With technology traditionally being viewed in opposition to the environment, with its reliance on power, batteries and mass manufacturing, the term green technology may sound like something of an oxymoron.

However, sometimes technology can reshape society in surprising and unexpected ways, being used for different purposes than that in which the product or service was originally intended. In this way, certain technologies are being used to mitigate or reverse the effects of human activity on the environment, reducing our carbon footprint rather than increasing it.

This rise of green technology is an interesting time for employees working in technology and development, allowing them to use their tech skills to help create positive change.

Here are 5 exciting examples of green technologies changing the world for good.

Reduce energy consumption with green power outlets

One of the ongoing problems of traditional power outlets is their continual need for power, even once a device or appliance has been switched off.

This continual use of power is often referred to as “vampire power” with its blood-sucking power consumption draining both the environment and your electricity bill.

To combat this waste of energy through vampire power, green power outlets have been designed that allow you to cut off all power to your appliances with one easy turn of a dial, increasing your energy efficiency and reducing environmental impact.

Did you know that many electronic devices can be harmful to the environment if they’re not disposed of correctly?

With approximately 20 to 50 million metric tons of electronic waste (or e-waste) being disposed of every year, e-waste is a huge problem for the planet.

As well as being harmful to the environment, electronic waste can also cause health issues for individuals. The tiny parts that go into your mobile phone, computer and TV can contain mercury, lead, cadmium and other dangerous metals inside. While dismantling and salvaging products for gold and copper, e-waste can pose a risk to people in developing countries tasked with this dangerous job.

However, the good news is that tech companies can now take care of their e-waste responsibly, through companies who will directly pickup and process e-waste and ensure none ends up in landfill or in the wrong hands.

Creating solar panels with 3D printing technology

With the exciting world of 3D printing continuing to grow, there have been some inspiring arrivals in the green technology sphere.

For example, Australian scientists are one step closer to making a cheaper and faster way to print solar cells onto plastic. Once available, this technology could be used to power laptops to rooftops, allowing you to run your home responsibly on power from the sun.

Green technology could also see the invention of a home 3D printer able to produce solar cells from easily available materials, with the capacity to provide remote areas outside of the power grid with cheap and reliable electricity.

Mini solar lights bringing education to Africa

With many people in developing countries living beyond the energy grid, electricity is a precious and valuable commodity.

In Africa, with half of sub-Saharan Africans living without power, many households rely on kerosene lamps – which are not only expensive to run but produce toxic smoke into the atmosphere.

Recently, the introduction of tiny solar lights, generating just a handful of watts, have made reading or working at night possible. These solar lights, being free to run and safe to use, have opened up possibilities for education that were previously unimaginable to many Africans.

Energy-saving computer hardware and programs

Computers are a continually rapidly growing source of carbon, contributing to approximately 2% of global emissions, with that figure likely to double within a decade. Is there a way for the IT industry to continue without the huge drain on power from fossil fuels?

Green IT products focus on providing consumers with more environmentally conscious hardware, such as energy-efficient laptops and servers. There are also software options on the market that can power down our desktop when it’s not being used, or run in the background of your operating system and tune up your computer's own energy-saving hardware.

The use of these technologies holds promising hope for the future, with innovative products and services enabling individuals and communities to reduce their carbon footprints and impact on the planet. It also offers an exciting time ahead for those working in the technology industry, allowing you to use your tech skills to help change the world for good.

False

How green technology is changing the way we work

We all know human resources is responsible for interviewing new hires and helping them through their onboarding process, but what other functions do HR professionals perform for their employers?

For HR teams, each day brings a diverse range of roles and responsibilities – from helping other staff grow and develop in their careers, to assisting with organizational strategy and budgets.

To get a better understanding of the diverse functions of human resources, let’s look at 5 reasons why your HR team is so important for your business.

Your HR team plays a vital role in the professional development of your company’s employees, carrying out important activities such as performance reviews and professional development programs.

HR professionals are able to identify the type of skills training and employee development necessary for individual staff members to improve their skills and qualifications. In this way, your HR plays a valuable role in enabling employees to reach objectives and company goals, which has a positive effect on your business’ profits and reputation.

Within their roles, HR staff can also gather valuable information and feedback from your staff, which can be used to improve levels of employee performance and engagement. 

The HR team can play an essential role in developing your company's strategic direction, with their job role giving them a direct say in all new hires and recruitment. This area of responsibility is very important in shaping the future of any company, having a definite impact on an organization's stability and future success.

In their interactions with staff across all teams and business units, and at all levels, HR professionals are able to form a big picture view of your organization and make continuous improvements to company processes and efficiencies. 

Through the use of employee surveys, focus groups and exit interviews, HR staff can conduct real assessments of your company’s culture and management through feedback from staff. This helps highlight any issues and challenges that need to be overcome, determining what underlies any employee dissatisfaction within your organization.

We tend to think of human resources as dealing primarily with the ‘people’ side of things, rather than finance, however your HR team can play a useful and positive role in curbing company spending.

