Cheap Thoughts

We had a discussion today at work about a strategic decision facing the business.  We were debating the merits of a couple opportunities ahead of us trying to decide which one we want to tackle.  I have been thinking about these opportunities for some time and felt like I had a solid argument for why one decision was the right one as well as why the other option should be shelved for the time being.  We had a fruitful debate at lunch, but I afterward was pulled aside and reminded that while I had done a good job of articulating my views I also left one glaring hole in my argument, I had neglected to explain the potential pitfalls of the option I favored.  I felt like an idiot.

Not only is tearing down your own ideas a healthy and essential part of successful decision making it also instills confidence in those around you.  Our natural tendency is to argue in favor of what we support while poking holes in what we oppose.  In order to really grasp the issue at hand and instill confidence in your team that you have thought more deeply about a topic than anyone else, you need to be able to do the opposite as well.  That means taking the time to both understand the strengths of someone else’s argument as well as the weaknesses in your own.  You'll know you've done this when you can more clearly articulate your opponents argument better than they can.    

Every year at Christmas dinner my family puts together a list of things each of us want to accomplish next year, then the following Christmas we sit down and see how much progress we made.  A lot of what each of us works towards is either trying to form new habits or break bad ones.  The exercise (which I love) has forced me to think about how to build good habits.

I am convinced that good habits are formed incrementally, not overnight.  It comes in installments; you get a little bit today, a little bit tomorrow, bit by bit you form the habit until it becomes second nature.  Habits are formed in the mundanity of every day life when no one is watching or reminding you how to act.  Being a better family member isn’t about grand gestures of affection, it comes from taking two minutes to call you parents to say hi when a childhood memory pops into your mind.  It’s about taking a detour home to say hi to your brothers when all you want to do is get home and relax.  All of those little gestures build up over time and before you know it you perform them without having to remind yourself that you're working towards being a better family member.      

I will be the first to admit that the routine of every day life can sometimes annoy me much more than it should.  The mother on a flight with a kid that won't stop crying, long lines at the grocery store filled with selfish people who are preventing me from getting home or having the wrong food brought out at a restaurant.  Small things that all lead to an insane amount of petty frustration that is shared by just about everyone at one time or another.  Its really hard to not let things like that get to me even though I realize how absurd it is to think that I am the center of the universe, but every once in a while the universe kicks you in the ass and reminds you of that fact.

My grandpa has been fighting cancer for a few years and has unfortunately been in the hospital for about a week straight.  Naturally, my grandma, his wife of over 50 years has refused to leave his side.  She is 80 years old and hates driving but has made exceptions over the past week to drive to and from the hospital before it gets dark out (when no one else can drive her).  The image of her driving is the is the same image that would normally drive me bonkers.  Why is this old woman slowing down the pace of traffic?  She is forcing everyone around her to change lanes! Why is she even driving at her age?  Just get off the fucking road and let me get home! It's an inner monologue I've had more than once.  But today I remembered that that old woman slowing down the pace of traffic was going to be my grandma.  And I remembered that my grandma prefers not to drive but she just spent the last 10 hours in the hospital with her husband and wants to get a few hours of sleep. I remembered that there are a lot of grandmas out there in similar positions and my frustration at them is completely unwarranted.  And I remembered that there are going to be a million other situations like that in our lives and we would all be better served if we remember that the universe doesn't revolve around us.

P.S.

To anyone  driving behind my grandma tonight, I apologize! 

Diversity in tech has become one of the most talked about topics in the tech community over the last several years, and rightfully so.  An overwhelming amount of evidence suggests that organizations function better when the decision-making process includes a diverse set of stakeholders.  Beyond corporate self-interest I, like so many others, believe that at the end of the day fostering diversity is also the right thing to do.  With that said there are still some questions I have yet to see answered: 

1. At what point does a company become sufficiently diverse?  Basically when can a company be looked at as a shining example of a diverse organization?
2. How are we qualifying diversity?  Do you have to be a woman or black to make an organization more diverse?  It seems like some people want a specific type of diversity.    There are a ton of great engineers coming to the US from eastern Europe, do they count even though they're white?  What about Asians and Indians? I'm stealing a little bit from Marc Andreessen here.
3. How should tech companies balance all of the stakeholders involved in the diversity process?  Each cause (women, African American's, minorities, etc) has their own agenda and are pushing companies for more inclusion.  How does a company strike a balance?
4. For all of the criticism the tech industry faces when it comes to diversity are we giving the leaders of these organizations enough credit for both admitting there is a problem and being much more open about their diversity statistics relative to other industries (think financial services)?  

I guess what I'm struggling with is for all the data points being tossed around to prove how homogeneous tech companies are it seems like very few people have come out and said "this is where we want companies to be when measuring diversity." 

