The majority of self-employed workers seek independence to be their own boss, retain a flexible schedule and build unique career paths. Still, many find that with increased control comes increased responsibility, and economic viability is harder than anticipated. Before you decide how many lattes you can afford as a self-employed worker, you need to take control of your finances. Over at US News and World Report, I talk about five steps to build your self-employed budget. Read it here.
I just… the insanity of this… “Flipboard, the online news magazine app, has raised $50m at a $800m valuation, which is almost 50% of the market cap of The New York Times Company at $1.75 billion.” A near-billion dollar valuation?
From Tom Forenski:
The valuation of Flipboard is an example of a Silicon Valley media company that produces no media content of its own. Its revenues come from advertising placed on its app which collects content recommended by the social networks of its users. Its revenues are not disclosed and it employs less than 200 people.
Compare to:
The New York Times Company [$NYT] publishes two national newspapers plus 16 regional newspapers. It also owns eight television stations and two New York radio stations. It operates more than 40 web sites. It has 5,363 staff and 2012 revenues of $2 billion.
Here again, we support the pipeline instead of the content creator. As a pipeline aggregator, Flipboard “derives revenue with advertising splits with publishers for ads it places on Flipboard pages,” reports Kara Swisher. Here’s a prediction: the revenue will be enough to keep Flipboard in business, but not the New York Times. Maybe I’m wrong; startups don’t release revenues after all, not until they go public, so it’s possible Flipboard is rolling in money and sharing it with publishers. But then why raise another $50 million?
More likely is they have no idea how to monetize at scale (despite their first $50 million, they’re still only piloting advertising programs and have started to partner with sites like Etsy to get a cut of their cart). Not that it matters if a company makes money anymore, they can still IPO. If pipelines, like say, Beacon, can support content creators in a meaningful way, that would make a near-billion dollar valuation exciting. Until then, pipelines and platforms will just keep taking cuts until there’s nothing left for the creator. Oh wait, that’s now.
The Atlantic wonders why the poor don’t go to work, and shows overwhelmingly that women don’t work for home or family reasons versus any other reason. “Are women staying home because they prefer to be mothers, or because they can’t find jobs that pay enough to make working a financially viable choice, once the cost of family care is factored in?” asks columnist Jordan Weissmann.
This is not a question. Overwhelmingly, we know it’s the latter. In 2011, the average cost for center-based infant care exceeded $10,000 a year in nineteen states and DC. That’s the average. Quality child care is exceedingly difficult to find – the New Republic calls American day care hell – and of course, more expensive.
One new mom I know plans to rent out her rowhouse condo and move back in with her parents. The father isn’t in the picture, but I can’t imagine it would be any different if he was. “Day care is around $1900 a month around here and a nanny is more,” she told me. Child care is only the beginning, however. The total cost of raising a child born in 2012 is an estimated $241,080, and that’s before you send little Jane to college. It’s no wonder that children are now a sign of status.
Got doldrums and dread? Here’s what to do:
Women are poor and jobless because they are forced to make crappy decisions. Men too. Let’s stop that.
Whether you’re making a career change or trying to find potential clients to add to your pipeline, networking is your best strategy for success. You don’t have to leave your office to get started; use online networks to meet and connect with the right people immediately. Over at US News and World Report, I talk about six ways to build your network online. Read it here.
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[audio:https://kontrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/dowhatyouwant.mp3|titles=How to Do What You Want In Life]The hardest thing in doing what you want is coming to terms with it. I’ve spent more than ten years doing that, maybe more, maybe since I was a little person? When I was young, my mother gave me a book to record my dreams. I never wrote down the visions that came to me at night, only what I fantasized about during the day. The themes don’t change over time. I’ve known for a long time what I wanted to do.
In many ways, I’ve been doing what I want, and in those positions and side jobs and experiments and activities, I’ve been circling closer and closer, around and around, like a bird goes about it’s prey. But quitting my job was recognition that, all of a sudden, the circle was getting larger, not smaller. I wasn’t closing in on everything I’ve ever wanted, but moving farther away from it. I needed a course correction, and I took it.
Since then, for two months or so, I’ve gone on a life break, a reset if you will. I exercise a lot. I read endlessly on the Internet. I sit on our stoop and people watch. I started drinking light wheat beers. I completed my best run, and then a week later, I did it three days in a row. We went on a vacation to Newport. I had my 30th birthday party, and another celebration for good measure.