It’s helpful for employers to understand how important the proper management of human capital is to your company's bottom line. Your HR team can reduce excessive spending by: 

Negotiating better rates for benefits such as health care coverage

Ensuring competitive and realistic wage-setting

Having a solid knowledge of employment trends and salary analysis

By making sure your recruitment and selection processes are efficient, HR can also minimize company expenses regarding advertising jobs, onboarding, training new employees and reducing staff turnover.

Conflict is bound to arise in all organizations, regardless of size or industry. With so many different personalities and working styles put together under one roof, it’s inevitable that certain employees will clash at one time or another.

The important thing is to have processes in place to deal with conflict, managed by experienced and qualified human resources professionals. HR staff are specially trained to handle conflict resolution between two employees, or even a manager and employee.

Your human resource manager can act as a consultant and mediator to sort out any issues in an effective manner and remove tensions from the workplace, before they get out of control.

Creating a Safe and Positive Work Culture

Last, but certainly not least, an organization’s HR team is responsible for creating a workplace culture that is safe and compliant, with minimal risks to your staff’s health or wellbeing.

In building a culture of compliance, your HR team will develop, implement and communicate policies around sexual harassment, bullying and workplace health and safety (WH&S). As champions of these policies, HR staff encourage equality, diversity and the protection of workers’ rights, with zero tolerance for any form of harassment or discrimination.

Every company wants to be known as an "employer of choice” – a workplace that receives recognition for the positive way in which they treat their staff. With organizational culture such an important part of any company, HR professionals also play a large role in how happy and engaged staff are in the workplace.

As you can see, your HR team is an incredibly valuable resource, responsible for empowering and strengthening your business through the successful management of your people.

Why your human resources department is so important for your business

Over the past 8 weeks, Go1 co-founder and COO Chris Eigeland has been in New York City fulfilling his duties as the Australian Youth Representative to the United Nations, culminating in presenting at the United Nations General Assembly.

During his time, in New York Chris has had the opportunity to attend a number of high-level forums covering diversity, innovation and youth, as well as being invited to speak as a part of Peace Day on Friday, September 16.

Prior to beginning his UN journey, Chris first travelled across all of the states and territories within Australia and spoke with more than 5,000 young Australians to understand their priority issues so he could include them in his address.

Now that he has delivered his address, Chris reflects on his time with other United Nations delegates, and what he learned from the experience.


“Last year the UN set the agenda for the next 15 years in terms of social economic culture development. It was increasingly clear throughout my tenure at the UN that in order to achieve the ambitious goals such as educating every person of primary to high school age in ending extreme poverty, we’re relying more and more on the largest human generation to ever exist. 

The key part of that will be how we approach the education question from a primary education perspective, rather than how we correct skills for the industries and economies in the future. One area that the UN is relying more and more is private sector and start-ups working to solve this problem.”

What do you think you learned from being in and around in that environment for 3 to 4 weeks throughout that process around government officials and so on from a range of countries all over the world.


We need to remember that government and international government systems like the UN don't have all the answers, and relying on small enterprises to think outside the box can really help to solve some of these problems.

The disparity in trying to provide this sort of opportunity is proving to be more challenging for UN members in areas of the world.”

Chris Eigeland: enabling young Australians to change the world

Being a perfectionist at work may seem like a good thing – to others, you probably look like a person who gets things done and gets them done properly.

In the workplace, you most likely appear as efficient, confident and well organised, checking things off a perfectly written to-do list while always looking busy and in control. But can being a perfectionist at work be a bad thing? You might be surprised to learn that telling recruiters or interviewers you’re a perfectionist could actually be holding you back.

Studies show that perfectionism is linked to depression, anxiety and a range of other mental health issues. You’ll also be at higher risk of burning out at work, so it’s vital to your wellbeing to get perfectionism under control.


Learning how to manage your perfectionist behaviour will prove positive for your productivity, self-confidence and working relationships. Let’s look at some steps you can take to start dealing with perfectionism at work.

Recognise that Your Perfectionism is Getting Out of Hand


The first step is recognising that your constant strive for perfection is causing you stress or issues at work. As bestselling author and president of TalentSmart, Dr Travis Bradberry, says “to defeat perfectionism, you have to learn to spot when it’s holding you back.”

Most perfectionists hide themselves behind hard work, appearing constantly busy and always in motion. While this may look super productive, the need to do everything perfectly can actually have a negative impact on productivity – spending so much time on making each task perfect, means less things are actually delivered and achieved.

When you let go of this need to be perfect and get your tendencies under better control, you’ll find you can actually work less while getting more done.

Because perfectionists care so deeply about their work, they can often find it hard to hear feedback, taking it personally and often straight to the heart. They can even get quite defensive or upset, as well as disappointed in themselves and their work.

However, feedback – particularly “negative” feedback – is a critical part of professional development, allowing employees to continually grow and learn. If you struggle to receive feedback from managers or workmates, try not to take it personally and embrace their comments as an important learning curve.