I've been spending a lot of time over the last few months, listening, reading and thinking about the public/private tech landscape.  It's become clear that for a number of reasons including increased compliance/regulatory/reporting requirement, shrot-term focused public markets and risk aver shareholders companies are being incentivized to stay private longer.  

I wanted to look at a corporate governance mechanism being talked about and used by many of the major technology companies that have gone (Facebook, Google) or will go public, the dual-class stock structure. It basically gives a small number of employees, usually co-founders and management something like 2-1 or 10-1 voting rights, which allows them to retain a majority control of their company after going public.  To quote Marc Andreessen, it allows founders to "create a fortress" around their company, in turn they are able to operate without  having to bow to pressure from activist investors and mutual funds  (are all shareholders created equal is an entirely different question).  They can reinvest in growth instead of eating themselves via dividends and buybacks.  This emergence of dual-class stock structures is a natural consequence of the hostile, short-term public market environment and I believe when practiced wisely it will allow companies to innovate, plan for the long term, and make bets on new untapped markets.  Basically, do all the things we want tech companies to do. 

This isn't just important for the employees and shareholders of tech companies but for all of us who rely on them to drive the outsized returns in the public markets and more importantly to improve the human condition over time.    The more companies that can invest in growth the better off humanity is in the long run.  I believe you could go as far as to argue that it is a moral imperative to foster as many innovative tech companies as possible because without growth democracy doesn't work.

I'd like to peer into the future and understand how prevalent dual-class stock companies will become?  Should we expect more of the hot tech IPO's to use this mechanism?  And if this type of corporate governance does become the norm what types of push-back is there going to be?  How will hedge funds, activist investors and mutual funds react?  They're obviously not going to like the lack of influence they can exert, but what could they/society do to buck the trend?  

It seems like everyone is jumping into the debate over how to classify people who drive for Uber and Lyft or work for Handy and the rest of the sharing economy.  Are they employees, contractors or some new middle ground we as a society are going to have to define?  I don't have any answers or proposals that have not already been tossed around, and I believe that the conversation is an important one for our country to have as technology erodes what employment means to millions of Americans.  This blog post isn't aimed at answering that question, but rather to suggest that we should reframe the debate and not allow it to be so Uber-centric.

When someone starts a conversation about the sharing economy their statement generally begins with some variation of the phrase "with companies like Airbnb and Uber."  It is shortsighted for us to use Uber as the proxy for the rest of the sharing economy because they are the most likely to eliminate their workers altogether.  If you believe that driverless cars will arrive in the not too distant future then it's certainly not a stretch to argue that Uber will be at the forefront of that movement.  Once that happens we won't need to classify their drivers because there won't be any drivers to protect.  The debate needs to be adjusted away from Uber and closer to  companies that don't have as clear a path to automating their workforce.  Instacart is going to have a much tougher times getting robots to go grocery shopping for all of us and Handy will require human skills for the foreseeable future as well.  Let's have the conversation but shift our attention away from Uber to companies that will actually have workers in the long run.

A friend of mine recently bought an Apple Watch and it’s been fun for all of us (roommates) to play around with it.  None of us have ever really interacted with a wearable for more than a few minutes, and certainly not one with as much functionality as the watch.  There were moments when I smiled and said “that’s pretty neat,” others where I though some functionality was missing and others yet when I was stumped trying to understand how to use it.

Putting those first few days of interaction with the Apple Watch in context I couldn’t help but feel that this type of technology is the future.  I am excited to see what types of killer apps people thinks up, which I fully expect as the watch is really a new medium. I predict that I will look back ten years from now and laugh at how little I understood about the technology and how dumb I must have looked trying to get it to work.  I think those first few interactions I’ve had with the watch will be very similar to the time many of us have spent trying to get one of our grandparents to understand how the iPhone works.  To us, it is so obvious and intuitive, but to them it is a foreign experience. 

I am a pretty big Apple fan and definitely see myself owning some type of wearable technology in a couple years, most importantly (to me) when the battery life improves, but I don’t think it’s an investment I will make anytime soon.  

I have used Instacart a few times and love it.  They've built a great product and I expect to see their business and others like it grow exponentially in the coming years.  With that said I have decided not to use their product (at least for the time being).  

I stopped using Instacart because it wasn't solving a real problem in my life.  I convinced myself that I had too much on my plate to bother going to the grocery store, but in the process realized that I was actually missing out on much more.  To be clear, my argument is not that Instacart and other on-demand services cannot be hugely beneficial.  My mother raised five sons and I am sure she would have happily paid a premium to have groceries delivered as she tried to balance everything running a family demands.  (As a side not I really don't know how mom's do what they do.  As I've gotten older I have started to appreciate what mom's everywhere sacrifice for their children, they are literally superheroes).  Some other obvious scenarios include persons who are snowed in or sick, elderly people who can't drive, or someone living with a disability.  The list could obviously go on, but it would not include me.    

