HEDGE | Behind Entrepreneurs: The Multitude

Notes on my new book, week by week

By Nicolas Colin (Co-Founder & Partner) | The Family

This series is based on writings for my new book (code-named ‘HEDGE’) about liberalism and the Entrepreneurial Age. Each Monday (usually), I share ideas and sources related to the latest completed chapter. To be sure to be in the loop, you can subscribe to my weekly newsletter.

How customers rose as the main force in the corporate contract

The age of the automobile and mass production was dominated by employees. The Dark Ages of business strategy and global finance favored shareholders. Today’s technology companies are turning customers into the strongest party in the Entrepreneurial Age. Our age of personal computing and networks effectively provides new ways of empowering individuals in a way that will force liberals to think up new ways to protect the connected and empowered individuals against the risks of our age.

• Find out why technology companies do not pay shareholders dividends
• Discover the German exception: shareholders were never the dominant party

Why production and consumption are increasingly blurred

Individuals are no longer workers in one world and consumers in another . Rather, being a consumer now implies being a producer as well. Consumers create value in their daily use of applications, produce goods and services as amateurs and make some of their resources available for trade. These empowered and connected individuals form the “multitude”, i.e. a greater, autonomous power that companies must learn to harness if they want to fuel their increasing returns at scale and create value.

• Discover the Cluetrain Manifesto, the visionary text that theorized this paradigm shift
• Read about “Creating Value in the Age of Distributed Capitalism”

What’s a tech company, anyway?

Tech companies depend on the multitude. Enrolling users in the value chain creates a sense of community and makes them accountable for part of the business outcome. To keep growing, a tech company cannot rely on economies of scale and barriers to entry alone. In short, there are three criteria to define a tech company: its business model is marked by increasing returns, it provides its users with an exceptional experience and it collects user-generated data systematically to constantly improve the experience.

• Discover the “New Corporate Contract for the Digital Age”
• Read about how the multitude makes tech companies different

All related readings

• The Cluetrain Manifesto (Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls & David Weinberger, 1999)
• The Architecture of Participation (Tim O’Reilly, 2004)
• 1,000 True Fans (Kevin Kelly, 2008)
• What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software (Tim O’Reilly, 2005)
• The Age of Customer Capitalism (Roger L. Martin, 2010)
• Creating Value in the Age of Distributed Capitalism (Shoshana Zuboff, 2010)
• Why Technology Companies Loathe Dividends (Roger Cheng, 2012)
• The Economics of the Multitude (with Henri Verdier, 2012)
• We Need a New Language for the Collaborative Age (Nilofer Merchant, 2013)
• A New Corporate Contract for the Digital Age (2016)
• Germany’s Bizarre Version of Capitalism — where Bosses and Workers Actually Cooperate — is Winning (Matt Phillips, 2017)

HEDGE | My New Book, Week by Week

Thanks to Virgile Goyet, Kyle Hall, Laetitia Vitaud.