Everyone makes mistakes. So when something goes wrong, go a little easier on yourself.

Viewing the smallest of mistakes as epic failures makes you less resilient to every day challenges. To succeed at work, you need to have the ability to bounce back from your mistakes and show resilience to challenges.

It’s important to also accept mistakes in others. Perfectionists can be highly critical of colleagues and workmates because they hold everyone to the same high standard to which they hold themselves. Try and let go of the need to criticise and judge the people around you.

As hard as it is to hear, perfectionism can actually be a sign of low confidence in your work.

While colleagues and managers may assume you are confident because of your high quality work, they probably don’t see the deliberation and doubt that lies behind each piece. Not to mention the constant drafting and re-drafting!

Perfectionists always feel like they’re coming up short. This means they often don’t have the self-confidence to go ahead with a new concept or challenge, for fear that it won’t be good enough.

As Dr Bradberry explains, “perfectionists’ hard work, research, and attention to detail produce novel ideas… unfortunately, their great ideas are often placed on the back burner because of their fear of risk.”

Next time you feel yourself scared of putting an idea or project out there, think about the risk of not making a move at all. The worst thing that can happen is that your idea or piece of work is knocked back, in which case you try again next time. This is the best way to build confidence in your work.

Stop Procrastinating – Just Get it Done!

One of the biggest problems with perfectionism is that it can cause constant procrastination.

Because deep down, you may not have confidence in your work and are scared of criticism or rejection, perfectionists can often become paralysed. Even the most ordinary tasks, like replying to an email, can become daunting when you’ve talked yourself into a perfectionist downward spiral.

When everything on your list needs to be done perfectly it can become so overwhelming that you end up completely frozen, unable to produce anything or meet your deadlines.

To avoid this, be realistic about the significance and priority of your everyday tasks – sometimes you need to realise that getting something finished and off your list is the most important thing, even if it’s only 80% “perfect” to you.

So next time you find your perfectionist tendencies taking over your work life, take a deep breath and think about all of these steps. Then make a start on that exciting new project, put forward your great idea, or post your work online for the world to see. After all, what’s the worst that can happen?


Is being a perfectionist at work a bad thing?

It’s great news that the NSW government has developed a new, six-year plan to make workplaces safer, healthier and more productive for all employees. The government’s new Work Health and Safety Roadmap for NSW 2022 aims to reduce the rate of illnesses, injuries and fatalities in all NSW workplaces.

At Go1, this a direction we support wholeheartedly, which is why we’re campaigning to help promote the Work Health and Safety Roadmap for NSW 2022.

At the same time, we know that government agencies are struggling to train staff properly due to budget constraints and limited technology. Without proper training, staff will find it difficult to deliver services safely and efficiently.

Go1’s recent Local Government 2016 survey found that most local governments aren’t even offering online training yet, let alone mobile. Fewer than one in three government agencies offers mobile learning.

Given that governments are setting the standard for the community, they need to be well trained and informed in all of the areas they deal with on a daily basis. All local governments we surveyed listed the same three compliance courses as their top priorities: Traffic Control, Codes of Conduct and Workplace Health and Safety.

So to make training easier, and help more organisations get online and embrace the advantages of eLearning, we’re offering three of our most popular workplace health and safety courses to all NSW businesses for free.

You can enroll in Go1 SafeWork for FREE here

Independently reviewed by Sparke Helmore Lawyers, this course is designed to provide employees with an understanding about bullying and harassment in the workplace, the type of behaviour that should be avoided and what employees can do if bullying or harassment is occurring in their workplace.

This course is designed to provide an understanding of the controls that should be applied to manual handling in the workplace. It has been reviewed by the National Safety Council of Australia.

Endorsed by Chubb Safety Australia, this course is designed to provide the learner with an understanding of why evacuations take place, what occurs during an emergency and their responsibilities concerning evacuation.

Keeping up with compliance is one of the most critical components in training. Governments are setting the standard for the community. They need to be well trained and informed in all of the areas they deal with on a daily basis, and eLearning can make this simple, efficient and cost-effective.

Go1 SafeWork provides support for a safer government

When it comes to retaining your best customers and building a successful business, the customer service experience you provide is absolutely critical. According to the White House Office of Consumer Affairs, a dissatisfied customer will tell between 9-15 people about their experience. Likewise, a Bain & Company study found that a customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service related than price or product related.

Clearly, when customer satisfaction begins to dip, you know you have a serious problem on your hands. Whether you’re working for a lean and mean start-up or an established corporation, make sure you don’t make these critical customer service mistakes:

When your customer service staff is inadequately trained it reflects poorly on your entire organization. To prevent this, it’s important to have standardized processes for dealing with upset customers, deescalating situations, and above all else, providing actionable solutions. Customer service training shouldn’t just be for the customer service department either. Everyone in your company should be on the same page when it comes to customer interactions.

Not greeting your customers in a friendly manner.

