Steve Woolf, one of our partners on JETSET, asked on his blog what people look for in a partner. We’re big on partnerships here at NNN — in the structure of our company, and in the way that we get things done. Every one of our networks has pretty vital partners involved, from the producers who create the shows to distributors who help us get them in front of people. And while we’ve added a lot of partners in the last three months, we’ve actually been pretty selective. I think about partnerships every day, and for me it comes down to two things: one, is there something they do better than us, that we want to be able to do? And two, do we like them?

The second’s at least as important as the first. I’ve been around long enough to know that life’s too short, and work’s too hard, to do it with people you don’t have a good time with. And if you have a good time together and like what comes out of it, partnerships can last a really long time.

So, a quick shout-out to some of our partners so far — I really like these people, and they do things that we can’t do, but thanks to them, those things are part of Next New. And then I’ll shut up and ask some of the other people here at NNN what they look for in a partner, and to thank anyone I forgot, so that we can keep Steve’s thread going.

The team at Spark, our first major partners, brings in challenging ideas nearly every day, and led a round that brought in an amazing group of advisors and investors. Rob and Corinne, our first new content partners, celebrate twenty episodes of Thread Heads today with a brilliant episode illustrating the partnerships with viewers our networks are building. Fred’s team at Frederator and the guys at Davidville have been a big part of what we’re building since before we had a name. It’s very likely we wouldn’t have a business without Apple and their amazing iPod, and although our partnership is strictly an editorial one (we make stuff, they promote it if they like it), it’s a main way that people find us. (Do I get an iPhone for that plug? No? Drat.) We were lucky enough to make friends with Google and YouTube when other people were taking another tack, and on their little video site we’re making thousands of new friends every day. A number of talented design groups have helped us make our networks cool and memorable, especially Threespot, Atmosphere, and the aforementioned Davidville. And new partners like Veoh, Joost, and more to come are making our content available in ways we never could on our own.

Not to mention the talented people like Steve and his partner Zadi who have worked with us to make some seriously cool programming for the net, and the employees and consultants who come together every day at HQ to get things done. When we met every one of them, the first thought was, wow, we like these people, and the second one was, damn, they’re good.

OK, enough from me. What does everyone else think? What do you all look for in a partner?

Please promulgate us on the interweb.

Posted by Tim at 11:56 pm on Friday, June 29th, 2007 in Next New Networks, People. You can follow responses through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.