I recently posted about on demand application development – the upcoming disintermediation of many of the current layers that stand in between idea and production. After reading this post from Fred Wilson, I’m thinking my post may have been short-sighted. The democratization of app development is one thing, but maybe an entire new class of business model is about to emerge.
Groups often form temporarily to get things done. Community-improvement type initiatives, school projects, support groups. In nature too – birds joining a flock, fish in a school. Not so much in the business world, at least not at the corporate level. Yet.
Entire verticals are moving away from models of scarcity. Media and news are the easy examples – the web and friends destroyed the old models in which content creation, production, marketing and distribution were scarce, centrally-controlled entities. That was low hanging fruit, ripe for disruption. Where do we go next?
In Fred’s post, he talks about how Pair Up enables startup founders to come together. That got me thinking – what about the rest of the startup? Startups, at least software based ones, have already been disrupted by the web paradigm – e.g. today’s tiny startups on shoestring budges.
What if we go a step further – a business and operational model that is constructed as transient from the start – groups of people hyperfocused on a specific and bounded mission. Startups sometimes start similar to this today but they often evolve into less disruptive orgs – they turn into companies – partially because that was the vision at conception. But companies are not as necessary or beneficial when we move away from models of scarcity. How would a business model evolve differently if the vision was not to turn into a company?
A new model could be to plan from the start to assemble a flock that will build a product or service and then disband. The members then join new flocks. Startups, models and software would emerge to take care of the operational and support layers (which often isn’t the strength or desire of the original flock anyways). Startups and solutions that build the business model wrapper around on-demand, crowdsourced, peer-produced app development.
Part of the new world is you don’t always need a company to do what you used to need a company to do. I’d argue the company gets in the way in some cases. Inefficiencies like this are opportunities for disruption, perhaps at the overall business model level.
