“You see, I was hoping to work on Saturday Night Live.” That was my request of the NBC Human Resources department when making my case for a 1994-1995 internship. Enough years have passed that I don’t recall whether I received an actual verbal response or just an extended eye-roll. But I do know the choice they offered me instead: The Phil Donahue Show or Late Night with Conan O’Brien.
Oprah presents Phil with a Lifetime Achievement Award
Familiar enough with Donahue from my NYC suburban upbringing I picked Late Night, opting for a personality that seemed more edgy, more provocative, more current. Only recently did I learn how, in his own right, Phil Donahue also deserved those descriptions.
On a recent The Daily podcast host Michael Barbaro recounts his love of The Phil Donahue Show and in doing so, served as my professor for where the host fit in journalism’s history. The answer? Much more groundbreaking than I’d realized. Beyond longevity, Donahue played a critical role in elevating and involving the studio audience, not as props, but as people with opinions, questions, and concerns that were of equal importance to his own. He believe in standing up to the powerful and creating space for dialogue. He followed up when someone dodged, and pushed back where appropriate. He made room for celebrities and politicians, but also regular humans (if not average ones). Oprah has said there’s be no “Oprah” if there wasn’t first a “Phil.”
There’s much more in his obituary, but I’ll end with this quotation which summarizes what he was striving for: “We were looking for a cacophony of voices, not a well-trained choir.” This was what he thought democracy deserves and requires.
Thank you Phil. I’m sorry I didn’t get the chance to work for you.
I am reluctant to call someone a ‘friend’ unless the relationship has crossed the threshold honoring the depth of commitment behind the designation. By that framework I started out as a ‘fan’ of Javier Soltero way before we became friends. It was his mobile productivity startup Acompli (later acquired by Microsoft) which first caught my attention. The state of email and calendaring apps at the time was depressingly basic despite the importance of them in day-to-day work, so I was an enthusiastic adopter of whatever developer was building for power users and not simply ‘making an app version of the existing web interface.’
Our journey from ‘fan’ to ‘friend’ had a substantial time lag – an intermediate period of friendliness – but I’m comfortable we moved to the F word a few months back after a nice walk in Marin. It was our first time outside of DMs, emails, texts, and we learned a lot more about one another. That increased my desire to continue probing, and, share it here, via Five Questions. There are some real gems about technology careers, entrepreneurship, and so on. Enjoy!
Hunter Walk: We both started our Silicon Valley lives in the late 90s, you most notably at Netscape, which was obviously important and influential. Did it feel that way in the moment – that you were at the origin point of something quite transformational – or more so only in hindsight?
Javier Soltero: Short answer is yes, it felt like something amazing was happening and it was great to be a part of it. On a personal level, the idea that I had started my first professional job in an industry and an area that I had been so passionate about since I was a kid growing up in Puerto Rico. I suspect a lot of people my age who entered the industry at that time and who were not from California felt similarly.
More broadly, that time represented an interesting time for the industry and its relationship to its enterprise customers. My time at Netscape coincided with the moment where almost every company in every sector had determined that it needed to invest heavily in internet infrastructure (email, calendaring, proxy servers, application servers, and more). However, as I spent my first year working in Netscape’s nascent professional services group, it became clear that most companies were neither ready to embrace this big change in their approach to technology nor particularly clear as to why they were doing it in the first place. It took at least another 5 years and the dot com crash for this to sort itself out.
HW: I’m sure you get hit up for career advice all the time. Are there things you tell people to consider, or frameworks you recommend, which apply almost regardless of the circumstances? For example, I believe it’s really important to know what you’re optimizing for when thinking about the next phase of your growth.
JS: The most general yet useful bit of career advice I often give is for people to look at the progression of their career as a story, and do their best to make the story compelling. This applies to the decisions that people make about future opportunities as well as the way they talk about and derive wisdom from their past experiences.
I’ve noticed that many people who are evaluating new opportunities understandably focus on the specific change between what they’re doing now and what they’d be doing next. I encourage people to think through their larger story, how they developed their interests and specialties, how they evolved as leaders/managers, what they learned from their own mistakes as well as those of others around them. Whether they realize it or not, everyone has or is developing an interesting story. It’s critical to learn how to tell it and how to evolve it over time.
