Themes for 2013

Not quite the last sunset of 2012, but almost!

We recently had our first holiday with Bodhi, ten days over in Western Australia catching up with my extended tribe over there and spending some quality time with Bodhi’s grandparents and aunt.

I had meant to write this while on vacation but found this impossible. I got half an hour on my laptop the day after we arrived and never got it out again. Holidaying with a baby is a different sort of holiday, more hectic and immersive, and you never really have time to fully relax or check out. Or write. At least I didn’t this trip, but I didn’t mind because it was so much fun to do stuff with Bodhi and to introduce him to so many family members.

And so it is that I find myself finally composing this now, long after I should be sleeping, a week after new years.

While I didn’t write it down I did manage to do something thinking on the trip, and some brainstorming with K, about our aspirations for the year ahead. I remember the same period a year ago, the slight anxiety about all the faced us: moving countries, becoming parents, our lives changed forever. A year on things feel more settled. Parenthood is endlessly challenging but infinitely rewarding, there’s isn’t an international move on the horizon, I’m not looking for work.

This sense of greater stability has allowed me to re-focus on some of the other things I care about, and the lifestyle K and I want to build in the longer-term.

I’m really into the rule of three at the moment. Three goals for the day, three themes for the week, three foci for the month. So in reflecting on the year ahead I decided to focus on three concepts for the year.

Wellness – restoring myself to a state of greater fitness and better health. Learn more about food and develop better eating habits. Support K in her food goals for the year.

Commitment – Getting more attuned to the needs of my family. Taking good care of the garden and learning to do things in a more organic way. Sticking with routines required for better health and productivity. Being more consistent with my writing.

Balance – Give my best self to all areas of my life. Be focused, productive and strategic at StartSomeGood and Make Believe. Be there for my family. Take better care of myself.

I’ve got a very good feeling about 2013. I feel like I’m on the cusp of a real time of change and evolution, but with my feet firmly on the ground, embedded in community and purpose.

Happy new year everyone!

Entrepreneurs, markets and investment

A fascinating debate broke out yesterday, on Christmas Day in the US, between a number of prominent tech journalists, investors and founders, regarding the existence or otherwise of a “Series A crunch.”

Jason Calacanis, founder of Mahalo (soon to be Insider.com) and LAUNCH, led the contrarians, declaring that there was no such thing as a Series A shortage, that the available money for investment would expand to match the available investable opportunities and that with revenue you would always get investment. The fact that there was much less investment available than demand for that investment simply shows that there is a lack of companies worthy of investment. From his blog post yesterday:

Capacity increases along with opportunity.

VCs are a greedy lot (and us founders and GPs love you for it), and the world has mountains of money sitting in bonds, gold, corporate stockpiles and plain old devaluing C-Notes (aka cash).

If 10 companies with the metrics of Fab, Dropbox, Yammer, Uber or AirBnb were to walk into a VC firm with only the money to fund five, you know what they would do? Raise more money!

Capacity expands all the time, and it could turn on a dime.

I’m a huge fan of Jason and always find his views thought-provoking and often insightful. His point here, however, is ridiculous, or as Sarah Lacy put it in Pando Daily, “bullshit.” What fascinates me about this debate though is how classically American it is.

The view Jason is expressing is s classically neoliberal view of the world: capitalism is a perfect sorting machine, with supply (of investment-worthy startups) always meeting demand (for these opportunities by professional investors) thanks to the magic of the profit motive, the “invisible hand” that makes it all work.

This is not, of course, always the case. There are mismatches in supply and demand all the time and investment is particularly prone to herd behaviour and strongly influenced by social networks, pressures and fads. The fact there was a huge amount of money for Series A investment in 2000 didn’t mean that all (or even most) of the startups receiving that investment were investment-worthy by any conventional definition. If we can see the dotcom bubble as an example of the mismatch of investment availability and “good” startups then the reverse is clearly also true, and it’s perfectly conceivable that we could currently be in a time with the quality of startups genuinely exceeds the funds made available by Venture Capitalists.

