Danny Crichton

It’s another year, and another year of great books. One of the goals of this year was to write more reviews of books that I have read — as you can see from the archives, that failed miserably except for a capsule blog post about Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem. I am making no promises about this next year.

That said, there were a number of great books that I read this year, and I hope more people read them as well. As I wrote about last week, I am attempting to be more deliberate with what I am reading. So there is more fiction this year, and I hope that trend continues next year.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee

This was the single best book I read this year. First and foremost, it is an amazing novel about the challenges of a family on the edge of society trying to make it between two cultures, Korea and Japan. But at its heart, it is a meditation on the challenges each of us face as we are confronted with events far beyond our control.

Pachinko is a Japanese parlor game that’s sort of a more gambling-oriented pinball (Google for more careful discussion of the importance of the game to Japanese culture). While the operator has some control over the balls in the game, ultimately, those balls are going to bounce against obstacles, mostly on their own, and winning or losing the game has more to do with the odds of the parlor than any specific actions on the part of the player. Yet, the feeling of skill — of control — is critical to the belief that we have agency in a harsh world.

Lee managed to layer that high-level metaphor into the family at the heart of her novel.

I have two problems: one is that I read a lot of books. The other is that I buy a lot of books. Unfortunately, my credit card is more plentiful than my time these days, which means that I have an increasingly large number of books that I haven’t read yet. I even bought a separate bookcase in order to hold all of these volumes. I currently have approximately 300 books in my apartment, and about 20% of those are unread.

I read a post (which I have since lost) which said that the basic rule of books is that if you bought a book and haven’t read it within a decade, you probably should just find a way to give it away. Books should fundamentally be exciting — they transport us to strange new places and can show us both the past and the future. There is a tragedy when books become burdens — reminders of all the interests and wonder we once held and no longer have time for.

And we really don’t have time for so many works. Every year, there are millions of books published if we count self-published as well as traditional publishers. Indeed, there has been a veritable explosion of books published in the last few years. Even when we filter for quality, the deluge is just extreme. I once tried to only buy books that were rated five stars on Amazon: and my wish list still kept growing. Seriously, try just to keep up with the top prize winners every year — you are still going to get 10,000 pages of content per year.

I think there are two sides to this. One is that I am addicted to reading, and I am weaning myself off of it. That might sound like

This tweet inspired me to write up this post:

Key point of piece : With signals of authority and tone erased from our information environment, we have a wide, systemic crisis in news . pic.twitter.com/TfC9p0FafL

— emily bell (@emilybell) October 29, 2017

This is an apt description of the problem of modern “content.” Journalists are now lined up next to native advertising partners. Ads often take on more signals of authority than researched pieces. We once were able to distinguish between all of this, but as we have blurred the lines, we have empowered those who want to bamboozle us (Russia?) while disempowering our most thoughtful writers and researchers.

While a lot of the focus in the media the past few months has been around Facebook, Twitter, Google, and other tech giants, I think the real fault lies in ourselves. We are the ones who don’t seek out high-quality information, or ensure that the content we read isn’t garbage. We are the ones who blindly read native advertising even though our tingling truth filter is letting us know that we are being led on. Sure, the internet has made it harder to know who is smart and who is secretly a dog on the Internet, but it isn’t that hard to verify this stuff.

Here are the strategies to inoculate against bad content:

1. Stop reading brainjunk - always run through a loop before clicking a link and reading an article. Is this publication legitimate? Who is the author? What is their background on the topic? Do they seem to have the right qualifications to write this article? Have they written something before? Avoid unsigned articles — everything is written by someone, and there is no good reason why you shouldn’t know who that someone is. Also

I was having two separate conversations with my friends this week, and both were complaining about recent challenges around promotions, In both cases, their managers had assured them that a promotion was in the offing, and that it was merely “paperwork” that remained before it would be processed. In both cases, promotions were delayed for these employees, engendering cynicism in an otherwise productive relationship.

Another friend of mine recently discovered that he was being paid significantly lower than other people at the same firm with the same experience and job title. Not a small pay difference, but something on the order of 40-50% of salary. When he checked around with colleagues, it seemed that others had worked harder to negotiate better bonus structures over the years, since their base salary rate was roughly the same. Since he hadn’t re-negotiated in three years, his salary had fallen massively behind.

In all three of these cases, people were good workers, but terrible communication from their respective companies has massively diminished their enthusiasm for continuing their careers. In fact, all three emphasized the need to move on to other firms, since it seemed that the best way to move forward in their careers would be to negotiate their salary with a new company. What a loss for their current employers, who will see valuable talent walk right out the door.

There is a bit of a zero-sum conversation that happens around promotions and salaries — companies can promote this person or this person, or raise one salary and keep the other level (to maintain the same budget). We rarely get out of this box to ask why we are having this conversation in the first place.

Two thoughts come to mind here. The first is that there needs to be better processes, probably

That’s the question that will be on every ballot in a week’s time in New York.

Every twenty years, NY voters have the opportunity to vote on holding a constitutional convention. If a majority of voters vote yes, each state senate district will elect three delegates to the constitutional convention (in addition, several are nominated to represent state-wide interests). The delegates will hash out changes — anything from a few words added, removed or updated all the way to a full re-write of the entire document. Those changes are then brought before voters again at the ballot box, and if a majority support it, those changes are ratified.

