Saying Goodbye to the TImes

The New York Times seems to be saying Goodbye to Hanukkah and I am saying Goodbye to the Times.

Here’s why……..

Once, they were the trusted source that set the standard. But the trusted standard-bearer of honest journalism has given way to a new kind of partisan house organ.

 

That veil of sanctity disappeared when they picked on a harmless little holiday called Hanukkah, that celebrates an embattled minority’s ability to withstand assimilation from an invading culture.

Back then, it was Hellenism. Today, it is anti-semitism in all its subtle shades.

In the digital world, the Times learned how to gin up its audience. Getting their click counter to move only required articles about certain recurring topics - of which Jews were one.å

The last presidency, for all its clownishness, turned the Times into a partisan blog with a daily-diet of Donald-bashing above the digital "fold”. This kind measurable success led them to abandon their News First standard of journalism and play the crowd response game. 

 “All the News That’s Fit to Print” became Just The Views That Get The Clicks - and the comments. 

When it come to that, articles about Israel or Jews in general seem to work as reliably. While many of these articles seem fair, they soon found out that a national newspaper from a significantly Jewish city that bashes Jews or their interests, preferably in subtle, progressive tones is pure catnip for anti-semites of all stripes - especially the literate, martini-sipping types. 

Now that Trump is cancelled, going after Jews and their special celebrations seems like the next best thing to do. In this case, by showcasing a lapsed Christian with some childhood Jewish exposure who decided they weren’t Jewish after all and their prayers meant nothing. Not only that, but as a practicing religious doubter found more meaning in a tree, a bunny and Christian traditions.

Talk about slamming the door on the way out. Thanks for fitting that into print, Times. Or just just printing it so the right people would catch a fit!

 

I bet you’re looking for a similar angle on other festivals that involve lights like Diwali, Kwanzaa and Ramadan.

So forgive my trespasses, oh gods of journalism but opening of the Times will no longer be my proxy for daily prayer. Its words no longer carry the weight or the trust, and they burn with quiet vitriol. 

 

The Times is no longer holy light of journalism. The old north star of journalism has succumbed to the digital pull of their partisan crowd. Instead, news aggregation on Google is today's standard. 

The Gray Lady’s once special flame made its last honest flicker - but, unlike Hannukah, there is no miracle of lights to look forward to. 

So Lights Out, Times, I’m saying goodbye.

Who's Smarter than a High Schooler? Not the CDC

My comments in the New York Times about why the tech community needs to speak up about fixing government in the 21st Century.

A high schooler was able to do a better job than the entire CDC. Think about it.....Don't we know how this works and what the solution is?

https://www.nyhttps://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/03/us/cdc-coronavirus.html#commentsContainer&permid=107403784:107403784

"After the Disruption": What Tech People Think of the COVID-19 Lockdown and Aftermath

After the Disruption – Preliminary Report

Highlights from yesterday’s meeting. A full annotated report with links and comments will appear next week The actual conversation in its entirety can be viewed here (Password: 2T*T@6x1)  

In a wide-ranging discussion, a group of tech execs, entrepreneurs and investors led by startup advisor, Alan Brody, discussed the COVID-19 lockdown from the point of view of the tech sector.

The picture emerging is that the world will be different, especially in cities like New York. Many people will take a break from big cities and big employers are likely to stick with telecommuting, dropping leases and treating headquarters as a gathering place rather than a daily location. Talent and population will experience a dispersal to secondary and remote regions. However, there will always be a desire for social gathering and so, over time young people will return to the big cities. Families may not. In the intermediate period, as business opens up there may well be a staggering of work hours, enabling lower density of public transportation and leisure. Immigrant workers – especially in tech will be encouraged to return to home, resulting in more outsourcing and new kinds of talent dispersal. Many government, business and societal structures will be profoundly challenged. 

• Everything that can or has gone digital will go even more digital and contactless.

• Robots will appear everywhere and the public will welcome them.

• AI will become more nuanced (remember fuzzy logic?) and embedded wherever possible.

• Lack of faith in government is at an all-time high, with self-reliance and personal high tech solutions preferred.

• Sweden vs the rest of the world. Still an ongoing debate…..

• Contact tracing will be passively resisted as no one seems willing to trust government with their data.

• Retail as we know it is probably dead. Online is the new norm. Only highly automated, highly convenient or highly bespoke retail is likely to return with any strength.

• Restaurants will be culled but diners may accept staggered seatings. Freelance chefs will emerge everywhere……

• We have become a quasi-socialist country with Universal Guaranteed Income a new reality.

