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Making the World Safe for Smart: Why TED Matters
Can Silicon Valley Really Change the World?
Published September 18, 2009 @ 04:42PM PT
The FrontlineSMS:Medic team, one of the most disruptive groups of entrepreneurs in the world, meets for the first time in person after months of online meetings. Via Daniel Bachhuber
On Monday, Mint.com announced that it had sold itself to Intuit for $170 million. While numbers like those make most of us who work with nonprofits blanch, the relatively low number for one of the most promising young tech companies, the fact that it sold to the rival it was trying to take down, and the less than enthralling batch of startups that took the stage at TechCrunch50 on Monday and Tuesday have some in the web tech world whether today's generation of startups have lost some of their disruptive swagger. The real question, though, is whether Silicon Valley is only imagining that it's in the business of "changing the world."
The Mint announcement came in the form of a blog post by CEO Aaron Patzer that made it seem like a fairy tale: a company that started in someone's kitchen, millions of happy users, $0 to $170 million in three years. This was the quintessential Silicon Valley story. Right?
Wrong, at least according to folks like tech journalist Sarah Lacy and 37 Signals founder Jason Fried. Fried ranted in a blog post titled, "The Next Generation Bends Over." His basic criticism is that, while $170 mil is a great pay day, that's not what it's about. What it's about is building solutions that are fundamentally better than what the old guy offered. In his estimation, Mint had the wind in it's sails and Intuit was running scared, but by selling, they lost it:
Mint was a key leader of the next generation of game changers. And now it’s property of Intuit — the poster-child for the last generation. What a loss. Is that the best the next generation can do? Become part of the old generation? How about kicking the shit out of the old guys? What ever happened to that?
Lacy riffed on similar themes, but kicked up the criticsm beyond Mint. In her post, "Memo to Start-ups: You're Supposed to Be Changing the World, Remember?," Lacy railed that while $100 million exits were great, what made Silicon Valley a place unto itself was the idea of a bunch of kids in a garage building something that made everything else that came before it fundamentally obsolete. Her point was that if we start to have a group of people emulating Mint (as opposed to emulating Google), there's going to be less and less disruptive innovation. As she put it, "A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy."
So what was behind the sale of Mint? Fried speculated it was pressure from a venture investor in the company, but in the comments, Union Squares Ventures Partner and well-known blogger Fred Wilson speculated that something different might be at work. He wrote "This smells to me of a young founder facing the prospect of making enough money at an early age that their life will be changed forever and not being able to resist it."
As for the rest of the group of startups at TechCrunch50? After trying my best to write about the most interesting ones, I have to agree with Lacy's (and it seems like most of their expert's) analysis that it was a pretty timid group of "10% better" entrepreneurs. Certainly it was hard for me to find many that actually fit into a "world changing" category.
Which actually brings up another, perhaps more important point, which is the occasionally deluded self-intoxication that the Valley has with the notion of what it means to "change the world." I genuinely believe that Lacy, who has spent much of the last year globe trotting to see how the developing world is entering the tech startup world, gets it, but she uses the unfortunate example of Zappos Tony Hsieh as a world changer.
All due respect to Zappos, a better way to buy shoes is not the same as changing the world. It's a great company, and relative to their field, they deserve the money they got in their recent sale to Amazon. But an easier way to buy stuff - particularly stuff that is not necessarily essential - is simply not world changing. If anything, the most transformational part of Zappos may be the way they evangelize their corporate culture.
But this hyperbole is why the nonprofit sector can have such a hard time interacting with the corporate world. It's hard to spent time with groups like Samasource that are trying to fundamentally shift the paradigm of outsourcing to create real growth and development opportunities for the developing world, or the Acumen Fund that is investing in local market solutions to water distribution, and then to be told that easier, faster, funner consumption of stuff is in the same ballpark. It's not even the same sport.
Or at least, classically, it hasn't been. I have absolutely no animosity towards the for profit world, or the profit motive driving companies. If I was Aaron Patzer and I was staring down the barrel of a half decade to beat out the current champion of finance software or $10+ million right now, it'd be hard for me to turn the money down. I don't begrudge them at all. Nor, by the way, do I begrudge Zappos for creating the most kickass shoe buying experience on the planet. I think it's an awesome company. And I also totally agree that companies like Google and Facebook are weaving a social infrastructure through which the world can change in totally new ways.
