It’s pretty easy to spot tech that will be widespread vs specialized. A hammer is immediately big. A Doctor’s hammer, immediately small. Both are really valuable.

Unless you’ve lived it, it’s hard for most people to imagine just how desperate Enterprises are for something that saves them from cliche. It’s universally shitty being employee number 46,193. You quickly don’t care and you certainly don’t think you can change anything any more than you believe you can fix the government. It’s a globally understood, generalized pain that’s the very engine that drives Dilbert, The Office, and countless satire everywhere. The truth is, worker bees, managers and execs are bored reaching for the same tools the last 15 years. They’re sick of waking up and going into a real-world scenario filled with TPS Reports and the guy with the red Swingline stapler. They’re sick of being productivity integrators in the same way that as consumers we were sick of being system integrators during the reign of PC Economics. It’s not too funny when 80% of your day is spent in the Dilbert pool.

Given the enormity of this problem, enterprises are subconsciously kicking and screaming for the next big thing that gives some relief from all this and comes closer to making their work-life contemporary, as powerful and as fluid as the high-velocity consumer web they love at home. Do I think Social Business Software will flush Dilbert out of business? No way. Do I think it’s the next big thing Businesses will have on their desks everyday? Absolutely.  Unlike consumer tech that iterates so unbelievably quickly that it doesn’t even have a chance to Cross the Chasm wave, Enterprise tech won’t skip generations (from blogging to microblogging) because Social Business Software is a big enough macro-category that solves a big enough pain that it can host all sorts of innovation that lives within it.

To say that Enterprises won’t embrace this change, is ridiculously short-sighted. To say Enterprises will change as fast (or the way we want them to) is insanely selfish. A lot of pivoting and stalling occurs along the road to discovering how to chiropractically align people and product. But once that vibration is achieved everything seems like a foregone conclusion. Do you need CRM? It’s “duh” now, and was “maybe” ten years ago.

For some of you, this future feels like it will never come. If that’s you, look at how the world has responded to Apple, Wikipedia, and Google the last 10 years. Do you really think we’re talking about a long time? The toothpaste is out of the tube.

“What’s it for?” The Social Business Sinkhole says it’s Pivot Time.

The bigger question at the heart of all this is: What’s Social Business Software for? The industry has been aptly struggling to clearly answer this for years now. When early majority businesses outside of Silicon Valley look at this space, they see a lot of stuff that screams “don’t buy” because none of it clearly fits into their world and/or urgently solves the big problems that matter. And don’t forget, they’re still trying to learn the basics while a ton of us are already burnt out on the same old stories. We make it  hard on ourselves.

The longer it takes for us to communicate “what it’s for,” the longer it will take for Social Business to be on everyone’s desk. The longer we don’t match the pragmatism of the workplace– from what and how we sell, to the way customers want to buy, to the way they want to try it– the longer it will take for the required herds to form that pull the rest of the market forward. And, most importantly, this is a category that REQUIRES enterprises to understand and embrace an extremely significant change in their behavior (”so, how I DO Social Business?).”

We’re are deep in the sinkhole and it’s time to re-aim our efforts from geeks to golfers.  It’s pivot time. Time to climb the ladder: From targets, to messaging, to offerings, to pricing now is the time to re-focus, simplify and solve, solve, solve. There’s a big smelly delta between the sinkhole and a big, voracious market of customers. And there’s not much time.

Off the bat, here are some things that need to change:

• Language: No matter how much we love it, the word “social” does not mean business. And what’s with the focus on “conversations?” It sounds like a self-help group.
• Specific Targets: Pick some and understand how what you’re doing changes their everyday work life in a meaningful and measurable way.
• Actions: Stop focusing on building destination silos and start focusing on building actions that match people’s jobs. Answer the question, “what do I do with it?” in a meaningful way that maps to department’s existing budgets.
• Evangelism: This is your customer’s job now, not yours. Invest heavily in getting customer advocates. No one listens to you.
• Radical Simplicity: If I see another vendor’s website trying to hit me over their head with their feature stick, I’m going to ralph. Can you imagine Apple spilling out a datasheet on the iPhone4? Get your engineers out of the way. I don’t want to hear what ingredients you have.
• Elegance: When is the last time you tested your product to see how crazy-simple it was to use? To see how much people used the word LOVE when they used it? You have to be 10 times better than what they have today. Be immediately loved and immediately available or don’t be.
• Envy: Create it.
• Education: Who’s out there teaching Old School Companies how to be Social Businesses? Get granular.