The most of the critical choices I made in my career were made with a healthy amount of emotion and gut and would not likely survive close, rational inspection. Yet each step in my career, from my early mistakes in college all the way to the work I’ve done at Microsoft and Google all tie together in a way that, at least to me, tell a much more interesting story about how I’ve developed over the years.
Years ago after Microsoft acquired Acompli I was asked to come tell my story at Carnegie Mellon. Their initial expectation in extending the invite was that I’d go up there and say something along the lines of “well, I went to this great school, got great grades, moved out west, started and sold a couple of companies and now here I am”. As I reflected on what I really wanted to say I ended up having to warn them that my story was a bit more complicated, starting with the fact that I got such horrible grades my freshman year that I was asked to take a year off to “re-evaluate my goals”. In the end, I got my act together, returned to CMU and moved on from there, but I could not pass on the opportunity to tell the story in a way that to me really highlighted the lessons.
The talk ended up being about how at each step of what looked like a perfectly planned and well executed career, there had been doubt, mistakes, and irrational risk taking that really provided the lessons that are worth sharing. The talk was called “I never learned to spell successful” (which is true, as a non native English speaker I often drop an extra L at the end).
HW: You’ve been a startup founder as well as an executive at larger tech companies. When hiring into teams in each circumstance how do you assess fit differently? Especially if, say, it’s someone who has only done startups making the case they now want to be at a BigCo, or even more commonly, the BigCo person wanting to join a startup. Do they ever really know what they’re getting into?
JS: I’ll start by saying it’s absolutely critical to know whether someone has or hasn’t worked in a startup before and to understand whether the majority of employees at a startup have prior startup experience. I don’t believe that lack of startup experience should rule someone out from a job at a startup. People who have the right skills and experience can be successful in both environments and just need to have their expectations about the job calibrated accordingly on their way in.
Even more important, the hiring manager and the founder/CEO should ideally be aware of the implications of having an employee base where a large number of people have never been through the experience of being in a startup. The uncertainty and risk are obvious factors, but perhaps even more important is the level of visibility and information that employees at startups tend to have about how things are going. The founder/CEO has to make a choice about how/when/if to be transparent about the things that are happening (good and bad) and the level of startup experience within the group will be a critical factor in whether the decision to be transparent turns out to be a good one.
Here’s a couple of examples of this from my personal experience:
As a first-time CEO of Hyperic back in 2007 I had made the choice to be very transparent with our growing team about the financial objectives of the company and specifically the quarterly sales target. As the company continued to grow and meet or exceed these targets we chose to celebrate the progress openly with the company like many other companies do. At some point I noticed a change in our culture. People in the company seemed to be behaving in a way that suggested we had somehow “already made it” and were starting to show signs of entitlement and lack of perspective. As a person who bootstrapped the business with my co-founders for the first 2 years, this did not sit well with me. I ended up choosing to ask two simple questions at the following all hands:
One, who here has worked at a startup before?
Two, what percentage of our paycheck comes from customer revenue vs. investor dollars?
I learned most people had never worked at startups and pretty much everyone thought more than half their paycheck came from customer revenue. Both of those questions and the conversation that followed proved to be a very effective way of preserving the drive and energy in our culture while keeping folks grounded in the reality of early stage companies.
Years later as CEO of Acompli, I knew I had hired an excellent team of startup veterans, but crucially none of them aside from the founders had seen success. In fact most were quite jaded about prior startup experiences that resulted in companies going out of business. Once again I chose to be as open and transparent with the team as I could from the very beginning and when the time came where we were in active conversations with Microsoft about an acquisition, I made the tricky choice to level with the team about where things stood throughout a pretty unique negotiation process. Through the negotiation, we passed on offers that would have been very consequential to every employee but did not reflect the real value of the company. As we discussed this with the team (something that is HIGHLY risky) I was surprised by how strongly the team felt about the decision to only sell the company for the right amount and the right terms. In that same conversation, I was open with the team about how difficult it was to ask for so much money for a pre-revenue company that had only existed for 18 months. Our iOS lead weighed in with a simple observation: “Javier, how many Microsoft apps do you have on your home screen? Answer: None. How much do you think it’s worth it for Microsoft to get a slot on the home screen with our app?” The rest, as they say, is history and I’m proud to say that hundreds of millions of people have Outlook Mobile on the home screen of their iOS and Android devices.