The way your customer service staff greets your customers can change the entire mood of the conversation that follows. If they are friendly and warm then there is a high probability that the customer will respond in the same fashion. However, if your customer service staff sounds stressed out, bored, or uninterested then it will only lead to a negative experience.

Some organizations make it very difficult for their customers to actually contact them. They hide their contact information or direct customers to a long and tedious FAQ in an effort to avoid a real human-to-human interaction. While it's true that customer service time adds to your costs, the customer service experience also drives revenue. When your customers can't find solutions to their problems then they will turn to someone else and they will tell the friends to do the same.

“I’m sorry, that’s just our policy.” This is a statement that will turn your customers away in a flash. When there's a situation that needs to be remedied and you can keep the customer by bending the rules a little bit, sometimes this is truly the best option. Amazon is a company that lives by this policy and will go above and beyond to make sure that you’re satisfied with the outcome of your purchase—even if this means doing things that aren't in the rulebook sometimes.

Sometimes your customers just want to be heard. If you want the interaction to go well then it's important to pause and listen to everything that they are telling you. In some cases the problem they have might not be as obvious as they think it is. This is especially true in the tech world, for example. If you take the time to listen to your customers before responding to them the outcome of the interaction may be much more positive.

Airlines and telecom providers are particularly bad about this. As soon as you get through to a real human being they ask you questions about your call and then hand you off to another representative. Then that representative asks you the same question and hand you off to someone else!

This is extremely frustrating and turns customers away. The solution of this problem is to give representatives the authority to solve the problem themselves without handing it off to a different department or superior.

Failing to follow up with customers after the contact was made.

Following up shows the customer that you care about their experience and that you want to make sure that the problem was fully resolved. It leaves things on a positive note so that the last thing your customer remembers is that you were attentive enough to make sure they were fully satisfied.

Some companies train their customer service staff to keep the customers happy at all costs. While this sounds like a great philosophy it also leads to a lot of promises that cannot be fulfilled. Obviously, when your customer expects one thing and is given less than they planned on then your reputation will suffer. Your staff should only make promises about service that they can actually keep!

Documenting your interactions with customers saves you time and provides you with critical data that you can use to improve your products and services over time. Plus, nobody wants to explain their problem over and over again when contacting a customer support representative. If you have a database that documents prior actions then you can get caught up and start addressing the problem faster, which will lead to a more positive outcome with the customer in the end.

Some companies – startups in particular – choose to provide customer service exclusively over email. While this isn’t a problem itself, it can become one if you are sending too many canned responses. Your customers know when they’re receiving a pre-fabricated message and it can make them feel like they are being brushed off. All it takes is adding a little bit of personalization in the beginning of these emails to make the customer feel like they are being paid attention to.

Another Bain & Company study found that it costs 6 to 7 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one. This statistic alone should show you how valuable each and every one of your customers are. The bottom line is that customer loyalty is paramount to the health of your organization. Avoid the mistakes I’ve listed above and you’ll be providing a superior customer service experience that will pay off tremendously in the long run.

Are you interested in learning how to better understand the needs of your customers?

You might find How to Understand Customer Needs to be a valuable resource.

When someone says “leadership” whom do you picture that epitomizes that trait? Is it someone like Steve Jobs with his laser-like sense of focus and clear vision of the future? Or is it someone like Martin Luther King Jr. who understood how to motivate and unify people, while at the same time acting as a moral compass for those around him?

The truth is that leadership comes in many forms. Some leaders are more compassionate and inspirational, while others have a “stiff upper lip” and lead by example. However, what works as strong leadership in a college football setting might not go over as well during a religious ceremony (and vice versa).

How can you embrace these concepts of leadership in your day today? 

If you’re in customer service, how can you motivate someone in your department to make a more human connection with their customers? 

If you’re a sales manager, how can you get your team to share your vision for how you’ll hit your sales figures in the next quarter?

If you are looking to learn more about leadership, here are two great courses that you might find interesting:

Ignorance to the law does not grant you immunity! Sounds dramatic, doesn’t it?

Well, when it comes to workplace compliance this is absolutely true. “Harmless mistakes” and a lax attitude towards federal and state mandates can quickly result in fines and lawsuits that can bring your business to a grinding halt.

If you want to keep things above board and avoid legal problems, then make sure you aren’t making these common compliance mistakes:

Everyone who is a potential employee at your organization must fill out an application form that’s compliant with your state and federal regulations. Different states require different information and it’s critical to be up-to-date about what to include on these forms. These mistakes are easy to make. Some employers, for example, provide the right forms and then they get lost or end up in the trash by accident. Don’t make this mistake!

Failure to provide harassment prevention trainingharassment prevention training.

Harassment is a serious issue that can have equally serious consequences for your business. That’s why many states have laws in place that require employers to provide harassment prevention training. Without this training, your employees may be violating the law without being aware of it. Even if your state does not require you to provide workplace harassment prevention training, it’s a smart thing to provide in order to avoid compliance issues in the future.

