Wired published a couple of months ago an article “The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online”. To be honest, I don’t like too much the word socialism in the title. But if we ignore the word, this is really relevant article. And it is especially relevant for mobile and web related start-up companies and their funding.

Wired writes:

“We’re not talking about your grandfather’s socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.”

And it continues:

“Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.”

And the writer has also some examples: “Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of sharing what you’re thinking (Twitter), what you’re reading (StumbleUpon), your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation of our culture.”

I think Grow VC could be one example in that list too. But I would call it as a new era of capitalism, where individual people and companies have better tools to work with other individuals and also have better control on their own life and businesses.

People don’t have be to a small part of a huge organization as it has been during the industrial age. But we still need models to work together and we also need owners and their control in companies. But openness, transparency and peer-to-peer models can make more effective capitalism.

All this is quite theoretical and abstract. Anyway, at Grow VC we believe that this new era of the web business also needs new models for funding and venture capitalism. VC business has been very similar the last 20 years. Our vision is to get it to support the needs of today’s new companies. Our global match-making service for investors and companies is the starting point. And all feedback proves that it is really needed. But I can tell it is only the first step on our journey to re-write the rules of venture capital funding. You will see a lot of other things during the coming months, how we think the funding world must also be renewed. And we talk about openness, collectivism, and co-operation; we want that all of view participate into this development. We want to get your ideas, comments and contribution to make this development possible.

This blog is one forum to discuss and develop concepts. If you register into the service, we have an internal discussion forum. You can also email us and you can develop components for the service.

How far you think crowd sourcing and collective actions, assisted by Internet, can take us in the future?

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