HW: Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt (who, disclosure, led the company for most of my tenure and was someone who really helped me along the way) was recently quoted in a class at Stanford as basically saying the company had gotten soft (although he clarified this later) You were at Google HQ during a pretty charged 2019 – 2022 period – was Eric’s critique fair?
JS: I only experienced 2019-2022 Google, so it’s hard for me to compare that against what Eric and many others experienced in its first decade of existence. I will say that a lot of tension arose from Googler’s expectations that the company’s culture had to be exactly the same as what it was when the company was one fifth the size. Even people who never witnessed that era of Google seemed to have a strong allegiance to customs and norms that simply don’t scale to a company of over a hundred thousand employees. Yes, there are elements of a company’s culture and values that endure even after decades of spectacular growth, but the way those elements are manifested and the way they influence the day to day operations of the company has to constantly evolve.
To put it in perspective, I joined Microsoft at a critical time in its history, within the first year of CEO Satya Nadella’s leadership. It was a time of tremendous change and tension within the company. As a leader who came from outside, I encountered plenty of tension and resistance and even more support and curiosity from even the most tenured Microsoft employees. In the end what made those first few years possible and gave us the Microsoft that exists today is simple: Satya made it clear to the company that we had to change. Microsoft’s culture enabled that message to be heard loud and clear and made the space for many important changes to occur. Google, by contrast, has not been as clear about that.
HW: One last, more personal, question. What’s something you care about that you wish more people understood or supported?
JS: Simply put, the impact of technology and device use in children and teens. I know this is a topic that many people are at least hearing about, but I truly wish this was better understood. As a career technologist, I am and always will be fascinated and supportive of any technology that can help us live better lives, achieve more, be entertained etc. However I also bear witness both through my own children as well as those I see around me that the use of devices as a distraction for children requires real discipline and a better understanding of how to employ the parental controls in order to avoid the many negative effects that excessive phone and tablet use can have on kids.
Most parents agree that they’d love to be in more control over the technology used by their children but few I’ve come across are even remotely familiar with the basic things you can do to control the amount of time spent on the phone as well as the apps they have access to. I’d know we’re making progress when we see Apple and Google highlighting screen time/parental controls in their commercials with the same level of energy they devote to the quality of the camera in their phones.
What It Takes to Raise a Series B [Ted Wang/ICONIQ] – Ted Wang, now investor and previous lawyer (creator of the Series Seed doc template), tackles what he looks for in a Series B investment. B Rounds are the toughest financings right now IMO for a variety of factors so it’s refreshing to see someone put real quantitative goalposts around them, despite the moving nature of said milestones. His focus is around efficient growth but still growth (min 2x ARR YoY, NRR >100%, Gross Margins >70%).
Betting on Theaters, Embracing Tech, and ‘Wicked’ With Director Jon M. Chu [Matt Belloni/The Town podcast] – What a great conversation. Chu is a Silicon Valley native who embraces technology but doesn’t believe it’s a replacement for art, culture, story telling. This tight 30 minute pod covers a ton – from AI, to the Hollywood System, ethnic representation, and why you need to be rebellious. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
So You Think You’ve Been Gaslit [Leslie Jamison/New Yorker] – History of the concept of gaslighting, what it actually means (and doesn’t mean), and how its popularization occurred in recent years. The term actually dates from a 1944 film called Gaslight!
Hire leaders with at least one 5+ year run [Harry Glaser/Modelbit] – Repeat founder Harry Glaser sharing his own criteria around senior leadership hires. As Vinod Khosla says, “the team you build is the company you build.” After sharing some of his mistakes (“hiring for the resume when I knew in my gut it was a bad fit. The dopamine hit of showing the board and the early team that you hired someone with a big title out of Nvidia or Salesforce is real, and it comes back to bite you every time”), Harry elaborates on his checklist. I’ll put the headlines below, but he elaborates on each of them so I’d suggest clicking and reading.
Hire leaders with at least one 5+ year run.
Meet three A+, out-of-your-league functional leaders to see what greatness looks like.
Hires from your network have pros and cons, but on balance they’re worth it.
Do extensive backchannel references.
