For the past two months, Frannie and I have been doing yoga.  It’s a totally new thing for me.  I was skeptical about it at first, but it’s been totally awesome and perspective changing.  Even though I am completely inflexible and unaccustomed to all of the poses (and perhaps because of this), doing the practice and cracking open my body in new ways has really had a noticeable effect.  I walk out of yoga feeling open, calm, confident, and clear.

There’s a lot I could talk about, but perhaps the idea that has stuck with me the most so far is the idea that we — generally speaking — walk around carrying an air of “subtle discontent”.  This is the nagging feeling that there’s something wrong, somethin missing,  something to get to (that’s not here), something more important to be focusing on, to be doing.  If you think about it and try to notice it, you might be surprised how ever-present it is.

This tends to manifest itself physically in tension between the eyebrows.  And a part of the yoga practice is noticing that feeling, releasing it, letting it melt away, and focusing on experiencing and enjoying the current moment.

For me at least — and I assume for lots of folks who are working hard and are generally under stress — this idea really hit home.  I think there is also something related to this in being hyper connected and constantly checking our phones.  Checking my phone, anxiously, habitually, for new emails, tweets, etc., is a certain form of this subtle discontent.  

And I love the idea of noticing it, being aware of it, melting it away, and refocusing on the present.

6hmm, yoga, large,

Last night at USV, we hosted the latest of several recent meetups on the “Peer Economy”.  We are in the process of organizing a number of companies and organizations that represent a certain sector of the internet economy in NYC, with an eye towards building a more formal coalition (perhaps in the model of San Francisco’s BayShare) at some point in the future.

As is to be expected, we spent the bulk of the discussion trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that ties us all together.   I think there’s a pretty strong thread, but it’s not immediately clear how best to describe it.  So I hereby invite you, the Internet, into the conversation.

So, as a thought experiment, how might you describe the common approaches and values between:

• peer-to-peer marketplace platforms like Etsy, Krrb, Skillshare, Shapeways and Zaarly;
• collaborative consumption networks like Airbnb and Carpooling.com;
• crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter, Indiegogo and LendingClub;
• co-working and education/development spaces like General Assembly and the DUMBO Startup Lab;
• support networks for independent professionals like the Freelancer’s Union;
• communications and media networks like Twitter, Tumblr, SoundCloud and StackExchange.

At USV, we have a word for all of this, which is simply “networks”.  That’s great and effective as an investment thesis, but it’s actually rather abstract as way of communicating the idea widely.  In Steven Johnson’s recent book Future Perfect, he uses the term “peer network”, which is better but still somewhat problematic (as peer means “pier” to most people and “napster” to others).  And our working description, as you can see, is “peer economy”.

Anyway, rather than try to “draw a box” around all of this — we instead attempted to (at Matt Brimer’s suggestion) focus on the center — on the core opportunities, values, and methods that all of these communities believe in and operate around.

The ones that stood out to me the most were:

• valuing creativity, self expression & individualism;
• increasing personal freedom through community support;
• creating economic empowerment;
• valuing authenticity and real human connection;
• built on trust (as developed within each community);
• and perhaps my favorite: Andrew Wagner’s “as New York as a slice of pizza”

In my world, I focus a lot on words like “innovation” and “networks” — but I think the thing that really stood out to me about last night’s conversation was the centrality of the human component.  Empowering “real people” to do new and awesome things.  To access new economic opportunities for themselves, while at the same time rediscovering community.

The idea that stuck in my head last night is about the “Indie Web” — what’s so interesting about the web and the networks of people on it is that they are at the same time individual & independent AND hyper-connected.  The fact that we’re connected lets us be independent.  It’s almost a paradox.

I like the idea that the web makes it possible to be an indie musician, dj or filmmaker, to be an indie craftsperson or manufacturer, an indie journalist, publisher, or even an indie scientist.

And what makes most (if not all) of this possible is the ability to be an indie entrepreneur, whether that’s through an open source project, a meetup, a web app, or even a venture-backed company (which is, admittedly, a certain flavor of “indie”).  

The point is, that on an open web, we have the unfettered ability to make new things that enable people to do new things.  Which is pretty awesome and exciting.

6hmm, peer networks, large,

Freedom is such a loaded word.  And what makes it harder is that there is not a single “freedom”.  There are many freedoms, that are intertwined and often in tension with one another.

In yesterday’s Times, Cornell economics professor Robert Frank notes:

while almost everyone celebrates freedom in the abstract, defending one cherished freedom often requires sacrificing another. Whatever the flaws in Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal, it sprang from an entirely commendable concern: a desire to protect parents’ freedom to raise healthy children.

Here is a case of one freedom (the freedom to sell and buy whatever we please) is in tension with another: the freedom to make healthy choices. To the critique that the wide availability of and social norms around sugary drinks doesn’t restrict that second freedom, Frank responds:

Unless we’re prepared to deny, against all evidence, that the environment powerfully influences children’s choices, we’re forced to conclude that rejecting Mr. Bloomberg’s proposal significantly curtails parents’ freedom to achieve the perfectly reasonable goal of raising healthy children.

