By JOHN MARKOFF
PALO ALTO, California - Steve Wozniak built the original Apple I to share with his friends at the Homebrew Computer Club, but it was his business partner Steve Jobs who had the insight that there might be a market for such a contraption. Indeed, for decades, Silicon Valley has been defined by the tension between the technologist’s urge to share information and the industrialist’s incentive to profit.
Now a new style of “hybrid” technology organization is emerging that is trying to define a path between the nonprofit world and traditional for-profit ventures.
They are often referred to as “social enterprises” because they pursue social missions instead of profits. But unlike most nonprofit groups, these organizations generate a sustainable source of revenue and do not rely on philanthropy. Earnings are retained and reinvested rather than being distributed to shareholders.
The new companies, like thousands of Silicon Valley start-ups before them, typically begin as small groups of intensely motivated people dedicated to the goal of building a product or service.
The best-known examples are efforts like the Mozilla Corporation, which maintains and develops the Firefox Web browser, and TechSoup, an organization that was started two decades ago to connect technology experts with nonprofit groups. It now distributes commercial software to nonprofit groups in 14 countries. (Mozilla’s mission is to preserve choice and innovation on the Internet, which it considers a social good.)
By most measures both companies, with hundreds of employees, qualify as vibrant businesses. Each has revenue in excess of $50 million annually.
“There is a lot of discussion taking place right now about a whole new organization form around social enterprise,” said James Fruchterman, president of Benetech, a social enterprise incubator based in Palo Alto. “Many of these efforts can make money; they will just never make enough to provide venture capital rates of return.”
Brewster Kahle, who has founded a number of successful Internet companies, as well as the nonprofit Internet Archive, said: “If we do this right, I think there is momentum here. The next major operating systems company might be a nonprofit.”
The Internet Archive, which runs Web crawlers - programs that index information stored on the Internet - and offers the popular Wayback Machine, which allows surfers to find previous versions of Web sites, now has two self-sustaining projects. The first is digitizing books and the second is creating and maintaining Web repositories for national libraries.
Mr. Kahle says he is developing a set of principles that he hopes will help formalize his idea that there is a middle ground between the technologists and the capitalists.
He lists operating guidelines like transparency, staying out of debt, giving away information and refusing to hoard.
TechSoup stumbled upon its business eight years ago after it began sending a truck around San Francisco to pick up donated commercial software to distribute to nonprofit groups. Today, the organization distributes products from 32 commercial companies, including Cisco Systems, Microsoft and Symantec, to roughly 50,000 organizations annually, for a small administrative fee.
“We were just trying to meet the needs of nonprofits,” said Rebecca Masisak, cochief executive of TechSoup.
Nonprofits with revenue are not new or restricted to Silicon Valley, and there is a great deal of debate over whether they offer a sustainable approach.
The new stream of technology-centric and successful nonprofits appears to be driven in part by a set of microelectronics technology trends that have sent shock waves through many industries, from publishing to music and movies.
“Computer technology and the Internet are lowering the cost of doing business,” said John Lilly, the chief executive of Mozilla, the Web browser developer that is being subsidized by advertising revenue from the search engine business.
That blends with the strong sense of social purpose held by a number of the best and brightest in Silicon Valley.
“We went through all these decades where we had nonprofits that thought business was evil and sustainability was irrelevant,” said Debra Dunn, an associate professor at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University in California who advises social entrepreneurs. “Now there has been an influx of business thought.
People are saying, ‘I have enough money and I care.’ ”
댓글 안에 당신의 성숙함도 담아 주세요.
'오늘의 한마디'는 기사에 대하여 자신의 생각을 말하고 남의 생각을 들으며 서로 다양한 의견을 나누는 공간입니다. 그러나 간혹 불건전한 내용을 올리시는 분들이 계셔서 건전한 인터넷문화 정착을 위해 아래와 같은 운영원칙을 적용합니다.
자체 모니터링을 통해 아래에 해당하는 내용이 포함된 댓글이 발견되면 예고없이 삭제 조치를 하겠습니다.
불건전한 댓글을 올리거나, 이름에 비속어 및 상대방의 불쾌감을 주는 단어를 사용, 유명인 또는 특정 일반인을 사칭하는 경우 이용에 대한 차단 제재를 받을 수 있습니다. 차단될 경우, 일주일간 댓글을 달수 없게 됩니다.
명예훼손, 개인정보 유출, 욕설 등 법률에 위반되는 댓글은 관계 법령에 의거 민형사상 처벌을 받을 수 있으니 이용에 주의를 부탁드립니다.
Close
x