Certain types of humor can be timeless and Carlin, despite having died in 2008, gets recirculated for his incisiveness. Itzkoff looks at why both side of the political spectrum have embraced (some might say co-opted) the comedian’s takes.
That Carlin’s work endures long after him is not only a testament to his talents; it’s a sign that his frustrations, which he expressed humorously but felt authentically, still resonate with audiences, and that the injustices he identified in American society persist to this day.
Thirty four years since its release, the lapsed time provides a perspective on Living Colour’s debut album that wasn’t available to critics in the moment. And it has aged well.
It’s [“Cult of Personality”] one of rock’s greatest Side 1/Track 1 opening salvos. But given that rock radio was still pumping out pop-metal trifles like Winger’s “Seventeen” and Poison’s “Nothing But a Good Time” in 1988, it’s easy to understand why Vivid’s mainstream incursion moved in slow motion.
3. NFT Tax Loss Harvesting
What to do with those NFTs that you bought at the height of recent mania? The doodles and GANpuke that were going to usher in enlightened decentralized ownership and access to communities? Most people are self-HODLs, because there’s no buyer, no market and no reason to sell. But if you wanted to try and unload them for huge losses in hopes of taking a take write-off, well, there are services to help you. Warning it might not be as easy here in the US.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Kate Clark covers some examples of investors not just disappearing a startup logo from their website, but removing over-the-top blog posts and other ‘we’re proud to have backed…’ tributes when it turns out that maybe they should have been so proud.
I’m of two minds on this (and appreciate the media holding us accountable). On one hand these websites are marketing vehicles, not newspapers of record. So if you think of it as a storefront and not the New York Times, well of course you’re going to rotate the merchandise and present yourself in the best light. That said, on some of these blog posts I wish that they’d preserve them (even if they remove the active link from the site itself) and write a ‘correction’ intro that talks a bit about what they learned from the failure. That would be really impressive introspection.
Why Investing Our Savings Instead of Other People’s Money Let Us Rethink What Venture Capital PMF Looks Like in the Decade Ahead. [Part Two]
a group of happy bees, digital art [DALLE-E]
According to the physical rules of aviation, there is no way that a bee should be able to fly, but it doesn’t know that, so it does. The same can be said of startups and their founders, in the sense that so many things can go wrong in the building of a company to an exit, that success almost seems to be a statistical anomaly [more on how bees fly]. Homebrew has invested in well over 100 seed stage startups this past decade, in most of them working closely with the founders and early team during their first several years. In other words, we’ve seen lots of bees fly. But, and I’m really belaboring the metaphor here, we also saw the venture industry move from bespoke beekeeping where the two parties are lovingly tied to one another, to industrial scale honey production.
an entire city constructed from bee hives, digital art [DALL-E]
In other words, Satya and I wanted to maximize our time with the bees themselves, not the size of our beehive and support systems necessary to prioritize scale.
We announced this change publicly (aka Homebrew Forever) in February and spent all of 2022 in this mode, revisiting, and in some cases revising, our core assumptions about venture capital. In other words, we started revisiting what PMF looked like after a proactive pivot. There’s lots and lots of institutional capital out there, much participating in its own self-commoditization (a whole separate post). There’s also many wonderful angel/operators and smaller supporting funds with large portfolio strategies.
What there isn’t a whole lot of: Early stage investors with institutional lead check experience (and a small support team, large networks, etc), who are investing their own capital, in a flexible manner, and then working post-investment to provide additional ongoing support. This is Homebrew Forever.
Why aren’t there many of these? Because like the bee, it breaks knows rules. If you’re good at this job you want to get more and more AUM under management (probably even more true if you’re bad at this job! 🙂 ) . If you’re good at this job, when you stop doing it at a firm, you shift into lifestyle mode, or become a solo angel. But no one told us we couldn’t do this, so we’re doing it! Go go MF’ing flying bee!