I am out of the country for Enterprise 2.0 this year but I hope that this is the year that the industry pivots and quickly gets a playbook in place to go from geeks to golfers.

Founder’s Perception

Imagine yourself looking through an electron microscope. See all the enormous and breathtaking micro-landscapes? Now imagine that you believe these landscapes are planets and you’re the ruler (this land is your land). It’s pretty clear that if anyone else can’t see how different you are, then well…something’s wrong with them. Right?

Analyst’s Perception

Now imagine that Founders from across the galaxy invite you to their planet. So, you sit on their couch. Maybe, eat a carrot stick from the grocery platter they bought just for you. Some vacuumed. Others Febreezed. Many just have underwear strewn dorm-room style. Regardless, they put on a slideshow and you grade it based on your handy checklist. At least you get to look around for yourself and issue a report back to the other planet rulers.

Customer’s Perception

You’re busy. Like, really busy. Someone tells you that you should look at the sky. You glance up, see a lot of stars and wonder what the big deal is all about.

Exactly as has been reported, I’ve left Blackbox Republic as of February this year. It was a fantastic, bumpy ride and my first time building a company from absolute zero. Ultimately, I discovered I had conflicting ideas and expectations from those of our Angel investors’. Because of this, I self-elected to step down and hand the company over to different management so they could deliver something aligned more closely with what the investor’s want. So, the company continues, just without my involvement.

Hello World.

As it goes, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what I want to do next. I’ve decided to stay independent.

At some point in your life you learn what you’re good at and what you’re not. After having worked in software, hardware and media startups-to-F500 companies with Marketing, Ops, Biz Dev, Sales and CEO gigs, I’ve got both the muscle and scar tissue to know exactly how to generate value. How to intelligently breakthrough. How to manufacture growth.

So, I’ve opened a work/live space in San Francisco and will spend my time between there and Portland. I’ve begun talking to several interesting companies about advising in a variety of capacities. I’ve had coffee at Blue Bottle and hit a few places for girlie drinks. Enough said.

Who I’ll work with.

• Executive teams with the balls to separate from the herd.
• Companies looking to create short and longer-term breakthrough results.
• Teams who need to execute their unfair advantages.

Here’s how to contact me.

We got this letter from State Farm today. They proactively canceled our policy out of nowhere with the explanation that:

State Farm does not write businesses that develop social software that allow people to meet online.  The size and scope of the operation does not meet our underwriting quidelines

It’s hard for me to believe that State Farm wouldn’t underwrite Facebook, Twitter or any of the bajillions of consumer and business-facing companies making or using social software.

That said, here’s the rejection letter we got from them today. I know that they’re on Twitter as @statefarm. Wonder if their underwriters know. So much for being “like a good neighbor.”

I had a fun brainstorming session recently with Pierre Omidyar (@pierre). One of the things we talked about was how social software’s design has impacted how we behave online. The metrics companies choose to put in front of us are really meaningful since people optimize their behavior around those numbers.

In the consumer space–because most companies decide to follow Google into “free” land– they fall trap to optimizing for the dusty, century-old media business model: get a ton of viral, sticky eyeballs, then sell ad space.

Number of friends, is the metric on big kitchen sink networks like Facebook, Myspace, etc. On Twitter it’s number of followers. And you can see the resulting behavior every day. As soon as someone joins Facebook, it’s a race to add as many friends to cart as possible to get that number up. Just look at Follow Friday. There are even applications developed to help you game your Follower numbers, so you can quickly achieve the status of 23,083 meaningless followers.

Here’s why Friending and Following doesn’t work

Besides not actually being part of an environment tailor made around meaningful connections, the other reason that Friending, Following and other social number don’t work is that no one wants to give you negative feeback. Sure, Robert Scoble stopped following 106,000 people but most of us don’t want to unfriend, unfollow, or unanything that would send a negative message to someone else. So, while we focus on driving our social numbers up as high as possible, those numbers end up being meaningless. They don’t reflect reality. In real life people come in and out of our life. People we vouch for at one point, we can’t vouch for at another point. Our friends change. People we want to meet change. Because the kitchen-sink networks optimize their numbers around mass-use in order to sell advertising, they can’t solve this problem.