I am more at peace, knowing somewhere I already made the decision the moment I quit, and now I am just preparing myself. There’s depression, and then there’s the overwhelming excitement of possibility, where your heart races and there’s nothing you can do to slow down. I’m not sure which I prefer. I try to temper my expectations. Other days, I strike down big goals from my heart. I tackle them in permanent ink.
If you could do anything, what would you do? The responsibility is big. Or so we believe. Most of us can do anything we choose, but we don’t because of perceived limitations. For the past two months or so, I have been stripping those limitations from my view. I have been trying to erase paradigms, or understand them, or feel comfortable wrestling with them because they’ll never go away, not completely.
Like, for example, when people asked what my next step was, and I said “I don’t know.” That’s not a good thing to say unless you want to make people confused and uncomfortable. Or later, when I knew, and I said, “I’m a writer,” the reactions are very different from when I mentioned “I’m in marketing,” or “I work for a startup.” I still do those things. But first and foremost, I’m a writer now.
Mostly I am coming to terms with a different financial reality. Because I want to make money, and I am pursuing what I want in the absence of money. This makes me confused and uncomfortable. But media is an industry in enormous flux, both risky and thrilling, where beloved institutions crumble and new ones are built in just hours. More than anything I want to be in the fray. Writing is a constant sifting and winnowing for the truth. That which allow us to make sense of our lives. And there’s a lot of sense to be made.
I want to build a space for dialogue to engage and challenge our ideas and institutions. I’ll investigate how to find meaning and make money in our work and lives, even as inequality rises to staggering heights and highly educated young people remain jobless or underemployed with debilitating debt, even as we live in a lesser depression, even as partisan politics reaches all-time highs and corporatism sinks to lower lows, even as we struggle with sexism and insidious ignorance, even as we feel the problems piling up around us are too big to solve.
Now is the time where I stop circling and make the dive.
There’s a reason I write a lot about women and tech. And it’s because if women do not take part in creating our future, we will never be equal. It doesn’t matter if we have parity in every other industry, if we do not have parity at the level of innovation, we will never be equal. We need to have just as much contribution on what technologies and software and industries define our world as white men.
It’s difficult, of course, when white men are still funding innovation, mostly because they refuse to recognize there is a problem. Nilofer Merchant reports how VC Ted Schlein, general partner at Kleiner Perkins, was recently invited to discuss race and investment in technology:
… all ears were tuned in when well-known VC Ted Schlein of Kleiner Perkins started talking… but Ted denied there was a problem. Despite the story the numbers tell — women receive less than three percent of all venture capital funding, and blacks even less than that — Ted said that the venture capital community was ‘color-blind’ and ‘operates fully on a meritocracy.’ This continued argument disregards the astounding facts that essentially 100 percent of funded founders are white or Asian, and 89 percent of founding teams are all-male.
But we know the technology industry, the current American Dream, is nowhere near a meritocracy. The industry itself is hollowing out the middle class and as one of Schlein’s peers, Sequoia Capital’s Sir Michael Moritz, said just last week, “If you’re not like us, it’s tough.”
A survey of 483 executives, managers, and professionals “found that 60% of those those who carry smartphones for work are connected to their jobs… for about 72 hours,” a week reports Harvard Business Review. Assuming those people do sleep for at least seven and a half hours “that leaves only three hours a day Monday-Friday for them to do everything else (e.g. chores, exercise, grocery shop, family time, shower, relax).”
That’s pretty disgusting. Even now, I often wonder how high-performers do “everything else.” When I was leaning in, a big feeling of deficiency was deciding how I was going to workout, spend quality time with Ryan, call my mother, have a social life, cook healthy meals, keep a household, let alone plan and participate in the experience economy that Generation Y uses to measure our success.
It’s pretty telling that the executives in the study don’t mind being so connected to their jobs, but do mind “when companies use 24-7 connectedness to compensate for organizational inefficiencies and when it significantly undermines their personal lives, productivity, creativity, and ability to think strategically.” Working 72 hours a week isn’t about providing value or doing great things or marking tasks off a to-do list, but about feeling important. Working 72 hours a week is about ego. And the saddest part is that these employees are trying to win a race that’s completely irrelevant, devoid of any meaning or real satisfaction.
There’s nothing wrong with working a lot, at times. It can be exhilarating and useful and fulfilling; I enjoy work, probably more than most people. But working at the exclusion of “everything else,” working so there are three hours left for life, is wrong. Wake up, and do it now: corporations don’t own you.