Jason is absolutely right that great entrepreneurs can survive and thrive in any conditions, that visionary companies can create markets not simply be subject to them, but counter-examples exist for these as well: inventions which could have been (or later were) super-profitable but which no investor had the courage or foresight to back, or who had the misfortune to require re-capitalisation at the wrong moment, during  time of economic uncertainty, and failed to survive, when only a few months the task would have been easily completed.

And it is also true that some mediocre entrepreneurs become spectacularly successful by being in the right place at the right time, by being lucky, having the right connections, having the money to survive long enough.

Claiming that all the ‘good” companies get funding is like claiming that all “good” bands get record deals (back when you needed one) but this is clearly ridiculous. But we know the Beatles were rejected by every major record label in London before finding someone prepared to release their music, we know that many more deserving artists never made it through the gatekeepers and plenty of other made it without their help.

The idea that capitalism is meritocratic is at the heart of the American ideology, the idea that those who are successful create their success due to their own special characteristics: because they were smarter, harder-working, more entrepreneurial. But markets matter, timing matters, location matters. As Malcolm Gladwell explored in Outliers (my favourite of his works) being in the right place at the right time (such as attending one of the only High Schools in America with an advanced computer to learn programming on, or being given computer parts by a founder of HP as a teenager), the family and group culture you grow up in and market and legislative contexts have a huge influence on who becomes a success.

Gladwell’s point is not that you don’t have to be smart, hard-working and entrepreneurial – you generally do to be a big success – but that these qualities alone are insufficient. Simply put there is a greater supply of smart, hard-working and entrepreneurial people than there are available economic winners in our societies.

And so it is with startups, and this is why many “good” companies and talented entrepreneurs will fail to raise the additional funds they need to survive this year despite the soundness and potential profitability of their ideas.

Image by davebarger made available on a creative commons license via flickr.

December Already?

The fact that it is December is kind of blowing my mind. This year has gone by at the most extraordinary pace, blurring together in my memory like the countryside outside a speeding car. Moving from San Francisco back to Sydney, moving into a new apartment, starting a new job, welcoming our son Bodhi into our lives, working hard to grow StartSomeGood into a success, traveling regularly for business and pleasure.

I’m back to Melbourne this week for the Global Shifts Social Enterprise conference, my fourth trip to Melbourne in the last few months, which is completely unexpected. Two weeks ago I was there for the excellent FWD2012, Australia’s first conference on digital campaigning co-hosted by Oxfam Australia and the new Centre for Australian Progress. I flew there directly from Adelaide, where I was attending the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) Summer School. Both events but particularly SIX have left me filled with ideas and thrilled to have met so many amazing people working in this space. While Social Innovation might be hard to define the people who self-select to join this conversation are unusually passionate, creative, caring and intuitive and it was both a pleasure and an honour to spend a few days in their company.

Going back only two weeks before that I was up in Far North Queensland to see the solar eclipse, which was one of the most amazing experiences of my life. The November 14 2012 eclipse outside Cairns has been on my agenda since I was unable to make it to the last full solar eclipse in Australia, near Lynhurst South Australia in 2002. Since then I’ve framed many of my plans around this event: we had always planned to time our return from the US to be able to attend and even with a 3 month-old in our lives, and with the support of the greatest wife a man could hope for, I was determined not to miss it (I’d be waiting another 16 years before the next one in Australia which will be in Sydney in 2028). And wow am I glad I could make it and deeply grateful to K for making it possible for me to do so.

Watching the moon blot out the sun and the day suddenly disappear into darkness was one of the most moving things I have ever witnessed. It’s impossible not to be awed by the experience, by the sense of galactic scale, the realisation that we are sitting on a little rock floating in space, surrounded by other rocks. The spectacle is unique and magical: watching the moon creep across the sun until, with a final solar glare, it is gone, replaced with a dark ball in the sky surrounded by a thin line of light. We happen to live at the perfect moment in the history of the earth when this is possible, a period of only 20,000-100,000 when the moon exactly fits the sun from our vantage point, before the moon’s inexorable movement away from us at about 3cm a year leaves only partial eclipses possible. I met a guy on the plane to Cairns who was going to his 14th eclipse and now having witnessed one and I understand the instinct. I’m not going to wait until 2028 to see another  – I’ve got my eye on the Eclipse Festival in Oregon in 2017 (heads-up American friends!).

