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    <title type="text" xml:lang="en">The Open Company Initiative blog</title>
    <link type="application/atom+xml" href="http://www.opencompany.org/atom.xml" rel="self"/>
    <link type="text" href="http://www.opencompany.org/" rel="alternate"/>
    <updated>2021-05-20T12:32:08+00:00</updated>
    <id>http://www.opencompany.org/</id>
    <author>
        <name>The Open Company Initiative</name>
    </author>
    <rights>Copyright (c) 2014, The Open Company Initiative; CC-BY.</rights>
    
    <entry>
        <title>How your company can benefit from being open: Lessons from Balanced</title>
        <link href="http://www.opencompany.org//2014/01/27/how-your-company-can-benefit-from-being-open-lessons-from-balanced.html"/>
        <updated>2014-01-27T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        <id>http://www.opencompany.org//2014/01/27/how-your-company-can-benefit-from-being-open-lessons-from-balanced</id>
        <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Matin Tamizi wants to shift the culture of how companies do things. “It’s time
they open up and share more,” Tamizi says. “As a society in general we’ll end
up moving forward a lot faster.” It’s something he’s doing with his own company
after realizing with some increasing frustration that the software industry was
continually trying to figure out solved problems over again and not moving
forward as a result.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;By way of example he mentions that he used to work on Wall Street, building
hyper-connected systems, but on moving to Silicon Valley he found, a decade
later, people were still trying to solve problems with backend infrastructure
that had essentially already been solved. “The fact that Wall Street didn’t
open those things up and discuss them publicly because they viewed them so much
as a competitive advantage meant we’re just redoing the same stuff over and
over again,” Tamizi says.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;He started challenging himself with his own company as to why things had to be
kept internal and found that more often than not there wasn’t a good reason. So
with the launch of his market payments platform, &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.balancedpayments.com/&quot;&gt;Balanced
Payments&lt;/a&gt;, he’s made a commitment to be as
open as he can and continually challenge the boundaries of transparency and
openness. He’s partnered with &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.gittip.com/&quot;&gt;Gittip&lt;/a&gt; founder Chad
Whitacre to launch the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.opencompany.org/&quot;&gt;Open Company Initiative&lt;/a&gt;,
believing the benefits of being open extend beyond just his own business.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://github.com/balanced&quot;&gt;Balanced uses GitHub&lt;/a&gt; to make all their code
public, as well as all their product decisions, something Tamizi says improves
both their internal and external communications, and creates accountability to
their customers. He notes public accountability is not really new, with Amazon
essentially forcing a lot of product companies into embracing openness with
their public product reviews. “That was actually very revolutionary at the
time,“ Tamizi says. “The manufacturers of those products screamed bloody murder
at the idea that somebody could talk about their product publicly and criticize
it. Some of the best companies learned that even if they didn’t have the best
product, they would use that public criticism to engage with customers and use
that as feedback for their product.” As there’s no platform to “review” payment
companies, Balanced Payments settled on using GitHub as its public forum.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;An important distinction is that open companies are not just about open
software. They’re open with their ideas, which can be a fundamentally
challenging for a lot of businesses. It’s not a concern for Tamizi. “It’s one
thing for the ideas to be open, it’s another to actually go out and implement
them,” Tamizi says. “Think about it this way, Google could open source their
entire search algorithm and for the most part people wouldn’t be able to do
anything with it, because the value that Google provides is this massive
infrastructure and the data that they’ve built.The software to them is not
actually that valuable. Also, knowing what Google is building is not all that
valuable; it’s the fact that they provide that service that’s valuable.”&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Tamizi says there are three main benefits to being an open company:&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;1. Culture.&lt;/strong&gt; The culture that results from embracing openness means more
people will want to work there. “You attract a very specific kind of person,”
Tamizi says - someone who is already in tune with your company and vision.
Balanced has managed to attract some great talent from open source developers
who were doing their day job and contributing to open source on the side.
Working at Balanced means that contributing to open source is part of their
job.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;2. Better Products.&lt;/strong&gt; Being open creates more internal and external
accountability for a company and as a result, it’s going to build a better
company and a better product. It’s the perfect “customer development” tool
because all decisions are made in the open and with input from customers.
Customers contribute ideas for feature requests and comment on ones that are
being proposed. It really is “listening to your customer”.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;3. Community.&lt;/strong&gt; The customers that you work with will be more engaged, so
you’re less of a separate entity. By cooperating with your customers you build
up a relationship where people feel part of the company that you are creating.
It’s about building a community.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Tamizi notes there other benefits too, including the ability to move faster
(there are no NDAs, and contractors can access and familiarize themselves with
all the code on GitHub). There’s also the &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008944/open-company/why-i-made-my-payments-startup-an-open-company&quot;&gt;media
attention&lt;/a&gt;
that operating as an open company can bring.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;So, what’s the limit on openness?&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;At the moment Tamizi declines to give me any kind of stats for revenue and how
many people are using the platform daily (though they have been public with
&lt;a href=&quot;http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/16/balanced/&quot;&gt;other stats&lt;/a&gt;). When pressed as to
why, he said, “We just don’t.” It seems like an odd distinction given their
openness on everything else. There are of course obvious protections around
processes to guard against fraud, being a payment company after all.&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Whether they’ll share revenue and sensitive company statistics down the line
remains to be seen. After all, in Tamizi’s own words: “Continually challenging
why we shouldn’t share something is part of our process. It’s part of what
being open is about.”&lt;/p&gt;

&lt;h3 id=&quot;feedback&quot;&gt;Feedback?&lt;/h3&gt;

&lt;p&gt;The subjects were &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/matin&quot;&gt;@matin&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/balanced&quot;&gt;@balanced&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;
The author was &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/bronwen&quot;&gt;@bronwen&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;br /&gt;
The editor was &lt;a href=&quot;https://twitter.com/bronwen&quot;&gt;@whit537&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
    </entry>
    
    <entry>
        <title>Gittip founder starts Open Company Initiative</title>
        <link href="http://www.opencompany.org//2014/01/13/gittip-founder-starts-open-company-initiative.html"/>
        <updated>2014-01-13T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
        <id>http://www.opencompany.org//2014/01/13/gittip-founder-starts-open-company-initiative</id>
        <content type="html">&lt;blockquote&gt;
  &lt;p&gt;The creator of an open payments system that allows users to give small weekly
cash gifts to help other users pay their bills is now extending the concept
to a wider initiative for companies interested in operating in a transparent
and open way.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;/blockquote&gt;

&lt;p&gt;Full story + video interview &lt;a href=&quot;http://www.itbusiness.ca/video/gittip-founder-starts-open-company-initiative&quot;&gt;on
ITBusiness.ca&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
    </entry>
    
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