During an entrepreneurial journalism fellowship at CUNY J-School, I met Contently co-founder Shane Snow, who helped to craft the startup’s original manifesto: “The delineation between ‘media company’ and any other enterprise is no longer relevant; we embrace the notion that any entity – brand, nonprofit, news organization, or individual – can be a quality publisher.”
In the social capitalism world, Sara Horowitz said of the growing freelancing community, “we have to be creating our own little media empire just to get the word out about what this is.” And so we see blogs from RelayRides and Airbnb. Etsy recently devoted blog posts to a book discussion about the handmade movement. But heyo! What about a venture capital firm?
Craig Shapiro (@cshapiro), former president of GOOD, heads up Collaborative Fund. Kary Campbell (@paperkary), a former journalist and current investor, oversees content strategy. The young firm invests in startups that bridge thoughtful lifestyle choices with thoughtful options (how can we buy from each other? how do we spend our time?), and transforming consumer culture from a dash for the newest, shiniest products to an emphasis on recycling products (a.k.a.: collaborative consumption).
“It’s totally different because there’s no rules,” Kary told me. Browse Collab Fund’s content. I’m telling you this as a multimedia producer: It is high quality. Their web design is stunning—making good use of HTML5—and they’re producing a clean-cut film series about their investment founders.
I’ve been hanging out with various members of the Collab Fund’s team throughout the summer. The reason I still haven’t gotten over Collab Fund’s editorial focus is that the content—not just the presentation—is well-researched and thought provoking. Another reason: They’re not just pushing content; they’re nurturing a conversation. Case Foundation entrusted Collab Fund with the @SocialCitizen Twitter account, whose audience reaches far more people than just techies and entrepreneurs. It has more than 330,000 followers, and Collab Fund has since grown a complementary subreddit.
But at the very beginning, Collab Fund started with just three tweets per day. “We wanted entrepreneurs with really amazing ideas to collaborate with us,” Kary explained, so she spent the next year building out Collab Fund’s voice. She started with outposts on FastCompany and Huffington Post, and then built those columns into distribution points for their content experiments. She coordinated with ideologically similar partners such as IDEO, Hyperakt and StartupAmerica to reach out to their audiences.
“If someone would blog about it, it would turn into a life of its own.”
But again, as a multimedia producer, I can tell you that content is not cheap. So why build editorial content into Collab Fund’s brand? Besides attracting collaborators, my guess is by creating exploratory content that is easy to understand (side note: at a Media Lab conference on data viz, economics and complexity theory, one person described design as the simple interface to complexity), the content may attract investors by normalizing collaborative consumption as a stable investment.
Closing out, I want to tell you about a smart collaboration with IDEO called Will Work For. This one’s fascinating. In letting their interactive fill-in-the-blank into the wild, Collab Fund not only received a number of open text field answers, but also received a number of email follow-ups. The crowning jewel was an invitation from a Miami-based curator to a round table with five startups in the budding Miami startup community.
What does this mean? Really, the collaboration was smart because it could actually be seen as strategic. In normalizing collaborative consumption and the sharing/peer economy, Will Work For is an engagement and identification tool. It’s a general audience piece, and although people stop to think about what they’ll say, there’s little friction in filling in the blank. But with those who took the extra step of emailing Kary, Collab Fund now has the beginnings of a rolodex of champions they could call on as they normalize collaborative consumption.