This is how a book written by the âgenerative journalismâ account/âknowledge service in an infodemicâ I contribute to would start. I believe thatâs called BLUF: bottom line, up front.
What would the first sentence of YOUR book on 2020 be?
Can a venture studio change the racial dynamic in Silicon Valley?
Have you heard of venture studios?
They're like movie studios, but instead of producing and releasing movies they create startups ready to scale. A venture studio focuses on just a few ventures and puts more funding into them than you'd see with an accelerator which places many small bets. They also recruit top executives once the existential question of "is this solution commercially viable?" can be answered with "yes".
One venture studio may be a way to solve a longtime problem in Silicon Valley: only 1% of VC goes to black- or brown-founded startups.
The sweet spot of Revitalize Venture Studio, from longtime SaaS entrepreneur Clarence Wooten, is knowing how to get a high-potential startup founded by diverse black and brown founders to product-market fit.
Often these are the very founders that lack access to early seed capital (up to $750K, far beyond most Family & Friends raises) needed to extend the life of their startup to get to product-market fit, which is a necessary stage to attract VC funding for Series A.
I just had the pleasure of meeting Clarence and learning more about his venture studio and want you to take a look at this pragmatic opportunity to support more POC in the Silicon Valley universe.
Radical, systemic change in the tech industry starts with us
You may have guessed that women in tech & digital are under represented across management/teams.
I live tweeted an antiracism panel attended by 300 people from around the global and produced by Ada's List, an intersectional group committed to changing the tech industry at scaleâââ from culture of a company, an overt policy, to processes that sideline women.
Radical, systemic change starts with us, says Adaâs List founder Merici Vinton.
Adaâs List is the place for professional women who work in and around the internet to connect, conspire, and take a stand. The group of 700
promote, support, hire & interview women
recommend 1 qualified woman or POC to interview for each open position
make our environment positive
help juniors progress in their careers
Sound familiar? Itâs their take on the Shine Theory of Aminatou Sow and Ann Friedman, says Vinton.
On White Privilege: Getting uncomfortable with our privilege, bias, and 3 actions to take is an event to keep focused on dismantling racist structures, raises funds for three Black-led organizations (@TheSisterSystem @ThisIsYSYS @azmaguk), and is part of the Adaâs List ReStructure Series. The rolling series of talks discuss and proactively work through some of the biggest issues coming out of the events happening right now.
"How are you doing?", Vinton as moderator of the panel asks the women of color, re Black Lives Matter protests.
"I spent the last 3 mos having these conversations. The process of exploring, meeting people where they are is quite healing," says one woman.
"Pissed it's taken so long for people to recognize this is a problem," answers another.
In company replies to BLM, "The voice of perpetrators & observers was amplified, centering their response rather than centering the pain,â points out Shefaly Yogendra. She digs into this in her blog "BLM in the Boardroom". "Where are your metrics?" she asks these companies that are virtue signalling. (Read Shefalyâs Twitter thread about the panel.)
Many corporations put out Black Lives Matters messages, while having few if any POC on their boards, in management, in their workforce
Virtue signalling. Have you heard of it? Another example of virtue signaling is the number of âBlackoutTuesdayâ profiles vs. the number of people signing petition to see justice done in the case of Breonna Taylor, one panelist pointed out.
"This is 400 years of oppression, it's not going to be solved in a webinar," says a panelist.
Also, "Resistance is normal", it's not a sign you shouldn't continue to speak up as a white ally when appropriate....get used to that feeling.
Be aware where you can be most effective. Not all platforms are the right place, fighting trolls on Twitter may not be worth your while.
Some conversations will be more effective when done in private. But NOT saying something is no longer an option.
"Diversity and inclusion is like any other business performance metric, or at least it should be," says Ashanti Bentil-Dhue
"Don't ask POC to do your org's work for free" says Yogendra.
"Talking about race is a non-negotiable now," adds Bentil-Dhue, but some business leaders think it's optional.
"We have a problem in the corporate space that can't talk about unconscious bias, in gender & race," says Naomi Jane.
Adaâs List round up of the best tweets about the panel on the #AntiracistAdas Twitter tag, and homework.