• Potent desire to bring jobs home and reduce reliance on China but deep sense of impotence at our overwhelming reliance on them.

• Big corporations and governments might even require China to second-source production in other countries as a condition of doing business.

• Many calls for new kinds of Marshall Plans will emerge.

• College students are feeling deeply cheated abut the prospects of a virtual college experience. This will cause a rethinking of the higher education system, a breakdown of non-brand colleges

• 4 year colleges may never return intact. Layers of nonessential administrators are likely to be retired.

• The possibility of new kinds of national service - including one for older people whose health vulnerability makes them doubly unemployable.

• Sales of mood altering prescription meds exploding. (Up 35% as of March 31^st)

• Mental health awareness and empathy increasing. This may well be part of a new kind of WPA.

• The expectation of a true vaccine and antidote is low. The expectation of new viral and environmental threats are high.

• Most expect the public to manage the virus anyway and return to life regardless - even bucking nervous governments who lockdown for too long. Democrats tend to be cautious and lockdown-seeking, Republicans more risk-tolerant.

• Generally, entrepreneurial solutions are expected to emerge to manage social distancing in business etc.

• Concerns with healthfulness and ways to measure this will proliferate. Expect a mad rush of testing.

• Blockchain technology may emerge as the key management technology.

• Healthfulness will be the new cool. The new status hierarchy will be based on immune vitality and the culture will look for formal and informal ways to display this. This may be the key to social gateways.

• Religions were mostly absent and in some cases were the unintended promoters of the contagion. As the plague once fueled the church Reformation and this virus may similarly challenge formal religions. Spirituality, on the other hand, appears enhanced.

• Economic recovery – will there be enough money to go around? Governments might turn to creating cryptocurrency type bonds while wealthy individual may turn to cryptocurrencies to protect wealth. (FDR’s Executive Order 6102 and Gold Hoarding Act cited.)

• Distance voting is now a must.

• New referendum technologies that force officials to be constantly accountable to the public may be demanded. (In this pandemic the public knew as much as or more than the government, sometimes more proactive and expected them to plan only to find they didn’t.)

• The standard Democrat vs Republican debate may appear irrelevant. Expect new voices to emerge.

Bottom Line. Present leadership is grossly inadequate, planning non-existent - even though clear warnings have been public for decades – including numerous hit movies that were largely anticipatory. There is a profound lack of vision and a high willingness for the public to accept conspiracy theories and unconventional explanations. While we have had pandemics the world has never shut down at once. Have we lost our nerve, our leadership? What is the lasting footprint?

Was this lockdown the overreaction of the underprepared?

Please share your thoughts and comments.

To meet our Investers and Pitch, visit Startupalooza.com

"This Won't Go Viral" - Life After Lockdown

The world is taking a big hit. It’s unprecedented and we are all wondering how one little bug can do this? There are probably many others with this capability, so how do we deal with this….?

Aside from the ability of rich countries to print money and take on debt, let’s consider the world going forward.

GETTING BACK TO WORK

• We have no choice but to get back to work. The cost of pausing the world for more that 1 month, and the ensuing depression, would probably be higher than the medical cost of the pandemic. It sounds harsh but we have no choice other than to somehow bite the bullet. China seems to have shown the way.

• We will learn to mass test and separate out the healthiest and send them back to work while isolating out the at-risk. (As a joke, we suggested sending them to casinos and ski resorts, Club Meds and back on cruise ships. The serious answer might be a more virtual monitoring and homeserving system.)

The biggest business opportunity takeaways are probably:

• Ideas that address future pandemics – from medical to social and any numbers of solutions in between. Mass testing is big now and so are life science solutions, such as managing our immune systems.

• Extracting value or higher efficiencies from current businesses, properties and other assets. We are going to have to find a few trillion dollars somewhere……

• Multisourcing products, bringing production home, robots and 3D Printing. The downside of globalization is that we are dependent on other sources for too many of our basic products. This time it’s a bug, next time it could be lots of bugs or, an enemy…..  Do you have a solution for any of this?

• Old is new again and every dog has its day. As we are seeing, some ideas are really old (malaria drugs as a possible solution to the virus) and some are relatively new but now have a new urgency (videoconferencing). Do you see other oddities, re-tooled anachronisms or "its time has come" situations?

The One Thing We Can All Agree On

No one, and I mean no one, will say their site/campaign/idea "will go viral" again.

Ever.

The 5 Things You Need to Know About Pitching

After reviewing thousands of pitches, we can identify a few critical issues that most startups need to understand. We also have a few traps that trip up many, and few ways to figure out what makes you look interesting to investors.