The Eclipse Festival, November 14 (click for full size)

And beyond the eclipse itself the week-long music festival held under it’s path was the best I have ever attended (note: burns are not music festivals). Incredible production, inspiring music, good food and, most importantly of all, a wonderful big group of friends there to share it with, many of whom I hadn’t see for many years or if I had only briefly. Spending time with them, and making new friends, was the true highlight of the festival (as it always is).

Bodhi continues to delight and amaze K and I. Every day he seems to have a new movement, sound or ability. This is my favourite new photo of him, from our visit to my parents property this past weekend, if you’d indulge my parental desire to show him off (I have to restrain myself from saturating Facebook with Bodhi photos):

Millenarianism and politics

One of my all-time favourite classes at university was “Prophets and Millenarian Movements in World History.” Millenarian movements are those that believe in the literal and imminent end of the world. All religions begin with a millenarial focus before usually becoming increasingly institutionalized and non-specific when it comes to the end times as they go along.

The entire subject matter was extraordinary, full of stories of charismatic leaders and people at their most raw and desperate and their most devout and hopeful.  What fascinated me most though was the behavior of adherents when the predicted end of the world doesn’t come to pass.  To act in the literal belief of the imminent end of the world is a true test of faith. If you really, truly, belief the world is ending you behave differently. You quit your job, say goodbye to your loved ones. Or you rise up in rebellion or, in some cases, commit suicide in the belief that a new, eternal, life awaits you on the other side. Believers put themselves out there and, if not enclosed within a believer community, are likely suffer a great deal of ridicule, condemnation and repression. And then the big day arrives and…. Nothing happens. The world is still here and so are you. What do you do next?

When faced with this head-on collision of faith and reality, who do you think prevails?

The answer, often, is faith. Believers are more likely to create an elaborate justifications for why the world didn’t end, to find a small mistake in their calculations or blame the behavior of non-believers, than to accept a flaw in their original thinking.

One of the most interesting examples of this was the Millerites in the 1830’s in the US:

In 1831, a Baptist convert, William Miller… began to preach that the Second Advent of Jesus would occur somewhere between March 1843 and March 1844, based on his interpretation of Daniel 8:14. A following gathered around Miller that included many from the Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian and Christian Connection churches. In the summer of 1844, some of Miller’s followers promoted the date of October 22. They linked the cleansing of the sanctuary of Daniel 8:14 with the Jewish Day of Atonement, believed to be October 22 that year. By 1844, over 100,000 people were anticipating what Miller had called the “Blessed Hope”. On October 22 many of the believers were up late into the night watching, waiting for Christ to return and found themselves bitterly disappointed when both sunset and midnight passed with their expectations unfulfilled. This event later became known as the Great Disappointment.
-Wikipedia

While many of those who had gathered in anticipation of the end of the world drifted back to their former lives a significant portion found this impossible to accept and began developing competing explanations for what had or hadn’t happened and why. The Seventh-Day Adventists Church is based on one such explanation. In their telling the end of the world had arrived on the date predicted, but in another, second, world, and which Jesus had to cleanse first before he could come to our world. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons) and the Churches of Christ also emerged from the millenarian fervor of this time.

More recently thousands of devout Christians, supported by a $100 million advertising campaign, insisted that the world would end on May 21 this year, convinced by the calculations of their prophet Harold Camping.

Some believers simply have too much at stake emotionally and psychologically to concede that they were wrong.

I was reminded about all of this today as I read the responses to Barack Obama’s resounding election victory over Mitt Romney.