As a white person, you can decide where your money goes and a corporation's work in antiracism (or failure to address appropriately) can be a trigger to patronize a business or not.
"As a black woman it's frustrating to hear we need to go back to basics, that we need more research and surveys. The research is there!" says Bentil-Dhue.
That's something our white peers can do, direct people to the existing research.
This history of management is based in slavery & we have to address that to improve
The history of management is based in slavery, once you see it you can see what it's doing to the people you work with and what you can change to make people the best they can be, says Yogendra.
If you have the ability to 'tap out' from what's going on, acknowledge that you have privilege to do so.
What are you going to do about it, recharge and come back and do something impactful?
How does the recruitment process or governance structure of your organization perpetuate racism?
POC have to provide unpaid labor to teach white people not to be racist.
"When white people can't get your name right chances are everything you do will be reduced to a stereotype," says Shefaly Yogendra.
Getting someone's name wrong is a micro aggression. White people, make the effort to get a POC's name right (and no need to make a big deal about doing so, it's the same as your name, just a name).
What's a good way to address intersectional identities?
Find & amplify people who have those intersectionalities & pay them for their fundamentally important expertise. We have to pay them, says Naomi Jane.
Today's bookshelf
Our bookshelf of tomes about this dark chapter in American political history keeps growingâŠ
âAge Of Lies. Rigged. Cold War. Hot Peace. Dirty Money. Unfreedom. Shadow State. Red Notice. Stable Genius. Untold Story. Putinâs People. Crime In Progress. Secret Meetings. Dark Towers. Trail Of Destruction. Age of Trump.â
Weâll keep adding to it until this chapter of history is fully written & in the dustbin.
Hereâs to the heroes among us who are going to bring us through.
Making early sense of the pandemic
âI saw the coronavirus coming in Januaryâ
I saw the coronavirus coming in January and have been tracking the pandemic ever since. Itâs been uniquely disturbing to see a mysterious wave of illness and death surging toward us, with far too many people refusing to face it.
~ Andrew M. Slavitt (former Acting Administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services)
âA wave of illness and death is surging toward us with far too many people refusing to face itâ
Iâd been looking to see which flus were coming out of China as my family members and business associates were heading to CES in Las Vegas in mid January. I wanted to know which bugs they might be dealing with at the massive consumer electronics trade show.
Iâve been highlighting points made on Twitter by various sources about the COVID-19 pandemic â and the antivax movement, which as it happens will be even more destructive a force in society with this true-blue no-vaccine killer virus on the loose.
So I found the pandemic in January. In February I found the general response weâd need to preserve our medical system and suppress the spread of the virus.
I'd discovered the below graph of Philadelphia vs. St. Louis deaths from the Spanish Flu, showing how social isolation helped depress the infections and deaths in one town while the otherâs lax policy resulted in a spike of unnecessary deaths.
A response blueprint in February
I saw a German computer scientist share this Spanish Flu example of what we need to do as a society to flatten the curve of COVID
Correct public health policy saves lives
A French multinational biotech company shared this study of how public health decisions saved citizens and flattened the curve of the Spanish Flu
It was great to see a Bloomberg deep dive on the same example when it came out a few weeks later, and the term âflatten the curveâ make its way into public health communications on COVID.
Collecting resources for all in March
Click through to reach my list.
I also follow these COVID lists, click on their names to see: Kim Mai-Cutler and Brian Koppelman.
I started a Twitter list of COVID-19 expert sources in early March.
It seemed especially important to gather my own science and public safety sources (and follow other lists compiled by early pandemic watchers) at a time when the president and far too many government leaders were ignoring or downplaying the disastrous and monumental impact of this virus on the planetâs human population. The disinformation campaign against early effective action will go down in history as a genocide.
âPeople said âI donât need that leaflet - I donât live here.â
Thatâs ok, viruses love to travel! â
In early March I was activated by the Fire Department as an emergency response worker for disaster preparedness. SF had declared a health emergency the prior week. The activation meant passing out coronavirus health department leaflets downtown (wash your hands, donât touch your face [impossible for humans I believe], elbow cough, make plans).
Handing out public health COVID preparation leaflets on that busy Financial District street corner was brutal. People didnât want to hear it.