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has a vision for the company, and we have a vision for her. Does Marissa Mayer have an ambition gap? Listen to the podcast here:
[audio:https://kontrary.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/MarissaMayerpodcast.mp3|titles=Does Marissa Mayer have an Ambition Gap?]
Transcript of this podcast:
Earlier this month, Comscore released numbers that showed, for the first time since 2011, Yahoo beat Google in traffic; Yahoo’s unique visitors were up by roughly 20% compared to July of last year, when the company came in third behind Google and Microsoft. For Marissa Mayer, it’s a success as one of the most scrutinized CEOs in America.
Hello and welcome to Kontrary, a different take on work and life. I’m Rebecca Thorman. Today, we’re going to talk about Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer and vision – first, her vision for Yahoo, and second, our vision for Mayer.
Let’s start with the recent profile in Business Insider, which they describe as an unauthorized biography. You can basically skip over the beginning which is really boring and not well-written at all, and start paying attention once you get to the lower bits about the transition from interim Yahoo CEO Ross Levinsohn to Mayer, and the dichotomy between their two strategies, which is essentially the decision between whether Yahoo is a technology company or a media company.
Marissa Mayer is a product visionary vs. Ross Levinsohn who is a businessman. Levinsohn was the interim CEO from May of 2012 until July 16, when Mayer took over, and was lead to believe he had the job. The strategy he presented to the Yahoo board was this:
Eliminate the majority of Yahoo’s products, increase Yahoo’s EBITDA (a fancy accounting phrase for income) by 50%, cut the workforce down to 4000 employees, and turn Yahoo into a media company. So essentially Levinsohn would be laying off 11,000 employees in order to make Yahoo profitable. From a purely economic standpoint this may makes sense, but it’s really devoid of any heart or inspiration.
Now remember, he’s been told to run Yahoo as if he will be and already is the full-time CEO. So he sends an email to all employees, and it’s this very typical rah-rah email, telling people, “I’m fired up and I hope you are too. I believe in the power of what we’re doing. We have an incredibly talented team, unparalleled strengths in key areas and most importantly, I see the purple pride building everywhere. Let’s move forward quickly with conviction and confidence.” Now, if I were a Yahoo employee, I can’t imagine getting that email one month, and then, if Levinsohn had been installed as the permanent CEO, being laid off the next month, or hanging around as one of the few remaining employees left.
The morale would have totally tanked. The purple pride would have turned black.
Levinsohn’s plan is very similar to the course of action that AOL took as well. AOL was founded in DC, I worked on their campus as part of a startup incubator for nine months in the past year. And I want to describe the campus. When you near the headquarters, there are all these identical buildings in a typical corporate park, and what you come to realize is that they all used to be owned by AOL, but now have the Raytheon logo emboldened on their side, which is a defense contractor. And there’s just one building left for AOL.
And it’s a beautiful building and workplace, to give it credit, and while the lunches aren’t free, the food is great with a lot of healthy options, there’s tons of natural light and so on and so forth. But the feeling at AOL and in the building is very dead. There are whole sections that are essentially abandoned. They’re not even blocked off, just abandoned and anyone can walk through and see the rows upon rows of empty cubicles under a set of dim lights. It’s depressing. And it’s this constant reminder that the company used to be something else entirely.
And I can imagine that Yahoo would have experienced a very similar downturn, and rather than Levinsohn’s plan bucking the system and reinvigorating the company, it would have taken a very long time to recover, because that’s just what happens with change, especially with something as drastic as that.
Levinsohn is a businessman, he’s about the content, and the bottom line.
Now, in contrast, the beauty of Mayer’s plan is that she believes. She believes in Yahoo and she believes in Yahoo products. She wants Yahoo to be a technology company. In the Business Insider piece, they describe how Yahoo employees created posters in the style of the first Obama campaign election, but instead of Obama’s face, Mayer’s face appears with the word Hope inscribed across the bottom. Think about that. Mayer’s plan is just as drastic as Levinsohn; there will be just as much change, but it’s centered around creating something, instead of tearing something down. Mayer’s vision is about lifting up, instead of giving up.
While some people thought Mayer came off negatively in the Business Insider piece, I really thought she came off as a bit of a hero, or at the very least a compelling leader; her vision has heart and stays true to this notion of innovation, that of going after something larger than yourself or the shareholder’s bottom line.