The numbers we track in our online/offline life

After my conversation with Pierre, it got me thinking about the numbers we track in our online and offline life. Since, Blackbox Republic is focused on fusing online/offline realities together, arriving at measurements that help enable meaningful relationships has been at the forefront of our development. The chart below is a visual representation of the delta between how we currently account for our online and offline social. As you can see, it’s pretty huge. I’d be interested on your ideas on how to bridge it more effectively.

One of our Founding members told me that “labels create drama,” and we agree. If there’s one thing we’ve overwhelmingly and consistently heard is that sexpositive people don’t want to be labeled. They don’t want checkboxes, or to live inside someone else’s rules. So inside Blackbox Republic you won’t find yourself having to put yourself in buckets. If you want to label yourself, fine. Do it. But we don’t make you.

Sometimes you don’t know how to fit in until you break out. — Michael Baczynski

2. Profiles

Profiles are tired, old snapshots of us. The web is littered with them.  Our public profiles are strewn everywhere like super-ego mini-marts. None of them are accurate. It’s the public, professional or dating us. Over and over. Who cares what your favorite movies are or where you went to high school.

3. Lookie-loos, tourists & creeps

Chris Rock once said that if a bullet costs five thousand dollars, there would be no innocent bystanders. When someone got shot, you’d know it was for a damn good reason. Since our members will pay to be there, they’re there for a good reason. Combined with our vouching system, that means that the tourists, creeps and lookie-loos will troll their usual haunts but not find a home in the Republic.

4. Hang ups

Sex-positive people don’t have an issue with their own sexuality or that of others. Odds are, if you are that comfortable with yourself, you don’t get over-heated about too much. In my experience, sex-positive folks have less overall hangups. If you can be open and accepting of the intimate parts of your and others’ life, you’re open to a lot.

5. Censorship

Blackbox Republic is a place for unbound self-expression. A place to explore your alter-egos. We’ve joined a ton of sites in the last few months and are surprised how heavy handed and micro-managed their administration is. There are member agreements that force you to agree to never name another competing website. The Admins delete, edit, and/or move member’s content. No doubt, dating and sex sites are used to a lot of bad behavior by their very definition.

6. Store

There are millions of storefronts all over the web. The last thing you’ll find in Blackbox Republic are more shopping carts. There are no product directories, or browsing the isles.

7. Ads

Don’t we get assaulted with ads enough in our public life? As innovative as the web is supposed to be, it’s really just the same old media model of “free” to get the eyeballs and sell ads. You won’t find that inside Blackbox Republic.

8. Public life

Blackbox Republic is a private community. That means it’s not for prying eyes, search engines, or career-ending accidents. Your life is our secret.

9. Boring people

Ours is a creative, right-brained crowd. You can bet that since everyone who’s there is serious about being there and as everyone is sex-positive, that there will be no shortage of amazing people. You won’t find depressing newsfeeds, get poked, have a drink thrown at you or get caught up in a Vampire contest.

10. Only sex

Blackbox Republic is a community where–yes–sex will happen. So will friends, dating, and marriage. It’s about your whole personal life, not just your sex life.

I’ve learned a lot since that post. Especially about bravery. By bravery, I  mean, pulling away from the crowd to face serious danger or pain. It’s one of those things, like most, that’s easy to armchair quarterback from the pack, but until you’ve done it– professionally or personally– you can only pretend to know it.

New companies face this every hour. The rest of the market says, “stop. you will get eaten.” You must be crazy, you will fail, close, never make it. Sometimes other companies even try to attack, to try to stop  you. The same thing can be said personally, when you pull yourself away from your group. They wonder what’s wrong with you, question you and try to pull you back to the norm.

You know those helicopter shots of herds of animals on the Discovery Channel?

As soon as you see one of those animals veer off, you think, “that’s the one that will die.” And you’re right. The company or person who veers off, risks everything. They’re a pinata for us to beat. And everyone loves candy. But breakthroughs come from ignoring that inner voice. The one that tells you to stay home on the couch. That tells you to lean back on your skis.

Below is one of my favorite blog comments. It was from Brent Britton in response to What it takes to Go Big. It’s amazingly well-written:

We’re stuck with some evolutionary baggage. We come from schools of fish and herds of animals for whom sameness is a survival skill and standing out from the crowd gets you eaten. So we have evolved a pleasure response to our own conformity. Fitting in to our peer group evokes a sense of comfort. Somewhere deep within our brains lies machinery that makes us really dig flocking.

