Musings

Taxation is the source of revenue for city-states. It happened in Roman times, it happened in Egyptian times, it happens today. Why, then, do so many online communities insist on letting outside institutions buy real estate on their local billboards as the main form of revenue? Facebook and Twitter didn’t have to be advertising companies. They had a critical mass of loyal citizens who ostensibly would be willing to pay for services the same way Americans pay for police, public school, and roads. They could have been online city-states. I like what 4Chan and Reddit are doing, to this effect. I bet the latter communities last longer than we expect them to, because they are treating the citizens of their communities as constituents, rather than product.

Sometimes I (and plenty of others) feel like Mark Zuckerberg and Dick Costolo are farmers and we are the crop. Yishan Wong and moot have an opportunity to be governors, or mayors. And when it comes to how they administer their sites and deal with community conflict, the differences are clear. Zuck and Dick’s constituents are clearly advertisers (though there is a tension there.) I don’t agree with everything that happens on Reddit or 4Chan communities – in fact I’m uncomfortable about most of it – but I think they operate with an unusual form of integrity. Unlike governments, which can go into debt, and even sometimes bankruptcy, companies need revenue or else they don’t exist. But online advertising revenue doesn’t seem to be easier to scale than online tax revenue. Ask any Wall Street analyst. The latter just feels like the more sensible system – the one likelier to last.

Let’s take a moment with the word pursuit. Its most famous application will serve as an interesting case study for its use, and for our understanding of it.

The goal of government, so famously wrought by the framers of the United States in the Declaration of Independence, is to protect the “unalienable rights” of Life, Liberty, and pursuit of Happiness. This trio of rights serves as the standard upon which political theorists plant their flags. And pursuit of happiness is the most interesting, and largely the least clear. How does one ‘pursue’ happiness? One definition in the Oxford English Dictionary describes a pursuit as “an activity of a specified kind, especially a recreational or sporting one.” In this case, pursuit of happiness is little more than a way of describing the activity of happiness. Cool. But the static version of pursuit may not be the one intended with the “pursuit of happiness”. After all, we tend to think of the pursuit of happiness in terms of the chase for it. The other definitions and etymology of the word affirm that instinct. The Middle English definition of pursue is to “follow with enmity.” In fact, the Anglo-Norman French pursuer comes from the Latin prosequi, which is also the root for prosecute. Is happiness the rabbit, and us the fox? Why did we decide on the pursuit of happiness? Why not the search, or the discovery? Why not exploration, or even the enjoyment? I wonder if hunting for happiness limits the other two goals. If I were to discover happiness, would that not give me life and liberty? The framers of the United States Constitution and Bill of Rights are often hailed as visionary beyond what they may even have understood. But I admit: I think about hunting, or car-chases, as I consider the word pursuit. Is happiness something we should be chasing with hostility?

I’m going to commit to the pursuit of happiness as the activity, rather than the chase. Gratitude, patience, prayer, song. That’s more like it.

Application infrastructure is making everything cheaper to build

Lately, application infrastructure has made it easier than ever to launch a prototype on the internet. Browser-based IDEs are in a race to develop tools that make programming fast, easy, and faster and easier. Guilds, to borrow Dave McClure’s term, of entrepreneurs are gathering in hubs like Techstars, YCombinator, and 500 Startups to draw support from their fellow classmates, share brand value, and supplement their own skills with the institutional wisdom of the crowd. As the obstacles to getting an application out the door have been overcome, one by one, the world of web and mobile products has trended towards the entrepreneur in a big way. Venture capital has noticed, and is adjusting accordingly, if belatedly, as I’ve noted in the past.

Entrepreneurs are banding together, driving valuation prices up

But I’ve noticed another trend has followed these. I’d like to call it the “collective bargaining agreement” of seed investing. At the last major entrepreneur-guild Demo Day, it was amazing to see how the prices had substantially risen from the one before it. But that wasn’t entirely surprising. After all, the early stage valuations for mobile and web apps, even given recent public tech stock volatility, has steadily risen over the last half decade. What surprised me, though, was how these entrepreneurs went about closing their deals. Almost the majority of them approached the negotiation with a price in their minds, and the conversation hinged around whether or not that was a price the investor could meet. These prices were non-negotiable more often than not.