One of the featured comments at the end of the BI piece actually says:
Yahoo is lucky to have Marissa as CEO. She has done what none of the previous CEOs could do. She has inspired Yahoo employees and [gave] them confidence…
And another:
My high school senior is devouring the article, and hopefully she draws inspiration from a talented and driven Marissa.
And I think that’s how a lot of women feel. We’ve created our own vision of Mayer, and are all looking up or at least over at Mayer to see what she does. She’s become a role model, and that brings responsibility, whether you like it or not.
And with responsibility, comes a lot of pressure. In an article on Time, Charlotte Alter writes:
Mayer still describes her success as almost effortless. ‘It’s not like I had a grand plan where I weighed all the pros and cons of what I wanted to do,’ she told Weisberg, ‘It just sort of happened.’
It’s a misguided attempt at modesty, but it’s the same ‘little ol’ me’ rhetoric that Mayer’s friend Sheryl Sandberg is trying so hard to stamp out. And it’s the same fairy tale reasoning that girls have internalized for generations; girls don’t ‘do’ things, things ‘just happen’ to them.
Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy responds, first by defending Mayer a bit:
Marissa Mayer isn’t actually allowed to make decisions for herself, her company and her family– somehow we all read those to be decisions she is making for the world.
and then draws a line in the sand:
We’re seriously supposed to believe Mayer just accidentally landed in a top CEO job? … Not owning up to a certain level of ambition is not only disingenuous, but it perpetuates the idea to the young ambitious women reading Vogue that ambition is somehow bad.
Leaders, regardless of their position, are always role models. It is part of the gig, inescapable, just by assuming such a position. While I find it hard to believe that Mayer doesn’t realize this, I also wonder, how far can we go in deciding and assigning responsibility? Our institutional leaders are only human, but man, if we don’t wish them to be more.
While I agree with both Pando Daily and Time, I don’t agree with the people who criticized Mayer’s recent Vogue profile and photo shoot. Is it disingenuous to make judgement on one message and not the other?
To answer that, let me share what Jezebel founder Anna Holmes has to say:
Ms. Mayer’s Vogue profile make me yearn for a time when female competence in one area is not undermined by enthusiasm for another, in which women in positions of power are so commonplace that we do not feel compelled to divine motive or find symbolism in every remark they make, corporate policy they enact or fashion spread they pose for.
I’ll end there. We’ve been talking about Marissa Mayer, CEO of Yahoo, the most scrutinized CEO in America, and her vision for Yahoo, and our vision for her. I’m Rebecca Thorman, and this is Kontrary, a different take on work and life, broadcasting from Washington, DC. Talk to you soon.
What do you think? Is Marissa Mayer’s vision for Yahoo the right one? And is our vision for Marissa Mayer fair? Should she try harder or is she doing well?
Sequoia Capital’s Sir Michael Moritz gave the Tech Crunch Disrupt keynote and detailed how “data factories have spawned a golden age for entrepreneurs, but make it tough for everyone else.” While theorists like Douglas Rushkoff and Jaron Lanier have made similar arguments for some time, it’s refreshing to hear such honesty from an industry insider.
Moritz’s ideas have wider implications about where the future of funding and innovation will land as well. While Moritz doesn’t provide many answers, the fact that his ideas are even provoking questions like, “Can we keep eliminating middle-class jobs and concentrating wealth without consequence? Or will this weakening of the bottom of the pyramid lead to a global financial collapse?” is excruiatingly important, particularly because he’s in the position to fund real value instead of the next data factory.
First, big-data factories employ many fewer people than their meatspace equivalents of yore. Ford at one point employed 700,000 people. Now Apple, at times the most valuable company in the world, employs only 80,000 people worldwide including its retail staff. Data factories don’t create nearly as many middle-class jobs.
Instead, the data factories get free labor. They distribute what seem like useful services to the world, things like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Etsy, or Kickstarter. Those services help people share, connect, find jobs, sell their own goods, or fund a project. But in actuality, they also collect troves of data and earn tons of money for the tech giants without forcing them to do much work. That money stays concentrated around the data factories and their limited staff instead of distributing it like traditional factories.
What’s the impact? “It means that life is very tough for most everyone in America” says Moritz. That’s not just some ambiguous sense of hardship. The median American household has stagnated. The absolute minimum wage value has decreased significantly. “It’s tough if you’re poor, it’s tough if you’re middle class. It means you have to have the right education to work at [the tech giants]. If you’re not like us, it’s tough” said the highly successful venture capitalist.
