Everyone viewed us as they view Facebook today: “This is all cool stuff, but how are they going to make a profitable business out of this?!!
At that point, VLSI only hired the best from the best schools (as Facebook does today). We were mostly in our early 20’s (as Facebook today). We worked together, had lunch together, partied together, shared housing together, even dated (as in Facebook today): Work was more than just work (and in fact to this day some of my closest friends post-college are those I met at VLSI). As my friend and I had lunch in the Facebook café (yes, it was free food!), I noticed a lot of similarities with those days in EDA.
As it always happens, EDA matured (as semi had before that) and companies became “corporations”. Work became just work. It really makes me wonder about the whole dynamic around corporations: less entrepreneurial, closed, paranoid, …. I always wondered, for example, why don’t corporations use Macs. Macs are better (performance), must safer, cost compatible, and open. My thought: Macs just don’t fit the bill because they’re just not “corporate”. As it turns out, corporations are also having a hard time today dealing with Facebook, or social networking in general - Facebook is not “corporate” either.
In the mid 90’s, corporations were struggling to deal with “this internet thing”. A lot of companies were limiting employees access because they feared employees would just waste their time browsing. I used to hear that argument all the time. Could you imagine if someone would limit the use of the internet at work today? All employees (and management) would be up in arm asking “how’d we get our jobs done?!!”
So 15 years later and now corporations are questioning Facebook. They’re looking for ways to limit employees time on Facebook, or other social network/media for that matter. Instead they can be greatly leveraging it. There is an insightful article in FastCompany magazine this month about how Cisco is embracing social network within the company to dramatically invigorate innovation and leadership. It’s a bold move by John Chambers (Cisco CEO), one that requires openness, something not typically “corporate”.
Cisco’s vision is highly appliable to electronic design companies. Xuropa is enabling professional networking dynamics built around technology-networking (a la social-networking) focused on the entire electronic design supply chain. Xuropa’s platform is something that electronic design companies can leverage (just as Cisco’s already doing using other social/professional networks), to revitalize innovation and leadership, and significantly impact the bottom line.
Back to Facebook: We, as high tech professional, have been taught to believe that someone needs to have a need first, and then we’d create the solution — and more complicated the solution the better. As I talk around the industry, I run into people who are upset (and even belligerent) about why Facebook is getting so much attention. “What are they trying to solve?”, I’m often asked.
What I find Facebook’s genius to be is that they (most likely by luck, and perhaps because they just didn’t know anything different) identified a trend (that people spend more time on the web than TV, phone, radio, writing letters, reading books, etc. combined) and created a fairly simple platform to enable what people would usually do on TV, phone, etc. They didn’t wait for a problem, they just closed their eyes and imagined “what if …”. That is really the genius behind the Facebooks, the Nings, and the Xuropa’s.
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Posted under Xuropa, business, career, industry, marketing
This post was written by Michael Sanie on December 15, 2008
“We, as high tech professional, have been taught to believe that someone needs to have a need first, and then we’d create the solution.”
This is SO true. Finding a problem to solve is the basis of the standard business plan. Of calculating ROI for a new product or service. You need to know who your customer will be and what is the Total Available Market and how you are going to market and distribute and so on and son on … all before you start. I’ve seen good ideas die on the vine while marketing directors develop business plans and marketing requirements documents and all the energy goes out of the project before it starts.
What you are advocating is what I like to refer to as Field of Dreams marketing, after that line in the movie “if you build it, they will come”. Sometimes you just have a gut instinct (based on years of experience), a Blink moment, that tells you that you are on the right path. And you have to trust that the customers will come.
This goes against everything that people are taught in B-school, but it is the reality of the new economy and even the old. Talk to most successful entrepreneurs and they will tell you that almost every successful business is doing something different from what it originally set out to do. In other words, the problem they set out to solve is not the problem they are solving.
The other reality is that these new platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn and Xuropa are not really solving a problem directly. They are enabling new communication channels so that other people can connect and solve each other’s problems. For instance, with Xuropa, the EDA companies have a problem that they can’t reach customers cost effectively and the customers have a problem that they can’t access vendor data efficiently. Xuropa enables the EDA vendor and the customer to solve each other’s problem and move the ball forward.
The great thing about this kind of platform is that you don’t have to figure out all the problems ahead of time. Facebook couldn’t have imagined the types of interactions that are going on now. The genius of Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn was creating a clean, lightweight, easy-to-use, mobile accessible application and to put up little to no barrier to using it, so it can grow quickly. Xuropa should strive to be all these as well.