Very few Republicans are prepared to see their loss, and the swing towards the Democrats in the Senate and House (where the Democrats received the majority of the votes but still have a 35-seat minority due to gerrymandering by Republic state legislators), as indicative of any flaws in their vision for America, or of the fact that most America’s don’t share their goals.

Instead the result is blamed on superstorm Sandy, or the superior Obama get-out-the-vote efforts or their use of data, or because the media is biased or suppressed information that would have helped Romney, or due to the failures of Romney’s vaunted “project ORCA”, or on the bipartisan spirit extended to Obama by Republic Governor Chris Christie in the campaign’s final days.

Rarely are the policies and beliefs the party ran on examined and when they are it’s more often than not claimed that Romney was not conservative enough, rather than to the right of the majority of the American people.

The reality of the situation is that the demographics of America are changing and the ground is shifting rapidly on social issues as gay marriage and ending marijuana prohibition. Where once these causes served to mobilise Republic constituencies they now mobilise Democrat supporters.

A failure to update your thinking when reality intrudes is a clear sign of ideological rigidity and close-mindedness. As with the case of believers in millenarian cults Republican activists have too much committed to the narrative they hold to relax it now. When your ideological commitment is so strong facts themselves become secondary to the story you already hold, immediately suspect if they contradict it in any way, useful only when they confirm existing feelings.

The best example of this comes from the far-right Heritage Action, the political action committee of the Heritage Foundation. It’s even got doomsday music and vibes.

Hard to imagine something like that playing well in Australian politics. But then, we don’t have the millenarian tradition America does.

Election Eve

Watching the news today I saw highlights of Obama’s last rally of the campaign in Iowa and my mind flashed back to the same night four years earlier, the night before the 2008 election.

We left Washington DC at dusk heading West. By the time we arrived in Manassas, 35 miles South-West into Virginia, it was dark and a light rain had started to fall. It wasn’t hard to find out destination, which was the Manassas fairground, but finding a park was a more significant challenge as the streets were choked with cars parked in every conceivable spot, legal or illegal. Finally we found a place and walked to the fairground, where Obama was holding his final rally of the 2008 campaign.

People streamed in the same direction as us and a buzz of anticipation and energy filled the air. It felt more like arriving at a festival than a political event, a feeling reinforced by the stalls and spruikers which lined the street for blocks before the entrance.
The Fairground itself was a sea of people and I wondered if we were going to get close enough to even see Obama. Eventually we emerged into the back of a field with a stage set up at the far end, surrounded by red, white and blue bunting. A huge “VOTE FOR CHANGE” sign rose above the bleachers to our right. We had made it just in time for Obama.

I think he was introduced by Mark Warner, the Democratic candidate for Senate. The 100,000+ crowd roared. I’d never experienced anything like it. I’d been at huge protests before, but the energy there is more defuse and chaotic. Here it was focused with a cultish intensity on the man on the stage, the soon-to-be President of the United States, barely blinking for the 45 minutes he spoke, mesmerized by his well-practiced lines. He closed with the story of the origin of his “Fired up! Ready to go!” chant, the exact same story he finished his final rally this year with.

A lot has happened since then. Some of the hope which characterized the 2008 campaign has become the resignation of this year. Where Obama’s 2008 campaign was fueled by a belief that politics itself could be changed for the better this year’s campaign is focused on a more traditional calculated: that the other guy is worst. Whoever wins a segment of the population will reject them as illegitimate.

The widening gap in the American political discourse, where arguments center no so much on what needs to happen next but on fundamental disagreements over what just happened, with facts only as valuable as their usefulness in advancing an argument.

For all the fanfare of participation around the presidential campaign and the real and important differences between the candidates, American democracy is in real trouble as the ability to talk and compromise becomes increasingly rare.

For me personally it’s been an extraordinary and often-challenging four years. The passage of time always spins me out and anniversaries like this prompt me to try to hold all that has happened over these years in my head at once. From Washington DC to San Francisco and then back to Sydney. Building communities and starting a family. Launching a company and struggling to hold onto my visa. Adventure and uncertainty and joy and frustration and love. So many experiences as we went out there and came back again it kind of boggles my mind.