Choosing to innovate requires overcoming the visceral desire to just sit down, shut up, and accept the status quo like everyone else.

Evolutionary disdain for radical behavior works outwardly too; we instinctively fear and loathe the behavior of our peers when it runs too far afield of the norm. And we have no qualms about letting them know it. This kinship-based weirdness suppressor is an evolutionary backup to keep us in line if we can’t self regulate as individuals. When people have too many different ideas, we think they’re crazy and we tell them so. Witness the very epithet “mad scientist.” Heck, witness how any group of teens treats a nonconforming peer. When Fulton proposed the steamboat, they called it Fulton’s Folly and they said it would never work. After all, why put a steam engine on boats when we’ve got reliable, centuries-old sails and oars? I have no doubt that when the first of our kind tried rubbing two sticks together in an effort to make fire, the rest of us stood around making fun of him and probably suggesting he was in league with Lucifer. We cannot conceive of our own place in a world that is marked by the change that innovations represent. Just ask the 19th century oarsmen that Fulton’s incredibly useful steam engine put out of work.

To innovate successfully, you’ve got to ignore the slings and arrows of critics. You’ve got to get yourself spending time around people who appreciate weirdness and smartness and who value new ideas because they are new. You’ve got to remember that pretty much everyone who ever said it couldn’t be done…about anything… was wrong.

My advice? Avoid lizardry. Yes, you’ve got this paleocortex in the back of your head insistently pumping out the signal that you are a fearful little ball of nerves just desperately trying to avoid getting eaten (because your paleocortex knows that you are crunchy and good with soy sauce). But for several hundred thousand years you and the rest of your kind have been toying with how to use this other rather nifty hunk of jelly right behind your forehead. The highly organized electrochemical potentials in your cerebral cortex have paved the way for all sorts of useful skills, such as choosing whether or not to supersize it, for example.

And also to decide whether or not to actually give voice to the signals coming out of your lizard brain or push through them to become the star you are, star.

Your evolutionary fears are but a subset of the whispering winds luffing through your sails. Choose to ignore them and boldly go.

In starting Blackbox Republic, I remember our PR Agency asking me if I was ready for all the personal and professional attacks I’d receive. They warned me that all the vocal nuts, from the Conservative Right to Joe Blow, would shake their evangelical sticks at me, call everyting I’m doing into question and yell foul. I told them what I’ll tell you. I believe, like they believe. Just in something different. I can’t think of anything better to do than to break through. To start something meaningful. To find your tribe-mates, your “company.” No matter how small or big. Eaten or not.

What’s a social nichework? It’s (a) choosing a target market and (b) building social software that’s tailored for them. “Social networking” is a technology meant for everyone. Social nicheworking software, isn’t. And there’s a pretty big chance that the first niche we’re building for, isn’t for you.

Blackbox Republic: Where do we (some of us) put our personal life?

Here comes the part where I lose some of you. Maybe even most of you.

Why? Because I’m going to say the word, “sex.” Worse, I’m going to keep talking about it. The #2 question: What’s Blackbox Republic? Easy. It’s a membership-based online/offline community for sex positive people to share their personal lives.

The #1 question is: What’s sex positive? No matter what I say at this point, a lot of you will hear “internet sex site.” Or porn. Or a hookup site. And I’m cool with that. Rock on with your giggly, bad self. You don’t need to get it.

For the rest of you open to the idea, “sex positive” means sexuality isn’t, and shouldn’t be, a big issue. By that I mean, you live your life being completely open about who you are. Even at the most intimate levels. And you like to connect with other people like that, too. If you’re sex positive, you’re a right-brained, creative person who doesn’t live life by someone else’s checklist. I think April’s post and video does a good job outlining the addressable market. The only thing I’d add to her post is that you can be happily married or 75yrs old or straight, bi, gay, poly, chocolate or mango and still be sex positive. Simply, sex positive is love positive.

So, why did I pick it? Simple answer: I believe in the sex positive community. I’m a part of it.

This is a picture taken the moment the company started.

This is the Temple at Burning Man. It’s an amazing structure covered in hand-written prayers. As April and I sat there, we watched people and talked about the event. We spent most of our time talking about relationships, and how different they were at the event compared to the daily world.

