An introduction to the questions about leadership and management raised by new new research in cognitive neuroscience, by Executive MBA ESCP Europe faculty member Dr. Robert Piret.

Here I am talking about how businesses are using crowdsourcing. Being paired in the same video with Don Tapscott is pretty sweet.

Has anyone else ever seen a web company create an investor testimonial video like this before? Very interesting, I wonder what the goal was. Paging Mario Sundar

Update: Duh, they want to go public. I somehow missed that from the article I read. I wonder how startups could use these kinds of videos to raise interest as they move through angel and VC rounds…

Today I am happy to announce that LinkedIn has raised additional funding from our original investors and added another world-class investor to our team. Bain Capital Ventures joins our existing group of investors – Sequoia Capital, Greylock Partners, and Bessemer Ventures – and leads this round of investment at a total of $53 million.* (LinkedIn has previously raised $27 million).

Congrats to the LinkedIn team. You have executed really well and I can’t wait to see what you accomplish next.

About VenCorps

VenCorps is an online platform for discovering, funding, and growing startup companies. Our community is made up of entrepreneurs, investors and other members of the startup ecosystem. We’re going to change the way startups get found, funded and grow. We’re counting on the wisdom of our community to find and pick the startups we will give seed funding to. Then, we’ll tap the participation of our community to help those startups grow.

VenCorps is the brainchild of Sean Wise, one of Canada’s experts in raising venture capital. He’s trained over 3500 entrepreneurs, who collectively raised more $2.1B. He’s also the author of The Globe and Mail’s Wise Words column & book by the same name, and an industry advisor to CBC’s Dragon’s Den startup pitch show. Sean has been a great boss and mentor already, I’m looking forward to learning even more from him over the long term.

A Spencer Trask Company

VenCorps is owned by Spencer Trask, an investment company with a mandate to change the world. Let me just say: wow, it’s amazing to work with such a firm. Mr. Spencer Trask himself funded Thomas Edison’s lightbulb, The New York Times, General Electric, and the first credit rating service Moody’s. Since then we’ve funded the first human genome company, the first stem cell company, the first optical integrated circuit company, and the first AIDS vaccine research, and crowdsourcing innovators like Innocentive.

The fund for startups that the VenCorps community chooses is managed by the Spencer Trask Collaborative Venture Partners. We have an amazing team and investors. Expect to hear more about STCVP later.

The Cambrian House Transition

Very soon we will begin a special alpha preview where we start to rolling out invites to the 65,000 members of the Cambrian House crowdsourcing community. Cambrian House is a world leader in crowdsourcing ideas, so crowdsourcing companies was a natural evolution. The Cambrian House team will now be focused on building out the companies they crowdsourced like Gwabs and Mob4Hire.

I’ve spent a lot of time working with the Cambrian House team over the last few months, and I’m humbled at the trust they have placed in me to manage the community they worked so hard to grow.

What’s Next

In the short term, we will be rolling out alpha invites to the Cambrian House community. Next up will be invites to people that signed up for the private beta (hint, hint). Once we feel like things are going smoothly we will open the site up to everyone for a public beta.

We will also be headed to conferences like Mesh and Under the Radar to make announcements, demo the site, spread the word and tape elevator pitches for startups.

I will be blogging more about startups, entrepreneurship and venture capital here and later on a forthcoming public VenCorps blog.

And finally, thanks to my colleagues that knew what I’ve been up to for the last few months and were kind enough not to blow my cover. I like to be transparent, but I dislike talking about things too long before I have something to show.

If you have any questions or comments, let me know.

Design can change the world…

David Walker, Comptroller General (Chief Accountant) of the United States is sounding the alarm bell about the fundamentals of the US economy. He says that the government has dug a hole of debt and spending that is the single greatest threat to the country. On Friday he left his post at the Government Accountability Office to run a 1 billion dollar funded foundation to “fund initiatives to address problems such as reducing budget deficits, curtailing Federal entitlement programs, reducing dependency on oil and conserving energy.” Here’s hoping he can get people to pay attention.

The Pirate’s Dilemma tells the story of how youth culture drives innovation and is changing the way the world works. It offers understanding and insight for a time when piracy is just another business model, the remix is our most powerful marketing tool and anyone with a computer is capable of reaching more people than a multi-national corporation.

The algorithm changed the way stories get to the front page. Now, they require more “diversity” of member votes, so a group of people can’t guarantee that their story will make the front page just because they all voted.

There’s a real problem with small cabals of people getting their content too often on the home page of Digg. About half of the front page stories are submitted by the top 100 Digg members. You only have to watch Digg for a week or two to see that groups with pet causes constantly get front page status. Look, I think Ron Paul is a sharp guy and Ubuntu Linux is really neat. But too many stories about the same subjects make reading Digg boring.

Marketers are freaking out. Some even went so far as to say that if the marketers leave Digg, it runs the risk of withering. Are you kidding? That’s absolute nonsense. Digg never needed marketers to try and use the system to get attention for their customers.

I use Digg both as a user and to share stuff that I work on, like our recent ConceptShare V2 launch. We made the front page of Digg for that story, not only because we asked our friends to vote for it. I only submit stories that I think will be interesting to the Digg community, and I took a lot of care to write the title and description in a way that would be interesting to them. Most importantly for me, I’m always transparent. Those things all add up.

It’s an open secret that Digg is for sale. I’m guessing here, but I’d venture to say that a key reason Digg hasn’t been acquired yet is their community. The Digg community is notoriously young, male and has all the charming qualities that go with being 13 and anonymous. They even had a standoff with the company (and won) over wanting to post the key to decrypt HD-DVDs, exposing Digg to considerable legal risk.

Digg needs to prove to potential acquirers that it can adapt to outsmart people gaming the system, intentionally or not. The service itself needs to encourage good behavior and discourage bad behavior, because the latter can easily ruin the experience for everyone. If that makes it a little harder for me to get a story I submit to the front page, well so be it.

This is a bit different than the average Case Camp presentation because I’ll be talking about how my personal brand mixes with my personal life online. The trick will be to make it relevant for the business audience, and I’ve got a few ideas. I’ll also post my slides up here after the presentation. If anyone in attendance will be taping, please let me know and I’d love to post it here also.