PROVO LABS

In December 2005, Paul's vision of forming a well-funded internet business incubator was realized when a private investor chose to provide him with the necessary capital. Provo Labs has quickly built a strong core team of dedicated employees who are building web sites that can turn into successful businesses. The Provo Labs culture is unique in Utah. They are highly focused on constant networking and learning and they freely share that learning among themselves and with others in the communit... y. All of their companies have official blogs and all of their employees blog. They are all into RSS feeds, Google alerts, podcasting and video blogging. They buy Blackberries for every employee and invite everyone to attend technology and business conferences regularly, so they can all stay on the cutting edge. They use LinkedIn to find contractors, employees and partners. Their technologists, led by Phil Burns, are totally into Web 2.0. They study new web services weekly and share their code libraries with each other. While they develop and use modular technology to do web mashups they also believe that they can reuse their marketing tactics and business models to do "business mashups." They think they will succeed as an internet business incubator because they will focus all of their companies on the things they are best at: 1) content acquisition 2) search engines 3) building community and user-generated content 4) internet marketing and 5) subscription business models. One of their doctrines that describes their Provo Labs culture states: "Most value creation happens outside of the office. Get out of the office!" What that means is that they know that their relationships with other people, including customers, investors, business owners, and key employees at hundreds of other companies, will be the most important factor in their success. They wholeheartedly subscribe to the concepts in "The Only Sustainable Edge" by Harvard Business School professor John Hagel. They focus on what they are great at and then they spend most of their time networking at the edge with their customers and business partners, to make sure they are interfacing with all the right companies that are increasing their capacity faster than anyone else. It's really the business ecosystems that they will play in that will lead to their greatest successes.More