Coburn Ventures Podcast

Today we’re talking about community and business, and we have with us two business leaders who know loads about this topic: Peter Espersen and Darren Herman. Their experience on the topic runs deep, and both have extensive entrepreneurial experience, but they each have past roles that will help you connect to them - perhaps putting together that you have met them previously at one of our gatherings - and see why we immediately thought of these two for our conversation: Peter Espersen was Global Head of Crowd Sourcing and Online Innovation at Lego, and Darren for his role as VP of Product at Mozilla/Firefox. So I hope you enjoy this conversation between the four of us, now for you, on community in business.

Today, we present just a few of the ideas related to process that we know have helped our team find leverage in what we thought were unmovable parts of the investment process. Some of these changes will sound rudimentary at the onset. I challenge you to listen to these ideas with a "students mind", reviewing your process, how your team works and maybe, just maybe you will find one or two ideas in here that you’ll venture out and explore to increase conviction while saving time. Who knows what will happen?

Elliot Noss, CEO of internet company Tucows for just about 25 years, starts us off with a simple but reverberating statement: “the fundamental compact between employer and employee has changed”. There are so many related mutations of work, as he calls them, to consider. A few up shots that don’t do this conversation justice: Changes that will stick have cultural principles that were already underlying, and people, culture and mission are still the critical focus. Let’s hear more.

Picture a pie chart of your work week: what percent is your job, your vocation, or total waste? Let’s use this model to uncover possible changes in process and decision making.

As more of our work life is digitized, we do know now, or we will know the how, when, why and where of work... where we work best, with whom and for what purpose. But there is so much to understand and experience before we can know what that means for industries across many sectors. Let’s dig in with Greg Parsons.

Growth and value are simply boxes we put around two giant categories. It’s helpful for marketing purposes, and for investment process. So what gives? Well, we have been in a period of disequilibrium for over 25 years, and that disequilibrium has skewed massively to growth. Let’s dig in on what this means for process.

The “study of the mind” is now mainstream, but why is this important, and how far ahead are corporations and advertisers?

This student mindedness conversation will help us take a step back, exploring an attitude or approach that can be highly personalized. But what is it? What does it look like in active practice? Pip and Brynne discuss what it is snd why it comes up so often so that you can identify what elements might be helpful to your process.

We continue with biologist Maria Souza on complex systems. In Part 1 we discussed resilience as a key property of complex systems. Now we examine the role of internal feedback loops in resilience and how to identify the lynchpins that could help change your system.

Biologist Maria Souza introduces us to the core properties of complex systems: how to identify a resilient system, and how understanding the property of resiliency — which is neither good nor bad in and of itself — can help us identify effective cultures.