1.     Sell The Business Not the Idea: Forget about your genius idea for a moment and ask what does this look like to your prospective market and then, your investor? Completely change your point of view and tell us who will buy it and why. How much they might pay. This is the key point – event though it seems obvious to you it does not to an investor, who knows nothing about you, your industry or the problem you are going after.

2.     What’s the Headline – the One Thing That Matters? You have a million ideas and a hundred ways to monetize the idea. Maybe. But no investor can absorb all these and they are probably not seen as credible. What they are looking for is the one thing that matters. In our experience, we have usually found it somewhere near the end of the pitch – like at the conclusion. If you see people perking up at the end, that’s probably your hook. Make that your headline.

3.     Know Your Pitch Structure. You should never spend more than 1/3 of the pitch explaining your idea, then you want to talk about the business proposition and how you are going to make it happen and then, why you and your team are uniquely qualified to do so. Ask for the money and tell them what it’s for (finishing the tech or setting up a proven marketing plan).

4.     Find the Big - or Describe the High Growth. Your idea needs to be big to be interesting to investors. If it can’t grow 10 times within 3-5 years don’t bother. And try to think whether it can grow 100 times because that is what investors are really looking for.

5.     Tell Us How It Scales: The only reason you need an investor is because you have an idea that will grow with the infusion of capital. They are not there to give you free advice or share their contacts (if you’re lucky, they might) but to invest on the theory that you will grow at a fantastic rate. So you need to give them a formula or a conceptual structure that shows how an injection of capital can make it grow. Forget narrative, jargon or flowery adjectives and get down to gameplan.

DO’s  

1.     Build Credibility: Show how your business background or experience somehow led you to or qualified you for this business.

2.     Where is the Opportunity Sweet Spot? Tell us where money is to be made. Investors aren’t here because they love ideas, they are here because they love ideas that can make them money. In other words, ideas are the vehicle, the destination is a wealthy exit.

3.     Talk About Sales. Products and services don’t sell themselves. You sell and it is going to cost you somehow. Tell us how you get customers and how much it costs you. Better still, tell us how you can piggyback on bigger partners…..Never mention viral, they won’t believe you. (If you do have viral sales, show how you can institutionalize it because every investor knows that in the rare case that viral happens it can also stop just as quickly.)

DON’T DO’s

1.     Don’t Tell Us How Big the Market Is – Tell Us How You Will Carve Out a Piece Of It - And Make It Bigger….

Just telling us how big the market is implies that if you just show up you’ll get a piece of it. Sorry, but it doesn’t work that way. No one gives you market share, you have to earn it. Better yet, you have to make a new kind of market.

2.     Don’t Tell Us What Other Companies Raised – Only What They Sold For

Just because company x raised a bunch of money in no way suggests that you will. There are a million reasons how they did that. But what they sold for has a roadmap and maybe you can follow that.

3.     Don’t Say You Need Money For Sales – Say You Have Proven How To Market It And You Need Money To Scale. You are the no. 1 salesperson of your company so when you ask for money for sales, you are saying you really aren’t and the money is to help you find one. But if you say you have figured out how to market it, that scales.

Mugabe Had The Best Job! Why Dictating is Good for Happiness and Longevity

Mugabe's passing reminds us that the best job of the last century - as defined by pay and longevity - was Dictator.

The only concern was avoiding assassination or losing a disastrous war.

To wit:

Robert Mugabe died age 94 - after 37 years in office (Zimbabwe)

Fidel Castro died age 90 - after 49 years in office (Cuba)

Mao Zedong died age 83 - after 27 years in office (China)

Josip Broz Tito died age 88 - after 45 years in office (Yugoslavia)

Joseph Stalin died age 75 - after 37 years in office (USSR)

Mobutu Sese Seko died age 67 - after 32 years in office (Zaire)

Even those who ended badly still had magnificent runs and left the game billionaires:

Muammar Al Gathafi died age 69 - after 42 years in office (Libya)

Saddam Hussein died age 69 - after 24 years in office (Iraq)

Hosni Mubarak died age 91 - after 30 years in office (Egypt)

Adolf Hitler died age 56 - after 12 years in office (Germany)

Mussolini died age 62 - after 21 years in office (Italy)

Nicolae Ceaușescu died age 83 - after 27 years in office (Romania)

As of now, Vladimir Putin is still in training at age 66 with just 19 years on the job. (Russia)

There is something about playing god and really getting back at your critics that is just so darn good for your health.