Every employee is required to complete a W-4 tax form after they have been formally hired at your organization. Most companies don’t miss this part, but it’s quite common that these forms become outdated after someone has been at an organization over time. The best policy is to require your employees to fill out a new W-4 every year to make sure everything is compliant.

Failure to provide anti-discrimination traininganti-discrimination training.

Like harassment, discrimination is another serious problem that can have costly consequences for your organization. While your state might not require formal anti-discrimination training, it’s a good idea to implement it to make sure employees don’t commit an offense due to ignorance of the law. Your employees could be having lunch, for example, and a line of questioning could end up crossing over into the discrimination territory. Many people are aware that it’s against federal law to discriminate against age, sex, and nationality but there are other groups that are protected against discrimination as well—including smokers.

Sharing an employee’s medical status or condition with others.

Sometimes employees need special accommodations due to medical situations that arise. While a manager or superior may be given access to the nature of the medical condition, sharing that information with others can be a serious privacy (and obviously compliance) violation.

Making same-sex marriage discrimination mistakes.

Same-sex marriage was made lawful after the Supreme Court ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges. This means that employers are committing federal violations if they do not update their policies regarding benefits, family, and medical leave, and so on. Since this was a relatively recent change, many organizations might need to revisit their documentation to ensure that they are in compliance.

Allowing telecommuting employees to commit unauthorized overtime.

The number of workers who have “gone remote” over the past few years has skyrocketed. In fact, it’s been estimated that 45 percent of the entire U.S. workforce telecommutes on some basis now. While this is having a surprisingly positive effect on productivity for many organizations, it’s can also lead to employees working too many unauthorized hours from home. To avoid making this costly compliance mistake, it’s absolutely critical to monitor the hours worked and make sure supervisors and employees are on the same page regarding hours.

Video surveillance in unauthorized areas.

While some employers have a real need to videotape and monitor employees, it’s important that privacy violations don’t occur. In most cases, employers only have the legal right to videotape common or public areas where there is no expectation of privacy. Further, employees should always be aware that they are or could potentially be recorded.

Intruding on someone’s privacy due to unreasonable search.

Your employees have a legal right to privacy and this includes protection against unreasonable searches. Lockers, desks and employee changing rooms may all be considered areas that are off limits to unreasonable searches.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered communities are protected against harassment, privacy invasion, and discrimination. Over the past few years there have been a number of news stories that have brought these communities into the forefront of the national spotlight. Comments and questions may be made in the workplace that violate the legal mandates that protect these individuals. To prevent this, it’s important to provide training that outlines the your policy regarding LGBT discrimination and the consequences of violating it.

Workplace compliance fines and lawsuits cost American companies billions of dollars every year. Some mistakes may be due to simple documentation errors, while others may come about due to employee ignorance to the law. Either way, compliance mistakes could end up costing your organization dearly. The best way to prevent these violations is to stay informed and provide continuous training for management and employees.

Are you making these workplace compliance mistakes?

I started volunteering actively around 2006. Since then, I have been involved in numerous charity works, independently and by organization.

My first experience as a volunteer in FESPIC Games 2006, where I was trained to handle disabled athletes. From there, I’ve grown a passion in helping others, which in turn led me to volunteer as street feeder on my weekends. While volunteering to feed the homeless, I’ve learned a lot of things and it makes me want to contribute more to the society. I realized that I could never make enough money to help everyone but I will make it a point to help whenever I can.

Upon my graduation, I spent my time teaching the aboriginal children and adults who are trapped in the aggressive development. They are illiterate but forced to live in middle of the city where the world revolves around money. I could not even bear to think how their future will turn out, it’s heartbreaking.

Once I started helping out, I volunteered to organize and participate in more charity programs through the company whenever I could get involved. These included blood donation campaigns, charity dinners and many more.

One of the craziest thing that I did on my own initiative was to set myself a goal to get 10 people to pledge as an organ donor in order to save 40 lives. To my surprise, it was actually not that hard to reach that number, and I realized that there are good people everywhere.

After this life got real for me and I got trapped in the 9-5 job for a while, but in 2014 I managed to find Epic Homes. Epic Homes operates a program that focuses primarily on building house for the indigenous, and the needy.

My journey with Epic Homes started as I worked on building a house for an indigenous family of 16. You can watch the video of my first build below.

This project was a very tough build where I had to dig 6 feet deep holes for the foundation of the house with only a hoe, shovel, and my energy. When I started as a builder, everything was done manually. There were no fancy gadgets or tool available to us to speed up the process. Starting your day before sunrise, and finishing up at the dorm after sunset- It was pure hard work. When I see the smiles on the faces of the families that I’ve been able to help, it’s worth every drop of sweat though, and the satisfaction that I got was way more than what I gave.

Since then, I try to squeeze in more builds whenever I can. I’m addicted to it!

You can see one of my more recent builds below, it was amazing!