And I can hardly imagine what the next four years will bring.

Fired up. Ready to go.

Missing Burning Man

Team More Carrot 2011

For me, Burning Man has never been about epiphaneous moments or breakthroughs. It hasn’t helped me gain a new understanding of human diversity or my own potential. It’s hasn’t helped me discover the real me nor has it changed my appreciation for my everyday life. What it has been, however, is the best week of my year for the past four years (and five of the past six).

This year has been about a different kind of adventure for K and I, one filled with joy and fear and hard work and community. A bit like a Burn, but not really. Despite being immersed in and overjoyed by this experience I couldn’t help but feel some wistfulness for the playa during the first week of September.

I missed the smell of the dust. I missed the intense three days work building our camp, More Carrot: The Black Rock City Farmers Market. I missed coming together with friends old and new in Reno and the anticipation of the night before we hit the playa. I missed the art and the noise and the kaleidoscopic variety of people and outfits and moments.

It was impossible not to remember moments from Burns past. Of minarets at dusk and the trash fence at dawn, of PBR for breakfast and sushi feasts offered by new friends, bike obstacle courses and pop-up Chinese restaurants, of our wedding in 2008 and of watching a memorial service while on duty as a Temple Guardian last year.  So many amazing, moving, inspiring, hilarious times.

And I realised what it was I missed most: The uniquely immersive immediacy of Burning Man.

When I’m at Burning Man I feel so present with my surroundings I forget I’m present with my surroundings. I forget for long stretches of time that there is anything else I could be thinking of. I think creatively, I imagine, I sketch out future projects, but I don’t worry about my to do list or about money or question my relationships or stress about politics. I’m just wherever I am, engaging with the person I’m there with.

In my everyday life I’m seemingly-unavoidably scheduled. I have days I’m working from home and days I’m in the city, daily meetings in person or on skype or by phone. I’m engaged in a constant battle to keep my inbox close to zero and I’m throwing presentations together in the hours before I give them.

At Burning Man I feel almost completely unscheduled. This despite being part of a theme camp with shared meals and shifts to be done on the market and despite the other volunteer stuff I always do, whether delivering the Black Rock Gazette newspaper or serving as a Temple Guardian. Beyond these specific experiences which I play just enough attention to what time it is to turn up to I plan almost nothing. Maybe one musical act on a particular night. But mostly I don’t chase bands around the playa, I don’t organise to meet people at particular times or places, I don’t target specific events or workshops. The last three years I haven’t actually looked in the What|Where|When events guide at all. Not once.

Instead I go where the mood takes me with the people I happen to be with, mostly my closest friends but sometimes delightful new people. Sometimes we decide to open a pop-up restaurant, sometimes we play cricket, sometimes we go looking for art, sometimes we go to the steam bath, or a cocktail bar, or to visit friends. It’s wherever the mood takes us and it’s always the perfect place, close-enough. I never feel like I’m missing out on anything because where I am is always spectacular.

This immediacy brings a real freedom to it, a sense of being in flow, at one with space and time. It’s a rare feeling, something you also feel when you’re falling head-over-heels in love, during the birth of a child or in the midst of creative production.

I’d like to try to create more of this in my everyday life but it’s so much harder here. These meetings (mostly) need to happen. I love collaborating with people and making things happen and that means deadlines and meetings and to do lists. And without these structures and habits and commitments I really can’t get much done, and there’s a lot I want to do. This busyness stems from my purpose and my passions and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The key, I think, is balance. I couldn’t live Burning Man year-around. As glorious as it is there’s so much else I want to experience in my life and a satisfaction and meaning that can only be gained through hard work and sticking with something. Bringing immediately into everyday life doesn’t require giving up meetings or to do lists but rather cultivating time for reflection and to connect with others in open and creative ways. Bodhi helps me be more immediate (although also makes me more scheduled), as does time outdoors, catching up with friends, going to festivals and riding my bike. I want to live with the spirit of Burning Man year-round, embracing immediately and generosity and shared experiences, even as I commit to the hard work of making difficult things happen.