If only there were a pharmacological alternative.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/06/opinion/robert-mugabe-zimbabwe-dead.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage

3 Essentials to Funding

3 Essentials to Funding

1.     1. Not Just Big – Scalable

Your idea must have the potential to grow big in order to get Investors interested. They need a minimum of a 10x return to break even on their overall investments. Even then, they are looking for promises of more because they know how often even 10x projections fall short.

2.     2. Traction: Some Proof of Acceptance – Patent/Likely Acquirer

Your idea might be brilliant but if no one wants it you don’t have a business. Find a way to show that customers of some kind somewhere want it. Otherwise you are relying on the judgment of Investors and they are not likely to trust their judgment unless you can show them there is a line of willing takers somewhere. Patents that are likely to interest partners or protection against competitors, help too!

  

3. Execution: A Team That Can Make it Happen and a Comprehensive Plan

Ideas don’t come alive on their own. Either you are uniquely qualified or you can attract a team to make our plan work. Ultimately, the Investors are likely to choose doers over thinkers. Ideas don’t get funded but people with ideas do. If you can show that you know how to get things done and get a competent team to follow you, even a mediocre idea can get funded

What are your thoughts about the lost Amazon deal in New York?

My comment in the NY Times about the dead Amazon deal in LIC.

"Congratulations!

You should be a happy as the New York longshoremen who chased the container industry to Elizabeth, New Jersey in the 60's.

Now, there are bars and no cargo ships in Brooklyn.

Prediction: Nashville will make a country celebration album with high tech effects. 

(New Yorkers can get it by same day delivery - thanks to Amazon Prime.)"

http://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/14/nyregion/amazon-hq2-queens.html?comments#permid=30618947"

VC Hacks - #1: Why Investors Only Give Your Idea 10% of Their Attention

What to Do About the Other 90%!             

  

When I hear a rambling pitch that gets lost trying to describe every detail of a new idea, I have to wonder: if only you knew what little time the investors will actually spend discussing it!

If they ever do talk about you, the only question they will be asking each other is: how can we make money out of it?

If they think your idea has that potential – vast growth, solves a big problem in a credible way, maybe if this is a new and incredibly intriguing product or just that you, the entrepreneur is uniquely qualified to take on a specific market – guess what:

They are going to reduce that to one sentence.

Then, they just as quickly, they will stop talking about the idea and start talking business.

• What does it cost to acquire customers (note, they never mention viral, because they don't believe in it!)
• Is this enough money required to get it off the ground?
• How big can this be and how much would they likely recoup?
• Who would acquire it? (No one really discusses IPOs and never, ICOs)
• How big is the competition and can they reasonably be faced? (If the competition happens to be Google, Apple or Microsoft, go home.)
• Can this entrepreneur (and team) really pull this off?

Conclusion:

If you knew just what sentence Investors will use to describe your company, you would be way ahead of the game! (This is why we hold Capital Raising Workshops.)

Instead of fussing over every last feature in your offering, you would get down to the issue of what makes you and your team good enough to make this fly, exactly how you plan to do this and with how much.

Then, you can talk about the probable growth path and exit – who is likely to buy you, why and when.

Why I think the Uber/Lyft Regulations are a much bigger debate than we realize.

Why I think the Uber/Lyft Regulations are a much bigger debate than we realize.

And it opens the door to Blockchain politics.

http://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/09/nyregion/uber-nyc-vote-drivers-ride-sharing.html?comments#permid=28172202

 

 

Forgotten in this discussion is the reason why yellow cab medallions became so valuable. City Hall was the bumbling architect of their rise and their collapse.

By limiting the number of medallions, the City established a monopoly, created scarcity and then let investors drive up prices. At one point, a taxi medallion was worth more than a seat on the stock exchange.

In return, yellow cabs dominated just the parts of the City that were most profitable and abandoned the rest.

When Uber and Lyft upended this, the City failed to make good on the monopoly it created and compensating for its loss, thereby leaving small cab owners suicidaly in debt.

Legally, the City has indemnity, but this issue will not go away.

Government still has the right to create false monopolies that technology will continue to disrupt. Very few politicians understand this other than creating new regulations that are generally too out of touch to matter.

It is also quite likely those regulations will be deeply influenced by special interests, leading to further public distrust.

Uber has shown that, by being truly useful to the public, even government with all its power and moneyed lobbyists can't stop them.

The real problem is not Uber but government itself and the outdated limitations of the two-party, management vs. labor debate and the backroom system supporting it.

Today's generation sees Blockchain, open ledger legislation, voting and Cryptocurrency as opening up government to the people.