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Startups are great, but we can learn a lot from “end-ups,” too

John Maeda, Guest Contributor — Sun, 03 Feb 2013 18:30:07 +0000

At last week’s DLD Conference in Munich, I had the opportunity to sit onstage with the co-founder and CPO of Airbnb, Joe Gebbia. We started by discussing the unique creative culture at Rhode Island School of Design, where Joe went to college, and where I currently serve as president. Joe shared some of his secrets of being a successful designer-founder, and then turned the tables and asked me what it’s like to run a 136-year-old institution like RISD.

As often happens these days, the Twitter summary of my answer was perhaps more articulate than my answer itself:

@johnmaeda: “Today end-ups — old companies and institutions — want to be become more like start-ups. Yet they are classic and important.” via @AnnePascual

@johnmaeda: “Start-ups want to end up successful. Both want to be great.” via @Sloane

I sit on the board of a couple of start-ups (like Sonos and Quirky), but I spend my days running RISD – what I call an “end-up” in contrast with a start-up. I also used to be at the academic equivalent of a start-up, the MIT Media Lab, which was founded in the 1980s (30 years is young in academic terms). Now, the term end-up may sound pejorative, but in fact I mean the opposite: If you think about it, the end goal for most start-ups is to eventually become an end-up, which is to say successful and long lasting.

At the same time, you increasingly hear that large corporations and institutions now wish to act more like start-ups, in order to innovate and become more agile. My friend Jocelyn Glei, editor-in-chief of 99U, remarked recently how “start-up culture” is so much more coveted and in the zeitgeist than it was 10 years ago; prior presidents simply didn’t talk about start-ups like Obama does.

(As an interesting side note, this analogy works for countries as well. European nations like France are the great end-ups of civilization. The U.S. was a start-up that is now coping with becoming an end-up. And China is an end-up that feels like a start-up again.)

Here are some of the crucial differences between start-ups and end-ups:

Start-ups	End-ups
Want to be something	Already are something
Agile	Stable
Culture is forming	Culture has formed
Have little	Have lots
Have little to lose	Have lots to lose
Try something for the first time	Tried everything and know what works
Unproven	Proven
Do what needs to get done	Clear roles and responsibilities
Flat structure with empowerment	Hierarchical structure with rules
May come and go	Stand the test of time
Heterarchy	Hierarchy

Start-ups have little, but also little to lose

By definition, customers aren’t drawn to start-ups because of a trusted legacy or brand. So they must prove their worth to each and every new customer and get their name out without a well-resourced marketing machine behind them.

End-ups with strong brands that draw customers in, however, can become hesitant to act for fear of tarnishing or altering that brand. Start-ups have no choice but to act, and act fully – it’s the only way they’ll survive.

Change comes naturally to a start-up

A start-up is like a baby growing up: It needs to change and grow to become itself. Start-ups often dream of having the strong internal cultures, passed-down stories, and shared history that you commonly find in end-ups and that guide their decisions.

But change is awkward to an end-up, much like it can be for a grown adult trying to reimagine him/herself. It’s often necessary for end-ups, but it’s never easy.

End-ups have resources; start-ups have commitment

At end-ups, employees have well-defined roles and responsibilities. In the best case, that ensures that things are done efficiently. In the worst case, though, it can inhibit people from taking on new responsibilities with agility. At a start-up, it’s all-hands-on-deck to make sure things get out the door, even if it’s sometimes unclear whose hands are doing what and chaos ensues.

And it’s important to note that it’s the stories and legends of the great end-ups that inspire most great start-ups – think of HP, Apple, IBM. Rather than assume that all end-ups are decaying dinosaurs, we must acknowledge that each is the envy of the other in some respects.

End-ups have learned to manage scale, and have accumulated wisdom over time; start-ups have the benefit of the agile beginner’s mind. The challenge for both is to seek greatness by learning from each other.

John Maeda is a graphic designer and artist, and is president of Rhode Island School of Design. Follow him on Twitter @johnmaeda.

Photo courtesy of Anettphoto/Shutterstock.com.