People are constantly asking me ‘why do you want to help others when you don’t even have much yourself?’ I am not surprised at all. Kindness has been taken over by greed up to the point where people are suspicious when you try to help them without asking for anything in return. I volunteer simply because I understand the power of a little help.

I was born in the heart of Borneo Island, specifically in a very small (less than 100 family) and remote village. It is so remote that we didn't have electricity until year 2000. A little help from many people in my life created a bridge for me that eventually get me to where I am today. I’ve worked in more than 10 countries and been to places where I never even dreamed that I would go.

If I could pass on one message to the world (from a person who has lived on both sides of civilization), it would be:


"Don't call yourself civilized just because you live in a better place, better amenities, education background or simply because your life is better than others. Call yourself civilized only if you have humanity...or at least if you still have some left in you."

When she’s not out helping her community, Len is a Customer Success Manager and Go1, and her blood type is type coffee. When she is in her cave, she spends most of her time reading books, listening to indie/jazz music, plays with her guitar and sings sad melancholy songs – according to her friends.

When Len is outside of her cave, she can be found in the woods. Camping, hiking and all things adrenaline is totally her kind of activities. Though she reads cheesy poems, she does jump off the cliffs, waterfalls and bridges for fun. I guess, after all she is still the girl from the Land of The Head Hunters and the wild blood of the clan is still running in her.

Mulen Berimbun: Why I’m a passionate volunteer for my community

As presented at The 1st Indonesia International Conference on Science Technology Park (IICSTP) on October 12-13th by Go1 CEO Andrew Barnes.

There are a growing number of accelerator programmes designed to start and support innovative startup businesses. Many accelerators are increasing the size of their intakes, with some programmes now launching over 200 new companies per year. On first inspection the large numbers and consistent approach taken to accelerating the participating companies appears to be in conflict with producing innovative and disruptive companies.

This paper uses Y Combinator as a single case study to investigate whether increasing the number of companies within a batch has resulted in longer or shorter timeframes for companies to achieve an exit (through acquisition or initial public offering). The paper finds that the timeframe for achieving an exit for Y Combinator companies is reducing, even while batch size has sharply increased. There is no statistically significant correlation between the cohort size and the initial money raised during the programme.

Disruptive new ventures are a hallmark of capitalism, where entrepreneurship revolutionizes existing economic structures (Schumpeter 1942). Creating new industry paradigms can be highly profitable. In the last four decades high-growth, venture capital backed startups have accounted for less than half of new US public companies, but have captured over 63% of the total market capitalization (Gornall and Strebulaev 2015). More recently, over the last ten years startup accelerators have emerged as a new method for incubating and investing in disruptive businesses (Miller and Bound 2011). Accelerators provide resources (generally in the form of seed funding, networks and mentorship) to groups of participating companies.The accelerator model was first pioneered by Y Combinator (YC), a programme that originated in Boston and now operates from Mountain View in California (Kim and Wagman 2014; Miller and Bound 2011; Dempwolf, Auer, and D’Ippolito 2014).

The first cohort of YC companies in 2005 (termed batches) featured less than ten businesses. YC has grown over the last decade and now launches over 200 companies each year. Intuitively there would seem to be a conflict between launching disruptive companies at scale. Indeed, existing research suggests that as companies grow larger, their ability to innovate may decrease (Ackermann 2012). The team behind YC are not unaware of the difficulty inherent in scaling the pursuit of innovation, and despite this have continued to steadily expand. YC’s mass production of high growth companies offers an opportunity for study: does the increasing size of cohorts have a negative effect on startup outcomes? This paper investigates whether there is a relationship between cohort size (in a given year) on seed investment round size and whether cohort size negatively impacts the average length of time for an acquisition.

There is reason to be both optimistic and pessimistic when considering whether innovation can scale. From a simplistic perspective there are certain types of advances that require sufficient size and scale to support the necessary research and development activities. The Large Hadron Collider offers unique insight into uncharted territory, and in turn may yield disruptive breakthrough findings. Without the support of countless scientists, many countries and many billions of dollars in investment it would not be possible. But this form of scale – concentrated on a single project – is not what YC and its peers are attempting. Instead YC’s programme supports a great diversity of startup businesses, all of which receive relatively few resources. As batch sizes increase, the time and attention from YC must be spread thinner still.

To support each company, YC must be able to systematize the elements required to support innovation. Isaac Asimov (2014, 2) suggests that “the process of creativity, whatever it is, is essentially the same in all its branches and varieties, so that the evolution of a new art form, a new gadget, a new scientific principle, all involve common factors.” If Asimov is correct, and if YC have been able to identify scalable means to deliver enough of the common factors, then there could be the opportunity to improve the outcomes for companies participating in YC, even while the size of cohorts increases.

In contrast to this, there are many examples where innovation has been negatively impacted as group size increases. In academia, research indicates there are decreasing returns as team size grow (Lee and Bozeman 2005). The productivity of corporate research and development teams decreases as staffing numbers increase, particularly for heterogeneous groups (Cummings et al. 2013). Venture capital firms seeking to increase the size of their portfolios also experience negative performance tradeoffs (Kim and Wagman 2014; Kanniainen and Keuschnigg 2004; Cumming 2006; Fulghieri and Sevilir 2009). Accelerators too may experience diseconomies of scale (Hallen, Bingham, and Cohen 2014).

