takingpitches

Forbes reports on the accelerating trend of using programming contests to smoke out the best talent even when it is not looking for a job:

A few years ago such out-of-the-way stars were invisible to U.S. recruiters. Today it’s much easier to spot them. Thanks to a flurry of online programming contests that attract entrants worldwide, it’s possible to identify coders who do Caltech-quality work, even if they live halfway around the world and earned their degrees at Ural State University…

InterviewStreet was the ticket out of Siberia for Yakunin, the programmer from Ekaterinburg. He wowed the hiring engineers at Quora, a knowledge-sharing website in Mountain View, Calif., by being the only person out of more than 700 respondents to win a perfect score on a CodeSprint challenge it sponsored. Often the best coders aren’t eager to apply for a job. They just want to prove their mettle against all comers. Mindful of this dynamic, InterviewStreet moved the bulk of its contests to a website called HackerRank, where most entrants log in with pseudonymous user names. Job hunters authorize the site to reveal their real names to potential employers.

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This story — reaffirming everything good about the potential of MOOCs — was on the front page of the Financial Times recently:

Teenage applicants from as far afield as India and Mongolia are catching western colleges’ attention by taking so-called “massive online open courses” designed for older students.

Schoolchildren taking courses on their own initiative already account for about 5 per cent of the 800,000 students at edX, the non-profit online venture founded by Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Some have used their results to apply to the colleges that pioneered MOOCs.

Amol Bhave, a 17-year-old from Jabalpur, India, learnt last week that he had been accepted to MIT after scoring 97 per cent on edX’s circuits and electronics course. He received the good news on March 14 – or “pi day”, as he put it in a Skype conversation with the FT.

“I am like the first person in my city to get into MIT ever so I have become sort of pretty famous,” he said. “I was so motivated by how we were taught [by edX] that I decided that maybe I belong to MIT after all.”

Mr Bhave came to the attention of MIT faculty members after joining two students he met in the course’s discussion forum to create a follow-up course. Anant Agarwal, edX president and an MIT professor of electrical engineering and computer science, wrote him a letter of recommendation.

The lesson: learning that’s available to all helps surface talent that may otherwise gotten undiscovered.

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I have long said Kickstarter centrally fit into the talent elevation thesis.  Fast Company puts it well:

“”If you can raise money on Kickstarter, you don’t have to wait around to be green-lighted,” says Matt Porterfield, a Baltimore filmmaker whose Kickstarter-backed movie, I Used to Be Darker, premiered at Sundance. “You green-light your fucking self.”

You green-light yourself–the idea that creative people don’t need intermediaries–has long been one of the Internet’s great promises, and Kickstarter appears to finally deliver on it.”

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Today on AVC, in response to “doing things you don’t like to do should be an outlier case. not the majority case”:

Yes, doesn’t have to be that way. a lot of times we love what we do but hate the structure in which we do it.

for example, i loved my geeky law practice, but just hated what the law firm structure had become.

talent elevation platforms like kickstarter in the arts, but others in other areas, have the potential to bring that enjoyment back by changing the existing revenue flows and the stagnating institutions that mediate them.

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The simplest articulation of why networks trump institutions (i.e, the central exploration of this blog) just occurred to me.

In institutional-based talent elevation, the following self-reinforcing dynamic usually takes over:

Mediocrity is attracted to Mediocrity.

Many verbs can replace the verb above: reinforces, elevates, supports, produces, recognizes…

But the central point is that it is a loop that is self-reinforcing and hard to get out of.

In contrasts, networks elevate, support and reinforce authentic talent.

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My comment on AVC today:

“Everyone is good at something”

Yes!

So many great platforms for folks out there to find out what that is and nurture it: blogging, etsy, Youtube, kickstarter, kaggle, sidetour, and on and on.

In a word, networks…

That is, tools that continue to move away from the world in which used to live in where non-networked institutions have the ability (on top of their continuing incentive) to thwart the supply of individual talent to generate market power for themselves.

Talent elevation and opportunity platforms!

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The Economist had a relatively wide-ranging article about online education in its last 2012 issue.  I don’t know about the revenue model, but I do think that MOOCs and talent elevation platforms fit hand in glove, as a way to surfacing rare finds:

A second model is to charge potential employers a fee for spotting suitable recruits among the students. Coursera charges for referrals to its best students.

Widen access to the opportunity to show talent, and then reward that talent.

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