Following on from the conversations about Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, and Tom Friedman, here are the type of business models you want to be looking for.
A whole series of communities are going to be growing on the internet where new groups of people come together and solve problems collaboratively where an old institution used to exist. In 1925 the goal was to get a good territory and distribute for someone who manufactured a brand name product. That went for almost everything from car parts to legal advice. Take a look at where software is going and look for the older business models. They are crumbling everywhere.
In the advertising world, spending on advertising has been a percentage of our Gross Domestic Product (GDP) since the time of Ben Franklin. Some of the large newspapers used to clear billions of dollars on the classifieds alone. Now they keep a fraction of it. Have they gone away? No, they have moved to places the newspapers ignored until is was too late.
Your goal is to find where the growth is moving, and join those companies so you can get a quick start to your career, and get as much responsibility as you can handle as soon as you can.
On the Business Model Front, we have noticed that some really big companies are being built around something quite simple, we have come to call this the Grandparent Business Model because Grandparents do a great job of creating an environment where the parents and kids can be together, and in a sense they are just the community keepers. We have noticed friends like Andy Kurtzig (withwww.justanswer.com) and Rob Kelly (with www.ongig.com) building companies with this theme. If we all participate in communities, could you create one? Here’s our whiteboard wall art to capture it.