Y Combinator differs to other accelerators in two important respects that may enable it to scale more successfully. First, by being renowned as the premier accelerator globally, YC is able to attract the top tier of potential startup applicants (Hochberg and Kamath 2012; Pauwels et al. 2016). Attracting the very top tier of applicants (ahead of other accelerators) is particularly important in an industry where outliers are essential (Kim and Wagman 2014). Second, YC strongly espouses independence and autonomy for the companies that participate in their programme. For example, unlike other accelerators which will often provide free or subsidized office space, Y Combinator does not (Radojevich-Kelley and Hoffman 2012). Paul Graham, one of the original co-founders of YC, cites the need for companies to develop their own culture (Stross 2012). Greater independence may certainly help YC companies innovate.

1.2 Pros and cons for YC’s increasing cohort size

There are potentially many negative impacts associated with increasing the size of an accelerator cohort. If the common factors for innovation described by Asimov are not systematized and designed to scale, then there will be less optimal outcomes on average for the participating companies. One obvious effect of larger cohort sizes is the increased competition for investment funding. If the available capital for seed investment is fixed, then increasing the average number of YC companies should result in a lower average seed round for each company. The increased competition for each investor dollar may be compounded by the perception of lower average quality as cohort size increases.

With increasing numbers of heterogeneous companies there will also be limits on the quality of advice and mentorship that can be provided. The homogeneity of advice given to an increasingly large cohort is more likely to be poorly suited to the unique needs of individual companies (Hallen, Bingham, and Cohen 2014). Unsuitable advice can negatively impact the chances of success.

3.1 H1: Does cohort size have an impact on the amount of seed funding raised by each company?

The 95% confidence interval for  has a lower bound of  and an upper bound of 2456.95.

3.2 H2: Is there an effect on the time it takes for a company to exit based on the cohort size?

The second hypothesis investigated is whether there is a relationship between the cohort size and the average time taken for a liquidity event (either an IPO or acquisition). As no Y Combinator company has been publically listed I only consider acquisitions. There were 127 acquisitions in the dataset and the results are summarized in Table 3 below. The 95% confidence interval for  in Table 3 has a lower bound of and an upper bound of 0.004.

There is a natural ceiling on the maximum number of days for an exit event based on the year that a company participated in YC: the average time taken for companies to be acquired from the 2015 YC cohort is likely much less than average time taken for participants of the 2010 cohorts. To control for this ceiling, I have included a variable for the total number of days that the company has been operating in Table 4. The 95% confidence interval for  in Table 4 has an upper value of  and a lower value of  -0.04.

The results in Table 3 and Table 4 do not provide support for any positive or negative impact with increasing cohort sizes. In both regressions there is no statistically significant relationship at  between cohort size and the average number of days for an acquisition. The effect size is also small and negative: the largest change recorded to cohort size (from around ten participants to 210) would only reduce the average number of days for an acquisition by four.

This paper began with the question of whether the success of Y Combinator’s portfolio companies can continue as YC scales the size of its programme. YC’s programme is now twenty-times larger than when it began. The investigation of 991 YC companies suggests that the increasing cohort sizes have not had a noticeable impact on the time taken for acquisitions or for the amount of seed funding raised. I hasten to note that a statistically insignificant finding does not itself suggest that the tested hypothesis is false (Ellenberg 2014). However, the narrow confidence interval for the effect size of cohort size does indicate that any potential positive or negative effect is minimal.

The minimal impact that increasing cohort sizes has had on the average amount of seed funding is unexpected. Intuitively one might expect that the greater the number of companies, the greater the competition and lower average investment each would receive. The results in Table 2 suggest that there is a statistically insignificant positive correlation between the size of cohort and the average seed round. Table 5 provides an overview per year of the average seed round and the number of YC companies in that year. The results suggest that YC’s brand as the world’s top accelerator may have meant its companies have been protected from the increased competition amongst peers. As Y Combinator’s brand has grown, so too has the number of applicants for its programmes. This has meant YC has been able to maintain an acceptance rate ‘below 3%’ (Yin and Luo 2015, 23). The negative impact of increasing cohort size is probably more acutely felt by accelerators that lower the entry bar.

The second finding was that YC’s increasing cohort size has had a negligible impact on the average time for an acquisition. There is already research showing that participation in an accelerator like YC has demonstrated reductions in the average time before acquisition (Smith and Hannigan 2015). What is unexpected is that cohort size has had no to minimal impact on the average time until acquisition.

