Issue 43: Narcoantennas, VC Squeeze and Godel’s Theory
Articles
‘a new Yiddish word has been invented: oysgezoomt, “over-exposed to Zoom,” as in “Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!” (“I’m so done with Zoom!”)’. A Yale professor’s Zoom journal. She speaks for us all. And, as she comes to learn, most things that matter happen outside of those scheduled Zoom meetings/classes.
The Venture Capital model, where money is given to a company in exchange for part ownership in said company for future returns, is under scrutiny. Has been for a few years. Questions about whether the model works beyond just the top funds. Questions about pattern-matching to the point of ignoring diverse founders and opportunity. GoingVC, in this 30 page report, asks the question ‘is the VC Juice worth the squeeze?’.
And, based on analysis of past exits, has the time come to abandon the incubator factory complex that the Techstars and YCombinators of the world made popular? (disclosure: I’m an alumni of a few incubators/accelerators)
April Underwood has led product development for Slack and for Twitter. So she knows a lot about how to serve millions of users with products that delight. She shares some lessons about product thinking.
There was a time, between 2010-2012, when if you asked me my fave startup I would have said Palantir. That opinion changed a long time ago and this long post reveals why.
Why does Europe, and especially France, lag behind in tech? Turns out there is a link between that fact and how it selects/trains its ‘elite’ (a word that is in itself indicative of the problem here). It’s a great dive into the politics, education, lack of entrepreneurship and cliques that run France and how they keep ‘the rest’ out. All to the demise of the France they strive so long to hold the same…
But France will probably look to stories like this one about the spectacular failure and hubris of ScaleFactor to justify why its ways might be better. While I disagree that failure is to be prevented in startups, I do wish Austin (my adopted home) would work on fixing the strike divide between the large tech companies that have outposts here and the (for the most part) smaller startups that are more hype than substance. ‘Fake it till you make it’ should not equate to blatant lies and deception.
James Baldwin’s 1962 New Yorker coming of age essay, Letter from a Region in my Mind.’ where he talks about the streets of Harlem, finding Dostojevski, Elijah Mohammed, (capital letter T) Time, non-violent protest, taking the land, the myths that bound (and still bind) his country, and the never-ceasing presence of the Church (as guide, accomplice, denier, judge) in the lives of black people. [Longread].
Silicon Valley, as represented by Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, gives anyone not in Silicon Valley a lot of reasons to dislike Silicon Valley. Especially because Silicon Valley has failed to give us the inspiration it promised in the time we need it the most. Unless you consider being an employed resident of Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos on Mars. Lyta Gold brilliantly argues that our tech giants have their science fiction fantasies all incorrectly interpreted.
Infrastructure-as-a-service is the business model of companies like American Tower Corp. It’s profitable and is the underlying reason why more cellular carriers can jump into the market without needing to own their own cell towers. But what do these companies do when drug cartels decide to piggyback off those cell-towers? Welcome to the world of Narcoantennas.
How will smart city infrastructure handle issues like narcoantennas above? I’m not sure. I do know that the future of urban infrastructure, especially the unsexy parts like drainage and sewer systems post-pandemic, will have to be anticipatory and adaptable.
For Math nerds: metamathematics and incompleteness, why? Like, seriously, why? :)
All of Little Dragon’s live performances in Austin happened before I moved here. And, as the pandemic rages on, I wonder when I will eventually (if ever) get to watch them perform live. Until then, I’ll read their thoughts on making music for the last 24 years.
Books: The books this month cover some serious topics that we all need to pay a lot of attention to in these current times and a dose of escapism. A healthy dose of reality and fantasy. I hope you enjoy.
Color of Money by Mehrsa Baradaran will open your eyes, upset you and jolt you into action if you care a single jot about equity and justice. Diving into the intricacies of the financial system and structures and how the push for ‘black-owned’ banks, combined with the constraints put on those banks, under the umbrella of segregation and systemic racism, has left the black community in America with little financial capacity to speak of. Baradaran questions the underlying frameworks of American capitalism touching on interrelated topics including mortgages, policy and welfare.
In Business is Beautiful: The Hard Act of Standing Apart, (Authors) Danet, Liddell, Downey et al dug into businesses that, in 2013 when the book was written, were doing things differently from the typical capitalistic approach to business. The authors chose to focus on businesses that made their Northstar metric intangible emotional expressions of what matters to them; integrity, craft, elegance, prosperity and curiosity. Add those to your company KPIs or OKRs and take it to the emotional bank. It was interesting to see how some of the companies have come out on the other end of this staying true to the approach (meeting the sustainability goals set for 2020 by 2019) and falling short of those ideals (falling to accusations of sexism and racism). Well worth a look through to see alternative approaches to building a business post-COVID19.
Safi Bahcall, a successful biotech executive, wrote Loonshots to share some observations from his career bringing deep tech innovations to market through collaborative private and public institutions. With clear demarcations, Bahcall focuses on product-type and service-type innovations and expounds on some physical concepts (phase transitions, emergence and equilibrium) to explain the complexity of innovating at scale. Drawing from varied examples in physics (particularly), military, pharma and the airline industries. this is a character filled and fun business book.
Lurking: How A Person Became A User by Joanne McNeil bridges the divide between both sides of a conversation that is currently raging in our culture'; anti and pro-internet. Some of us are ready to burn it down while some of us completely rely on this tool that has grown in leaps of influence from a corner room for nerds to the glue that has kept us all sane (??) in these pandemic times. That’s one difference. The key difference though, according to McNeil, is between the people who develop these products and the users of the internet. And therein she says lies the real issues with the internet, not with the people who are known as users but with the design, system and structures that underly the internet. Those parts built by this small subset of humanity called developers.
‘We can remember it for you wholesale’ (short story PDF) by Philip K Dick. Or better known as source material for ‘Total Recall’ starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.
Till next month, Ich bin azoy oysgezoomt!
Seyi