There is a new class of ventures emerging. They’re not focused on creating the next profitable widget. Their core purpose is about empowering people with tools, knowledge, social connections to live a better life and fulfill their dreams.

The currency of their value creation is broader than just along the economic spectrum. They are about unleashing the abundant resource of human potential and social capital.

This is a transformative departure from most organizations whose fundamental currency is economic capital. Given this, there’s bound to new ways of organizing, sharing resources, knowledge, tools and people. Social capital is fundamentally positive sum, and therefore potentially abundant, as it grows in value the more it’s used. Whereas organizations based on economic capital predominantly engage in pure quid pro quo, zero-sum exchanges of value.

I’m not sure what all the implications of this are, but I think we should try very hard to figure it out.

Here are some thoughts on why there are probably new organizational possibilities:

I think there’s a lot of potential to take many of these type of projects and create an organization similar to YCombinator but for projects centered around “unleashing human capital”.

This consolidation and focus around a single brand could create a rising tide that lifts all of our work by focusing energy around what these new class of companies need to be successful which could include things like more effective PR, fundraising, and most importantly, collaboration. I think by bringing projects and people together in this fashion there’s an opportunity to rethink some fundamental assumptions about work, business and value creation. Experimenting with some loosely organized uniting brand allows us to begin how to build these structures in way that could accelerate the trajectory of all the projects it touches.

This is a project my friends and I will be working on over the next year or two. If this is something that interests you, let me know.

In a previous post I described market evolution as follows:

But once there are lots of teams executing on a new opportunity, most of the battle from a macroeconomic perspective has already been won, it’s just a matter of which individual player will earn the spoils (and how long they can maintain relevance before a competitor overtakes them or the market becomes commoditized). Fact is, there were many search engines and social networks before Google and Facebook. The markets they operate in were big enough that inevitably an industry giant would emerge who would be able to use the lucrativeness of the market to generate a runaway positive feedback loop up until saturation. Though not inevitable, it would be very hard for Facebook and Google to screw up and concede supremacy in their primary markets. But it is probable a new company will beat them to the new markets they try to extend to. For more on the power of markets see Marc Andressen’s post, the founder of Netscape and now Ning, on why the market is the only thing that matters and when it is big enough it will practically drag companies to a solution.

Once the timing and conditions are ripe there will be enough people trying to tackle the clear billion dollar markets that somebody will get the execution right. The startup ecosystem is that good at providing all the puzzle pieces!

Future billion dollar companies will ride trends such as the move to the cloud, mobile information, personalization utilizing our preferences and social graph, and new data capture enabled by the falling cost and size of sensors.

Two more examples of byproducts. Focusing on byproducts makes you less likely to achieve them. Instead focus on what the real end goal should be.

I recommend first reading the original post where I discussed byproducts: Why You Can’t Get More Happiness, Money and Love By Pursuing Them Directly

Learning from Failure

You’re first startup venture will probably fail and it will be a great learning experience that will increase your chances for being successful on your second venture. But you can’t go into that first venture with the expecation that will just be a great learning experience, because then it probably won’t even be a good learning experience, otherwise you’ll quit too early. Only if you have the unwavering irrational belief that this venture is destined to succeed will you push hard enough and long enough to learn some real lessons.

Competitive Spirit

Passion for athletics commanded the largest portion of my free time from the time I was 5 to the time I was 17. At some point around 13-14 I had some pretty tough injuries that were misdiagnosed with compounding lingering effects. (I’ve described that in some more depth in this post)

At some point around 17-18 I wound down my competitive athletics commitments so I could focus on my burgeoning entrepreneurial interests. Now that I have some distance from my athletic career I can see how much I’ve gained from sports.

The other day I was watching a Giants game and they were doing a brief promotional segment on a Giant’s sponsored program for getting more young girls involved in sports. They started listing all the virtues of playing sports, “competitive spirit, toughness, teamwork, ambition…” but hearing those traits rattled off made me want to snicker. In my experience, the only players who touted those virtues as reasons for playing weren’t very good. And the coaches who talked about those virtues to their players usually had bad teams. The good coaches and athletes focused on what they needed to do to get better, what they needed to do to win games and more importantly win championships.

I wasn’t driven by developing toughness, or being a team player. I wanted to win, and I wanted to realize my dreams of playing professionally. But I knew winning required mental toughness and involving my teammates. And along the same lines, you don’t pitch teamwork for teamwork’s sake, you pitch teamwork because it’s required to win.

You don’t chastise cheating, because it’s morally wrong, you don’t do it because it can hurt you chances of winning. Minor discrepenciases of what’s allowed by the rules are fine, and you have to weigh the risk/reward consequences of doing something unallowed.

But after my urge to mock the girls baseball promotional subsided, I realized I have all those traits, and they’ve carried over to other areas of my life even though I’ve stopped playing sports 6 times a week. And while instincts and genetics deserve credit for the existence of these traits, my engagement in sports nurtured and developed these traits.

But the reason I had such a negative visceral reaction to listing the virutes, comes down to byproducts and end goals. Teamwork, toughness, and ambition are all byproducts and by even considering them or any other byproduct as a valid end goal you make them less likely to occur.