So, balance. An hour a day. A day a week. A week a year. Time without pre-established priorities, restrictions or responsibilities, without a to-do list guiding your actions or an event I’m preparing for. Unstructured time for thinking, playing, feeling, being.

Missing Burning Man this year has also given me more perspective on the big questions of whether and when to take Bodhi to the burn. Since we knew Bodhi was coming we have been discussing this. I’ve vacillated between thinking it would be great fun to take him when he’s young and to see him experience such a fantasy land through the eyes of childhood and thinking that it would be more fun not to take him and to use it as a week off (every two years, say) from the priorities and responsibilities and constraints of parenthood.

Missing this year’s Burn has made me realise more strongly than before how much I value the unstructuredness (somewhat: I still help organise a theme camp so compared to how unstructured your burn could be it’s pretty structured, but compared to how structured my life usually is it’s very unstructured) and openness of Burning Man and the immediacy I experience there. It also made me feel the loss of the balance Burning Man has provided over the past four years, the way it has inspired and recharged me, the new ideas and, new friendships and new insights into myself I would come back from my week in the desert with.

All of which makes me lean towards not taking Bodhi, for a while at least, and using it as a chance to step away and recharge every couple of years. I’d love to take Bodhi when he’s a bit older, when I trust him to look after himself sufficiently in the conditions and socially, but the stresses and pressures of taking a baby/toddler/tiny child to Burning Man would, I think, restrict much of what I most value about the experience. For now at least.

How do you create unstructured time in your life?

Crowdfunding and the Power of We

Today is Blog Action Day, a day when thousands of bloggers around the world join together to explore and express themselves on a shared topic. This year that topic is The Power of We.

Together, we can do anything.

I really believe that. In fact I co-founded a company, StartSomeGood, based on the belief that we live in an abundant world and that when we join together and share what we have we can create the future we seek.

StartSomeGood, and all crowdfunding, is about supporting new initiatives with the capital that already exists in our community, rather than relying on government, investors and traditional outside sources of capital. We (the StartSomeGood team) believe that we (all of us) already have all the ideas we need to overcome the social challenges which confront us, already have all the changemakers we need, already have all the money we need. The power of crowdfunding is to bring all these things together, to unlock the power of we.

You see this play out in domain after domain – as we become more connected and the barriers to our participation fall away new possibilities become apparent. Our connectedness makes us smarter, more creative and more impactful as we share and collaborative, pooling what Clay Shirky calls our “cognitive surplus” in order to create things far beyond the scope of an individual alone.
The examples of our increasingly collaborative planet are everywhere, from Wikipedia to the 350 climate movement to startup weekends and the Social Innovation Exchange.

StartSomeGood is, on every level, an example of this, an organisation and service only made possible by this trend. Our team is spread across seven cities in four countries on three continents. We have hosted successful fundraisers from social initiatives in 20 countries so far. Every project on our site is utilising an emergent set of social tools to share their story and invite participation and support in new ways.

And many of these initiatives are themselves building tools to better connect us. From the speech therapy app Speech4Good to the Australian collaborative consumption charity network Dandelion Support Network to GalliGalli who are using open technologies to better map the history, culture and economics of Kathmandu in Nepal social entrepreneurs are leveraging technology creatively to address inequality and create new opportunities for their communities.

Greater connectedness gives We an ever greater advantage over I. Change agents, from activists to organisers, social entrepreneurs to muckraking journalists, have always been connectors of people and ideas, have always been recruiters and inspirers of changemakers and have always confronted entrenched interests and business-as-usual. New tools, including crowdfunding, has created amazing new opportunities for people with passion and purpose to step forward and make things happen.

So, what are you waiting for?

If you want to raise funds for your initiative please check out StartSomeGood and let us know if we can help you!

Image by artotem via flickr available on a creative commons license.