So how is it going? Encouraging, and working at a ‘first principles’ level but to be honest, still in evolution. If you think of venture capital is an oversimplified “See” -> “Pick” -> “Win” -> “Support” model, this would be my snapshot for HB♾️ (how I lovingly abbreviate Homebrew Forever)
See: Best summarized by the following list of ‘referral sources’
Cold Inbound: Steady (which is good — we see a lot)
Cold Outbound: Slight increase (we’re trying to do more of this now but still retuning our processes)
Angels: Steady, but we need to continue creating relationships with new angels
Seed Funds that write non-lead checks: Down by ~50%. We still see a ton of collaboration with the funds we’re closest with, but others have definitely taken us off their list with our model change. Not for competitive reasons (I don’t believe) but because they are primarily trying to help a startup find a lead investor, and we used to be that for them, but now rarely lead seed rounds. So they might like us, think we’re useful to companies, etc but their ‘job to be done’ is to find a lead because that closes the round -AND- helps secure their allocation.
Previously ‘Competitive’ Seed Funds and Multistage Funds: Up by 100%. So this is the other side of the coin from above. The funds we were always friends with but where our shared ownership goals made co-leading seed rounds fairly unlikely are now much more likely to share opportunities with us (and us with them). And the larger multistage funds who would normally lead A rounds for our portfolio but where there wasn’t much collaboration with their seed practices, well, that’s switched too. What I’ll emphasize here is that we don’t seek out FIRMS, we seek our GPs. That’s to say, there are ~24 or so GPs spread across an almost equal number of firms that I just LOVE to work with on cap tables, and I’m targeting them like a thirsty multichannel marketer.
Overall I’m happy with 2022 opportunity flow but we’re not even close to the performance ceiling and have a bunch of work in 2023 to improve.
Pick: Obviously it will be many years before we know the financial outcomes of our ‘picks’ but if the goal of HB♾️ was to be 100% focused on the simplicity of ‘do we want to work with these founders,’ I’m happy with our picking. We didn’t become too cautious using our own capital, nor did we become too undisciplined. We ended up making 11 investments in 2022, which historically has been our average independent of strategy.
Win: 11 offers made, 11 offers accepted. The ‘sacrifice’ we made to achieve this win rate is of course we’re now predominantly deploying six figure checks instead of seven figure ones (we did one new investment greater than $1m and brought in some friends on that one for a seed SPV), but that’s the goal here anyway. Bespoke beekeeping instead of agribusiness, remember?
Side note: I did get ghosted by an entrepreneur on a potential personal angel deal and that stung (bee pun!) because it was someone I’ve lightly known for a while, he asked me early for help/advice, acknowledged that when he raised money I’d like to angel, then stopped returning communications once the round finalized. See, it happens to investors too, not just founders.
Support: Homebrew tries to be a force multiplier for founders, which compounds over time, improving their probability of building the best version of what their company could become. Neither Satya or I would continue doing this work if we were turned into passive investors, no matter the financial success.
As now a non-lead investor we have to simultaneously remind the founders (and lead VC) that we can be quite useful to them, while also not creating additional management overhead. In our move to HB♾️ we re-wrote our onboarding guide and process, and made other tactical changes to how we build trust and context with the founders we back. I’d call it a work-in-progress — we’re almost certainly ‘hitting above our ownership weight’ but that’s enough for us, and not yet reliably reached quickly and uniformly across the new portfolio. Another place for experiments and improvements in 2023.
so tldr, we’re happy at the day-to-day level but working on the higher level product and go-to-market with a sense of urgency to turn ‘good’ to ‘great.’ Just like many of the startups we’re fortunate to support!