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Good design can improve leadership by making big data accessible

Stacey Higginbotham — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 20:56:26 +0000

After a lesson in typography and an explanation of his lifelong passion in bringing technology and design together, John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design, laid out his view of the future challenge facing leaders now that social media and technology have overturned the traditional company hierarchy. Fortunately, the solution to that challenge appears to be a applying good design to a lot of data.

The crux of the leadership problem as Maeda sees it is that the hierarchical format with CEOs at the top and layers of management below them has been upended. “That hierarchy has been hurt indefinitely because anyone can talk to anyone else,” he said at the GigaOM RoadMap conference Monday in San Francisco. “You can’t control the flow of information between people anymore. There is a heterarchy and the CEO has been pulled into the middle of that.”

He implied that this opens up opportunities for creative people to become leaders, but he directly stated that creative people could help make any leader in this new heterarchical structure more effective. The secret to effectiveness in this brave new management world is making all of the data a leader has at their fingertips easily understandable, and to use design to connect concepts and relationships amid a mess of information.

So for Maeda, the question is both how do you lead in this new age of the heterarchy as well as how you can use design to support the leader. But in the 15 minutes before he got to that point, he led a fun intro into the importance of typography as an example of how design puts form to content, classified the difference between startup culture and larger company culture (he calls those “end ups” as opposed to startups,) and offered a book recommendation. As as one would expect, his slides were awesome. So check out the video for an entertaining talk and for startups out there thinking about data visualizations, check out his last few minutes to understand visually how design and data can aid leaders. Any company who can build those links will make a mint.

Check out the rest of our RoadMap 2012 live coverage here, and that video recording of the session follows below:

Watch this video for free on GigaOM

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Announcing RISD President John Maeda to speak at RoadMap

Katie Fehrenbacher — Fri, 19 Oct 2012 17:31:00 +0000

We’re super excited to announce that the president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda, will be giving a talk on the future of design, leadership and connected culture at our RoadMap event taking place on November 5th in San Francisco. RoadMap is a day-long event that will take a deep dive into the idea of design in the age of connectedness, focusing on how user interfaces and user experience are the keys to delivering meaningful experiences in the connected age.

If you don’t know Maeda, he pioneered computer-based visual art at the MIT Media Lab and his work appears in the Museum of Modern Art. Now as the head of Rhode Island School of Design, he is pushing forward the boundaries of expression, design, connected culture and leadership. He’s given numerous TED Talks on themes like Designing for Simplicity, and his Journey in Design and recently wrote an article for GigaOM on how “design is both the insanely radical and the passionately incremental.”

Maeda wrote:

In the year since the passing of Steve Jobs, design has experienced a moment — a renaissance. Walter Isaacson’s biography cemented the fact that Jobs’ unusually acute passion for both art and design within the tech industry was the key to its dominance today. Design-driven startups, including Rhode Island School of Design’s own Airbnb, are garnering much more attention in Silicon Valley and the more design-driven New York tech scene.

Design is emerging as a key focus for today’s web, mobile and gadget creators. That’s why at RoadMap we’re bringing together both the thought leaders who are creating tomorrow’s connected products, and those who are dominating the connected industry today. Speakers at RoadMap will include:

Perry Chen, CEO, Kickstarter
David Karp, Founder and CEO, Tumblr
Ben Silbermann, Co-Founder and CEO, Pinterest
Kevin Systrom, Co-Founder and CEO, Instagram
Evan Williams, CEO, The Obvious Corporation
John Maeda, President, Rhode Island School of Design
Yves Béhar, Founder, fuseproject
Stefan Olander, VP, Digital Sport, Nike
Tony Fadell, Founder and CEO, Nest
Dave Gilboa, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, Warby Parker Eyewear
George Blankenship, VP, Worldwide Sales and Ownership Experience, Tesla Motors
Alex Ljung, Founder and CEO, SoundCloud
Katia Beauchamp, Co-Founder, Birchbox
Steve Case, Founder, Revolution
Paul Mascarenas, CTO and VP, Ford Motor Company Research and Innovation
Oren Jacob, CEO, ToyTalk
Jennifer Pahlka, Founder and Executive Director, Code for America
Bobby Podesta, Head of Creative, ToyTalk
Scott Wilson, Founder, MINIMAL

There’s a limited number of tickets, so buy yours now here. Come be inspired at RoadMap 2012 on November 5th.