But if people are really, really interested in where the next generation of truly disruptive innovation is going to come from, it's not Silicon Valley. At least not this iteration. If people really want to see the next generation of disruptive innovators, they need to look at the thousands and thousands of undergraduates all around the country who are taking advantage of new opportunities to get abroad. They need to look at the students who are coming face to face with poverty, injustice, and all of the warts of an unfair world, and are returning to restless nights where they realize they can't do nothing.
It's these students - and after 7 years at Northwestern University I know just how their numbers are increasing - who have the intensity, the passion, and the absolute total and utter unwillingness to not succeed that will help them create the organizations, and yes, products, that will really change the world.
Some of them will come down the pipeline of Silicon Valley; hell, that's why I'm here. I'm incredibly bully on the potential to use the new architecture of the social web to expand access to information, democracy, participation, and creativity. But their dreams will not just center on the big pay-day - at least not alone. Instead, they will be looking for the moment when everyone in India has access to clean water, or every health worker in Africa can automatically call up their patients health records via SMS, or some other moment in which, because of what they've helped build, the location on a person's birth certificate no longer determines their destiny.
And they'll probably figure out how to make money along the way. Get your checkbooks out.
EntrepreneurBait: Africa, Awesomeness, Imperialism
Published September 17, 2009 @ 03:46PM PT
After a few months of experimentation, "the daily entrepreneur" is no longer daily. I found that while many people appreciated the links, it was difficult to get people excited and interested day after day. While a feature like this may eventually return, for the time being, I'm going to be experimenting with some other forms of semi-regular links.
With that said, welcome to EntrepreneurBait, a bi-weekly post that features and puts some context around some of the most interesting and provocative posts. Thanks to @tactphil, @socialedge, @beunreasonable, and lots of other folks on Twitter for many of these links.
There have been a lot of great posts about Africa, social media and startups in the last couple days. A blog post on This Magazine makes the argument that the use of Twitter in rural areas - the case in question is the recent riots in Uganda - is not about the immediate availability of news as much as the "personal microphone" effect. African blogging platform Maneno's Director of Technology Miquel Hudin wrote a recap of the Maker Faire Africa event held last month in Ghana for the PopTech blog, and
There has also been a lot of conversation recently about Innovation. Today, the ever provocative Umair Haque wrote "The Awesomeness Manifesto," which is all about how we need to shift our thinking away from "innovation" - a broken, 20th century economic concept that relies on destruction, in Umair's mind - and instead talk about "awesomeness," which includes pillars like love, value, sustainable creation, and being insanely great. Sean over at Tactical Philanthropy also wrote about innovation, connecting articles about Six Sigma (efficiency management practices) with design thinking of the sort practiced by firms like IDEO.
There have also been some just Generally Interesting Things. William Easterly has been writing about the relationship between imperialism and state-led development (an interesting counterpoint to the argument that imperialism is always directly related to free-markets). From the organization side of things, I've been hearing more and more buzz about "Kiva for education" nonprofit startup Vitanna. And the Feast Kitchen has announced their final roster of startup finalists.
Remembering 9/11 and Fostering a New Era of Citizen Leadership
Published September 11, 2009 @ 10:43AM PT
Eight years ago today two jetliners crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City. A collective hush fell over America as we watched the towers crumble and fall, taking with it our imagination of invulnerability and heralding a new and very different 21st century.
Reflecting on the irony of humanity's dual capacity to create and destroy, early 20th century critic Walter Benjamin wrote "There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism." The years after September 11th, 2001 have showed us that the reverse is also true.
Because while the stories we hear usually focus on terrorism, war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a seething world at odds with America, the first decade of the 21st century has demonstrated how in a new, networked era, people are not willing to just let the world happen, quietly ceding the authority to change things to governments and businesses with means.
Instead, we've seen an explosion of creative citizen participation. In the US, volunteerism and studying abroad are on the rise and have set off the spirits of a generation who refuse to sit around patiently waiting for their turn for leadership. Around the world, creative social entrepreneurship is driving change as people - even the poorest of the poor - use their talents, relationships and other resources to drive change.
