The CIRCLES Open Knowledge Manifesto
Enough reinventing the wheel. We have the internet. There are 5 billion people online interested in the next big thing. Today’s challenge for great companies is distribution, not competition. And nothing spreads faster than a great idea. It’s time we share our knowledge openly.
We see a world in which every professional builds their career on and contributes to an open base of knowledge. Talent and hard work are spread across the globe, while knowledge is tightly held within networks of power. Let’s empower every individual to pursue the career they want, and to do their job better than before.
We are sharing how we build CIRCLES publicly. To keep knowledge private, we’ll need a reason for it. Since distribution is a greater challenge than competition, our default will be openness. The hidden costs of keeping everything secret for us is just too high. CIRCLES serves a vision of sharing knowledge, and we are relying on knowledge sharing to get there.
Imagine if Mercedes shared their knowledge publicly. Consumers interested in the luxury driving experience that Mercedes is known for would still buy Mercedes, because only Mercedes can make a Mercedes. If an entrepreneur wants to build a sustainable car brand with all-electric cars named Allset, she can start from the shared knowledge of building a car company like Mercedes. She only needs to solve the problems of making the cars electric and selling them. Along the way, she can share her learnings, so Mercedes can follow her lead on electrification. While Allset may come to define sustainable cars, Mercedes will continue to define the luxury driving experience.
Competition doesn’t kill businesses. Distribution failure kills businesses. According to Casey Winters, the market winner is the first company to achieve “product-market scale”. Product-market scale means being the first company to scale product-market fit in a market. And if you ask Ian Siegel, founder of ZipRecruiter, what scale means in a new market, he’ll say it means winning mindshare. His proof: We’re not sure what ZipRecruiter is, but we’ve definitely heard of it. We think an easy way to win mindshare is to share company knowledge publicly.
Competition risk is not the thing keeping most professionals from sharing knowledge anyway. Most professionals say they aren’t sure they have smart things to say, and don’t want to look dumb. That’s ok. If there are people on the internet that care about what you’re working on, there are probably people out there that will help you get there. Sometimes at CIRCLES we know what we’re talking about, and sometimes not really. So sometimes our learnings help others, and sometimes others help us improve. That feels pretty fair to us.
Sharing how we build our short video platform means other platforms will come along soon enough. That’s ok too. We are a company dedicated to expanding access to the world’s knowledge for every professional, and we’re in it for the long haul. Leading us is an army (currently small but fierce) of industry influencers dedicated to sharing their knowledge with others. We know that future professionals won’t replace us, they’ll stand on our shoulders.
