Announcing Our New Idea Site, OpenView Labs!
September 19, 2010
I am really excited about today’s announcement of our new idea sharing site, OpenView Labs. You can find the site at labs.openviewpartners.com.
The website is aimed at expansion stage technology company management teams and its mission is to distribute ideas and inspiration for helping management teams turn their visions into reality.
The website is the next iteration of the value add work that we do on behalf of our portfolio companies. We started working on the value add program about 10 years ago with the idea that we could really differentiate ourselves in the market by developing a meaningful capability to help the technology companies we invest in address the issues and opportunities occurring at the expansion stage. Over time, we developed unique capabilities, both with a full time staff in OpenView Labs and a network of professionals that work with our portfolio companies. For several years now, we have been putting on forums and workshops every quarter for our portfolio companies and have a collaborative work spaces on Central Desktop to help connect the senior teams of our portfolio companies.
Last year, we realized that we keep our ideas too much to ourselves and by sharing them with others we got good questions, feedback and refinements and we also get back a lot of good ideas from others. At that point, we started blogging, with each firm member writing a blog post every week (see the OpenView Blogs). Earlier this year, we launched a weekly tips and tricks e-mail that contained the best ideas from our blogs and the best ideas that we found from around the industry each week (you can sign up here if you are interested).
Finally, we decided that we needed a public vehicle to post more complete articles and information that people could read regularly and also search when they had a specific need, so we developed the labs idea site.
You can learn more about the OpenView Labs website via my podcast describing the OpenView Labs website or by reading the OpenView Labs Website Story.
Take a look and let me know what you think!