So Rypple is this company in Canada doing some great stuff to improve work culture that is very similar in direction to LoveMachine. So great to see! I talked the other day to their co-founder / co-CEO Daniel, seemed like a super smart guy. They’re having success getting companies to adopt some very similar ideas – sending short messages of appreciation as the core of a set of decentralized management tools. They’re also experimenting with offering coaching and other services atop the basic system – seems like a promising direction.
I’m so happy these guys are making it work (they’ve been at it for a couple years) with something similar to what we are trying. It’s funny – when Second Life started there was another company in the space and their CEO was incredibly competitive and aggressive – was clearly unhappy we existed. But I always (unsuccessfully) tried to urge him to realize that he was making a mistake. Competition for scarce resources (or customers) is often assumed by early-stage ecosystem players to exist when it actually does not. In fact, in the early days (and LoveMachine and Rypple are brave pioneers in the very earliest days of changing work cultures), the only real ‘competition’ is all the people who think your idea just isn’t going to work at all. The people doing the same crazy stuff as you – those should be your allies. The fact that they exist means you might just be right. Also, selling stuff to companies (or consumers) in the early days is typically like being 2 peanut sellers in St. Marks square… there isn’t much need to worry about competition or pricing or whatever, because you could wander that giant square all day long and never run into each other or the same customers.
Slowly but surely, businesses are going to start adopting new models for how they organize themselves and value people.