The findings suggest certain implications for accelerators. It does appear that there may indeed be scalable “common factors” when it comes to producing innovative companies (Asimov 2014, 2). Y Combinator’s success in scaling the size of its cohorts suggests that it has systematized some of them. The literature review identified some of the unique strategies that YC uses to support innovation. The first is its focus on individual autonomy. Practices such as not offering office space are in contrast to ‘virtually all accelerator companies’ (Radojevich-Kelley and Hoffman 2012, 60). By strongly encouraging participating companies to develop their own cultures and environments, YC is attempting to encourage heterogeneity between their portfolio companies.

Second, YC has been able to keep acceptance rates low, despite the increase in cohort size. Increasing cohort size at the expense of quality would likely have a negative impact on both seed funding size and acquisition prospects. As Y Combinator has been able to maintain and even grow its brand, it has been able to attract an increasing number of applicant companies. With acceptance rates below 3% (which is better than industry averages), selection to YC continues to be a strong quality signal for participating companies (Yin and Luo 2015, 23).

Replicating the success of YC in is not trivial. However, a focus on the elements that will support innovation at scale appears to be an essential ingredient.

As with all studies, there are limitations which must be considered with this investigation. A primary limitation are the variables available for investigation. When considering whether cohort size has an impact on firm outcomes, the ideal outcome variable would be firm market capitalization. The amount of time taken for acquisition is an imperfect proxy for success. Unfortunately, data on valuation or market capitalization was not available. Further research in the area would benefit from access to such data.

With that said, the limited information on acquisition values seems to suggest that YC’s performance is continuing to strengthen. One of the most recent YC exits (and also its largest to date) is Cruise, an autonomous vehicle company, that reportedly sold to General Motors for $1bn (Crunchbase 2016). Cruise was part of YC’s 2014 cohort, which was the largest cohort year for YC to date.

Another potential limitation relates the incentives of accelerators at scale. For accelerators that are able to develop focused, larger portfolios there are strategic benefits from exiting underperforming companies quickly (Fulghieri and Sevilir 2009). This dynamic doesn’t seem to apply as much to YC as it does not have a focused portfolio (the diversity of participating companies appear to be increasing with time) and does not have control over exiting firms (either through acquisition or by shutting them down).

Finally, while not a limitation, it is worth noting that portfolio size is a function of an accelerator’s business model. The typical accelerator business model ‘is to invest in a set of ventures with a relatively small amount of money rather than continue to support the ventures in multiple rounds’ (Kim and Wagman 2014, 5). Accordingly, accelerators are able to invest in a large number of potential firms. More recently Y Combinator has opted to adopt a different model, guaranteeing follow on investment in all its portfolio companies up until a valuation of $300 million (Altman 2015). Given the unique nature of YC’s future strategy, there is an opportunity for further and deeper research.

I would like to acknowledge and thank Assoc. Professor Dr Damian Hine at the University of Queensland Business School for reading an early draft of this paper.

Ackermann, Stephen J. 2012. Are Small Firms Important? Their Role and Impact. Springer Science & Business Media.

Altman, Sam. 2015. “YC Continuity.” Y Combinator Posthaven. October 16. https://blog.ycombinator.com/yc-continuity-fund.

Asimov, Isaac. 2014. “Published for the First Time: A 1959 Essay by Isaac Asimov on Creativity.” MIT Technology Review. October 20. http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531911/isaac-asimov-asks-how-do-people-get-new-ideas/.

Cohen, Jacob. 1994. “The Earth Is Round (P<. 05).” American Psychologist 49 (12): 997.

Cohen, Susan, and Yael V. Hochberg. 2014. “Accelerating Startups: The Seed Accelerator Phenomenon.” Available at SSRN 2418000. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=2418000.

Cottrell, A, and R Lucchetti. 2016. “Gretl User’s Guide.” http://ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/pub//gretl/manual/en/gretl-guide.pdf.

Crunchbase. 2016. “Mar 11, 2016: General Motors / Cruise | Crunchbase - General Motors Acquires Cruise for $1B in Cash & Stock.” March 11. https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/d7ca7de8846a22a446e474e388617673.

Cumming, Douglas J. 2006. “The Determinants of Venture Capital Portfolio Size: Empirical Evidence.” Journal of Business 79: 1083–1126.

Cummings, Jonathon N., Sara Kiesler, Reza Bosagh Zadeh, and Aruna D. Balakrishnan. 2013. “Group Heterogeneity Increases the Risks of Large Group Size a Longitudinal Study of Productivity in Research Groups.” Psychological Science 24 (6): 880–890.

Dempwolf, C. Scott, Jennifer Auer, and Michelle D’Ippolito. 2014. “Innovation Accelerators: Defining Characteristics Among Startup Assistance Organizations.” SBAHQ-13-M-0197. US Small Business Administration. https://www.sba.gov/sites/default/files/rs425-Innovation-Accelerators-Report-FINAL.pdf.

Ellenberg, Jordan. 2014. How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking. Penguin Publishing Group.

Fulghieri, Paolo, and Merih Sevilir. 2009. “Size and Focus of a Venture Capitalist’s Portfolio.” Review of Financial Studies 22 (11): 4643–4680.