When Homebrew Started Investing Its Own Money, The Reaction From Our Venture Capital Peers Surprised Me [Part One]
During the last several years venture firms approached fundraising like trips to an All-You-Can Eat buffet: fast, frequent, and without regards for the digestive impact. As they piled more LPs into more fund vehicles, and then deployed that capital faster than ever, it’s not a surprise that everyone involved is now dealing with the after-effects of a decade-long gorge.
a buffet of money, digital art [DALL-E]
Homebrew was born at the beginning of 2013, and grew itself modestly during the bull market that stretched into 2022. But ahead of the correction we decided to pull forward a goal we’d always dreamed of: going self-funded. That is, instead of primarily investing other people’s money into startups, invest our own. We’d still stay ‘Homebrew’ and keep the same team, but adjusted our strategy to better suit the new strategy. Instead of seeking to own 10–15% of a startup, we’d remove our ownership target and just focus on ‘do we all want to work together.’ And instead of an average check size approaching $2m, we’d scale back to mostly $100k-$500k (~20% of the time larger), in order to make it easier to fit into any round (also owing to the limitations of our bank accounts). For me and my partner Satya this was about creating a sustainable model where we can optimize for working with *any* company at *any* stage, albeit still hopefully as early as possible. So we made the decision in Fall 2021, began investing this way in January, and started talking about it publicly in March. Just as the markets collapsed! Correlation or causation? 🙂 Anyhow, the choice we made was more about to starting to experiment with new approaches to venture rather than embracing or rejecting any single playbook.
The volume of reactions from our industry peers surprised me— notes, conversations, backchannels and so on. Truly I didn’t think people would really care. I mean, we’re a small fund among lots of other firms! Homebrew became either a projection for people’s own frustrations with the venture model or a ‘true north’ for others who were considering similar evolutions but had something blocking them.
A) “Oh it must be so nice to not [x]”
Lots of comments directed our way that were really more just reflections on what the other person’s priorities rather than our own.
“Oh must be nice to not deal with LPs any longer!!!” Not at all. We have a small group of institutional LPs that we really love being in business with, maintain close ongoing relationships with via Homebrew I, II, III (plus Screendoor), and have mutually left the door open to figure out how to put their capital to work together going forward.
“Oh must be nice to retire!” Actually we’re still working the same amount (with some changes in the what and how — that’s coming in Part 2 of this post).
“Oh must be nice to be that rich!” Obviously you need to have banked some dollars, but this comment often came from people who, at least on the surface, live grander lives than I do. What we chose to give up was a bunch of future management fees, etc and then to go into pocket for a few years of investment capital (believing after that carry from earlier Homebrew funds would be recycled into our new model). What we actually might be is more risk seeking.
B) “I want to do this but…”
The most touching conversations were those with other VCs who shared some version of “I want to do this but I don’t have a Satya” [ie it’s lonely to do this by yourself] and “Me and one of my partners want to do this but if we left our firm it would break our commitment to the remaining GPs/hurt the fund.” Turns out there’s a meaningful number of folks who are conflicted about their firm’s growth and want to get back to smaller, personal investing, but are choosing to prioritize their exiting relationships (some with a firm plan to step down after next fund, others with a more noncommittal timeline).
In hindsight I guess I’m glad that people cared. Not because it reflected anything about our place in the industry but rather it showed me there are peers who also want to break out of venture’s self-commoditizing treadmill and create their own models.
In Part Two, I’ll reflect on what we got right and what we are still working on….
Casey Newton’s Deep Skepticism Of Twitter Replacements & Getting More Comfortable With Substack’s 10% Take Rate
My daughter knows Casey Newton as the ‘watch pro wrestling and eat chicken wings’ friend. She is not wrong. But beyond the bond of those shared pleasures, we also have a long — and mostly agreeable — relationship rooted in his coverage of the technology community and my participation in said industry. When I last interviewed Casey, back in 2017, he recognized there’s a “natural, & healthy, tension between myself & the people I write about.” So with that context, here’s another FIVE QUESTIONS with Casey Newton.
