Seeker Blog

…who thought that developing world mandarins wouldn’t rush to buy a system explicitly built to undermine them?

Peg 2.0 offers some useful suggestions on amping up One Laptop Per Child into a for-profit venture. Negroponte argues that non-profit has been important for access to mandarins. Yes, he has had access, but the photo-ops with heads of state has produced almost no orders from those same states. A venture back entreprise has more advantages — such as slashing OLPC’s high turnover rate:

…OLPC’s problem is just that it doesn’t sell enough laptops, and that problem can be linked back to two big (and connected) problems: arrogance and ideology, and high staff turnover.

Let’s tackle high turnover first. This one is a no-brainer. When you work for a charity, you’re not getting paid much, and you can leave whenever you want. When you work for a startup, you have equity, and the urge to leave is often compensated by the urge to grow your company and cash your chips.

The main reason why OLPC could shoot for a $100 pricetag (and miss, by a mile) was thanks to an innovative screen technology, cheap and fitting for developing world conditions. Mary Lou Jepsen, the woman behind that, left OLPC to launch a startup around that technology. There’s nothing wrong about that: the profit motive is a legitimate one, and when you invent an innovative, useful technology there’s nothing wrong with wanting to profit from it. But obviously if OLPC had already been a company Ms Jepsen wouldn’t have had to quit to do that: her best hope to profit would have been to stay with OLPC and hope to monetize her stake; meanwhile OLPC would have kept its Chief Technology Officer. With a little capitalism, everybody wins.

Same thing with Walter Bender, the chief software guy, who left over OLPC’s decision to put Windows on the laptops (a frequent request from customers). Now obviously, in startups it happens that senior people quit over differences in strategy, and even start competitors (as Mr Bender did). But the exit costs are much higher. So there’s a lot to wager OLPC would have bled talent much less if it had been a company.

…And that’s the goal, isn’t it? To get laptops in kids’ hands, right? Or is it to aggrandize Nicholas Negroponte? If it is the latter, the VCs on his board would have told him to cut the bullshit and get his act together, fast.

In short, the best reason why OLPC would work better as a company is that in a company the shareholders can fire the CEO. Negroponte seems great at vision, and the $100 laptop may be one of the best ideas of the 21st century, but he’s proved abysmal at execution. In a startup it very often happens that the person who launched the company is not the best person to grow it, or run its main product’s execution.

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