Michael Harries, the Chief Technologist of the Citrix Startup Accelerator recently wrote a blog post about WhoKnows, check it out below:
My son plays in a string quartet. The group sounds fantastic and I’m so proud. I suspect that one of the reasons this works so well is that all four players get to know each other incredibly well; strengths, weaknesses, warts and all.
Startups too, are at a comfortable stage of company evolution, where, for the great ones, every founder and employee is tightly connected to every other person in the company. It’s a family of sorts, playing an amazing technological symphony.. Roles and expertise are very clear and easy to access. Unfortunately this level of intimacy is not easy to maintain as the company grows, first to 100, to thousands, then to tens of thousands and more. Frankly speaking, there’s no way that close connections scale from 10 x 10 to 10000 x 10000.
Have you ever wished you knew who could help you with the best way to solve a particular customer problem, knew how to deal with machining approaches for a particular material, program in lisp, or had insights into market movements in Kenya? Admittedly, you might not have had these particular issues, but knowledge workers like you and I reinvent the wheel every day rather than leveraging knowledge already in our organization. If only we had a way to reach the right expert.
Thankfully, machine intelligence is coming to our rescue and we’re really excited to welcome a new company to the Citrix Startup Accelerator family solving exactly the problem of learning expertise across the whole company and surfacing this knowledge at exactly the right time.
WhoKnows is our latest Citrix Startup Accelerator company and marks our 23rd investment into a startup creating new solutions for a world with work-life harmony. This is really cool stuff, and well worth checking out.
Check out the full blog post here: http://blogs.citrix.com/2013/11/20/a-smaller-more-intimate-big-company-who-knew-whoknows/
