Ears Wide Open

“You have to love this sweet, satisfying machine," wrote David Pogue in his New York Times review of the Squeezebox. The sweet machine in question is a $300 device that lets audiophiles take digital music from their computer hard drives or from Internet-radio streams, and play it with impressive clarity on high-end speakers in their living rooms. "Its creators have sweated so many details, you want to hand them a towel."

Ah, but who actually did that sweating? Not just the handful of engineers on the payroll at Slim Devices, the startup that makes the Squeezebox. The player, which has sold an impressive 50,000 units, is largely the brainchild of its customers around the world, who have done much of the vital engineering and design work--for free. They've been motivated by their passions--for great audio, for cool products, for the art of engineering--and also by the satisfaction of being admired and relied on by a global community of their peers.

We know about open-source software and Web services such as Linux, the Mozilla Web browser, and Wikipedia, of course. But Sean Adams, the 27-year-old college dropout who started Slim in his Silicon Valley garage, bet that the same ethos of knowledge sharing and community could extend to a manufactured physical object, one being sold--gasp!--for profit. True, it's a conclusion he came to by accident. Adams had a more conventional company in mind when he was making the rounds for venture capital. He just happened to be looking for funding during the Valley's particularly inauspicious time of late 2001. "Sean wanted Slim Devices to be open source because he didn't have the money to build a company in the usual way," says Patrick Cosson, Slim's vice president of sales and marketing. "It wasn't a political position. It was out of necessity."

And you know what they say about necessity. Slim Devices will bring in around $10 million in revenue this year. Its fans include music stars Herbie Hancock and Alanis Morissette. And its latest product, released last September, the higher-end $2,000 Transporter, has reaped three times the expected orders.

Slim Devices is still small, of course, and young. But it offers a glimpse of how many companies may come to function in the future: as ecosystems that depend on the active participation of broad networks of contributors. "Everywhere you find innovation today, a community is involved," says Patricia Seybold, author of Outside Innovation: How Your Customers Will Co-Design Your Company's Future (Collins, October 2006).

In this world, running a company is not about brilliance or command, but about attracting and orchestrating the work of talented and passionate outsiders--people who know more than you do, have better ideas, and maybe even care more about your product than you do. As Slim's five-year history shows, there's still an important role for the company and its leaders, but it sure isn't what people have been learning in business school for decades.

People around the world have been contributing to Slim Devices free of charge for all sorts of reasons. Some do it to showcase their skills in the hope of attracting a job offer. Some do it for the challenge. But much of it comes down to this: We want things our way. "Initially, I really got involved because the product didn't do quite what I wanted," says Adrian Smith, who's employed as a network architect for a large telco in Britain. "Instead of just complaining, [Slim] allowed me to roll up my sleeves and try to improve it."

Hard-core audio enthusiasts like Smith, the sort Adams calls "people who will do anything in the pursuit of sound," are the backbone of the Slim Devices community. But what keeps these avid listeners engaged, in fact, is the chance to be heard. Felix Mueller was a software engineer in San Jose, California, a few miles from Slim's headquarters in Mountain View, when he started writing new features for its players. The startup's bosses treated him with deference when he dropped by its vintage 1950s Silicon Valley building (which originally belonged to Fairchild Semiconductor, the legendary company that invented the computer chip). "When I first met Sean," Mueller recalls, "he greeted me with, 'You must be the famous Felix.'" Mueller remained a key member of Slim's community even after he moved to Switzerland. Smith says Slim's executives have earned his trust by relying on his software and "treating me as the expert on how it works."