Tomasz Tunguz, a Principal with Redpoint Ventures, talks about how important information asymmetries will become on Quartz. This is particularly interesting because we are in the era of information symmetry. Back in the day, you walk into a car dealership and you get screwed by the salesman because information asymmetry existed; you didn’t know much about cars and the salesman knew a lot. Today, you walk into a car dealership and you’ve done a lot of research online beforehand; you likely know just as much as the car salesman. That’s information symmetry.
Information symmetry is good for all sorts of reasons. It leads to more collaborative and effective negotiations, for instance. But Tunguz is counting on information asymmetry to fund the future success of venture capital. Not necessarily bad, that’s just business, but I don’t see the every-man-for-himself approach bringing loads of innovation to the capital market. Indeed it seems counter to his next argument that VCs need to shift from being part of the financial industry to that of service, and should foster the startup community – of which, he later clarifies, will only be internal communities, of course.
Today Apple announced the new iPhone 5s, available in three different metallic finishes, including gold, and the new iPhone 5c, available in an array of colorful plastics for just $99. The dichotomy between the two phones is striking, almost as if they were built for the 1 percent and the 99 percent, mirroring the inequality of incomes and access to the Internet.
Make fun of the colors and plastic, but cheaper access to hardware and all the data along with it is a good thing. In 2009, twenty percent of Americans didn’t use Internet at home, work or school, or on a mobile device. In 2013, twenty percent of Americans don’t use Internet at home, work or school, or on a mobile device. After four years and seven billion dollars spent, the number hasn’t changed.
Our conversations about taste should be conversations about access. “Persistent digital inequality — caused by the inability to afford Internet service, lack of interest or a lack of computer literacy — is also deepening racial and economic disparities in the United States,” reports the New York Times.
While we guess that Steve Jobs is rolling in his grave in response to the colorful plastics, former Wall Street Journal journalist Jessica Lessin reports that in fact, cheaper phones were being considered as early as 2009. The affordable options were sidelined because of increased difficulties in the manufacturing processes, not because they weren’t pretty.
Meanwhile, sixty million people have been “shut off from jobs, government services, health care and education, and the social and economic effects of that gap [is] looming larger,” argues Edward Wyatt in the Times. So we can argue that Apple’s high-brow brand is being watered down (although surely the gold iPhone 5s makes up the difference), or we can rejoice that as technology grows the wealth gap, profits off your free labor and eliminates middle-class jobs, the industry is also providing affordable products and solutions while you make ends meet.
It’s always fascinating to see why a startup fails, always useful to see what goes wrong. Not everything can or should be a huge business, or “a big hit.” For that reason, I appreciate that Pando Daily reporter Erin Griffith wades into the deadpool to bring us stories, like how YC alum Tutorspree shut down.
Tutorspree graduated from Y Combinator in 2011, calling itself an “Airbnb for tutors,” reports Griffith. Basically, Tutorspree was a marketplace that matched a tutor with its tutee. Besides the glaring pitfalls in such a model, several of which Griffith outlines in her article, we should also be thinking about whether this startup was really worthy of a $1 million investment and $7 million valuation in the first place.
Our obsession with building “big hits” hides all the other wonderful opportunities to make a real difference in people’s lives. Aggregating existing exchanges, like tutoring, and trying to monetize off the backs of others isn’t world-changing. Founders should try creating and providing real value.
Journalist Noreen Malone argues in the New Republic that tech bubbles exist, but mostly to protect the relatively young, well-off, and like-minded generation that builds apps that don’t matter. “Tech is something like the new Wall St. Mostly white mostly dudes getting rich by making stuff of limited social purpose and impact,” economist Umair Haque argued on Twitter. Malone also quotes Mother Jones’ Clara Jeffrey: “I saw the best minds of my generation building apps to send sexts and brag about fitness and avoid the poors.”
Scale, for the sake of size alone, is a small ambition. When you get investment, from venture capital or angel investors, your entire company changes. Your goal is to seek users or sales at the expense of everything else. I have been part of startups that failed – or will fail – for this reason. You sacrifice learning, and as a result, you don’t build a useful machine. You don’t build a meaningful machine. You build a marketing machine (which most people will fail at, since good marketing is predicated first and foremost on a good product). But the strongest biz dev strategies can’t save a crappy product. The best sales people won’t conceal thin intentions.
SIlicon Valley is losing its ability to inspire. “Popular culture has soured on Silicon Valley’s hotshots,” Malone argues. And that’s because long ago, Silicon Valley lost its ability to innovate.
Want to create real value? Start here.