Exponential Organizations: Why new organizations are ten times better, faster, and cheaper than yours (and what to do about it)

by Salim Ismail

Two key factors enabled Waze to succeed, and those two factors hold true for all next-generation ExO companies: Access resources you don’t own. In Waze’s case, the company made use of the GPS readings already on its users’ smartphones. Information is your greatest asset. More reliably than any other asset, information has the potential to double regularly. Rather than simply assembling assets, the key to success is accessing valuable caches of existing information. Andrew Rasiej, chairman of the New York Tech Meetup, said it best: “I think of Waze as a civics app. It’s collecting information about the movement of cars and people in public places. What else could you do with that data?”