Launching Tech for Abundance in NYC
Join the WhatsApp group, commerce wins, book review, secondary sales
On Wednesday night I teamed up with Abundance NY, Lux Capital, and Company Ventures to host our first Tech For Abundance event. This was a small event but we had >700 people sign up to join which was totally nuts and just speaks to the enthusiasm for productive political engagement right now.
New York City is in flux, politically and technologically. Old paradigms of liberal governance are being challenged by adherents of abundance as AI disrupts industries. The city should be a great place to build a business AND should take full advantage of our entrepreneurial spirit to make government work better.
We had a great panel with people working every day on these issues
Andrew Staniforth, co-founder and CEO of Assembly OSM (modular housing)
Zach Long, co-founder and CEO of Conductor AI (government forms/approvals)
Shaina Horowitz, Director at NYC Climate Exchange (climate
This was also the launch of the Abundance Tech Whatsapp group. We’ll be running a group for abundance-minded builders across the NY startup and tech universe. I’m really excited to bring this network together and hope you’ll join ANY to sign up.
Challenges to cost of living, quality of life, and good government make it hard to build and thrive in NY. Housing, transit, and safety all work against dynamism. They make it harder to find and attract talent to New York. There is a huge groundswell of energy to change that and there is a ton of latent potential among entrepreneurs and operators in New York be part of the soltuion.
It’s particularly cool to see people come together across the political spectrum. We had people in attendance ranging from DSA members to the Manhattan Institute. We don’t need to agree on everything to work together and the crises facing New York require coalition building across those kinds of divides.
The fight is now and we are winning.
You can read more about the event and the current moment/movement in Business Insider.
Commerce (and incentives) always wins
This tweet from Jordy feels like a portend of things and sentiment to come
Every white collar professional in a "time and materials" business is thinking the same thing. Approximately: if we bill hourly but get tasks done much faster we lose money.
Obviously this isn't really true, at least not on a macro level. If you become much more productive, you either make up the difference by doing more work and/or by charging much more money for your newly better output. Maybe both. A law firm client should be willing to pay more per hour for better work done much faster. Everyone wins.
But on the micro level (the firm, individual manager, or customer relationship), this fear makes a lot of sense. Well-established pricing schemes are sticky, especially when they govern valuable longstanding relationships. And changing a business model altogether is nearly impossible. Every institutional fiber will resist it until it's too late.
These incumbent firms who are not just passively but actively resistant to wholesale change represent great targets for startups, across many services categories. The incumbents will eventually get disrupted by AI-forward new entrants that have better offerings and are able to innovate on pricing with flat rate, subscription, or usage-based models
This is a textbook case of an innovator's dilemma. So textbook as to be boring! The newcomers will start at the bottom of the market making it easy to ignore them for a while. There will be new behemoths and business models aligned with AI and increased productivity.
Prices go down, margins and volumes go up, commerce wins. Commerce always wins.
I Read
Blindsight by Peter Watts. This was a great hard sci fi with some fun random bits (for some reason there are vampires but it works) It’s got a genuinely great take on alien life and first contact. Without spoiling much (the discovery is a lot of fun): something so incomprehensible to us and us to them that our mere existence might be perceived as an act of aggression. And it also goes deep into the idea of “the Chinese room” which is both an important plot device and a super rich, challenging way to think about consciousness, empathy, and sentient AI.
“It's a fallacy really, it's an argument that supposedly puts the lie to Turing tests. You stick some guy in a closed room. Sheets with strange squiggles come in through a slot in the wall. He's got access to this huge database of squiggles just like it, and a bunch of rules to tell him how to put those squiggles together.”
Does that mean he speaks Chinese? No. But does the system? Yes? At the very least, it’s a claim against the Turing test as being useful which feels really relevant right now!
The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine. All those “Joe Biden needs $10 right now or America is lost” texts basically prop up a consultant network and don’t raise any money for anything real. This is just the grossest form of scam and predation because it actively gets in the way of progress and reduces trust. And the DNC is letting it happen.
The Secondary Deal Etiquette Keeping VCs From Cashing Out of Startups. I talked to Business Insider about the changing norms around secondary transactions in venture. The tl;dr is that if “private is the new public” then private market secondary sales will be the new normal, even if the culture hasn’t totally caught up to that reality yet. Actual volumes are quite low for now but there’s nothing evil about selling. Ultimately that’s the business!