Hunter Walk: Hi Casey and welcome back. I think you’re the first person I’ve interviewed twice on this blog. The biggest personal change since our 2017 discussion is your founding of the tech newsletter Platformer (which everyone should subscribe to). Ahead of its launch we’d spoken quite a bit privately about going indie and I’m so glad you took that path. In hindsight what did you underestimate and what did you overestimate in terms of initial challenges?
Casey Newton: This is kind of a dodge, but the truth is that the launch went mostly to plan. I had the benefit of a big mailing list that I took with me, and so when I turned on payments Platformer was ramen-profitable basically from day one. It took me about six months to climb back to my old Verge salary, and right after that I launched my Discord with some other writers and that led to a big spike in revenue. Most of the discourse around independent journalism centers on how hard it is, and leaving my old perch was certainly scary, but in the end it worked out great.
I mean, there were many small annoyances along the way — finding a bookkeeper, and an accountant, and interacting with the California Franchise Tax Board, to which I always seem to owe some amount of money no matter how many times I’ve paid my bills. And I did find myself missing the feeling of being in a newsroom from time to time, though I continued to have access to The Verge’s slack as a contributor and that helped me feel less lonely.
Often when people ask me how Platformer going, there’s an edge of fear in their voice, as if they expect me to say that I’m barely holding on. But recently I hired my first employee, so I’m hoping some of that dissipates.
HW: In our previous discussion you talked about measuring journalistic success in two ways: impact and audience. Is that still how you think of your job?
CN: Those are still the two biggest ways. But increasingly I’m thinking about measuring success in terms of sustainability and expansion.
In recent weeks, we’ve seen layoffs at Gannett and the Washington Post, and Protocol shut down completely. Those journalists aren’t losing their jobs because their work isn’t valuable — it’s because they’re chained to unsustainable cost structures.
Platformer is designed to weather a lot of the storms that my previous employers got caught up in — downturns in the ad market, the rise of a buzzy new social app, or pressure from investors can’t really trip us up. (We don’t currently have ads or investors.) We just have several thousand paying customers who like what we do, and that number is up 50 percent year over year.
Our number of subscribers could stay flat or even decline precipitously and we could keep doing the journalism we’re doing indefinitely. And speaking for myself — I probably would!
Anyway, “continuing to operate” might sound like a low bar, but the longer I stay in media the prouder I am of the fact that we have.
The other measure I have now is my ability to fund more journalism through hiring. Earlier this year I brought on the great Zoe Schiffer as managing editor, and in just a couple months she has helped us break scoop after scoop.
I never want Platformer to grow bigger than a handful of people. But the fact that Platformer readers are now supporting multiple journalists in their work is a milestone I’m proud of.
HW: Substack, which you use for Platformer, says to not think of them as a newsletter company, but more broadly as part of a creator oriented shift in media. As one of their valued customers, what do you want from them in the future? Before you started Platformer we debated whether their 10% cut would force you at some point to seek cheaper alternatives. How do you think about that value prop now?
CN: I feel better about the 10 percent than I used to. In part this is because I write about platforms like Apple and Meta that insist on taking 30 percent; or YouTube, which takes 45. If nothing else Substack is cheap by comparison.
Another reason I feel better about it is because the company figured out an actual growth mechanism this year: when you subscribe to my newsletter, Substack will show you three of the other publications I recommend and invite you to subscribe to those as well.
When Substack introduced this feature on April 12, we had 57,135 free subs. As I write this eight months later, we’re about to hit 100K.
Platformer Subscriber Growth
So that’s the good news. The bad news is that these subscribers don’t really convert to paid. But still, lots of them do open the newsletter, and eventually I suspect Substack will start an ad network, split the ad revenue with us, and the 10 percent fee hurts even less.
All that said, it continues to be strange that the better you do for Substack, the more expensive it gets. There aren’t many businesses like that, and I would like to see them offer more perks to top writers over time.
