Portland sitrep, venture capital v sustainability, fixing government

Hi there!

Typing this newsletter on a hot Portland afternoon in the last week M and I are spending in this lovely city, there are a few things that I've been mulling over in my mind. No doubt, this partly is because spending time in a new place takes you out of the day-to-day to some degree, and time zones multiply that effect. (After a morning of conference calls on European time, it's safe to assume that by now, mid-afternoon, everybody I work with in Europe is if not in bed, then at the very least not in work mode anymore.) So the mind explores neural pathways that are otherwise underserved. Proceed at your own peril.

I've been meeting and discussing a wide range of things with lots of folks I rarely, if ever, met. That's part of the reason for spending time in new places, after all: To meet new folks, get some fresh ideas, put some actual faces to tiny twitter avatars. And so that's what I've been doing a fair bit. And for whatever reason, a few topics came up constantly, over and over again, framed ever so slightly differently, but frequently enough that I wonder: Has my thinking & perception shifted? Is there an overall change in the atmospheric pressure of our industry? Has it just been a series of random conversations?

Venture capital v sustainability

The story is as old as VC - or startups for that matter - but the idea that any founder could set out aiming to build a sustainable business and yet accept VC money seems ever more ludicrous. Pretty much by definition, accepting venture capital means taking exactly that one option - to organically build a sustainable business - off the table. It's the one thing that you cannot do anymore without defrauding your investors. Yet, so many young (especially first time) founders I talk to just assume that startups, and VC funding, are the expected way forward. It's almost as if Starting A Startup And Getting VC Funding has become the default mode of expression for a certain age group & type of person, as much as maybe in earlier days you would have expressed (or at least explored) an idea before by writing a book/blog/arts project (depending on where and when you were at the time). Again, nothing particularly new here. It's an old debate. But! While before it seemed that even the most critical of the system would have some morbid (or even open, honest) fascination with the "format" startup - yours truly included! - it seems perception is changing. As Silicon Valley produces more multi-billion dollar companies every week, it all feels a little more stale than before. Past it's Best-Before date. Maybe there's a way out of this dilemma without a whole industry crashing with all the trauma and job loss that comes with it? Maybe it could even return San Francisco to the lovely, lively town it was before even well-earning adults had to rent out their bed rooms on airbnb to make rent?

Looking at the same basic question from another angle: Growth gets all the fame and attention. Maintenance is so much less sexy, yet so much more important. But as Warren Ellis (or was it Bruce Sterling?) put it at some point during ThingsCon, there's no dopamine hit in keeping things running. Disruption is where the kick is; no praising articles are written about Stuff That Works As It Should.

Yet - and I'm aware how much I'm switching into rambling mode - how many more times should we allow a team of startup founders get away with the whole We're Building A Heirloom Grade Web Service To Make The World A Better Place if they accept investments that by definition mean they'll have to pull the plug on their service even if miraculously they beat the odds and don't go belly up? If the best case scenario of success is to cheat the users who trust and support you early on, are we allowed - obliged even - to call BS on that kind of message? 

I don't have an answer. But I'm convinced it's a pretty fundamental question. So there's exhibit A.

When did you cut your teeth?

As exhibit B, just a quick question: When, in which specific cycle of the development of the internet, would you say you've cut your teeth? 'cause I've been wondering about how differently those who build things on the web today think and work, and specifically how much of it is influenced, and how, depending on if they cut their teeth during the dotcom boom/bust cycle, the post-crash years, the early web 2.0 years and today's billion-dollar-company Silicon Valley.

The more I think about it the more I think the influence of this pretty random context in which each person in our industry was thrown into the mix must be huge. What I mean is, how much did the when & where influence the way a person tackles internet projects/companies/etc. they would like to see exist?

To paint a picture with extremely broad strokes, how does someone who happened to launch & IPO a web service on the height of the 2000 dot com boom approach something new compared to someone who built their first services in the mid-2000s, with essentially no funding and bootstrapped and (coincidentally?) Social Software driven? How different again is that from someone coming in today who's almost expected to aim for Y-Combinator and a billion-dollar company?

What about gov?

Together, these questions bring us to governance/administrational questions, and more specifically to the UK's Government Digital Services (GDS) and their international counterparts, as is so often the case. Over the last few years we've seen governments and administrations increasingly attract a whole lot of great tech talent. Government! Tech talent! (Footnote: Yes, yes, DARPA etc., I know. But modern, mid-2010s web service style tech talent? That's A New Thing.) I'm pretty certain that there's a close correlation to the questions outlined above around sustainability and Actually Doing Good, ie. building stuff that works beyond the initial dopamine hit. For real people, trying to achieve real things. Like getting food stamps or changing their postal address or, y'know, registering a company. 

And so GDS, and to some degree even the White House, have started attracting some amazing talent. Other organizations orbiting this peculiar nucleus that is government, like Code for America are growing in both size and influence, too. (Unsurprisingly, the German gov has to the best of my knowledge not even launched internal teams capable of becoming one of these Attractive Cores For Tech Talent. But there's always hope, no?) 

In recent work that'll feed, to whatever tiny degree, into the policy-shaping process in .DE, I've had the chance to work a little bit for the German government, in one of these pretty normal convoluted organizational ways that require a lot of institutions to shove information around for a bit before everything settles in place; which is, to be clear, absolutely legit and nothing to be sneezed at. I just mention it so I don't have to go to great lengths explaining the exact pathways my input will follow. I was positively surprised that the people in charge of said project, which was around smart cities and other emerging tech and their impact on governance and the urban population, sought out my collaborator and me - because of course by choosing the source of policy input, you implicitly choose a certain kind of political statement, too. One one side, corporate lobbyists represent their employers' flavors of a future and their preference. It's their job, and it's legit, and it's well funded and well established. Other positions don't get as much say, or as loud a voice, in the process. Where there's no funding there's no structure, and without structures you don't get to participate in this process. Unless someone on the inside invites certain types of inputs. And if that happens it's a good sign - it means the overall machine works, because someone's keeping an eye on the process. That's good. And it's good that organizations like Code for America, and their international counterparts, exist and are there to help out with this kind of input if there's a government administrator who knows what to ask for.

Anyway, </ramble>.

Shout outs

If you haven't picked up your digital copy, I highly recommend Warren Ellis' ebook of collected talks, CUNNING PLANS. It's a quick read, but nowhere near as quick as the ridiculously low price of 99 pence/ 1.12$ suggest. Good stuff. His talks from Cognitive Cities and ThingsCon aren't in there, but are - or in the case of ThingsCon will soon be - available online and also highly recommended. 

Scott Smith, whose newsletter you should definitively check out, is working on a new project called Thingclash, which he's been exploring a little bit at ThingsCon. It's a framework for understanding (and ultimately making better) connected devices/services around us. Important work, and Scott's output has been reliably, scarily impressive both in terms of amount and quality. If you don't already, you should keep a close eye on him. You won't regret it.

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