Tag: Shot Clock

Evgeny Morozov’s Takedowns, Andy Grove’s Ideas, and Olive Garden’s Mess

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Evgeny Morozov, Alec Ross, and the Tech-Business Takedown
Ever since there have been people who thought big ideas about tech, there have been those eager to cut down those ideas. The current master of the art is Evgeny Morozov. His recent Baffler takedown of Alec Ross goes after the former State Department official and current Silicon Valley-friendly techno-utopian for his glib pronouncements on How the Internet Is Changing Everything. Morozov’s longform dismissal of Ross bounces between ace policy dissections and ad hominem attacks. And at 5,000 words, it’s positively compact compared to his 16,000-word mugging of Tim O’Reilly a while back. Morozov’s distrust of Valley do-gooderism (“solutionism,” he calls it) is deeply felt, and it’s instructive to see how well he wields the Internet to point out weaknesses in his foes. But there’s a pattern here: The Ross takedown begins with Ross asking Morozov for advice; the O’Reilly takedown ends with O’Reilly offering to get together with Morozov to talk. In both cases, Morozov shows that he’s unwilling to listen. Just as with those he accuses, he’s got his mind made up already. Sure, some of his targets deserve the Morozov treatment. But years after he started pointing out the flaws in everyone else’s architecture of ideas, it’s still unclear what, if anything, he might want to build up.

Andy Grove’s Lasting Lessons
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the death of Silicon Valley giant Andy Grove is more than a one-day story. Ben Thompson’s most recent Exponent podcast dissects Grove’s influence as a leader (for good and bad) and Teresa Tretch’s Andy Grove’s Warning to Silicon Valley is a sharp Times op-ed that recalls an influential 2010 essay Grove published in Businessweek about creating jobs. Grove’s ideas about scaling and free markets are idiosyncratic and, at their peak, inspirational. Grove may have symbolized Silicon Valley for many, yet he often used his position not to celebrate but to question Valley orthodoxies springing up around him. In particular, he often pushed back against the assumption that the only point of profit was profit. Grove was a complicated figure; don’t let his position as a symbol of the Valley make you forget that he was able to stand apart from it, too.

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Against the Sharing Economy, For Extreme Transparency, and Samsung Goes Startup

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Against the Sharing Economy
Takedowns of the sharing economy are moving from kneejerk Luddite outbursts to detailed, data-driven analyses. Tom Slee’s What’s Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy, an excerpt of which is running in Jacobin, goes after the usual suspects (Airbnb, Uber) for the usual offense (helping themselves, not communities). Slee’s argument is based on the relative opacity of these firms’ practices. Staying private gives them “maximum flexibility” and imposes far less government-mandated transparency, thus creating a “perfect storm of bad incentives.” In particular, Slee gives examples of how the companies manipulate proprietary data as a PR tool, disseminating misleading data points and commissioning even more misleading reports, choosing which data to share with cities and drivers — and which to keep under wraps. We’re still waiting for a truly balanced look at the industry that gives weight (if not necessarily equal weight) to both its strengths and weaknesses. Until then, Slee’s evidence-heavy essay reminds us that the arguments against the sharing giants can’t be easily dismissed.

Extreme Transparency for Sale
Before putting social analytics tool ThinkUp up for sale, cofounder Anil Dash laid out terms any potential buyer must meet to qualify, including commitments to protect user data and refunds for paid subscribers if they don’t like the new owner. “We’re publicly sharing our plans for ThinkUp because we know it’s the best way to protect our users,” Dash wrote. We hope this extreme transparency and customer advocacy works; it would serve as a terrific precedent.

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Because Calling It “Profiting From The Financialization of Death” Won’t Make the Phones Ring

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If you listen to sports talk radio in California, as I do, you’ve heard the ads. A firm called “Reliant” promising “10–12% returns” with “no market risk.” Sounds way too good to be true, right? That’s the range of return that Bernie Madoff promised. But, heck, who isn’t interested in great returns with no risk? So, after hearing the spots a few times, I Googled the company to learn more. No luck. Finding anything about the firm is hard — the name is so generic it’s impossible to figure out who’s really behind the scheme. And the ads have no detail on what the company actually does, just an 800 number to call. That’s a red flag — who runs expensive radio ads without an SEO strategy?!

The fifth or sixth time I heard the ads, curiosity got the better of me and I called the number (it’s 800–788–1000, FWIW. It only works when the ads are running, natch). What I learned was fascinating.

