Wikimedia: The Mission versus the Money / Lane Becker / Intersection 23

As the head of the for-profit arm of the not-for-profit Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the free global online encyclopedia Wikipedia, Lane Becker often jokes that he’s the organization’s “token capitalist.” His team runs Wikimedia Enterprise, a SaaS platform product that provides companies with fast, reliable access to the content from Wikipedia and its sister web projects for use in their own sites and services, with customers ranging from small startups all the way up to Google.
One of the biggest challenges for the Wikimedia Enterprise team is staying on the right side of the Foundation’s deeply held purpose of providing free knowledge to the world, while also working to turn a meaningful profit to sustain that mission. Or to put it another way, figuring out how to make money off of the sale of data inside an organization deeply committed to giving that same data away for free can be… challenging.
In this talk, Lane will cover the full range of issues he has faced building a sustainable start-up business inside a mature organization, including developing a set of values for your new business that aligns with and amplify existing organizational values; designing a business model to align with these values; dealing with the challenge of selling to businesses whose values aren’t entirely in step with yours; and aligning with critical community voices in order to ensure that the business delivers for the people you’re ultimately there to serve.