Listen hard for “lightly positive” references.
The interview is about what kind of human they are, and whether you can communicate with them.
The right answer is “it depends.”
Accept no bullshit.
Board referrals are often favors to someone else.
Retained recruiters just want to get the hire done ASAP.
The biggest risk is the feeling that you must fill this role right away.
A product executive colleague at Google once joked he was basically an email router; that most of the problems they solved were largely about sending or forwarding a message with a small amount of value added. Certainly my life as an investor has me doing a bunch of this as well. I’m actually quite particular about how, when, and why I’ll make (or decline) an introduction request (as the middle man) but that’s a separate post. Here I’m creating a URL I can send to people when they ask me for best way to make an introduction. Blog as archives!
Your lemons tend to ripen before your cherries. That was the advice an experienced seed investor gave me when we founded our own shop Homebrew. It’s a colorful (and delicious) way of describing what’s commonly known as the performance ‘J curve.’ Sometimes you get lucky and have outsized exits early in your fund’s life – these are helpful for brand momentum and recycling – we had one in Homebrew Fund 1 with Cruise (I guess also IRR positive even though it’s really cash on cash that matters). But for the most part, your realized losses occur before your realized gains.
I’m a personal LP in a wide variety of venture funds. Often because it gives me exposure to areas we don’t invest in directly, or as a way to support and learn from friends. Below I’ve take a screenshot of roughly the last ~18 months in my AngelList VC account. You can decide whether ‘using AL’ is a positive or negative selection bias – it usually means just smaller, younger firms so definitely likely more performance variance and lengthly periods to meaningful outcomes. Most of these funds I’m probably making $10,000 – $50,000 investments in (just to provide a scale of what 1x needs to look like versus the numbers below) and I think they represent about 25% of my total LP commitments by number of funds, not by dollars.
As you see there are a ton of very small disbursements! These are mostly the proceeds from seed/Series A failures – what ‘cents on the dollar’ looks like in practice! Every once in while they’re probably interest payments from notes/dividends or escrow payments, which is less relevant.
There are three of any meaningful size (given my cost basis) and none ‘returned the fund’ by themselves – like I said, those cherries are still ripening. Two of them [$4,490 and $16,986] fall into the ‘quick outcome’ bucket – you’ll need to ask those fund managers whether they wished the founders played on instead of taking the acquisitions 🙂
The largest [$20,120] is a partial secondary transaction, and one I especially appreciated. Basically the involved GP solicited my advice about whether or not they should sell a small portion of a portfolio unicorn in a growth round where there was excess demand. Selling this portion would get them to 1.0 DPI (in combination with some earlier distributions) in their first fund and into the carry, as well as create liquidity during a period where other managers are bone dry. It was my strong recommendation to do so, for a handful of reasons:
The still have a large amount of TVPI in this company and would benefit from its continued growth while derisking the downside a bit. It’s responsible given the fund size.
We were at a peak in the market and the company (like most) could perform really well and still have to re-earn that valuation.
Their LPs would remember that they were a good portfolio manager and understood not just how to get money *into* startups but out of startups as well. It would make the next fundraise for the firm that much easier.
It feels great as a GP to get into the carry!
Now the company has continued to do well but I don’t think this person regrets what they did and regardless I stand by the advice!!!
Venture capital is an easy model to understand and a challenging model to excel at – especially with emerging managers where there’s amazing upside but also more risk. That’s one reason why we believe our fund of funds Screendoor is so well positioned to succeed for LPs, even those who also do direct investment alongside us or into other segments of the VC ecosystem.
David Zhou recently featured Lisa on his Superclusters Podcast, and it’s a great listen for anyone in the business of Being a VC or Backing VCs.
Having been fortunate enough to hire Lisa to run Screendoor, I’m of course biased in this endorsement. But it’s not just me – as David leads with when referring to the backchannel research he did on Lisa for the interview: “the number of raving fans you have in the LP ecosystem is phenomenal!”
