From the beginning we’ve been driven by the mission to do our part to help America and the world meet the many pressing challenges of the 21st Century. We believed one of the main ways to truly meet those challenges would be to make some structural breakthroughs that would have long-term consequences. They key was to find ways to get many, many more people productively involved in solving problems – an order of magnitude more. The only way to realistically do that would be through leveraging the transformative capabilities of technology, particularly the new tech tools just becoming available now.
Specifically, large-scale problem-solving would have to link all the good work that goes on in physical meetings with all the good work taking place in the online environment where far more people can get involved. The key link between those two worlds lies in the use of inexpensive yet high quality video. We have developed an original approach that captures and thoroughly recreates the off-line experience and gets it to come alive on the web.
We also saw the coming wave of innovation around web collaboration that is now breaking all over Silicon Valley. Early on we built our next generation problem-solving platform on the most promising new foundation for that kind of work: Google Wave. We are strategically aligned with Google Wave and are building and refining our platform in a rapidly growing community of developers who promise to keep us pushing the cutting edge of this exciting new field.
We are located in San Francisco and built on the Silicon Valley startup model. We re just finishing up investment in our Angel round and expect to raise more capital in 2010. We built our business model on two lines of business, essentially around the public challenges and the private problems.
Our public challenges are where we catalyze work around big issues like how America can shift all electricity to clean energy as fast as possible. These public efforts will be sustained by sponsorship and eventually membership. The initial network of individual experts and innovators working in the gatherings and online environment are invited, and will create a very valuable community with time. We expect these public challenges to aggregate terrific participants from all over, and gain the attention of audiences in this country and the world. The plethora of video and evolving wave work could attract sizable numbers with time. There will be opportunities for organizations with interest in developing relationships in these fields to sponsor the good work or make sure their perspective is represented by becoming a member.(See more)
Our private projects that we tailor to the more specific needs of individual organizations is supported by licensing and services. We have an end-to-end offering that roughly follows the trajectory of a public challenge, but we also can help an organization with one or two elements of the overarching formula. For example, we might just apply our immersive video techniques for capturing an existing meeting and set up all that video for productive online collaboration. (See more).
As in all startups, the team is as important as the idea. Here are some of the key senior people who bring essential expertise to the company:
Peter Leyden - Founder and CEO
Leyden oversees the integration of all the critical pieces to the new process and platform. Leyden knows the web and technology: He was managing editor of the original Wired magazine in the 1990s when it pioneered the early web. Leyden knows how to leverage a network of talented individuals to solve complex problems: He worked for years at Global Business Network that pioneered the use of networks of innovators to solve complex problems faced by governments and corporations. Leyden knows all about the latest online tools and video: He directed the New Politics Institute in the last political cycle and helped people in politics shift to the new political paradigm best demonstrated by the Obama campaign. Now Leyden has drawn off all he has learned to help create and drive Next Agenda.
Jim Kiles - CFO and head of Business Development
Kiles runs business and finance and drives all deals. Jim is a longtime Silicon Valley hand who helped launch roughly 60 media startups through the 1990s as the Director of Strategy for Intel Capital. Jim is a longtime entrepreneur who knows what it takes to make a startup company successful.
Kristin Cobble - Chief of Meeting Design and Facilitation
Cobble is a world-class meeting designer and facilitator with 20 years of experience in the field. She comes form Global Business Network and the Monitor Group, a high level strategy consulting firm. She specializes in getting many different stakeholders involved in working on common problems and coming to common agreement.
Eugene Kim - Chief of Online Collaboration
Kim is a bona fide expert on integrating face-to-face and online collaborative processes. As the founder of Blue Oxen Associates, a leading consulting firm in collaboration, Kim has helped a diverse range of organizations with collaborative challenges, from NASA to the Wikimedia Foundation.
Ben Schick - Chief of Video Operations
Schick oversees all our video operations. Ben has 20 years experience in many of the fields related to video: television, film and animation. He most recently ran Media One Services, San Francisco’s premier independent TV studio. He has long experience covering live events and conferences and working with corporate clients as well. Ben works closely with our video partners and network of video journalists, many of whom have experience with the Obama campaign or Al Gore’s Current TV cable channel geared to young people.
Next Agenda is an innovative Silicon Valley startup company that has been working since the summer of 2008 on cracking a new model of large-scale problem-solving that fully leverages the next generation of online collaboration tools and fully exploits the capability of inexpensive web video. 