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Climate Change Refugees, Everlane Opens Up, and a Silicon Valley Giant Passes

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American Climate Refugees
It’s a terrible milestone: the first community in the U.S. to end due to climate change (Bloomberg). Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana is sinking into the Gulf of Mexico. It’s a small, atypical community — a few dozen houses, all on stilts — but it provides an early look at how local and state governments are trying to help doomed communities, in this case by moving the whole thing somewhere else.

Why Everlane Opened Up
Everlane is an iconoclastic fashion brand (no advertising, no discounting, no seasonal collections), but it’s also important for its emphasis on “radical transparency” before that became a buzzy term. For example, Everlane breaks down the individual costs for each product: materials, hardware, labor, duties, transport, etc. In Business of Fashion, founder Michael Preysman riffs on why that approach was a differentiator. “We didn’t have this notion of ‘radical transparency’ straight out of the gate. It emerged from helping customers understand who we were and why we were doing things in a certain way. We said, ‘Hey, we’re making a t-shirt that normally sells for $50 and we’re going to sell it for $15.’ But how do you actually explain that to customers in a way they get? How do you get them to understand that it’s a really high quality t-shirt and not a t-shirt that cost us $3 to make? So, we thought we’ve got nothing to hide. Why don’t we just tell people exactly what it costs us to make?”

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An SXSW Surprise, What’s Wrong With Silicon Valley, and What’s Right With Uber

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An Austin Surprise
Marketing’s tightening grip on SXSW has been unpleasant to watch, but this year one unlikely company created an experience that delighted all comers. Find out which company NewCo founder John Battelle gives the award to for best — and most surprising — marketing execution at SXSW.

Holding a Mirror to Silicon Valley
There’s plenty wrong with Silicon Valley. Indeed, a small industry of pundits (prime current example) lives to poke holes in the Valley mentality. An essay making the rounds now, Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance, raises core questions about Valley assumptions, and has garnered more than 2,400 recommends at press time, which makes for a hit on Medium. The success of the piece reminds that there’s an audience worried about the same things. (And, frankly, they’re the sort of people who want to work at NewCos on a mission.) The essay asks how we build social fabric, ownership, and meaning into the companies and products we create. Authors Ross Baird and Lenny Mendonca don’t offer any answers, but for steps in that direction Baird has written a followup in response to (and pushing forward) a healthy debate questioning the underpinnings of Valley capitalism that’s happening on Medium now.

Matt Joseph’s Twitter Rant and Reaction
In one of his responses to “Silicon Valley’s Unchecked Arrogance,” Baird references the Valley’s lack of diversity. Matt Joseph, an entrepreneur prepping for a Y Combinator demo day, is living it. This tough-minded wide-ranging, 30-installment Twitter rant shows what it’s like on the inside if you’re black, where “we had to overcome things that others in the exact same position didn’t have to.” It’s not easy to read if you’re white, male, and live in the Valley, and some people who fit that description have waded into the conversation, leading Joseph to respond “Moments like this give me hope. Proud of the VCs and others who had the courage to look in the mirror and start convo’s in their networks.” Let’s hope it’s not a one-day thing.

Government Promotes Open Source — Or Does It?
At first, it looks like some legislators in New York State are trying to give the open source software community a chance to do well by doing good. Senate Bill S161 provides a tax credit “for taxpayer expenses associated with the development of open source and free software license programs.” Pretty good idea, right? At least it is until you discover that the maximum tax credit is $200, or less than the cost of one Microsoft Office license. As firms grapple with how to make open source pay, it’ll be fascinating to see what role government plays. One of the state senators behind the New York bill says its purpose is to encourage innovation. That’s great, but with a $200 cap, this bill seems more symbolic than real.

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Tech Should Lead Beyond Tech

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If your business focus is in technology or the Internet, as mine has been for nearly three decades, it’s quite possible you’ve never heard of the GLOBE Series, a global conference dedicated to sustainability in business. Until I was invited to participate this year, due in large part to NewCo’s core mission, I certainly hadn’t. What I saw opened my eyes and left me pondering the role of tech in the future of our planet.

The longest-running event dedicated to global environment and business, GLOBE draws more than 9,000 delegates to Vancouver from more than 50 countries around the world. There’s no shortage of government ministers, nonprofit leaders, and sustainability officers from huge companies like Nestlé, Lowe’s, and Citi. But if you peruse the speaker and sponsor lists, it’d be fair to conclude that sustainability simply isn’t a core issue for technology companies. They’re pretty much no-shows.