Two other sections of the pod I’d direct your attention to which I think make Screendoor especially unique (and compelling) in our backing and support of new VC firms
Our service model: Once we become your LP, not only do you get time from the Screendoor team (comprised of three senior investment professionals who have lived in the venture LP world for years), but also our GP Advisors [experienced VCs who have all built their own firms – representing Homebrew (us!), Forerunner, Kindred, Precursor, First Round, and ++++
Our investors become your investors over time: The LPs who back Screendoor represent a select group of endowments, foundations, institutions, family offices and other capital allocators committed to the venture segment. As opposed to keeping this group distant and opaque from you, we look to build relationships early and often, so as your firm matures, they can invest directly in you when there’s mutual fit. This abundance mindset gives them the opportunity to tap into the returns of Screendoor while proactively getting to know the best emerging managers and having an inside track to allocations based on the trust they’ve built with you.
If you’re a VC raising a new fund, or an investor interested in participating in Screendoor, we’d love to hear from you.
Thank you Susan. I owe a lot to you. Many people do. I’m thinking mostly about your wonderful family right now, but I did want to share two of my favorite memories. If someone were to ask about my time with you at Google, I’d tell these stories.
The first came at the beginning when you pulled me into your AdSense product org. You might remember that I’d always wanted to do marketing at Google but started out on the business side of the house for a year or so (much to the initial bruising of ego and equity). After having proven myself, the opportunity arose to transfer into Product Marketing and I was just about to do it when you interceded. I knew who you were of course but this might have been our first 1:1.
“Join product,” you said. And I thanked you for the offer but let you know that I was pretty excited about marketing. You leaned in a bit and said,
“Hunter, there are three ways things happen at Google. What Larry, Sergey and Eric want. What I want. And what You want. The first two want you to become a PM.”
Momentarily paused by this Godfather-style offer I couldn’t refuse, you then relaxed and said a bit more collaboratively, “Look, I spoke with Jonathan [Rosenberg] and come do product, and if you don’t like it, transfer into product marketing then. But Product is really where you want to be at a place like Google.”
And you were right. For the next three years you served as my manager, then skip-level manager as we grew.
The second memory was more of a coda. It was towards the end of 2006 after a very tough year working on Google Video. It wasn’t just that we were failing, it was that we were failing because of Google’s politics, personalities, and blind spots. On top of that my promotion packet was denied, leaving me, in my mind, significantly under-leveled. My manager let me know that everyone was still very high on me but I needed a ‘win’ before getting advanced. And shared that in lieu of the title change you’d approved a bonus.
I immediately booked a 1:1 slot with you and said “I don’t want your money, I want your time. Tell me where I can do better. Give me feedback. This company is throwing off cash but your time is more valuable to me.” You said you understood and a few months later supported my transfer to YouTube where I spent the rest of my Google career. You always believed in YouTube, years before you joined us as CEO (I was already gone). Thank you for your advocacy and help, even when many on Google’s executive team wavered. For another six years you gave me exactly what I’d hoped for – your time.
Today we know your time was even more precious than any of us could have imagined.
Back in my day, we had web pages and URLs. And you had to look for stuff.
“Who needs to know about this?”: Communication as you Scale [Molly Graham/GlueClub] – People forget all the time that your company values can stay the same as you grow but the activities and practices required to achieve them successfully often have to evolve. Some things you leave behind, others your pull forward in a modified fashion. Here Molly makes the claim that ~50 people is a major transition point for most startups and that COMMUNICATION is the most important/quickest to break at this inflection.
What follows is a fantastic guide to how to think about communications; what you need to implement; and evaluating success. Seriously, read it.
Are We Doomed? Here’s How to Think About It [Rivka Galchen/The New Yorker] – Takes you inside a class at the University of Chicago where each lecture focuses on a perceived existential risk to humanity (AI, Climate Catastrophe, Nuclear Destruction), with a scientific approach. I was also surprised to find that the term ‘existential risk’ as an academic concept only dates back to a 2002 paper by philosopher Nick Bostrom (although obviously theorizing about doom scenarios is, well, timeless).
The Last $250k [Charles Hudson/PrecursorVentures] – A notable pre-seed investor, Charles is remarking on the clarity of action which comes when you’re down to your last $250k of capital and wonders why we don’t/how we can operate with that focus while there’s more money in the bank (so as to not have to get to your last $250k).
