Category: Notebook

A bunch of short items on my current obsessions.

Categories
Media Notebook Technology

$1 Billion-Dollar Valuations for Pipelines and Platforms, and for Creators?

Flipboard raises $50 million on near billion valuationI 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.

Categories
Notebook Poverty Privilege Women Work/life balance

Why Women are Poor and Jobless

Why_the_Poor_Dont_Work_Census_Gender

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:

  1. Get behind affordable child care.
  2. Women should stop acting like they can do it all. It takes a village.
  3. Everyone else, remember that too; act accordingly.

Women are poor and jobless because they are forced to make crappy decisions. Men too. Let’s stop that.

Categories
Education Notebook Technology

Here’s How to Improve Education

In this interview from 1995, Neil Postman, an author and media theorist, talks about technology, information overload, and the state of being both more and less connected simultaneously (via Tom Forenski). It’s pretty fascinating; Postman could just as easily be talking about present-day, not twenty years ago.

At one point, he fortells the decline of education:

I’m one of the few people, not only that you’re likely to interview, but that you’ll ever met who’s opposed to the use of personal computers in school. Because school, it seems to me, has always largely been about how to learn as part of a group. School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we have important rules in school, always emphasizing that one is as part of a group. And I worry about the personal computer, because it seems to emphasize individualized learning and activity.

Educators are worried too. Information overload has become a real issue, and with professor’s lectures essentially becoming just another thing to process, students have zoned out. “There’s so much content, and so many places to access that content, that if our burden, our challenge, as instructors is to relay that content, there’s never enough time,” Russell Mumper, a Vice Dean at the University of North Carolina’s Eshelman School of Pharmacy told the Atlantic. “And if your interaction is solely based on PowerPoint slides, [students] are no longer paying attention. They’re distracted.”

Mumper decided to flip the classroom, where the focus would return to connecting and communicating with one another, and actively participating in the classroom — exactly what Postman advocated for in his interview. Of course, it’s technology that allows the flipped classroom to exist in the first place. Mumper distributes the video lectures his students watch at home through Echo360, an educational technology company.

Still, while most technologies serve to keep us connected online, it’s good to see that many others serve to keep us connected face-to-face.

Categories
Notebook Start-ups Technology Women

Another VC toes the line on meritocracy and innovation

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.” 

 

Categories
Corporatization Notebook Work/life balance Workplace

Your 3-Hour Life

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.

Categories
Notebook Technology

Technology grows the wealth gap, profits off your free labor and eliminates middle-class jobs

Sir Michael Moritz

Sir Michael MoritzSequoia 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.

Categories
Innovation Notebook Technology

The future of funding and innovation

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.

Categories
Notebook Technology The Internets

Apple announces iPhones for the 99 percent

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.

Categories
Notebook Start-ups Technology The Internets Uncategorized

Your Startup Probably Shouldn’t Exist

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.

Categories
e-Commerce Notebook Technology

Art You Can Understand

Amazon now offers art, and has “partnered up with over 150 galleries and art dealers across the US… The site offers over 40,000 original works of fine art, showcasing 4,500 artists. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes it the largest online collection of art directly available from galleries and dealers.”

Creatives and critics don’t have high hopes.

“Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so,” said economist Tyler Cowen. “One enduring feature of the art world is that a given piece will sell for much more in one context rather than another… What makes Amazon work for me is simply that they sell better stuff and a wider variety at cheaper prices. Why give that formula up by treading into a market where such an approach won’t make any money? Why compete in a market where an awesomely speedy physical delivery network means next to nothing?”

Well, because art and its pricing have largely been hidden and mysterious. Any time you disintermediate the secretive layers of a market, there’s value there. Despite a slew of art startups, fine art has remained out of reach both economically and emotionally for most people. The gallery experience is less than welcoming, and its traditions are largely foreign to mainstream consumers. Buying a couch, a new TV or appliance, getting a loan from a bank, or moving across the country seem easier than buying a piece to hang on your wall.

Amazon’s art initiative makes art more accessible, the pricing more transparent and straightforward, and yes, art more mainstream. Not sure Amazon’s goal is to immediately offer consumers the best price, but rather to commoditize art in a way the everyperson can understand.

But that still leaves the question of taste. Like fashion on Amazon, Wired Opinion Editor Sonal Chokshi said the art initiative won’t work for pandering to the lowest common denominator. “If you buy that the key to doing real fashion online is more merchandizing savvy than algorithms, Amazon hasn’t nailed this… Fashion — with a capital F — is inherently exclusive. You can’t be everything to everyone. It’s as much about what you cut out as what you include,” argues Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy. Without a strong curatorial point of view, Chokshi says, art too will fail on Amazon.