I've been blessed with opportunities to see many aspects of this new citizen leadership. One of the most important and underreported is the incredible swell of activity around peace and dialogue in the Middle East. While news continues to focus on the violence, the story of the Middle East is far more about a longing for peace, the need for infrastructure, mobility, and security, and the growth of a generation committed to a better future.
The story is expansive. In Israel and Palestine, average citizens organize for peace with more regularity than most would think looking at Western media. Organizations like Just Vision are dedicated to telling those stories. What's more, there are many organizations like PeaceWorks that are trying to build the economic infrastructure to accelerate an end to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Larger groups like RAND are thinking systemically about how to build the actual infrastructure for peace with projects like the ARC. Jeff Skoll's new Urgent Threats Fund is explicitly focused on leveraging all solutions - including those of social entrepreneurs - to build peace in the Middle East.
But the story of citizen engagement is not just at the epicenter of that one conflict. For while some would try to convince us that Americans are engaged in an us vs. them, clash of civilizations conflict with the broader Arab and Muslim world, the reality is wildly different. Groups like the Interfaith Youth Core are enabling broader communication between young people from wildly different faith backgrounds to form bonds that will extend into the future as they assume positions of prominence and leadership in the world.
And around the Arab world, young people are - just like young people in America - harnessing their friends, family and other resources to design entrepreneurial projects for social change. We've had the good fortune at Northwestern University to bring a number of those students - working on issues as diverse as health access, community development, and communications infrastructure - to our annual Global Engagement Summit.
But for as exciting as this new era of citizen leadership may be, serious barriers remain. War, violence, and the perception of impassable barrier of religion, faith and custom far too often remain the norm. The question becomes how do we, as average citizens, accelerate our engagement to make a difference. There are a few paths:
1. Use the platforms that we have to support the work of individual leaders for change in issues of interfaith communication and Middle East peace and development.
2. Find ways to assemble our voices and advocate for greater government engagement with real, long-term peace building, including enabling opportunities for greater economic development and opportunity.
3. Tell a different story. Tell the story of people who try to build up the world rather than destroy it. There are far more of them in every culture, every faith, every nationality, but their work is more subtle and requires us to take a more active interest in sharing their stories as far and as widely as we can.
(Photo: Sunrise over Mt. Sinai by Jesper Särnesjö)
Save Reading Rainbow
Published August 31, 2009 @ 09:51PM PT
Reading Rainbow host Levar Burton, via: GPN/Nebraska ETV Network and WNED Buffalo
[Join the action to Save Reading Rainbow!]
One of the most beloved and long-running children's shows in the history of television will leave the airwaves next year. According to NPR, the 26-year running Reading Rainbow will be discontinued because the Public Broadcasting Service, Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the Department of Education aren't willing to put up funding for a show that teaches children why to read, but not how to read. It would be an incredible waste to lose a show that has instilled a love of reading and education for millions because of a new fad in educational analysis.
The basic idea, according to NPR, is that research has suggested that in the literacy fight, basic phonics are the so called first line. According to the vice president for children's programming at PBS, Linda Simensky, Reading Rainbow began at a time when the key question for educators was "how do we get kids to want to read." Since then, priorities have changed, and with it, the place for a show that takes the luxury (to use NPR's word) to focus on helping children develop a passion for reading has evaporated.
I am not an enemy of the current Department of Education. I am excited about new approaches and experimentation with the ways that we educate the next generation. I think there are incredible opportunities in the for-profit market for software, web portals, and other businesses that open educational access more broadly.
But I am against an infatuation with data that doesn't recognize that there are certain elements of education impossible to capture with numbers and quantitative students. Would we deny that a love of reading is a vital -- the vital -- ingredient to helping people develop a life long interest in books? Would we deny that just because you know how to do something, that doesn't mean you like or will want to do it?
Education is not just about imparting knowledge into empty vessels. Education is about providing skills yes, but it's also about sharing the values of a society, incentivizing positive behaviors, and helping people understand themselves in the context of a larger world.
This matters for social entrepreneurs for a couple reasons. First, social entrepreneurship and innovation is about finding solutions that work. But it's about doing so in a way that recognize the full complexity of social problems, and indeed, rebelling against reductive thinking. Second, social entrepreneurship is about unleashing the innovative capacity of everyone to change the world. Reading - not the mechanics of it but the act of trying to assemble and interpret new knowledge - fundamentally changes our sense of ourselves in the world. We should be worried about trends which would undervalue the institutions that threaten that sort of viewpoint expansion.