Some people laughed, some people said no!, some people said âI donât need that - I donât live here.â I thought, Thatâs ok, viruses love to travel! A handful were grateful and said âhey thanks for doing this.â They knew weâre all in it together and with 2 community transmission cases in SF that very day, the virus was already here, and also waiting in a cruise ship off the Golden Gate.
To be continuedâŠ
A knowledge service to cut the noise in todayâs infodemic
âIf you canât follow whatâs happening, you canât adequately think or act in this crucial moment.â
Trump impeachment rally - San Francisco Federal Building 12/2019. Image by me.
Todayâs info war sure is info hell, isnât it? The United Nations is calling it an âinfodemicâ.
When I talk to people â intelligent people, educated people, media and news professionals, tuned in people, random people â pretty much when I talk to everyone, they donât know at all what I know.
Or they know a lot less, or they admit they get their news from âCNNâŠand FoxNews, for balanceâ, or they simply arenât trying to follow the firehose of info flying at us these days.
The enemy is noise, the goal is clarity.
~ Jon Stewart told the New York Times this week
Most people I talk to are clinging to an outdated and irrelevant opinion or worldview like itâs a life raft.
This is a problem.
An information diet that doesnât serve you is COSTLY
during a pandemic that requires us to reenvision how we live;
in an Election Year;
when Western Liberal Democracy is under attack both domestic and foreign, with a main weapon being military-grade psy op disinformation and propaganda directed at a civilian population.
If people canât follow whatâs happening or learn the historical basis of whatâs happening or perceive the machinations of global alliances and systems including the largest law enforcement action against organized crime that the world has ever seen, they canât adequately think and act in this moment.
Itâs a costly problem that can be solved, as Jon Stewart points out, by clarity.
âFor more than a decade Iâve been following sources & stories that are coming together now. I want you to see what I see.â
Iâm an info hound as you know. Iâve been curating speciality lists of expert sources on Twitter for more than a decade, and relying on them almost exclusively for my news gathering needs through the Arab Spring and the Gezi Park Protests in Turkey. The list of 1,000 sources I mention in this post was meant to be my lens on American politics and current affairs for the 2016 Presidential Election.
Iâve been following stories that are all coming together now. And Iâm working to share that with you. So you can see what I see.
Introducing a curated knowledge & awareness project for concerned citizens
See a few news stories a dayâŠ
Subscribe to a daily Trust Is A License Nuzzle newsletter with just a few of the top news stories shared from 1,000 curated sources
Knowledge Is Power (formerly referred to as Trust Is A License, a phrase from Shefaly Yogendra) is generative journalism, a community service to inform citizens
At its core the project is a Twitter account run by a small group of diverse centrists who see all sides of global and societal threats and want to ensure our fact-based perspective gets voice and distribution in this age of extreme disinformation campaigns.
Weâre also exploring a variety of other ways to connect, present, and share this vital and contextual information that only become more relevant with each passing day. We all need to know this. Itâs our history. More on that soon.
One of our readers has described us as civil service journalism. âWhat youâre doing is generative journalism. Itâs a community service to inform citizens at a time when the Fourth Estate is dying and under attack, and news media has devolved into propaganda machines.â
âWe vet content & sources, metabolize info & amplify points to help you understand this moment in time. â
As the mainstream media failure became clear, citizen researchers and curators like me picked up the slack. At Knowledge Is Power, our focus has been on vetting the content and sources, metabolizing the information, and finding ways to underline and amplify clear points we believe are valuable to cutting through the noise and understanding this moment in time.
We hope to connect the dots for ourselves and others. We started doing this for OURSELVES. Yet, itâs for others. Without any marketing the accountâs organic reach has grown 160x in its first year.
By vetting and amplifying the work of citizen researchers, whistleblowers, journalists, social justice workers, national security experts and more, we aim to strengthen democracy and stop the playing-the-extremes-so-nothing-gets-done horseshoe that divides us.
âOur mission is to help with what comes next: when we dig out from the damage, there will be a massive need to educate people about what just happened.
