Daily Endeavor Blog

Last week there were a few particularly intense and nourishing days moving between events — Mark Hurst’s Good Experience Live (GEL) Thur/Fri, then LaidOffCamp NY’s Friday night panel and full event on Saturday where I had a great time MC’g both, followed by an Endeavor Prep Bootcamp we ran on Sunday. It was 4 days of people investing in what’s next.

At GEL, Scott Heiferman kicked off with an upbeat talk about how he sees people increasingly turning their backs on desperate marketing, and instead turning toward each other, much like we did before industrialization creeped in to most corners of life last century. Scott captured the idea in a poignant phrase:

Instead of DIY, it’s increasingly DIO

Instead of do-it-yourself, it’s increasingly do-it-ourselves. His idea is right on. In my experience when people want to do anything that’s hard or truly new, it never happens alone. Instead of the lore of the lone genius in the tower, there’s always a circle, a team, a network, a community of supporters and promoters that are co-creating along the way.

This idea became the theme for me throughout the weekend, underscored especially by the hundreds who showed up for LaidOffCamp. Attendees with expertise to share led 30 sessions throughout Saturday. It was DIO in action. Not only did a small group of us self-organize to produce the event, a much larger group came to breathe life into it. I’m glad Chris Hutchins was able to make it too, to see what he’s spawned.

For a piece of the events, here’s Chris Russell’s (JobRadio.FM, Secrets of the Job Hunt) podcast of a session I moderated with Deb Berman, Dr Doug Hirshorn, and Matt Wallaert:

Though a lot of cultural angst is spent on individuals “doing it on their own,” nothing great ever comes together in a vacuum or without a raft of other people. It’s much the case with Endeavor Prep.

We’ve built up the service, the sites, all the operations and infrastructure with deep wells of expertise from all over. We’re super fortunate to have such a great team and extended team supporting our work. Thank God we’ve been using wikis (thank you Socialtext) as our shared workspaces to pull of it together. It’s allowed us to find the best experts and work with them where they live. A quick look at even the first dozen people displayed in one of our workspaces includes New York, Barcelona, Bloomington, Santa Cruz, Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, DC, Santa Monica, Toronto, Corona Del Mar and Boston.

Building this company has been a triumph of the collective. The iterative prototyping approach — build, use, learn, repeat — is the straightest line to discovering how to serve our customers, and it is 100% powered by people and their tremendous contributions. We’ve been advised, informed and helped along by well over 200 people over the last year. This is in addition to the learning that’s been provided by a similar number of undergrads and recent grads, as well as the folks who work with them, over the last three years. I’m deeply grateful to all of you.

Customers, investors, advisors, friends — all of you — thank you.