Much of Instacart's initial traction came from/continues to come from catering to tech workers in San Francisco, New York and the like.  I am going to generalize here by saying that the demographics of these workers are males and females, under the age of 32 and single (or at least not married with kids). I  fall into this bucket.  Somehow we have all convinced ourselves that our lives/responsibilities are too great to find time to go to the  grocery store.  I told myself that ultimately Instacart would allow me to spend more time working.  That's bullshit.  Again, I am in my mid-twenties, no wife, no children and no real responsibilities outside of the office. Not only do I have time, but I think it's important that we all find time to get out there.  Does anybody love waiting in line at the grocery store? No.  But when we begin to cut those experiences out of our life what are we left with?  What is life without real human interaction?  Better yet where will real human interaction com from if all we do is shuffle between the office and our apartment?  Talk about living in a bubble.

How can we form comprehensive views of society if we don't actually experience it firsthand?  We can't work at the intersection of the humanities and technology if we don't experience the world around us.  Perhaps an even more troubling consequence of the "shut-in economy" is it effects on our ability to build great new companies.  By removing ourselves from the world we become less sensitive to the problems around us and the problems that need to be solved!  And if we don't experience those problems how can entrepreneurs build great new companies to solve them?  You'd just end up with a bunch of really smart/driven people optimizing processes they and everyone else in their bubble are dealing with. 

In general I think I have done a poor job of evaluating the tradeoffs of using these new services.  Someone to do your shopping, deliver your food, do you laundry, etc.  The gains in convenience are obviously immense, but you also run the risk of losing touch with reality.  In conclusion, I want to post a link to this scene in Goodwill Hunting, which has been on my mind the whole time I was trying to formulate this thesis. 

The concept of basic income has been around for quite some time, however it wasn't until the past few years that it has gained some real traction.  Admittedly it is something that is still very new to me, but as I continue to see more people talking and writing about the subject it's clear that the conversation is only going to grow louder.  One of the arguments frequently used by those who support a basic income is that by giving people a safety net they will be free to pursue their true passions and we would witness a renaissance of art, philosophy, literature, etc.  One the surface that sounds like a wonderful society to be a part of but is there any evidence to suggest that is actually how people would spend their time?  

Over the course of the last century, the average time a person in the developed world spends working during the week has decreased from 70 hours to 30 hours.  That's great news!  How has the developed world taken advantage of those new 30 hours?  To be blunt, we haven't, we spend 28 of them watching TV.  If these statistics are accurate they pose a troubling issue for anyone who supports basic income.  What happens if people are receiving that money and adding nothing positive to society?  What happens if there is so much content out there that the average person spends more time consuming it rather than going out and creating it.

Practically speaking full employment can be defined as follows, anyone who is interested in having a job can find one and anyone who wants to work more hours can get those hours.  I have always considered full employment to be unobtainable, something an economy should strive for but which could never be feasibly achieved.  Are we entering a world where that no longer the case?  

My central question is whether or not the sharing economy (Uber, TaskRabbit, Instacart) can actually get us to full employment?  As a side note, I realize that you need a car to drive for Uber or Instacart among some other basic prerequisites, but I want to stay focused on the bigger picture here.  All three of these companies allow individuals 1) The chance to earn income above the minimum wage 2) The ability to clock in and out of work at their convenience 3) Earn income directly proportional to the amount of time they are on the job.  Furthermore, they are looking to rapidly expand their workforce meaning as of today workers can add more hours whenever they want.  Phrased differently, these companies offer employment to almost anyone interested and give their employees a (nearly) endless amount of work to do.

I realize that working for these companies is not "work" in the traditional sense of the word, in Uber's case you are a contractor, not an employee, but I also doubt there are many companies on earth who are hiring as quickly as Uber is right now.  The impact these companies are having on society/the economy should also force us to rethink how we define and achieve our objectives.  My brother is currently in college driving for Uber on the side to make some extra cash, and while I couldn't tell you exactly what he is making per hour it is DEFINITELY over the minimum wage, and he gets to go to work whenever he wants.  For all the debating over exactly what an Uber driver can earn I suspect that everyone is earning above minimum wage salaries.  This new breed of companies gives (almost) anyone the ability to do the same.  I understand there are a whole range of issues that need to be resolved by these companies, their employees. and regulatory bodies, but at the end of the day shouldn't we praise companies who enable that type of workforce productivity?