“For the type of companies I work with, that $250K usually translates to 4-6 months of life, barring a fundraise or other capital infusion,” Charles writes, then noting that it’s not about effort – most everyone is already working very hard. But rather:
The most important things to work on become incredibly clear
The data needed to validate the company’s hypothesis becomes much clearer
There are things that the company was doing that they stop doing because those things don’t really matter given the gravity of the situation
Why we changed prices 3 times in 1 year [Matt Hodges/Equals]– Oh I love the art and science of pricing. It’s just a truism that most startups begin pricing incorrectly – either choosing a structure that ends up not being properly connected to the desired motion of their business (per seat vs usage based vs tiered, etc) and almost certainly higher or lower than where they’ll end up. The way I think about it is pre-PMF your pricing should be rational but not a barrier to adoption, and post PMF you should be pushing pricing up to find where your true limits on value exist.
Equals is a SaaS reporting and analysis startup that walks you through their pretty wide ranging journey to figure out how they should charge. Spoiler alert, simple was best and they turned off self-service.
Investing in the Age of Generative AI [Kevin Shang/East Wind]– Everything anyone writes about AI investing is simultaneously out of date and prescient. Although I guess you can also be out of date and incorrect, but if that’s the case I would be sharing with you here. Here Kevin believes “Regardless of how venture firms choose to ‘play’ this cycle, this almost feels like an existential moment for the venture industry.” And translates that into strategies based on firm size/focus.
Manage the What, Not the How [Molly Graham/Glue Club] – Molly always has great management essays, riffing off her own experience at learnings at places like Facebook and CZI. This one focuses on finding that right level of direction but not micro management.
It’s tempting to manage how employees work. But in 90% of cases, what really matters is: Did you hit the goal?
To run a successful company, particularly one past a certain size, controlling the “how” is simply not an option. You have to learn to be extraordinary at aliging around the “what” and at coaching people as they go.
How to Build and Run Your Exec Team [Harry Glaser/Modelbit] – We’ve known Harry for a while, and have the pleasure of working with him as investors in Modelbit, so I enjoy his posts, both in a vacuum and as context for the way he’s building this startup. This one is a pretty practical take on how you evolve the exec team and cadence of management during the first phase of hypergrowth. As he writes,
The transition to a real structure with “teams of teams” and executives is fraught for two reasons: First, as the company is going through a transition where employees no longer automatically know everything and everyone, the founders are not going through that same transition. They don’t realize the employees are losing track of all the new people, don’t know the priorities any more, and are feeling disconnected from the mission. This makes the founders slow to add structure and process as they scale up.
Skilled immigration is a national security priority [Noah Smith and Minn Kim/Noahpinion] – It always amazes me that growing skilled immigration to the US isn’t a bipartisan priority. Would certainly be one of my objectives if I served in government. Noah Smith is pretty consistent on making the case for smart immigration policies and here he (and Minn) tackle the ‘competition with China’ angle.
Maintaining a lead in industries like AI, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing – all things that are essential for national defense as well as big contributors to national wealth – will require the U.S. to have more than its share of the world’s human capital.
This is why calls to “just train Americans” instead of recruiting skilled immigrants ring so hollow. Of course the U.S. needs to train its own skilled workers, and it should constantly be striving to improve its education system and to direct students toward the fields where they’re needed most. But at the end of the day the U.S. represents only 4.2% of the world’s population, while China represents 17.4%. China has a much bigger talent pool than America because it’s simply a much bigger country. If the U.S. wants to match China’s gigantic pool of human resources, it must supplement domestic talent by recruiting from abroad. Mathematically there’s simply no other option.
The Oral History of Gremlins [Alan Siegel/The Ringer] – Besides being an amazing nostalgic read about a fun movie from my childhood, this oral history has a few moments that reminds you how fragile the creative process is, and what great leadership/insight looks like. Excellent products – whether they are films, software, cars – are full of collaboration, but not consensus or compromises. Spielberg is amazing.
For example, on casting the male lead
Galligan: They had to take the tape and they had to FedEx it to Spielberg. Apparently when Spielberg saw me put my head on her shoulder, he turned to Joe and he said, “Stop the tape. Just turn it off.” And they were like, “What?” Joe and Mike thought he wanted to discuss something. And he got up, started walking out. And they said, “What?”
Dante: Steven turned to me and said, “We’ve got to cast him. He’s already in love with her.”
