Going Meta

Going Meta

What if you could build a company, a pure virtual company, that helped build other pure virtual companies with team members all over the world entirely self motivated? Is that something you might be interested in? 

In today’s startup world we have extensive AWS services to help enable technical solutions. We have AngelList to help with fund raising and fill roles. We have GitHub, Bitbucket, Medium, Mattermark, MongoDB, Google Docs and a vast array of empowering companies and products that can help build a startup. 

What’s missing? VCs are still very geo focused. SV/SF still weighs heavily when it comes to building the most successful startups but there are limits to this. While a thousand cities can flourish to some extent, there are orders of magnitude more smart people out there who can’t find their niche. There is huge potential in perfecting a virtual solution with decentralized teams. 

How do you manage a virtual team? Painfully. Maybe you don’t. Enable and motivate. Self organizing. Give and record credit. Create todo lists, forums and wikis with public, private and group access. What else? I don’t have the complete answer yet. We never totally will. 

If you are going to build something and dedicate your precious time, it should be something meaningful and systemically important. I can’t think of a bigger idea.

How would one start? You need to build community and bootstrap. Build the tools needed to build the tools. You could co-opt existing tools but likely would deploy your own asap to ensure data privacy and ownership. Something like reddit + wiki.

On Medium