When fundraising, an entrepreneur can optimize for price, or optimize for partners

Some entrepreneurs want to optimize for price above all. The difference between a $6M cap and a $12M cap (or a $20M cap) is psychologically and materially important to them. They believe they can get to revenue quickly. They continue optimizing for the highest possible valuation whenever possible. This is one extreme. Other entrepreneurs want to optimize for partners above all. They have a wish list of 5-6 investors or firms who they think are strategic, a cultural fit, or they just want brand association with, and are willing to meet those investors at the valuation where they are most comfortable. Investors want to get the most of a company for the least amount of money, so these entrepreneurs tend to get their valuations pushed down. This is the other extreme.

What we can learn

There is an optimal point in this curve for each entrepreneur out there, but the unionizing of the entrepreneurial side has pushed the conversation hard towards the former. This means that smaller funds, or those whose mission and mandate is to be more price sensitive, are increasingly disqualified from the collective bargaining agreement type of seed investing. Entrepreneurs in these guilds should be careful about this trend, as short-term price optimization is attractive, but not always the best path, when there are really good partners out there. Investors should be wise to this evolving reality, and should communicate their expectations clearly and aggressively, as technology hastens the pace of seed investment dealmaking. 

Refrain is a fascinating word.

Taken as a noun, it is a technical musical term referring to that melody to which you always return. In literary terms, it is the familiar, sometimes nagging phrase from your lecturing dad, or needy spouse. It’s a return, something you come back to. Taken as a verb, however, to refrain is to keep from – to avoid. It carries the suggestion that you might have done something, but managed to avoid it. I think of skateboarding in front of the library, smoking in the bar, et cetera.

The etymology of the two instances goes back the same amount of time – the 14th century – but one’s Latin root comes from “frenum”, to bridle, as a horse. The other, from “refringere”, from “frangere”, to break.

Not much to report here: A refrain is something which you always come back. To refrain is something which you must keep from living in the same word strikes me. Opposites, living in the same word.

I really enjoyed this University Ventures newsletter, which provided a fresh perspective to the conversation over the rise of online education. It analogizes beer drinkers to future post-secondary students, breaking them up into “Buds” and “Sams”. The former, according to this analogy, drink beer to get drunk. The cheaper the better, so long as it gets the job done. The latter drink beer because they love the taste of beer. They drink artisanal microbrews primarily for the taste, with the implicit assumption that there’s a pot of drunk at the end of the rainbow. Today’s industry punditry act like the Sams are the most important group, although the Buds are 95% of beer drinkers, and the Sams only 5%.

Similarly, there is a class of online students who are there *just* to get the degree, because that degree will get them the job. They distinguish between different programs based on interest, but mostly based on employability. They go to University of Phoenix, Capella University, Drexel University, and others like it. They number in the millions worldwide. There is, meanwhile, a class of students who are studying online from tenured professors from Princeton, Stanford, and MIT in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and algorithm design, for free. As the newsletter quotes

The day before Stanford professor Sebastian Thrun opened up his fall semester course on artificial intelligence to the world and ended up with 160,000 online students, approximately 3 million other students were pursuing degrees online – attempting to change their lives without ever setting foot on campus.

This analogy effectively demonstrates that higher education has two purposes: one, to quote John Dewey, to “[learn] how to learn, how to realize one’s full potential, and how to live – not only as an employee, but as a contributing member of society, as a citizen”; and two, to get a damn job. The latter is the dominant driver, by far. As Harvard Business Review recently reported, the skills earned during a Bachelor’s degree today last only five years: too few years to remain competitive, too few years to pay back the average student loan. Vocational training, as a responsibility of an educator, looms large in our modern society, which is leaning heavily towards the freelance economy.

