Posts from April 2017

A Direct Listing

I saw this question pop up in my Twitter feed this morning:

I don’t know anything about Spotify’s plans so I am not going to comment on that.

But the idea of doing a direct listing instead of an IPO is a super interesting to me.

Here is what I said to a friend of mine over email on this subject last week:

we don’t need IPOs to raise money anymore

the private markets work great for that now

but we do need a way to allow small investors to own the stock and we need a way to give employees, former employees, early investors, etc liquidity

So the idea of taking the fundraising function out of the going public equation is super interesting to me.

The questions that come to mind to me are; who will make a market in the stock?, who will write research on the stock?, how will companies build an understanding of their company prior to the listing?, will there be a lockup for existing investors?

The “IPO road show”, which is the roughly two week process before the IPO, is both a sales process to raise the money and a great opportunity to build excitement for the stock and understanding of the business. I guess a direct listing could include a road show as well. I think it probably should.

And the underwriters, who make a big commission on the IPO, commit to trade the stock and write research on the company in return for “being on the cover.” There needs to be some other way to get the investment banks involved in the stock to ensure that there is a market for the stock and research is done on the stock.

Finally, you wouldn’t want the entire cap table to come into the market on the first day of the direct listing. So that means there would need to be a lockup of some sort for the existing investors. But if there is no primary raise, then you would need some shares to trade, so maybe you let some of the existing cap table off of lockup on the direct listing and the rest over time.

I suppose this has been done before. If that is true, then there is a history of prior listings to look at to understand how this is done and how it worked. But as I said earlier in this post, I am super interested in this idea and I would like to see some big companies that don’t need capital but want a public stock try this.

#stocks

Decentralized Self-Organizing Systems

Mankind has been inventing new ways to organize and govern since we showed up on planet earth. Our history is a gradual evolution of these organization and governance systems. Much of what we are using right now was invented in ancient Greece and perfected in western Europe in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries.

I have been thinking for some time that we are on the cusp of something new. I don’t know exactly what it will be but I think it will be inspired by the big technological innovations of the late 20th century and early 21st century and it will be based on decentralized and self-organizing systems.

The Internet is, at its core, a scaled decentralized system. Its design has been a resounding success. It has scaled elegantly and gradually to well over 2bn users over fifty years. No central entity controls the Internet and it upgrades itself and scales itself slowly over time.

Open source software development communities are also an important development of the past fifty years. These communities come together to create and maintain new software systems and are not financed or governed by traditional corporate models. The goals of these communities are largely based on delivering new capabilities to the market and they don’t have capitalist based incentive systems and they have shown that in many instances they work better than traditional corporate models, Linux being the best example.

And, for the past decade or so, we have seen that modern cryptography and some important computer science innovations have led to decentralized blockchain systems, most notably Bitcoin and Ethereum. But there are many more to study and learn from. These blockchain systems are pushing forward our understanding of economic models, governance models, and security models.

I think it is high time that political scientists, philosophers, economists, and historians turn their attention to these new self-organizing and self-governing systems. Maybe they have and I am not familiar with the work. If so, please point me to it. If not, maybe this post and others like it will be an inspiration for the liberal arts to catch up to the computer scientists and mathematicians or at least work closely with them to figure out what is next, to articulate it and put it in the context of other governance and economic systems. From that work can come progress that mankind needs to move beyond the current systems, which work, but have many flaws and are becoming stale and in need of an upgrade.

#blockchain#crypto#economics#hacking government#policy#Politics#Religion#Science

Fun Friday: The Digital Dance

Last week at the Annual NYC Computer Science Fair, I got to judge a student coding project showcase. The team that won was 50 young women from the Young Women’s Leadership School in Astoria Queens.

These young women choreographed a dance routine using software and hardware engineering. The used LED lighting strips and Sphero robots to animate their dance routine and they wrote the software code that synchronized the music and dance routine with the hardware.