For me, and I would imagine for many readers of this blog, Reading Rainbow was a vital part of childhood. It treated children with respect and excitement. It, combined with my parents' constant encouragement to read, created a love of reading that I've kept through college and which has a dramatic impact on my ability to understand and synthesize the world around me.
It's PBS' imperative to decide what it's obligation to the fight against illiteracy must be. Maybe it's appropriate for them to fill a gap left by parents and schools either incapable of or unwilling to provide basic early literacy skills. But it makes me worried to see one of the most treasured educational programs cast aside in favor of something more skills based. It makes me wonder if in the process of looking for what works, we've forgotten what matters.
[Mad? Join the action to Save Reading Rainbow!]
Remembering the Levees: Obligation and Opportunity Four Years After Katrina
Published August 29, 2009 @ 10:00AM PT
Hurricane Katrina hit on August 29th, 2005. The storm would kill more than 1600 people, displace thousands more and cause more than $40 billion in property damage. The Bush administrations deplorable response to the crisis made many question the US government's commitment and capacity to care for it's most vulnerable citizens. For years on, our obligation to help New Orleans rebuild remains as strong as ever, but in doing so we must also recognize the incredible passion of those who would see the rebuilding as an opportunity for renaissance.
Obligation:
In August of 205, my comprehension of Katrina was colored by having just spent the last three months visiting nonprofit organizations in the post (or ongoing) conflict zones. It was mind boggling to have just spent months in and around refugee camps to then return, see the construction of our very own version of them in the middle of football stadiums, and to watch politicians desperately try to explain it away without using the word "refugee."
Crisis forces us into confrontation with ourselves, individually and as a group. I think for many, the (lack of) response to Katrina showed the callousness of the Bush administration more clearly even than the Iraq war.
I dug up an old piece I wrote on September 2, 2005 but never published. I want to quote it extensively here, not because I think it offers any profound insight or analysis, but because the sheer raw helplessness of my response expresses relatively accurately how many felt then, and perhaps reminds us that anger was and is justified, and our obligation remains:
To watch television news today is to see a world entirely beyond our own reckoning of ourselves. It is to see an entirely different potential reality - the potential, that is, that we Americans may just be liable to the same insanities, impulses, brutalities, and tragedies that afflict the rest of our seething world - that there is something beyond us (call it Nature, God, or whatever you'd like) that does not care what our gross domestic anything is or indeed, how much freedom we have. It is to see a reality which we have been trying desperately (and with much success) to bury under our own mythology for centuries.
The two-hundred and whatever million of us unaffected sit on our couches watching something that can't possibly, can't fathomably be happening here. Reporters who choke up as they see bodies float by; rescue workers uncovering heating ducts and finding suffocating old women; rape gangs and twitching drug addicts roaming lawless streets; phone calls from people up to their necks in rising water saying they just might not be able to make it home any more; looters (or is it desperately hungry human beings?) breaking into any store that might conceivably have some sort of provisions; tens of thousands of people stuffed into a football stadium without water or food waiting for the cavalry that got caught up in something else and a government that dithers. We watch an entire government system which, at every level it seems, simply cannot do what is needed. They cannot even say what is needed.
Here we are, and we dither. We do not send the troops where they are called for. We do not call on the provisions of our laws and history which give our leaders extreme power in truly desperate situations. We cannot, even in this moment when we are laid at our most bare, the moment when every politician's rhetoric falls short by definition, when a huge number of our own cease to be Americans first and are forced to survive, to desperately cling to life and family and hope by whatever means necessary - even in this moment we cannot let ourselves for a second believe that when it comes down to it we are just the same as everyone else - that the worms do not care where we were born.
As the bodies float by, the reporters stand agape. The politicians, conservative, liberal, red, blue, green, pink, brown, whatever, cannot bring themselves to say words like "refugee." There are troops now, finally, and a truck or two as well. But how many more than necessary died because of delays and planning and squibbling, squabbling stupidity? The citizens of this great nation, the place that Old Abe once called "the last best hope for the world", stare with disbelief.
