The vision - Part I

When I started my first company, scholars.com, in 1995 I became convinced that the Internet was more than just a delivery medium; that it was possible to connect people together in ways not previously possible. To me that's the power of the Internet.

With scholars.com it was about connecting learners to mentors (subject matter experts) 24x7 through online courses. This introduced me to the power of connecting people together though in this case it was to get a technically correct answer. But CBT Systems, the world's largest eLearning company, liked it enough to buy my company.

But during my subsequent years at CBT Systems/SmartForce/SkillSoft I realized that the world was getting more complex with a lot more shades of gray. There was no longer just one right answer to a question, there were often several answers from several sources:
- how does my company do it? (talk to employees)
- How do others do it? (talk to peers for best practices)
- What is the technically correct way of doing it? (talk to experts)

And unlike 1995, when there wasn't a lot of content or people on the Internet, today there is too much. It's like going into a library where all the books have no titles and no one is wearing name tags (why do you think Google was created?). No context. And of course what have companies focused on over the last several years? Connecting people to content (web pages, articles, courses etc)! In all the excitement around the technology we have forgotten about the people and the knowledge they already possess.

So I started Ensemble Collaboration with the goal of finding a better way of connecting people to one another and use their collective knowledge to help people work smarter. Very quickly I surrounded myself with people far smarter than I (Mike LeBlanc and my wife Sasha) who took it to a whole other level and started to bring it to life.

Inspired by how eBay convinces strangers to buy stuff from one another (trust and security) and how Amazon.com became a great source of book reviews (peer rating and ranking) we likewise wanted to create a 'gated knowledge Internet'. A place where I could get answers and not have to reinvent the wheel (I'm a firm believer that in today's connected world 80% of the answer I am looking for probably already exists and the remaining 20% will likely come from collaboration for some personalized mentoring).

So we had to create a soution to hide the back-end complexity of collaboration from the users, speed up the administrative task of creating/maintaining collaboration and improve the quality of the interactions. In short just like Google helps you find the right content we wanted something to help you find the right people.

(see the next post on how we did it)