Merchandising has solely existed on Amazon in the form of bestseller lists, recommendations and reviews. Amazon isn’t the expert, the algorithimic consumer is. That could be disturbing to those with a proclivity to self-ascribe taste, but it hasn’t hurt the sale of novels and books, a similar market where curation and word-of-mouth drive our current conciousness. And as far as fashion, I may discover a great shoe on a blog, but will search for the best price on Google. Consumers have evolved enough where discovery and point-of-purchase can be several clicks apart (see: the rise of showrooming). 

Worst case, however, Amazon Art adds several more chapters to the site’s catalgoue of everything, ensuring that you start and/or end every purchase on Amazon. 

Categories
Generation Y Happiness Knowing yourself Love What You Do Notebook Self-management

It’s (Not) Okay to Fail

Generation Y does not need permission to fail. We got medals and ribbons for that very reason as kids. Gen Y normalized failure. Failure is not scary. It means you get to stay in the status quo, which most of us are very comfortable in. You get to keep being who you are, and that isn’t all bad.

It’s success – that’s scary. Indeed, we’re not changing stuff up because we’re afraid to fail, but afraid to succeed. We need to let people know, “It’s okay to succeed.”

Part of the reason we are so obsessed with normalizing failure is that we want to feel good about ourselves. And that’s hard right now, no doubt. It’s hard to find a job, to get out of debt, to pursue meaningful work. It’s hard to make time for family, get away from our computers, and engage face-to-face. It’s hard not to compare our bottoms to everyone’s top on Facebook.

So, we embrace failure. In its call for speakers, the Dare Conference says, “If you’re willing to be vulnerable, admit your failures, and share what you learned from them, we want to hear from you.” Apparently people aren’t doing that enough on the Internet?

So, we court failure. This guy goes around trying to get rejected on a daily basis. He intentionally tries to fail as if that’s an accomplishment.

So, we sleep with failure. We dream of failure. We live with failure — as a point of pride.

I don’t want to fail. Failure is boring. Failure usually means you didn’t try something; you didn’t follow through; you didn’t finish. Most people don’t really fail. They succeed at being lazy, and call it failure. But at least they tried. Er, right?

Lazy is not failure, it’s just lazy. Practice moderation, instead of binging on inspiration. Practice patience, instead of quick wins.  Start something, but then finish it.

Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the modern web browser, Netscape and leading venture capitalist, said pivots used to be called fuck-ups and begged for the startup community to put a little more stigma back into failure.

“We joke around the office that the worst is the fetish for failure,” Andreessen said. “You don’t want people to be intentionally encouraged to fail. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma. The entrepreneurs I admire — I admire the ones who pivot but I really admire the ones who have persisted.”

Persist. It’s okay to succeed.

Categories
Notebook

Does stuff have you stuck?

I met long-time online friend Allie Siarto, co-founder of a social media analytics company, the creator of Entretrip, and a wedding photographer on-the-side, at a DC coffee shop near my apartment. She ordered the Yared, a large mug of orange juice steamed with lemons, limes and honey, and we talked business, careers and life. One of the questions she asked was, “Does stuff have you stuck?”

Allie told me the story of how she and her husband bought a house in East Lansing, Michigan, one that needed a bit of tender loving care, but was generally a great house. There was one room in the house, however, that she really wanted to renovate – the kitchen. Of course, anyone that has a house, or watches HGTV, knows that the kitchen is the most expensive to renovate. And yet, Allie really wanted a new kitchen.

So she kept working. She kept working at things she didn’t like to do, and let one deal go so far that there was little room to back out. The more claustrophobic her work became, the more the kitchen came into focus. Clippings were saved, ideas were paved. And the closer she got to new granite countertops, the more she wondered. For the sake of a future kitchen, should she be so unhappy now?

There’s something to be said for sacrifice. But you should also look at your needs and wants, your values and desires, and ask yourself, “Does stuff have you stuck?”

Allie backed out of the deal with no room to back out. She and her husband rented their house, kitchen and all, and moved to the East Coast; it’s temporary, but with opportunity. They found an apartment in Dupont Circle, a two-bedroom on the cheap, a favor from a friend-of-a-friend. All of the apartment owner’s things are still there; she uses his umbrella when it rains. And someone else is living with all of her things in Michigan.

She shrugs. This is where her story ends.

She smiles. This is where her story begins.