Last Friday at the Art Directors Club in New York, Piers Fawkes of PSFK sat down for a panel discussion on contemporary collaboration with Mike Brown of Virgin Group, Ben Lerer, founder of Thrillist, Sam Lessin, CEO of drop.io, and Nate Westheimer, VP Product, anyClip.com & Organizer, NY Tech Meetup. The afternoon’s talk centered around creative collaboration in the realm of business and entrepreneurship, and how both creative individuals and business-oriented entities can profit from working around shared interests.
From the discussion emerged a common sentiment, introduced by Lerer, that smaller creative groups need to take advantage of and leverage what they have over larger companies via a bartering process of sorts. Westheimer conceived of this bartering as a sort of exchange between small and large, whereby smaller firms trade technological and intellectual innovation in exchange for the resources and legitimacy that only a large company can bestow.
Indeed, Lessin described the entire entrepreneurial process as one of leveraging—most succinctly, as taking nothing and leveraging it into something meaningful, more often than not employing technology to do so. It is this something-from-nothing endeavor that can be used to establish a fruitful collaborative relationship with a larger group. Finally, Lerer cautioned that throughout this bartering process, smaller groups ought not be so capricious as to devalue their work through their enthusiasm for collaboration. Small innovators would be better served letting their work go unsold than to sell it for free or at too great a discount—above all, creative independents ought to value their work fairly, both to themselves and collaborators.
Below is footage of the entire panel discussion.
[images via Dave Pinter]
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From the perspective of an entrepreneur, this was a really useful event. One of the biggest take-homes for me was when an audience member (a freelance biz dev guy) explained that in his experience, it usually works best to pay even a nominal fee to motivate freelancers who are willing to work for nothing. I’d like to hear more from freelancers about their experiences working for little or no upfront money. What’s the best way to align goals, including back-end compensation suggestions such as fees that are only paid if/when the start-up gets funding.
June 15th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
This was a great conference. I think it could easily have been another hour or two and still would have been succinct. The wrap-up above is a useful takeaway as well as the speakers got a bit off track during the talk at some points.
June 16th, 2009 at 5:03 pm