Here is the dance performance:

And here is how they made it happen:

I love this for so many reasons, but here are a few of them:

  1. Young women have not been as interested in software and hardware engineering because we have not made it relevant to their interests. This is an example of how to do that.
  2. The Digital Dance has now become an annual event at this school, the next one is coming up this spring, so another 50 or so young women will be exposed to hardware and software engineering each year.
  3. This is something that other schools can and should do. It could become a “thing” and I hope it will.
  4. It’s awesome.
#hacking education

Toxic Comments

We are fortunate here at AVC. We have mostly civil and respectful conversations. People behave themselves here. That is sadly not the case everywhere.

I don’t know what the people who post comments like this are feeling and thinking. It is horrible. Awful. Hateful. Hurtful. Painful. Disgusting. Disturbing. And a lot more.

If you operate a large social media service like Twitter, Facebook, or Disqus, you get to see stuff like this every day, hundreds of times a day. It is a view of humanity that is deeply upsetting.

Disqus, which is a USV portfolio company, where I serve on the Board, and which operates the comment service here at AVC and at millions of other websites around the globe, has been working on scaleable solutions to this problem.

They posted an update yesterday on what they are doing to combat this problem.

Here are some excerpts from that post:

The Disqus Platform supports a diversity of websites and discussions; with such a large network of publishers and commenters, having a policy against hateful, toxic content is critical. While we do periodically remove toxic communities that consistently violate our Terms and Policies, we know that this alone is not a solution to toxicity. Oftentimes these communities simply shift to another platform. Ultimately, this does not result in higher quality discussions, and it does not stop the hate. In order to have a real, lasting impact, we need to make improvements to our product. Which is why, if at all possible, we work with publishers to encourage discourse (even unpopular or controversial discourse!) while helping to eliminate toxic language, harassment, and hate.

Over the past several months, many passionate folks have reached out to us about severe violations of our Terms of Service. With the help of our community, we’ve been able to review and enforce our policy on dozens of sites.

We appreciate all of the help and feedback we’ve received and we are excited to continue to partner productively with users and organizations that are passionate about fighting toxic content and hate speech. To improve our efforts, we’ve built a Terms of Service Violations Submissions form. This form is a way for users to explicitly share with us when they’ve found a community to be in violation of our terms. In addition to reporting individual users (which helps moderators know who in their community is perhaps exhibiting toxic behavior), you can now report directly to us when you think there’s a publisher/site we should take a look at. When we are made aware of potential violations, we review them internally and make a decision about whether or not to allow the site to remain on our platform.

This isn’t a small scale matter; we know that to have a meaningful impact across our network, we need to build solutions into the product. With that in mind, we’re committed to building tools to make the moderation experience easier and better for publishers (and commenters, too).

Here are some things that we’re working on:

  • More powerful moderation features. We’re working on two features right now, Shadow banning and Timeouts, that will give publishers more options for managing their communities. Shadow banning lets moderators ban users discreetly by making a troublesome user’s comments only visible to that user. Timeouts give moderators the ability to warn and temporarily ban a user who is exhibiting toxic behavior.

  • Toxic content detection through machine learning. We are working on a feature to help publishers identify hate speech and other toxic content and then handle this more effectively.

  • Commenting policy recommendations. While we already provide suggestions for how to create community guidelines, we’ve realized that we can be more proactive and more assistive to our publishers. We’re working on helping our publishers expose their custom commenting and community guidelines by making them more visible to their readers and commenters.

  • Advertiser tools: Just like publishers do not want toxic content on their sites, we know that advertisers do not want their content to display next to toxic comments. Leveraging our moderation technology, we will provide more protection for advertisers, giving them more control over where they display their content.

If you think this is a simple problem to solve, you are sadly wrong. And if you think that Disqus and USV and I don’t care about solving this problem, you are wrong about that too.

#Web/Tech#Weblogs

Proxy Servers

In reaction to the Trump Administration selling us all out to the big telcos, I am dedicating this blog post to proxy services, which we should all start using.

A proxy server is a computer (in the cloud) that redirects your Internet browsing and other traffic away from your ISP to a specialized service that can do a lot of things for you.

Here is how you configure Chrome to proxy your traffic to something other than your ISP.

Here is how you configure OSX to proxy your traffic.

And you will need to select a proxy service. There are plenty of free ones out there. But you get what you pay for. If you want to have a proxy that is reliable and won’t sell your data, you should consider paying for a proxy service.

Here is a good roundup of some popular proxy services.

