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Once again, the holiday season is upon us and people around the world give and receive presents. We all know stories about Santa Claus who comes from the North with Rudolf, the red nosed reindeer. In a few hours this nice, old guy distributes presents to kids and adults all over the world. Distributing gifts alone is not enough for this vast task, but he must know the relevant wish lists, get the actual gifts, package them and manage the logistics. I think we all have come to realize, it’s just not possible. Even young kids come up with nasty questions, how is it possible he knows my wishes and how can he deliver all these gifts around the world to all the kids?

At the same time we really believe in the same concept in many businesses. We believe that all significant investment money comes from one place, not from the North Pole or Lapland, but from Silicon Valley. We believe all top level entrepreneurs come from one or a few single universities, Stanford or MIT. We believe you only can create a successful startup in one place. We believe a few leading companies have all the resources to create new technologies and innovations. And we believe Wall Street can define the right value for all relevant assets and a few people in top management can make all the right decisions. We can conclude there are a lot of cases, where we really believe in the Santa Claus model.

Or do we really believe in the Santa Clause model?

People start to see the Santa Clause model is simply not enough. We start to see that we can do things ourselves with other people. I can use some my money alone or with my family and friends to give some Christmas presents. And I receive gifts from my family and friends. Actually we don’t need Mr. Santa to take care of that. He still has an important role to create dreams and be a good example, but actually we must and can do all this ourselves.

If you look at Google Trends, you can see the crowdsourcing really started to emerge in 2008 and crowdfunding in 2011. It typically takes between 2 to 5 years from an emerging trend to a significant market. We are starting to approach serious business in these areas. There are many reasons, like enabling technologies (especially web 2.0), political factors (like increasing demand to democratize the world, not only from dictators, but from corporations and banks as well), and the shift from industrial era models to the real networked societies. This all combined is why crowdsourcing and crowdfunding are emerging. People like to manage their own life, their own work and their own economy. 2012 will be a new year when we will see a lot of progress in this area and much more serious business in utilizing these models.

It is nice to hear stories about Santa Claus, his home somewhere in the North and about his little helpers. It is a part of the Christmas spirit. But the Christmas spirit alone doesn’t bring presents, happy faces and surprises to all kids and adults around the world. We all do it together, when we remember the people who are important to us. We are all virtual Santa Clauses and we build our own virtual Santa Claus Land.

With startups the situation is the same. Success stories and the spirit of Silicon Valley is important, but we must build and fund companies ourselves including other people outside of Silicon Valley. We cannot wait for Santa Claus, we ourselves can build the virtual Silicon Valley.

The best gift each and everyone of us can give startups, entrepreneurs and our economy is to make a New Year resolution “I will invest my work, time or money in startups in 2012″. It’s easy to do with the Grow VC service starting with $20 or investing your work in a startup. And as always giving can be more rewarding than receiving.

Our entire team at Grow VC wants to wish You a Merry Christmas and Successful New Year!

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Tags: holiday

This entry was posted on Friday, December 23rd, 2011 at 8:05 am and is filed under Entrepreneur Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.