Twitter 2.0 ⬇️ This company generated $5 billion in revenue last year. Within two weeks Elon Musk was telling the new team the company might go bankrupt. Twitter has always had problems, but now it’s in crisis, and its CEO has consistently made the wrong decision after being presented with the right one.
Elon Musk ⬇️ I had basically no opinion about the guy before he took over the bird app. But then I started talking to all the people whose lives were suddenly in upheaval thanks to his various layoffs and purges, and my opinion of him lowered significantly.
Jack Dorsey ⬇️
‘Free Speech’ ⬆️ People mean a lot of different things by this, but at the very least I think we’re having a louder public conversation about the importance of free expression than we’ve had in a long while, and I do think that’s good for us in some ways.
Verification ⬆️ If you ever wondered why platforms should verify some users — and very much not verify others — boy have you gotten a great lesson in that over the past few weeks.
Mastodon/Post/Etc ⬇️ Dead on arrival. I’m still waiting to see the first good Mastodon post. God help us.
HW: One other update from the last five years is you’re part of an improv comedy troupe! Talk about that here and plug where people can see you perform.
CN: A few years back I realized that I didn’t have a good answer to the question “what’s going on outside work?” I am a giant ham, and so my roommate at the time suggested I try improv. I went to a class and never looked back.
We organize shows roughly every six weeks in San Francisco, and recently started performing with another troupe that’s scary good. (We bring in a stand-up as well, and something I’m really proud of is that we pay them for their work!) Some folks have come to see us a dozen or more times.
Before I moved to San Francisco I fell in love with the city because there was so much weird, fun, funny stuff in the city that you could just stumble across if you walked far enough. Doing these improv shows is my little way of building the San Francisco I want to live in.
You’re Not As Attractive As Lensa’s Magic Avatars Suggests. And Why That’s a Problem.
Digital Plastic Surgery. Or maybe AR Beer Goggles. That’s what everyone’s Lensa Magic Avatars look like to me. If you’re VERY ONLINE™️ then you’ve certainly noticed these in your friends’ social feeds, passed them around by group chat, or perhaps even created your own. It’s the latest version of enhanced selfies, a Magic Mirror for Modern Times.
Now I haven’t made THIRST TRAP HUNTER yet (not out of privacy concerns about where my photos end up or unwillingness to pay — I just don’t have enough number of selfies on my phone they require), but I’ve seen a lot of yours. And sorry, you’re not that hot.
Why does this matter? Well, we’re kinda training AI to deceive us. A positive feedback loop where the phony best version of ourselves is what gets ‘rewarded’ in the Darwinian competition among Lensa’s training sandbox. And if over time, the biggest data set wins, what are the implications if the most explosively viral image models start with, essentially, ‘do you like this’ vs ‘is this true?’
Furthermore, it’s not crazy to think conversational AI say whatever it needs to close the sale. As I wrote in 2016, What Happens When Bots Learn to Lie:
Should a shopping bot provide positive affirmation about the clothing items I have in my virtual shopping cart? “Oh you’ll look hotter in this,” the bot coos as it pushes a $150 sweater as an alternative to the $25 sweatshirt I was considering. Is that a lie? Doesn’t a salesperson at a store do the same thing? Is it better or worse when it’s done by a computer simultaneously to 10,000 customers?
Will multivariate testing of our bot future contain ethical parameters in addition to performance measurement? Techniques like priming can be used to dramatically impact behaviors. For example, asking you if you are a “good person” and having you answer in the affirmative, before I request something of you, increases the likelihood you’ll do what I want, driven by a need to live up to the identity you created for yourself.
One of the ‘AI Destroys Humanity’ tropes is how eventually the computer programs created to protect us decide we’re so self-destructive that the only way to ‘save’ us is to kill us.
Wouldn’t it be the ultimate late stage capitalism irony if the path to a deceitful enslaver AI started not with self-awareness but with ecommerce conversion optimization?!? Turns out Al Pacino was right.