While California ballot propositions technically could do something like this, it’s rare to have the opportunity to hold a convention and take a holistic approach to updating the constitution of a state for the 21st century.

Given the process, I am strongly in favor of holding a convention.

I think one of the real challenges of politics in 2017 is the lack of interest in making transformational changes that dramatically improves the lives of Americans. Our ambitions as a nation are constantly getting crushed by small considerations at the expense of the big picture. Whether it is transportation, or housing, or health care or any number of other policy areas, we just no longer think big.

That’s certainly how local politicians see it. The ballot question is one of the stranger politics in New York. Unions are uniformly opposed to holding a convention — there are palpable concerns that are probably justified that the text of an updated constitution might provide the state with ways to avoid its extraordinary pension obligations.

Likewise, there are many politicians on the right who are opposed, because they fear the constitutional convention will have

2017 and Regulated businesses

Princeton University EGR 475
Danny Crichton / Oct 20th, 2017

Personal Background

Venture trends from the field
Building a startup today

Agenda

Personal Background

Narcissism

Complex Venture Trends

Life in 2017

1. Huge Biotech Excitement

Massive interest in “deep insight bio” - software and bio
Massively increasing valuations
Political pressure and regulatory reform from FDA
Global increase in spend

2. Startup Frontier IS increasingly “complex”

Growing realization that complex ventures are only interesting investment area
GovTech, “smart enterprise”, “emerging tech,” logistics, cybersecurity, and other new investment themes are very popular these days
Problem: partner talent not always matched with themes

3. Asset class arbitrage

SBIR program increasingly used by startups to launch
Early-stage SV VCs are competing ferociously with traditional funders given better economics
Remains to be seen if long-term returns will match today’s enthusiasm

4.New Strategies for building regulated startups

More venture firms specialize purely in the political aspects of startup building
Ready-made playbooks from Uber/Airbnb etc. make it easier to grow
Longer-horizons on VC funds (e.g. MIT’s Engine)
How to avoid “binary outcomes”

5. Center of gravity remains in SV

SV is less a center of gravity today for traditional startups - more diverse regions
But in regulated businesses, there is a need for the services (legal, etc.) that only SV can provide

Building a Startup Today

Life in 2017

1. Finding a niche Is hard

Unlike consumer apps where “imagination” can take you to your destination, regulated startups require a lot of strategy up front
Learn from a wide variety of professionals and sources

2. Product Design is really hard

Product design is much more challenging with regulated businesses - in some cases, pre-approval before you can even use in the field
Find feedback loops early

3. Finding the

Two stories collided for me this weekend. The first was from Austria, where 31-year old Sebastian Kurz led his People’s Party to an electoral victory, driving that country harder to the right. Kurz was formerly the foreign minister of the country, a job he began at the advanced age of 27 years old. Assuming that negotiations with his coalition partners don’t upset the process, he will become the youngest sitting head of government in Europe.

Interestingly, this somewhat matches the meteoric rise of Emmanuel Macron in France, who assumed the presidency at 39 years old. While two countries is hardly statistical valid evidence, it is striking that Europe seems to be priming a new generation of politicians for leadership.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the other story this weekend that caught my eye was from New York, where Ginia Bellafonte asked in The New York Times why so few young people seem to run for local politics. Quoting from the article:

New York City may be more lamentably dull than it was 20 years ago, but it remains a magnet for exceptional talent — in many parts of Brooklyn it is easier to trip over Rhodes scholars than it is to find a half-gallon of milk with additives. Recent economic studies also suggest that as knowledge fields have become increasingly concentrated in the country’s biggest cities, New York has become even more attractive to the brilliant and prestigiously educated.

That from this vast pool we have not been able to fish out a vibrant, impressive (and young) political class is one of the paradoxes of life in New York right now.

Indeed.

New York may be a special case of course (Stockton, CA, a city of about 300,000, is headed up by 27-year-old Michael Tubbs), but it

Like many people, I continue to look at the devastation in Puerto Rico, California, Houston and Miami with a mix of shock, horror, and resignation. Twelve years after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, it seems that we have barely made any progress on how to respond to disasters in a timely fashion.

Why?

An initial challenge that I think goes overlooked is that it is really hard to quantify disaster recovery. Sure, Puerto Rico’s government has put together a nice dashboard with their progress, but what exactly are we comparing it to? What’s the benchmark? 15% of households currently have power in Puerto Rico — is that good or bad? Maybe the federal government is doing a fantastic job bringing back power for any households given the devastation …. Or maybe the federal government is doing terribly, and should be at say 40% if they were competent. It’s really hard to say because we are comparing to a counterfactual.

The second challenge, and one that is only going to get worse, is that these disasters are getting more intense over time. One part if this is certainly that storms are getting more intense as climate change rears its ugly head. But that’s not all: urbanization is increasingly pushing people to live in areas that are not resilient for disasters. Houston, for instance, might have had significantly less damage if homeowners didn’t literally live in a designated flood zone.

Disaster Recovery starts with Disaster Preparation, and so when we get to the root of the challenge, we see that it isn’t just FEMA lacking generators or the president shooting hoops with a roll of paper towels. It’s that the very architecture of urban life is ill-suited to the chaotic world that our