And a particularly weird speech that everyone was trying to get Director Joe Dante to cut
Dante: They said, “Well, we’ll get Steven to make you cut it out.” So they went to Steven and said, “Make him cut it out.” And Steven said, “It’s his movie. I don’t even get it. I don’t know what it is he likes about it, but it’s his movie. Leave it in there.” So it stayed in the movie.
Robert Putnam Knows Why You’re Lonely [Lulu Garcia-Navarro/New York Times] – Putnam, who wrote the brilliant Bowling Alone to describe the increased lack of IRL community in the US, is back with an update. While I recalled his general thesis, this interview reminded me about the importance of Bridging community alongside Bonding community. In his words,
Ties that link you to people like yourself are called bonding social capital. So, my ties to other elderly, male, white, Jewish professors — that’s my bonding social capital. And bridging social capital is your ties to people unlike yourself. So my ties to people of a different generation or a different gender or a different religion or a different politic or whatever, that’s my bridging social capital. I’m not saying “bridging good, bonding bad,” because if you get sick, the people who bring you chicken soup are likely to reflect your bonding social capital. But I am saying that in a diverse society like ours, we need a lot of bridging social capital. And some forms of bonding social capital are really awful. The K.K.K. is pure social capital — bonding social capital can be very useful, but it can also be extremely dangerous. So far, so good, except that bridging social capital is harder to build than bonding social capital. That’s the challenge, as I see it, of America today.
Inside Danny McBride’s Lowcountry Comedy Commune [Sam Schube/GQ] – Incredibly talented dude, operating within his comfort zone, with people he cares about, and enjoying his life. Left Los Angeles and set up a production studio back in South Carolina. This is one of the recipes for happiness.
in 2017, he and a handful of his closest collaborators, who also happen to be some of his closest friends, decided to move to South Carolina, where they had filmed plenty of TV and then returned together as serial vacationers. The plan was simple, but grand in ambition: to airlift the whole McBride creative brain trust, 8 or 10 whole families, to a pleasant and occasionally hard-partying city far from the spotlight.
Rhoades [zoologist and chemist] had watched a nearby forest be decimated by an invasion of caterpillars. But then something suddenly changed; the caterpillars began to die. Why? The answer, Rhoades discovered, was that the trees were communicating with one another. Trees that the caterpillars hadn’t yet reached were ready: They’d changed the composition of their leaves, turning them into weapons that would poison, and eventually kill, the caterpillars.
Scientists were beginning to understand that trees communicate through their roots, but this was different. The trees, too far apart to be connected by a root system, were signaling to one another through the air. Plants are tremendous at chemical synthesis, Rhoades knew. And certain plant chemicals drift through the air. Everyone already understood that ripening fruit produces airborne ethylene, for example, which prompts nearby fruit to ripen too. It wasn’t unreasonable to imagine that plant chemicals containing other information—say, that the forest was under attack—might also drift through the air.
The Secrets of Alicia Keys and Swizz Beatz’s Museum-Ready Art Collection [Nate Freeman/Vanity Fair] – Excellence is so sexy. Watching this amazing couple win together while impacting culture and economy is just BRAVO. They started collecting, nurturing, evangelizing black artists early in their careers and have established themselves as serious players.
The Deans also were collecting Black artists, especially Black figurative artists, at a time when the art market has started to correct for decades of neglect. Dean was particularly struck by the contrast he saw between visits to the homes of old-guard collectors and his peers. It further fueled their collecting. (The couple put many of their largest-scale works on view at their homes—including a $20 million mansion in La Jolla, California, that is said to have inspired Tony Stark’s house in Iron Man 3—and have never sold a work since the inception of the collection.)
The Only App That Always Wins The Battle For Your Attention [Ben Cohen/WSJ] – As the father of a daughter who prizes her Duolingo trajectory, our household lives this article. “Streak” mechanics are often cheap implementations of game mechanics, or even worse, build bad habits into bad apps, but when applied to learning a language, it’s hard to argue they’re empty calories.
Traits I look for in founders [Nakul Mandan/Audacious Ventures] – We enjoy coinvesting with Nakul and the Audacious Ventures team. Recently added his blog’s RSS feed to my reader [OPEN STANDARDS FOREVER] and highlighting one of his posts (but go back and read more).
