The Mesh - Lisa Gansky [4]
Ofoto used the Web’s rich and growing digital infrastructure to share photos through people’s social networks of family, friends, and colleagues. As we hoped, Ofoto became very profitable while generating far less waste than the traditional film model. We sold Ofoto to Eastman Kodak, where it became the company’s core digital photo service. We grew to be the largest online photo sharing and printing service in the world, with well over 40 million customers.
Over the last several years, I’ve continued to bring a variety of Web and mobile services to market, while sustaining a concern about nature and communities. During my career, I have worked with the founders of Yahoo!, AOL, Google, PayPal, and Mozilla. Again and again I’ve watched the same process unfold: an innovator sees a new opportunity, exploits it, inspires others, and we all benefit.
In this fast-moving environment, it has become an essential business skill to recognize, well ahead of your competitors, the discontinuity that generates new platforms, models, expectations, and brands. See it first. Act. Win.
The Mesh is that next big opportunity—for creating new businesses and renewing old ones, for our communities, and for the planet. And it’s just beginning.
1
Getting to Know the Mesh
WHAT’S HERE: two parts data and a pinch of social; better things, easily shared; wear your mesh lenses; my date with mini mucho; welcome to the mesh buffet.
“What’s good for General Motors is good for the country,” CEO Charles E. Wilson bragged to a Senate subcommittee in 1953. Although popular cartoonist Al Capp subsequently used the comment to satirize Wilson as “General Bullmoose,” the boast was not unfounded. GM reigned for decades as the titan of the leading industry, envied for its brand and business model. Three years after Wilson testified, Fortune magazine began publishing their list of the five hundred largest corporations in the United States. General Motors came out on top, and stayed there for the next twenty years. For another twenty-six years, GM vied with two other auto-related corporations, Exxon and Ford, for the top spot. When GM was forced to beg Congress for a bailout in late 2008, and then went into bankruptcy, it drew the curtain on an industrial model, centered on cars, that had dominated business for much of the twentieth century.
Meanwhile, far from the national spotlight, a different kind of car company was quietly breaking business records. That company, Zipcar, had established itself in less than nine years throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe. From its inception in 2001, Zipcar had one of the decade’s fastest growth rates. Revenues doubled and tripled in the second and third years. In 2009 it generated over $130 million in revenue, up over 30 percent from the previous year.
Zipcar is a near perfect example of a successful Mesh business. It doesn’t make, sell, or repair cars. It shares them. The Boston-based company was the brainchild of two friends who first met in kindergarten. While sitting in a café in Berlin in 1999, Antje Danielson saw signs for a service that shared cars. She became interested and then enchanted. She discovered that the service was easy to use and made enormous sense. Unlike traditional rental car companies—an old-fashioned share platform—the cars could be conveniently located and distributed throughout the city. You could locate and reliably reserve the precise car you wanted on the Web, and use it for an hour or for a day or more. That made the service practical for ordinary day-to-day use, not just for travel.
When she returned to Cambridge, Antje shared her discovery with her friend, an MIT business school grad. “A lightbulb went off in my head,” says Robin Chase today. “I thought: This was what the Internet was made for.” From that conversation, the two made plans to launch what was to become the largest