Beyond Money¶
OpenGeo makes money by competing in the market. But we never seek the types of returns that would make real investors happy. The market is essential for giving us feedback on what we are doing, and we believe in finding profitable niches in order to help make the market as a whole more efficient, while also supporting our operations. But our commitment to our values is greater than our desire to making large amounts of profits, which means the innovations we use to reach that a profitable niche will be open to all. And thus quite easy for anyone else to replicate - when they can use our source code, read our business strategy and research how we executed it’s not hard to follow. Instead of holding on to our niche for as long as we can instead we will find the next one and pass it off to our partners. Our partners will be able to ride it longer and likely extract much more than we would, while being able to leverage our brand and core experts. We’ll just have a small percentage of the profits go to us, for the work we actively do and for the brand and we’ve built.
Our first goal is to further our mission of open geospatial information, and better tools to make that possible - it’s simply not be super profitable. Sustainability is quite important to further that mission, so we do aim for profits. But once we make them we’ll seek to reinvest to further our mission, and also pursue things that are less likely to make profit (geospatial collaboration to help alleviate poverty instead of to help oil companies find new wells). Indeed as a 501c3 we are obligated by law to reinvest any revenue made on the market back in to our mission - we simply can’t write big checks to our initial funders.
We believe this focus on creating meaning and doing good in the world instead of making the maximum amount of money possible is a distinct advantage of OpenGeo. The best people in any profession do what they do because they love it, not because it will make them rich. Those who are in it to maximize money probably do have something they _really_ want to do, and at some point will give themselves over to that entirely. We seek to short cut that step of working really hard for something one doesn’t care about, and align what people truly want to do with what OpenGeo does. We’ve found this lets us get much better ‘talent’, as in this day and age more and more people are disillusioned with large corporations, and realizing that life is much more about finding meaning in day to day work, not in maximizing money and _then_ doing what one really wants. The future directions of OpenGeo will be determined by where the individuals that make it want to grow personally, and we will limit the size so that’s always possible. And encourage people to spin out on their own to create their own OpenGeo, that partners closely but where they get more control over the exact direction.
On Location-based Advertising¶
This lack of emphasis on making big money means that we are simply not interested in location-based marketing and advertising. While it is clearly ‘the future’, and while our tools are often used by startups and others aiming in that direction, it is just not a direction we will likely ever pursue. Everyone at OpenGeo wants to do something that makes the world a better place, in some way. Giving people coupons and ads based on their location is just not that interesting. Helping build community, enabling people to analyze and contribute to location specific problems, and connecting people with one another through location are all things that many location-based companies will enable through massive growth powered by advertising. We just prefer to work on the core platform or directly on the problems. We hope to help build an open location infrastructure of which advertising is part of the fabric, but that fabric is about much more than selling and buying.