Regardless of what you think about the soda ban, it’s a good example of the problem.  And a microcosm of the large tension around freedoms between the right (“lower-level” personal freedoms) and the left (“higher-level” social freedoms).

This tension of freedoms is also at the center of the debate over the open internet.  I just finished reading Susan Crawford’s new book, Captive Audience, which makes an impassioned argument that we need to prioritize our freedom to connect to the internet and our freedom to innovate on the internet over certain other freedoms (namely: the freedom to build network infrastructure without government regulation).  

In Crawford’s view, data is the new electricity — a utility and commodity that must be provided openly and non-discriminately to all Americans — and should be regulated as such (much the way that electricity underwent regulation in the early 20th century, with the result of ensuring equal access). And she argues that the freedom to connect (as individuals) and the freedom to innovate (as companies) are much more important to society than the freedom to operate a broadband network sans regulation.

Many on the right don’t agree with this view — either because of fear of government surveillance and control, or a belief that the infrastructure market, left alone, will get the job done.  

On this particular issue, it will be really interesting to see what happens this year, as FCC chairman Julius Genachowski leaves office (along with his net neutrality foe on the right, Robert McDowell).

I personally find Crawford’s argument compelling, at least in that we must choose to prioritize the freedom to connect and the freedom to innovate.  It’s clear that we’re quickly falling behind other countries in this effort (e.g., our target connectivity for 2012 is 4mbit up / 1mbit down, while South Korea is targeting symmetrical gigabit connections for every citizen this year).  As we continue to prioritize our freedoms, we should choose the ones that embody the greatest amount of potential and opportunity - and to my mind, that’s freedom to connect to and innovate on top of an open internet.

But we must also distinguish between the notion of government ownership & control of the internet and government regulation of internet access.  Fred Campbell’s argument on Red State frames Crawford’s argument as a play for government ownership and control — e.g., data is not like electricity because data is speech, and it can’t be controlled or owned by government.  I’m with that — but in practice I don’t believe that a privately operated network is any safer from government’s prying eyes than a publicly operated network (see CISPA).  

So the real question seems to me to be: what can we do to ensure that people have freedom of choice at the application layer? That’s where the innovation is happening, where the biggest opportunities for growth and progress are, and where we should be placing our freedom chips.

6large, hmm, net neutrality,

I spent a while on the phone yesterday talking to Christie George, director of New Media Ventures.  NMV is an angel network focused on advancing progressive change through politically-oriented tech & media ventures.  (Incidentally, on the board of NMV is Mike Mathieu, founder of FrontSeat, makers of one of my all-time favorite civic tech interventions, WalkScore - more on why in a future post).

One of the topics Christie and I got to talking about was the funding ecosystem for “civic” startups.  NMV is in an interesting position — their projects sit somewhere at the intersection of venture investing (but with a way lower expected return), philanthropy, and political giving.  They try to be “entity neutral”, in that they give to both for-profit and nonprofit ventures — but for now I’ll focus on the for-profit side.

What makes the venture investing space work is that there is an established pipeline of funding: you raise your angel or seed round, and assuming you hit your milestones you can continue to raise a series A, B, etc.  At each stop on the ladder, there are funders who are waiting for you, know what to look for, and are ready to invest if things look right.  This funding ecosystem is designed to help turn ideas into billion dollar businesses.  

With ventures that are shooting at a different target — say, building a thriving (but not billion dollar) business that also advances a cause (civic or otherwise) — things look a little different.  There is a real risk of “setting ventures up to fail” by pumping them up with seed funding, and then leaving them hanging when it runs out and there’s no one there to fund the next round.

This exact question came up at my SXSW panel: 

@nickgrossman spot on, who funds #civictech ventures? Traditional forms of capital not there yet. Thankful @knightfdn fills this gap #SXSW

March 10, 2013

Jase notes that the Knight Foundation has done a lot to fund the civic space, in many cases stepping up with big dollar follow-on investments.

Another answer is that these businesses simply operate in a different way, which just doesn’t fit the venture model.  Clay Johnson calls this the “Washington Model” — i.e., services-oriented firms that come to profitability early and don’t have a conceivable venture-style exit — and he has done a bunch of work via Big Window Labs to help these kinds of businesses grow.  

Presumably investors looking at “Washington Model” civic investments would be looking for a dividend-style return rather than a acquisition- or IPO-based multiple.  And clearly, they can’t expect to fund corporate growth at the scale of a venture-backed investment without revenue to support it.

A decent test case is something like Thunderclap - an increasingly popular tool that coordinates mass tweeting to make an impact.  Thunderclap is a project of Design/Develop, a NYC-based product and services shop.  I am not sure how Thunderclap is funded (presumably out of DE-DE’s services-supported R&D budget), and I wonder what the future looks like for a product like that.  It looks more like a venture-backed social media app with a free+ business model than like a washington-model services firm.  So assuming it continues to grow, what happens to it?  Who invests and how do they make it work?

There are lots of other examples out there and I’ll be keeping an eye out.

6hmm, large, new media ventures, thunderclap, civic apps,