Let us return to the beer-drinker analogy. Some people don’t like drinking beer at all: it takes too many to get drunk, and they don’t have the appetite for it. And others just don’t like the taste. Of these people, many prefer rum, vodka, or whiskey. It does the job more quickly, after all. One implicit, and incorrect, assumption in the beer-drinker analogy is that the four-year university, and the Bachelor’s Degree, is the only way to learn and to be employable. Vocational schools have proven that there are other institutional paths. But as another class of “online learners” are demonstrating, there are paths that aren’t institutional at all: they are part-and-parcel, based on a specific skill (or topic) that any learner might find instrumental.

Skillshare and General Assembly allow one to take high-impact courses on an individual basis, based strictly on need, from experts in the field. LearnUp and Tutorspree care about closing skills gaps for learners of every age. Udacity and Coursera are part of this movement as much as they are part of the institutional movement: imagine their education as a series of high-impact ‘shots’. These web resources offer a buffet of classes which can be optimized for taste, but are innovative because they are optimized to close the skills gap first. They are much cheaper than four-year programs, and in some instances free.

There are two great implications of this set of innovations. For the advocates of “education as learning”, there is a fear that an unbundled buffet, meeting the demands of the job market, will challenge the primacy of the humanities, the arts, and the sciences. William Deresciewicz wants us to remember that an elite education is a way to to make minds, not careers. But the market wants engineers, not philosophers. Will there still be a space for liberal arts? What will we lose, as a society, if not? And for the advocates of “education as job-training”, there is still the critique that employers care about a Bachelor’s degree because it’s a government-backed, deeply accredited stamp of approval. If an online learner takes “Web development in Ruby” from an upstart tech company, will an employer still want to see their GPA and transcript? What does an accreditation system for the buffet style of post-secondary education look like?

Elite universities like Stanford, MIT, Harvard, and Berkeley are wise to offer online education, free and through their degree programs. The digital natives are most comfortable in front of a smartphone, tablet, or laptop. But universities, elite or not, must also prepare for a future where learners are lifelong, where they are taking classes as and where they want and need, and where they are doing so both for the taste, and for the buzz.

I want to make a quick comment about a problem which has been hounding me for the last two or three years, reaching a breaking point this year. This problem is that of scheduling. We all have to do it, we all hate it, and we’re all patiently waiting for someone to fix it. For those of us who cannot afford for someone to do it for us, scheduling tends to go something like this:
Me: Let’s get together.
Her: Totally. How about Thursday?
Me: Can’t do Thursday. Monday morning?
Her: How about Monday afternoon?
And so on. It’s painful. I’ve estimated that I spend almost 5 hours a week emailing people just about whens and wheres. That is half a work day. I’ve tried the tools out there: doodle, tungle.me (RIP), Baydin Calendar. I even sometimes try my friend Sahil’s method of only taking meetings within 3 blocks of where I live and work, or another friend’s method of devoting a half (or even full) day to open office hours, where I’m “on call” for meetings at the same time every week. I have close friends who have worked at big companies where they used Microsoft Exchange internally, and I’ve worked at smaller companies where we all used Google Calendar. None of these strategies work. The personal hacks and tools mentioned above all fail as solutions for a couple reasons:

– While I am thorough about my calendar, including both work and social events, and scheduling blocks of “me time” to write, read, or think, I am unpredictable about my time. (And I bet most people are, if they can help it.) Sometimes I wake up sick, or frustrated, or get into a great groove with one thing or another. Sometimes a meeting runs long, and sometimes I’m just feeling more protective of my time than normal. Rescheduling is just as painful (and often more so) than scheduling in the first place.

– Different people warrant different meetings. While I might take a half-hour lunch with an office mate who I see every day, I might want a full-hour for a meeting with a client, or a potential outside partner. While I might put one meeting at the very top of my priority list, another might be very low priority. And finally, critically, the felt power between two participants of a meeting is rarely equal. One person usually asked for the meeting. And tools that automate the scheduling process lose that nuance in a way that breaks the experience.

– My calendar and my communication interface are separate. Deciding to have a meeting, and even deciding on the location, happens in one interface. Marking that meeting in a database happens in another. It’s a process that doesn’t work at all over mobile devices, and is still inelegant on the web.