We are called into confrontation with ourselves and who knows, now, what it means to be American? Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that the Kentucky Derby was a "jaded, atavistic freak out with nothing to recommend it but a very saleable "tradition,"" and I can't help but wonder, now, if it isn't the same with our unyielding faith in America.
Opportunity:
An amazing thing, though, has happened in the four years since then. While the government's response was lackluster, the citizens of this country didn't miss a beat. People young and old and of all political persuasions found creative ways to help, either by raising money and other resources for the Red Cross and other relief organizations or by actually making the trip to volunteer in the hardest hit areas of the Gulf region.
What's more, the response has not been limited to short term volunteers and donations. Tulane University, basically submerged in the flooding, has been reborn as a university of choice for students who want to both get an education and demonstrate their commitment. The inaugural Clinton Global Initiative University program was held at the school in 2007 where university president Scott Cowen affirmed his commitment to making Tulane the place where students come to learn how to serve their country.
What's more, residents of the Gulf old and new are rebuilding or reigniting new cultural, nonprofit, and entrepreneurial organizations in an effort not just to solve the problems created by Katrina, but to point the face of the Gulf forwarded to a 21st century with less poverty, higher literacy, better jobs, better access to health care, storm-proof homes, and more.
All Day Buffet has done an incredible job uncovering the full range of amazing work happening particularly in New Orleans. Their list of the "New Orleans 100" are the 100 most creative, exciting, forward looking projects and organizations across categories including Art and Architecture, Music, Creative, Nonprofit, Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation, and more.
And the Louisiana government has embraced social entrepreneurship as a part of the rebuilding process. In 2006, Lt. Governer Mitch Landrieu launched the first state-level Office of Social Entrepreneurship in the country. The office holds workshops and training sessions, advocates for social innovators on the state level, and hosts a business plan competition.
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As crisis often does, Hurricane Katrina exposed the best and worst of America. Our bumbling response to a disaster that, if not human created was amplified in impact by our neglect of the protection the Gulf region needed, revealed much about our capacity and our psyche. But we - both the citizens of that region and all those who have found ways to support them - have also shown the deep creative optimism of the American Spirit.
There is much to be done, but four years after the disaster it seems clear that the best way to commemorate those who lost their lives is to invest in the incredible emergent ecosystem of those who would use this new opportunity to not simply to rebuild but to advance.
For more information about how much remains to be done, read US Poverty blogger Leigh's post, which has a ton of information about poverty in the Gulf and how to get involved.
(Photo: Affrodite.net)
Dickens, Satire and "The Foundation"
Published August 27, 2009 @ 10:47PM PT
"Please sir, I want some more."
Following up on the new Canadian TV series "The Foundation," Philanthrocapitalism authors Matthew Bishop and Michael Green have compared the new satire to Charles Dickens' lampooning of the excesses of Victorian charity.
In this piece, they make two key points. The first is that the field should be excited that philanthropy feels relevant enough to satire. That's true. No one wants to make fun of something that's not culturally relevant.
The second is that satire is not a denial of importance of the subject of satire. Instead, in many cases it's about pointing out the hypocrisy of people's behavior, a different thing entirely. In the case of "The Foundation" is certainly appears to be less about a disbelief in the potential of philanthropy to do good, and far more about bringing to light - if in sometimes painful fashion - the undercurrent of social status hunting that can sometimes characterize participants in charity.
I think it's a useful framework. Satire has been society's way of keeping it's own feet to the fire since the genre was invented in the Mediterranean thousands of years ago. Our modern need for satire is demonstrated by our love for the Daily Show, Colbert Report, the Onion, and even after 14 seasons, South Park. Satire points out our bs, and in the process reminds us of what really matters.
Enjoy this clip from "Starvin Marvin," an episode from South Park's very first season that brutally lampoons the humanitarian international.
When Society Expects Us to Fail, We Usually Do
Published August 10, 2009 @ 01:23PM PT
Season 4 of The Wire focused on a group of 8th graders caught between school and the reality of urban life
Lurking underneath data about nonprofit performance and hiding in the shadows behind our enthusiasm about innovative approaches to social change is a reality that saps our ability to create change.
When society expects us to fail, we usually do.