We realized that two big things were happening:

1. People made meaningful connections.

When people spend $200-$300 on a ticket, $2,000 on an RV, tons of money on food, clothes, and spend a ton of time getting there, they’re buying a journey. They are there for the experience. They know many things will happen. But they want to be around people like them, around the freedom of expression, and around the connected whole. You can’t tell who’s a CEO or Janitor, there is no materialism, or agendas. Besides Second Life (which was also inspired by Burning Man), we couldn’t think of another place online that was focused on having a journey vs focusing on the end-results.

2. The “Margarita Moment”

The other thing that was inspiring was just how much the giving mentality at Burning Man connected everyone. One day, April and I were on an art car in the middle of the hot, open desert and a man on a bicycle rode up  and asked us if we’d like a frozen margarita. He poured us one and then drove off. It was the perfect gift at the perfect time and we didn’t ask or have to do anything for it to happen. We call it the “Margarita Moment.” We actually even took a picture of it.

The drive home was 17 hours. We talked about online relationships the whole time.

The big questions we asked was why couldn’t something like Burning Man be available for everyone all the time ? When we finally got back we looked at where meaningful relationships and gifting currently occurred. And we looked for a place that united the sex positive community.

1. The perpetual, public Facebook reunion

When I got back from the event, my friends began tagging pictures of me wearing a tutu and goofing off at Burning Man and I found them a while later all over my Facebook profile mixed in with my work pictures. I don’t know about you, but I barely know all my “friends” on Facebook and Twitter. Oh, and true story, this week, my electrician friended me on Facebook.

2. Dating sites: People as produce

Who would know how to develop online relationships better than the dating industry? That’s the next thing we looked at. Unfortunately, we found a market that was 15 years old and suffering from massive idea bankruptcy. The notion of whipping out your credit card to pay for a chemistry test, love, a date, sex is totally broken. Most of these sites (which I’ll show you soon), treat people like produce. You’re meat. And people are shopping you. The whole thing is a carry over from newspaper personals and needs to die.

3. Gifting at ‘ye old online vendors

What does eCommerce have to do with this, you ask? Well, it was the only thing to look at for online gifting. And in doing so, it struck us that it, too, is remnants of a 15 year old post online-gold rush era. To gift someone, you have to leave the online social situation, drive your computer over to an online store, get a username, password, verify email, find crap, add it to your cart, call your friend up, get their address (as if you’re not sending them something), etc etc. It’s very unlike the Margarita Moment. There’s nothing social or gift-like about it.

The Perfect storm

This “add to cart,” transactional online reality dominates the web and is need of a makeover. The fact that (1) there weren’t any Social Nicheworking software companies (2) there wasn’t a trusted place for sex-positive people to share their personal life and (3) the online relationship market was a mess made this the perfect storm for Blackbox Republic to be formed. We raised $1M from angels in the sex-positive community with very little effort.

So, now it’s time to go big in a completely different way.

Change your feed readers, this blog is no long about Enterprise 2.0. It’s now about creating a new category: Social Nicheworking. You can bet I’ll be talking about what we’re building solve all of this. I look forward to taking some of you on that journey and to opening up conversations with a completely new set of people as well.

I’ve never had the experience of walking into a company and being inspired, then leaving a company four years later and being just as inspired, if not more. But Jive has been that for me. I’ve never learned as much as I have in my years there. Or worked with amazing people like Dave Hersh (you can read his post about my departure here), Matt Tucker, Bill Lynch and the rest of the team.

Jive has been that magical connection between a market opportunity, a company and a team of amazing individuals. I loved to work with them every day. It’s a team that wakes up and goes to sleep fighting to win. A team that shares a single vision and DNA. A team of people who has what it takes to go big. And that’s exactly what they’re doing.

Going big.

I don’t know how many of you have been lucky enough to have an experience like that in your careers. If not, I hope you do. Everything I’ve ever said about the company, I believe. And I’ve never been more proud of the people there and the mission they are on. I believe in them.

Every parent’s dream for their child is that they succeed beyond their wildest dreams. And every company needs different things at different parts of their growth. These are natural events, the coming and going of people in a company to help them achieve what’s needed. Jive has grown a ton. They have been proclaimed the leaders. They have defined a completely new category. And this, is an organic parting of ways for us. It’s the way companies are supposed to grow.

Chapter Big

It’s time for me to make more big things happen. To work on new things. To change the rules and create breakthroughs. I’ll be sharing more soon. But for now, just know that I’m leaving Jive at the end of the month. And join me in wishing them lots of luck.

I know I do.