I am sure that many AVC regulars are using one or more proxy services and I encourage all of you to share with us your favorites.

#Web/Tech

The Machine Will See You Now

Siddhartha Mukherjee has a good long read in The New Yorker about machine learning and medical diagnosis this week.

In it, he explores whether machines are going to replace radiologists, dermatologists, etc or help them do their jobs better.

He concludes with this observation:

The word “diagnosis,” he reminded me, comes from the Greek for “knowing apart.” Machine-learning algorithms will only become better at such knowing apart—at partitioning, at distinguishing moles from melanomas. But knowing, in all its dimensions, transcends those task-focussed algorithms. In the realm of medicine, perhaps the ultimate rewards come from knowing together. 

We are very excited about the possibilities of using machine learning to help diagnose medical conditions early when they can be treated successfully. We have made a number of investments in this area and I expect we will make many more.

I believe that this is the future of medicine and the sooner we get to it the better off everyone, including the practitioners, will be.

#hacking healthcare

Earthjustice

We are doing a $40k match offer this weekend for Earthjustice. It was $30k as of yesterday morning, but this tweet changed that number yesterday afternoon:

So we are now matching up to $40k in donations to Earthjustice this weekend. If we fill up the entire match, we will raise $80k for Earthjustice this weekend.

So what is Earthjustice?

It is an organization that pursues legal cases against those who are doing things against the interest of our planet.

Here are some examples:

  1. Earthjustice recently won cases in New Mexico and Nevada in which utility companies were trying to reduce the amount of money they pay consumers for their solar power.
  2. Earthjustice litigation led to the shutdown of the Big Sandy coal plant in Kentucky.
  3. In 2014, Earthjustice helped to secure a landmark Supreme Court ruling that upholds the EPA’s authority to limit carbon pollution.
  4. Earthjustice is currently litigating to halt illegal dumping of oil waste into California’s water supplies.

These are just a small sampling of the legal work that Earthjustice does. You can read more here.

If not Earthjustice, who would file and work on these cases? The interested parties, the polluters, utilities, carbon industry, etc have massive balance sheets that allow them to work the system in their favor. Society needs well funded organizations to fight back for all of us. And that is what Earthjustice does.

Our match offer is good all weekend. If you want to participate, please do so today.

Here is how you can do that:

  1. Go to our EarthMatch page on Crowdrise and give any amount (minimum is $10).
  2. After you complete the donation, tweet your donation out using the blue Tweet button on the post donation page. That will register it for our match.
  3. If you don’t use Twitter, you can forward your email receipt by following the instructions on the post donation page. Tweeting is much better though as it will amplify the campaign.

And please post this match offer [https://www.crowdrise.com/EJMatch] on social media and wherever else you might find people who want to support Earthjustice.

#climate crisis#hacking philanthropy

EarthMatch

It’s time again for our monthly match, our once a month team match offer for a cause that is helping to protect the country and the world from the current administration.

It was hard to pick a cause this month because the administration has done so many awful things recently (executive order rolling back climate change efforts, working to defund Planned Parenthood and Meals On Wheels, etc, etc). But we’ve landed on climate change because our team this month, Susan, Albert, Amy, Brad, Joanne, and me, feel that our planet needs our help right now and we are going to do something for it today. Plus its going to be Earth Day soon. It is April. And this is no April Fools except for the fool in the White House.

Our cause this month is Earth Justice, an organization whose tag line is “the earth needs a good lawyer” and god knows it does now with these carbon lovers running things in the US.

We are putting up a combined $30,000 match ($5k from each of us) to raise money for Earth Justice this weekend.

Here is how it will work:

  1. Go to our EarthMatch page on Crowdrise and give any amount (minimum is $10).
  2. After you complete the donation, tweet your donation out using the blue Tweet button on the post donation page. That will register it for our match.
  3. If you don’t use Twitter, you can forward your email receipt by following the instructions on the post donation page. Tweeting is much better though as it will amplify the campaign.

All of us will be posting and tweeting about this campaign today. Please join us in doing that to get the word out. And please donate to EarthJustice. We will match your donation up to $30k of total donations this weekend.

Let’s go.

#climate crisis#hacking philanthropy