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Is Facebook’s Big Connectivity Report About the Right Thing?

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The new Facebook report, State of Connectivity 2015: A Report on Global Internet Access, both demonstrates how the company is dedicated to making a better world, and frames the problem such that the company’s approach seem like the only one worth considering. Along the way it reveals, inadvertently I think, that connectivity isn’t the primary problem that organizations as well-funded and far-flung as Facebook ought to be solving.

The Facebook report is a formidable document (PDF). Sixty-one pages deep, it clearly aims to justify Facebook’s commercial and associated philanthropic work (with a strong, smart emphasis on capturing and learning from data). Yet it tries hard to be evenhanded. You’d never know from reading this report the intensity of the competitive and political issues Facebook encounters in its attempts to get more people connected. Best of all, it emphasizes parts of the connectivity story that are rarely considered in the West, such as the fact that more than four billion people don’t have any Internet connectivity. That number is decreasing — the report notes that from 2014 to 2015 the number of people using the Internet increased by 300 million — but more than half of the world’s population remains offline. It is, as both the for-profit and philanthropic parts of Facebook and its competitors recognize, the biggest business opportunity on the planet.

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Social Movements Change Business, But One Thing Hasn’t Changed

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It’s OK to have a cause. Just don’t lose sight of why your customers are your customers.

That’s part of the message Derrick Feldmann delivered to a crowd of 50 Tuesday at San Francisco NewCo Presidio Institute. As founder of The Millennial Impact Project and author of Social Movements for Good: How Companies and Causes Create Viral Change, it’s his job to talk to activists, nonprofits and businesses who do good.

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Rebooting the Solar Industry

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Subsidies helped solar achieve its best year ever in 2015. With the extension of the solar investment tax credit, Congress will help utility-scale and rooftop solar grow even faster in 2016, even if investing in solar doesn’t always work out (Solyndra). Had the credit not been extended, forecaster IHS says, the impact on the solar industry would have been “huge,” causing a 10% global decline in the solar industry. The tax credit means solar is hot right now, but its presence across residential rooftops is being challenged by OldCos.

Net metering, which lets customers sell the unused electricity they generate back to utility companies at full retail rate, has made installing solar on roofs economical. It’s helped NewCos like Sunrun, Sungevity, Mosaic, and SolarCity. Utilities aren’t fans, though. The rapid growth of rooftop solar has created a debate over the value of energy sent to utilities and use of utilities’ infrastructure. Utilities have implemented monthly charges and reduced net metering rates. The Washington Post points to this presentation, which suggests utilities are campaigning against net metering for fear of “declining retail sales,” “loss of customers,” and “potential obsolescence.” Utilities are contesting policies like net metering in 39 states.

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Basic Income Goes Mainstream

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Rarely does a plan to do research gain much attention beyond those directly affected. But when Sam Altman of incubator Y Combinator announced last week his firm’s plan to fund a five-year study on basic income, it felt like every business thinker wanted a piece of it. This is happening for two reasons.

First, we’re at a moment when inequality has brought people as unlikely as Thomas Piketty and Bernie Sanders to the forefront, when people are reaching a consensus that things aren’t fair even if there’s no consensus as to why. We’re also at a moment when experiments trying to ameliorate the problem are getting attention and sometimes even funding. Switzerland is set to vote on a proposal to make it “the first country in the world to provide a basic unconditional monthly income.” Swiss pundits say the bill is unlikely to pass, but this is one of the most high-profile attempts so far to see whether there’s good in guaranteeing people income regardless of whether they are employed.

Second, it’s fascinating that this work is being funded by Y Combinator. Those whose memories go back to January will recall that Paul Graham, a Y Combinator founder, wrote an essay more or less defending inequality, saying that poverty itself is the primary problem, not inequality. The essay quickly turned into a pinata, although with few exceptions responders were more interested in attacking Graham’s argument than inequality itself. (Perhaps the most pungent and comprehensive response came from Tim O’Reilly.)

Regardless of how you respond to Graham’s essay (it’s easy to both nod your head and get furious in the same sentence) or whether you think his firm’s plan to fund basic income research is sensible, what’s more important right now is that people with platforms are talking about the issue and backing up their talk with action. If a key purpose of a NewCo is to create positive change, Y Combinator’s research can be a step toward discovering whether basic income might be a way to make some positive change. And, if this is research work that appeals to you, you have until February 15 to apply.

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