Tag: collaboration

Back in 2000, B2B consortia marketplaces were all the rage. They quickly became popular in every industry segment possible. The premise was that the Web could enable a new level of collaboration among industry players to streamline business-to-business transactions, and eliminating redundant processes.

At the height of their popularity, there were close to 200 such initiatives, with hundreds of companies as their respective industry members. Following the dot-com crash, almost each one of these initiatives folded, for one reason or another, and only 2 survived. The theory of B2B marketplaces made a lot of sense. The practice and implementation were another story that was cut short, due to unrealistic assumptions, expectations, or not enough will power or budgets to see them through.

I’m giving this background as context for the flurry of blockchain-based industry consortia that are springing out today across the globe. I am both excited and cautious about this burst of activity. Excited, because these initiatives are elevating the blockchain’s agenda in the eyes of executives, industries and companies. Cautious, because I know that some of them will not succeed.

However, I am optimistic that the success rate record of the blockchain consortia will be much better than the fate of the dotcom B2B consortia initiatives.

So, I’ve compiled here a detailed list of the 25 significant consortia or group efforts that are known and are doing work to advance the state of blockchain understanding and implementation.

The scope of my work was:

Who are the organizations that have taken a collaborative approach to blockchain implementations and learnings?
Collect basic facts about them
Facilitate the following of their developments and progress
Map the activity
Share a Google Sheet of data

The interactive version is here. (this means you can click on each marker to reveal more information about each organization)

And here’s a link to the Google Sheet that I used.

Some facts about them:

25 global consortiums
13 in financial services, 2 in healthcare
10 in the USA, 3 in the UK
22 started in 2016
4 working on some aspect of standards
Average # of members in each: 25
Largest memberships: 100 (Hyperledger and ISITC)
Total number of participants: 550

Here is a Slideshare presentation that includes all the data.

State of Blockchain Consortia by William Mougayar – December 2016 from The Business Blockchain

Consortiums are hard. Pulling diverse companies to work together is not easy. You need disciplined processes, persistence, patience, a tolerance for some politics and lots of maturity.

At best, they level the playing field among participants and help to move forward collectively. Therefore, consortia work doesn’t offer a competitive advantage, which is why most participants have other blockchain initiatives in parallel.

I will make the following predictions for 2017:

The number of such initiatives will surpass 100 because many sectors and industries are still not represented.
At least 7 of these 25 will fold, or declare an end to their efforts, not necesarily as a sign of failure, but more to signify having reached their objectives.
At least 3 of them will fail while exhibiting visible signs of disagreements within their members
Only 4 will be seen as very successful, 2 of which have yet to be announced

No matter what happens, the consortia activity is worth following. If I missed any groups, please email me or let me know in the comments here, or on the sheet.

Good luck to all of them for being at the forefront of this important blockchain work.

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Venture Capital, Entrepreneurship, Marc Andreessen, B2B, SaaS, Growth Hacking, User Experience – Roundup #20, Nov. 24 2013

By William Mougayar

On November 24, 2013

In Advice, Week in Review

Startup Management is a manual selection of 15 article links from the hundreds of weekly articles being curated. Previous issues are available here. For regular updates, please visit the website’s River of news (as a stream), or Magazine view (by category).

Venture Capital and Global Ecosystem

A lot of good articles this week in the Venture Capital and global Ecosystem categories. Rather than list them here, here are the direct links for these categories: Venture Capital and Ecosystem.

Marc Andreessen

Here’s a transcript of an insightful interview of Marc Andreessen by Andy Serwer of Fortune, Inside the mind of Marc Andreessen. Must read. He talks about the state of IPOs, building long lasting companies, disruptive models, the shared economy, and where advertising and marketing are going.

B2B Marketing

There is a certain grind to B2B marketing in the early stages of growth. In Five Content Marketing Growth Hacks for Enterprise Startups, Ross Simmonds outlines 5 of these activities: 1) Webinars, 2) Presentations, 3) Videos, 4) Case Studies, and 5) Content.

VC/Entrepreneur Relationship

Brad Feld says to Create Structure out of the Gate and You’ll Thank Yourself Later, via a guest post by Ari Newman, where they advocate to treat your early debt investors like board members and institute structured governance expectations from them.

Raising Venture Capital

Alex Turnbull, CEO/Founder of Groove has 5 questions you need to ask yourself prior to taking VC money, in Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding. Bottom line is that your goals and the VC’s need to be aligned. There’s a good discussion in the comment section of that post, and on USV.com.

Employee Equity

Andy Rachleff of Wealthfront had a long post in First Round Review, The Right Way to Grant Equity to your Employees, where he lays out a process, some principles and formula. Fred Wilson responded, mostly agreeing with Andy, but pointing to a difference in how equity is to be calculated, in Employee Equity.

Product Management

Top Hacks from a PM Behind Two of Tech’s Hottest Products from First Round Review is a long read, but contains some really good nuggets of practical advice in product management from Todd Jackson who worked for Mark Zuckerberg and managed the fine line between Mark’s vision demands and the product development realities. “You can’t leave any chance for misunderstanding, or for even one person to walk away from a meeting with different conclusions.” And “When engineers are motivated, even if they run into something they don’t know how to do, they’ll say, ‘We can totally figure this out. We’ve got this.”

Collaboration

Ellen Gottesdiener and Mary Gorman explain How do you Turn Competing Stakeholders into Collaborating Product Partners. You’ll need to figure this out when you have customer partners, business partners and technology partners, each with diverging goals and priorities.

SaaS Strategy

There is a gem of a chart in this article by Indy Guha, The race for growth: Why SaaS marketers are feeling the pressure. Developed by Bain Capital Ventures, and named “The “Revenue Pit-Crew for Cloud Apps Growth”, the table breaks the key enterprise SaaS tools by the various needs and outcomes: 1) qualified leads, 2) initial buy experience, 3) churn reduction and upsell revenue, and 4) cash for growth management. Must read if you’re in the enterprise/SaaS market.

User Experience

How do you provide design feedback when a team gets together to review a product? Jake Knapp of Google Ventures has Nine Rules for Running Productive Design Critiques. Not surprisingly, tact is as important as substance. And Frank Guo says to Create Great UX in an Agile World by Conducting Lean UX Research, if you’d like to inject agility into the user experience process.

Growth Hacking

Brian Balfour outlines 3 phases of evolution in Traction vs. Growth. They are 1) Traction, 2) Transition, and 3) Growth. They correspond respectively to 1) product/market fit, 2) discovery growth levers, 3) turning up growth levers. It’s a great read, and includes the metrics you need to look at, for each phase.

Software Development Choices

Should you build mobile apps in native or cross-platform code? “40 percent of developers have started building native, only to switch to HTML5, and 31 percent have started building cross-platform, only to switch to native” says John Koetsier in HTML5 vs. native vs. hybrid mobile apps: 3,500 developers say all three, please. However, Ravi Pratap says there’s and alternative to responsive design, in Responsive Design vs. Adaptive Delivery: Which One’s Right for You? “With adaptive delivery, the most significant difference is that the server hosting the website detects the devices making requests to it, and uses this information to deliver different batches of HTML and CSS code based on the characteristics of the device that have been detected.” Finally, a third article from Abhay Parasnis on a related topic, Native, Web, Platform: What’s the best way to build a new app?, where he lays out the pros and cons of each approach, from a developer’s perspective. That SUMs it up! Don’t forget to share on Twitter, add us to your Feedly, forward to a friend, follow on Twitter, read in Flipboard, or just visit the website often and daily. To sign-up, please click here. William Mougayar Founder & Chief Curator Startup Management]]>

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