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Upstart funds promising student startups — and not just in tech

Barb Darrow — Wed, 08 Aug 2012 13:00:38 +0000

A college grad with a computer science degree from a brand-name school typically has little trouble snagging a good job and perhaps even launching a startup — even in this tough economy. But there’s an untapped reservoir of creative talent in college– people that could build next-generation startups — that is getting lost in the shuffle.

That’s a resource that Upstart hopes to nurture by finding private funding and experienced mentors for young talent, says Upstart founder David Girouard, an ex-Google exec.

The goal is to enable people close to graduating who have good ideas for a startup to actually pursue them instead of taking a job that’s less inspiring but necessary to pay back the school loan debt loads that many students shoulder. (The average school loan debt for a graduating senior is just over $23,000 last year.)

“At Google we hired hundreds of great young people who couldn’t put together $30,000 to buy a car if their life depended on it without going into credit card debt,” Girouard told me in a recent interview. This funding can be used to pay for office space, staffing, the cost of living — whatever they need.

On Wednesday, Upstart will formally announce the program and introduce seven students funded under its pilot program along with 13 backers including Andy Palmer, a serial database entrepreneur and Frank Moss, professor at the MIT Media Lab, managing partner of Strategic Software Ventures, LLC, and a former exec at IBM and other tech companies.

Phase two of the program will start this fall at five universities—Arizona State, Dartmouth, University of Michigan, University of Washington, and Rhode Island School of Design. And there will be more to come, Girouard said.

Backing the person, not the project

There’s a couple of cool things about this model. First, Upstart doesn’t target the already sought-after computer science or engineering superstars from schools like Stanford and MIT. That is by design. “We wanted diversity,” Girouard said. “The early input is this could really work for artists and designers – people who could build their own sole proprietorship businesses.”

Second, recipients don’t have to cough up a huge chunk of equity in what they create. Investors actually buy into the person, not the project itself, in return for a portion of that person’s income over time, but there is a cap, Girouard said. “There’s an algorithm, for every 1 percent of your income you’re willing to commit, you can raise X dollars, with 7 percent being the cap. Depending on the school, your GPA, we can project your income out over 10 years. But you give up zero control, no equity in whatever you do,” Girouard said.

The model is reminiscent of medieval patrons who funded artists. “It’s like Kickstarter or Indiegogo but instead of backing an idea or project, you’re backing a person,” Palmer said in an interview.

Pairing mentors with entrepreneurs

That sounds like a win-win situation for prospective entrepreneurs who need funds and advice and for established business leaders who like to work with young people. But it’s bigger than that, says Moss. Startups create a huge proportion of new jobs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimate that 65 percent of job growth comes from companies with fewer than 500 employees.

“We have to experiment with new ways to empower grads to pursue their dreams and passions or our society is in trouble, “ said Moss said. Moss, as you might guess from his MIT affiliation, is not a fan of the notion proposed by VC Peter Thiel ~~Thiele~~ that school is a waste of time for true entrepreneurs. Students should go to school, but we also need to find a way for them to build companies — not just default to going to an investment bank or big company to pay the bills, he said.

Vincent Lucero, of the University of Washington, netted $25,000 to fund his startup Soaring Squirrels, which is building a mobile game that teaches kids about the environment as well as a gaming platform that will make it easier for developers to put games on all the major platforms easily and for users to move their saved games from device to device. Lucero and his partner are using the funding to pay for their graphic artist — they prefer “old school” graphics. He is also joining Google but will pursue the startup separately.

Nathan Sharp of Harvard got $50,000 to help pay his student loans and give him some breathing room to bootstrap his business — PayOrPass — an e-commerce platform that lets shoppers tag any product on any web page with “a non-binding best-offer bid.” PayOrPass then takes those sales leads and broadcasts them to its merchant partners who can fulfill the orders.

Since he was already well into development, he would have launched the startup regardless but the Upstart money gives him more time to find the right investors and to pay off some of his college loans.

You can read more about the Upstart program here on Girouard’s blog.

Soaring Squirrels Cast illustration courtesy of Marina Montes

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