Last week, nextNY sponsored a community conversation on Business Development in a 2.0 world, or BizDev2.0. The question to the floor was “Are all of the business development professionals going to be out of work in five years, to be replaced by RSS, APIs, etc.?” The consensus seemed to be that the 2.0 world does not replace business development, if anything the interconnected mashups and APIs enable business development by eliminating weeks and months of the dance between startup and enterprise, and amongst established enterprises. In the 2.0 world, anyone can take an idea and implement it and hook it into the various APIs and services and platforms and feeds that make up the world. That mashup either demonstrates the idea’s value, or shows that it’s not quite ready for prime time.

Charlie O’Donnell and Marti Grimmick organized the event with guests Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, Chris Fralic of First Round Capital, Niki Scevak of Homethinking, Tina Sharkey of AOL Instant Messaging and Social Media, Zia Daniell Wigder of JupiterResearch and 12 Hours of Dialogue, and Robin Chan of Verizon Wireless. Ben Bloom organized securing space at Columbia University’s Warren Hall.

I think the discussion highlighted several key points:

• The dial tone for Web 2.0 consists of open web services, APIs, and data streams. These lower the cost of establishing a relationship, make it possible for commodity relationships to exist with minimal overhead, and help to prove whether or not there’s value in the relationship; value which can help determine if a formal relationship should be established. Individuals are unlikely to add enough value in a commodity relationship to make it worth the time and resources of a larger entity to pursue that relationship.
• Even with APIs, data streams, etc, there is still a need for business development in the relationship dance between services, especially if one side is a major site, and the other is much smaller. Fred Wilson suggested doing more deals since deals are easy to do: far better to establish fifty relationships with smaller sites, than to expend time and resources pursuing one or two big deals, on the chance that one or more of the smaller sites will take off.
• The widgets and various JavaScript addons to sites will succeed if they add value to sites. Sites should not make the mistake of treating these necessarily as leeches since they may help draw people to the site’s ecosystem and keep users (and their attention) focused within the site’s ecosystem rather than wandering away. MySpace’s attempt to block YouTube and the user’s subsequent revolt was an example of how to damage a symbiotic relationship between widget and major site.
• People are central to business development in a 2.0 world: where they focus attention, the perceived usability of the sites they use, the value they believe they’re receiving from using the service. People are not necessarily solely seeking monetary value from using a site, one example was given of a site which offered cash payments as an award to users with the highest reputations in the community, but users were more concerned about keeping the reputation and recognized authority than getting actual cash value from it.
• User experience is critical to the success of a site built upon mashups, in a world where the data and services are commodities; it is the user experience of the site which sets it apart from others within the space.

Far from eliminating business development, the 2.0 world eliminates a lot of the noise from business development discussions and allows the players to focus on the specifics and value of the relationship, instead of the mechanics of the interconnected services. Business development becomes a catalyst to get things done and help reinvent the model of the traditional business relationship.

Rishi Khanna made an interesting comment near the end that getting eyeballs will become more difficult as users get better at managing their attention. I am curious about whether the average person actively manages where she pays attention or if it’s sort of a passive, unconscious act. Tina Sharkey from AOL made the comment that MySpace users have been observed with an I/M window open, their MySpace page open, and their cell phone within reach: paying attention to all three. There was some back-and-forth discussion about how users get compensated for their attention, whether the services they’re receiving from the various sites “for free” is enough, or if users expect or require additional compensation when their attention streams are repurposed or monetized by the sites they use.

Other sites discussing the BizDev 2.0 session:

• Notes from Biz Dev 2.0 (15 Nov 2006) by Ed Costello
• NextNY Discusses BizDev2.0 by Andrew Parker
• NextNY BizDev2.0 by Dan Kantor
• Mashups: Feature Not A Company? by Lee Semel
• NextNY Biz Dev 2.0 by Fred Wilson
• bizdev2.0 tag on del.icio.us