Less than two weeks later, I logged into Pandora, an excited beta tester and fell in love. It was simple and elegant and helped me rediscover and discover music in an amazing ways. I read into the Music Genome Project and was totally inspired by their vision and dedication to the music they so lovingly delivered to me. Basically, they baked a deep level of delight right into Pandora. Everytime I logged on, I was delighted with discovery.

I wasn’t the only one. They were delighting beta testers everywhere…and soon, they were delighting the general public. That kind of love, I thought, comes from a pure place. This isn’t just a ‘cool product’ launch. Nope. There is something deeper here.

Then I met Tim. Tim Westergren is one of those ‘gentle people’ who have embraced higher purpose to their own ego detriment. When you talk to him, he not only listens, but he absorbs…he looks deeper into the conversation. Maybe it is because he is a musician and artist first, but it almost feels as if he can see behind what you are saying. Tim believes in what he is doing at an amazingly admirable level. I can’t recall exactly, but I think he went a couple of years without pay so that the Music Genome Project would stay alive.

Tim is one of those people that inspires you to become a better person.

Then I met Tom. Now, Tom Conrad is a more recent addition to Pandora, but has every bit of heart and soul that Tim has. You wouldn’t know that he wasn’t with the project from the beginning. His dedication and love for what they are doing was equally inspiring. Tom is the kind of guy who laughs genuinely and opens himself up easily. We liked him instantly and consider him a friend.

Since then, I’ve met several other members of the Pandora team and each one of them have been equally dedicated to user-experience and the Music Genome project. Individual stories inspire them…not numbers. Tim now travels across North America, visiting user communities at various universities, telling the Pandora story and listening to theirs. He carries every one of those stories with him back to the team who develop their direction around complex user narratives.

Do they care about money? Sure…they have investors and bills to pay. But they also know that following their dream, listening to their community and dedication to their higher purpose of giving musicians the opportunity to be discovered has to be their focus in order to succeed.

So, that thing that I couldn’t quite put my finger on before? Yep. Higher purpose. And guess what? Tens of millions Millions of people are creating their Pandora personalized radio stations. They aren’t focused on quantity, but just in case you are…

You see, all sorts of hubub goes around in the media (new and old) when ‘big’ stuff happens. Someone gets millions in funding or someone gets bought for billions. But what everyone keeps missing is that there are a huge number of really rockin’ companies being launched without any intention of doing either of those things. These are the ‘unsung’ heroes of the Web 2.0 era.

These companies care about quality over quantity. These bloggers have small, dedicated audiences and could care less about their T’rati ranking or page views. These startups are bootstrapping themselves to be the true disruptors – those who are challenging the very notion of ‘success’ and the core ethics of business. They want to build their companies and products right instead of flipping.
So, when Ev announced Obvious Corp and their move to buy back their assets Odeo and Twitter, my heart skipped a beat. Could this be another sign that the scales are being balanced? To me, Obvious was sending out the message to other startup entrepreneurs that there is no shame in bootstrapping. There is no shame in putting users ahead of VC interests. We can and will build businesses out of something real.

For those of you who don’t Twitter, it is helpful to know how involved Ev is in ‘testing’ out his own software. I’ve talked about how involved over at HPC. He is truly part of the community he serves. This type of energy and dedication can’t be faked. I truly believe that the reason Ev’s projects have been so successful (even the ‘unsuccessful ones’ are successful by reasonable standards) is because of his involvement with his user community. In the case of Odeo (that he proclaimed a failure), he admitted that one of his downfalls was that he wasn’t a podcaster himself, therefore, he didn’t know who his audience was. I don’t hear that from many CEO’s.
I really, really loved David Galbraith’s analysis of Obvious Corp:

If you can’t IPO or sell then what alternative is there?The Sustainable Model

The alternative is to question the whole notion of exit and to build a real company.

When I was an architect, you didn’t set up a practice on your own to ‘exit’, you setup to build a company that made a profit and made products that made the environment a better place along the way – a sustainable enterprise. The whole idea of ‘exit’ in the context of building an architecture firm, or a legal or medical practice is preposterous.

The reason why tech. companies have fallen into the mindset of raise money and exit, ‘live fast and sell young’ is that they traditionally needed large amounts of capital, both to bootstrap and later to fuel growth. They needed to gain ‘market share’ dictated by quantitative things like price rather than intangibles such as good design . But that has changed.

David is so right. We ran into this issue when we started Citizen Agency. People were so ensconced in this ‘raise capital, build and flip’ model that they couldn’t comprehend the business model of a consultancy. They’d ask, “What is your business model?” We were floored. Only in the Valley.

The funniest part of this situation is that so many people still don’t understand why Obvious Corp made this move. There are a few people who have surmised that they were trying to regain respect from the VC’s so they could raise more money in the future. Others tied it back to Ev’s Future of Web Apps talk when he discussed the failings of Odeo – thinking that this would help ‘clear his conscience’. Even their own VC’s are taking it as a signal of respect towards backers. I’m not saying that Ev and Biz don’t respect their backers, but I would bet that buying back Odeo and Twitter had very little to do with a hat tip to their investors and more to do with taking back control of their own future.

And what will that control get them? The ability to focus on what matters to them the most:

…I just wanted to create a company that would be as much fun and as fulfilling as possible. Fun in work to me means a lot of freedom, and ton of creativity, working with people I respect and like, and pursuing ideas that are just crazy enough to work. I don’t want to have to worry about getting buy-in from executives or a board, raising money, worrying about investor’s perceptions, or cashing out.

Craft. Community. Creativity. Sounds like a bright future to me.
That is why Obvious Corp is our Upstanding Citizens of the week. Thanks for the inspiration!

From time to time, we’d like to chronicle those who inspire, excite and offer leadership for citizen agents like us, here on our blog. Feel free to play along too and tag your posts with “Upstanding Citizens” as these folks tend to deserve more recognition than they sometimes receive.

To start, I’d like to excerpt some pieces of a recent interview with Dan, Nathan and Steven from silverorange, a small web development and design firm from PEI whose clients include Mozilla (which is where I first encountered them), Digg and others.

Robert Paterson: So what then is your organizational goal?

SilverOrange: I think that it is to foster an organization that supports our “Whole Lives”. To create and maintain a platform that enables each of us to do the things that we want to be able to do. To set in motion an organization that would be self-sustaining and that we can rely on to support all of us for a long long time. So we definitely do not set out to conquer the world which is implicit in the Total Financial Growth Model. Nor did we sell out in the boom and just take the money.

The interview continues and concludes with:

Robert Paterson: So now the big question — how in this unusual culture of fierce mutual support and accountability do you relate to your clients?

SilverOrange: We will no longer act as merely a supplier. We seek clients who wish to partner with us. This is more than words. In commercial sites we offer the site as a foundation of a contract where we both act to improve the tool to grow the results of the clients and hence for our business. We share in the growth that comes for using our tool. We don’t sell a product we sell our ongoing expertise in an area where we help a business grow their web business. In this way we mirror with our clients what we do at home with each other.”

“We aim for sustainability and hence growth that can be relied on. We tell each other the truth – especially about doing it right rather than easy. We respect the other person’s skills that are often not our own and we rely on those that have the knowledge to take the lead. We share the risks and the rewards. We in effect own a piece of each other. We have fun and we like each other.

Oh, and if that sounds as good to you as it does us, they’re hiring.