In a profoundly important piece published in the Washington Post today, former teacher Sarah Fine writes about why she left teaching behind after four years of incredible effort. She lists the culprits you expect, of course. "Burnout," she says, is shorthand for the frustration of dealing with apathetic students, administrations that add work and limit authority without changing pay, and all the other things we've come to associate with a broken education system.
But that wasn't, in the end, what drove her out. She admits with difficulty that it was as much about the way the rest of the world saw her as it was about anything she felt day to day:
Do my lawyer and consultant friends find themselves having to explain why they chose their professions? I doubt it. Everyone seems to know why they do what they do. When people ask me about teaching, however, what they really seem to mean is that it's unfathomable that anyone with real talent would want to stay in the classroom for long. Teaching is an admirable and, well, necessary profession, they say, but it's not for the ambitious. "It's just so nice," was the most recent version I heard, from a businesswoman sitting next to me on a plane.
She goes on to reinforce the notion that her Millennial generation is engaged and active, but sagely notices that the flip side of engagement can be a challenge, as well: "Our engagement also explains why we are leaving the classroom. We are not used to feeling consistently defeated and systemically undervalued."
How ironic.
How ironic that this young woman who had given four years to trying to make it in this vital position eventually had to succumb to the exact same sort of expectations of failure that likely made it so difficult for her students to succeed.
We expect failure from students who grow up around drugs and without strong parental and community support. We expect failure from the teachers who would try to give them a different path forward.
In so doing, we cue society to look at our education system, and by extension the people in it, as broken; worthy of pity and perhaps even sad admiration, but fundamentally fighting an unwinnable battle and as such, naive.
And while our media machine holds up the Finding Forrester examples of unexpected success, the focus on exceptional individuals in the stories we tell ends up reinforcing the hopelessness of the system as a whole.
While we understand, on some intuitive level, the debilitating impact of societal scorn, it remains far too easy for us to write away the emotional impact of societal pity. This is what Sarah Fine is talking about when she asks why her lawyer friends never have to explain why they do what they do. It's not about the work itself, but about the way society values that work.
In many ways, this all comes back to success and is at the center of Alain de Botton's recent talk at TEDGlobal on a kinder, gentler form of success. He linked career anxiety and modern society's justmental tendency to define a person in terms of what they do with the particular way we value material items. In his estimation, we are not a particularly materialistic society, we've simply come to associate certain types of emotional rewards of success with the position of particular types of goods. The point is that it's the emotional reward we're after, not the good itself.
I can't help but be reminded of a moment from South Park, which I continue to believe is the most dead-on pop cultural commentary we have. In this particular episode, 8-year old Kyle Broslovski is asking his father for money for a Chimpokomon, the newest toy that all the students at school must have:
Kyle: Dad, can I have money for a chimpokomon?..Please everyone else has one
Father: Well, Kyle, that's not a reason to buy one. You see son, fads come and go. And this chimpokomon is nothing more than a fad. You don't have to be a part of it. In fact, you can make an even stronger statement, by saying to your peers, I'm not going to be a part of this fad, because I'm an individual. Do you understand son?
Kyle: Yes, yes I do dad. Now let me tell you how it works in the real world. In the real world, I can either get a chimpokomon, or be the only kid without one, which singles me out, and makes the other kids make fun of me and kick my ass.
Father: Hmm. Good point. Here's $10. Actually, here's $20, get one for your brother as well.
The way that a society makes judgments about the value of any good or any pursuit has an immense impact on the way people pursue those things. The expectations that a society has for people in any particular position, whether it's as a teacher in an inner city or as a member of a poor community, have a serious and often detrimental impact on the way those people come to see themselves, and often comes to define the upper boundaries of how they view their potential for success.
When it comes to education, we simply cannot allow the story of a broken, hopeless system to persist. We cannot allow the story of education to be a set of predictable archetypes - the talented student who just needs to believe in themself; the teacher who wants to help them but has the whole world fighting against them - and a predictable set of outcomes - consistent failure with a few shining moments.
Education is how we transmit what it means to be a part of a community, a part of a country, a part of a global community. It is, particularly as the nature of work and life continue to change at an accelerating pace, a field that absolutely everyone has a stake in.
Let's start by stopping our questions about why someone would teach, and starting to ask how we can help.