I want a product where I can express intent to someone else, or receive a request from someone else, and appropriately bucket that person according to the nature of the request, and my relationship with the person. A database as simple as a calendar should surely allow such functionality, right? I want a product where I can decide to take only half my meetings, or none of my morning meetings, or to free up everything non-urgent in my afternoon. Yes, the topic of felt power is one we avoid in polite conversation, and nobody talks about it, but it matters.

Felt power is nowhere more, err, felt, than with executive assistants. Every successful woman and man in business either has one, or has considered hiring one. They are the silent gatekeepers, managing the felt power of relationships, deciding which deals get done when, and who meets with their boss, and for what amount of time. They soften the blow of a declined meeting. They add powerful subtlety in the form of “So-and-so is booked all month” or “so-and-so only has 15 minutes to chat on the phone.” As the networking word to the wise goes, “you want to get on a [important person’s] calendar: be nice to the EA.”

Software has obviated many aspects of the secretary’s former function — from the word processor to email, from the spreadsheet to wireless internet and smart phones. A modern-day executive assistant and a mid-20th century secretary look very different in almost every way except one: scheduling. There must be wisdom to that. As a wise friend of mine once suggested, perhaps making that felt power too obvious will make a product like this necessarily fail. Maybe our collective avoidance of the subject is what keeps the wheels turning. I wonder. And for my sanity, I hope I’m proven wrong. Soon.

I am a South African, by birth and citizenship. I’ve been in the United States nearly three decades, but my language, culture, and family are all South African. I am an immigrant working in high-technology entrepreneurship. I have created a dozen jobs, and intend to create as many more as possible in the coming months and years. My maternal grandmother, Rosyln Peteni, is a nonagenarian: she is in her nineties. She was born and raised in South Africa, where she saw World War II from afar, the institutionalization of Apartheid, the decolonization of nearly an entire continent, and the eventual liberation of her own people, led by her late husband’s old classmate, Nelson Mandela. In her words, she cried, and ever cried, when her baby girl married ‘that activist refugee’ in Botswana, because what were they ever going to do? Would they be safe? She tells and often retells the most interesting stories I’ve ever heard. I call her Makhulu. I’m happy she’s alive.

Earlier this year, Makhulu expressed interest to my uncle in coming to the United States to visit – and stay – with her baby girl, my mother. A few weeks later, she hopped on a plane for a trip around the world, landing in Andover, Massachusetts, where my family lives. Makhulu is sprightly and spry. She follows the national polls closely, worrying that Romney will defeat Obama in November, but acknowledging that anyone is better than Palin. Her tennis fandom is real and delightful. On her way to the hospital, she insisted above all, that we tape the quarter- and semifinals of Wimbledon, in case she made it back. She wanted to watch Serena. The week of July 4th, Makhulu had a heart attack. Getting new health insurance for a nonagenarian is almost comedic folly: not worth it. But it came with real risks. She isn’t American, after all.

I arrived late on July 4th on a flight from San Francisco, harried and heavy of heart. The doctors were amazed that she had survived, and transferred her from the emergency room to the ICU for further monitoring. Soon, the attending physician came to give us our options. He said we could do a catheterization, an invasive surgery which runs in the tens of thousands of dollars. I was soon to find out that MassHealth, the universal health care program in Massachusetts, included coverage for family members who were visiting Massachusetts residents, citizens or not. My grandmother got what she describes as “the best care she had ever received in her life”, and from “the nicest white people in the world,” no less. She was comprehensively treated, and returned home in time to watch Serena win singles and doubles in the same day. She was happy for Serena, and to be alive. We paid a co-pay, and for prescription medicine. Massachusetts, in our weakness and helpless mortality, gave us a chance. 

That Fourth of July is my most memorable to date. The United States saved my grandmother, even though there was nothing in it for them besides level-headed compassion for its citizens, and their loved ones. And the great irony of the evening fell upon me when I realized that this MassHealth law, a federal version of which is under fierce debate, was invented and deployed by the very man who campaigns against it on the national stage. It is efficient, compassionate, carefully written and wisely deployed. Thank you, Mr. Romney. And by God, America!! – lets do our part for Obamacare.

http://www.barackobama.com/i-like-obamacare/