â
As people begin to dig out from the damage of the cyber war/information war/total kinetic war against Western Liberal Democracy (including Trump & transnational organized crime) that we are currently experiencing in America and throughout the world, thereâs going be a need for a massive education of the American people about what just happened. Hollywood is already telling these stories. We want to help with that.
âŠor get everything we share
Follow the Trust Is A License Twitter feed to see who & what weâre highlighting & what discussions weâre a part of.
Scan some recent tweets.
Scan some top tweets.
Or subscribe to our Substack newsletter (which we may start publishing on soon!):
A message to white people: you must do the work to be anti-racist
If you're not doing the work to be anti-racist, you're not doing the work that matters to our fellow humans of color.
***This is a message to all the white people I know and don't know: WE HAVE TO GET THIS. This is on us.***
Please, and thank you: Apply yourself to see and understand structural racism, an insidious force in our institutions and society that keeps POC from partaking in the kind of life and opportunities you as a white person expect and often enjoy without question.
Then understand it some more and share what you learn with all the white people you know. This is on us.
P.S. Your white privilege cannot be renounced, you've got it for life, and it's granted to you because other people perceive you as white. It doesn't matter what you think of yourself. "Oh I may be whitish but I'm not a racist". So bear the burden of finding out what white privilege is and how to use it for good as a white ally. The #1 thing you can do is educate other white people. I'm doing that in a variety of ways. Ask me something you've been wondering, and I'll try to answer. Send me a private message if you want. I am here for questions.
Our advisor Craig Kornblau advises Google Ventures on the future of film in a streaming world
It's been wonderful for the past year and a half having Craig Kornblau advise our entertainment tech startup 10 BLOCK â and Google Venturesâ GV â on the intersection of the entertainment industry and the tech world. "The reason I decided to work with early-stage and growth companies is, having lived in big corporate America and big entertainment companies, it's really hard to find massive innovation in large companies. I think real innovation is going to come from small companies," he says in this interview about the future of film in a streaming world.
Ghost kitchens: In the news for fraud, and as a good VC investment?
I went out to dinner 2 weeks ago and ended up talking to a TV reporter for an investigative segment he was working on about the ghost kitchens of GrubHub. That particular restaurantâs owner was shocked to find his establishment being advertised on GrubHub since he does not have a listing there, and doesnât even do delivery. So who made the food that the online delivery customer ordered? And who received the customerâs cash for it?
This brand hijacking system needs an immediate revisit.
I saw that a week earlier, a local blog reported the poor conditions at a ghost kitchen.
Read broke-ass Stuartâs reporting on ghost kitchens in San Franciscoâs SOMA district.
And yet today, an industry intelligence newsletter says that "ghost kitchens are red hot" today because they let restaurants operate without brick and mortar dining locations. Thatâs PitchBook Data.
Meanwhile, the ghost kitchens turn out fraudulent food, defrauding restaurants and diners alike (as seen in the news stories above). This is a good investment? In the time of COVID19??
In the news & behind the scenes: itâs the flywheel
Scott Galloway takes on the streaming wars in this weekâs No Mercy/No Malice newsletter.
He writes
âMy colleague Sonia Marciano teaches that to achieve success, the best strategy is to find the dimension with the greatest variance â the biggest delta between best and worst. In the streaming wars, both flywheel and distribution offer the greatest variance, and monopolies dominate those categories.
âA flywheel is a disk that stores kinetic energy and then spins it out to a nearby engine. In the context of business, as the flywheel rotates it increases output or revenue without increasing input or cost. The ultimate flywheel is Amazon. Amazon Prime attracts shoppers who want a wide assortment of products with rapid fulfillment. These subscribers also enjoy the benefits of services like Amazon Prime Video, which increase the stickiness of Prime and time spent on the platform.â
Hereâs Galloway on how these flywheels, or feedback loops, can work in the world of video on demand, the world of 10 BlockâŠthe mobile streaming platform Iâve been running as chief operating officer for the past two years.
âIn the context of the streaming wars, SVOD adds momentum to the flywheel. Movies and entertainment evoke powerful emotions. The connective tissue of the flywheel is increasingly emotion. The NPS score (consumersâ emotional connection to a company) is negative to zero for ecommerce and internet companies, but itâs strong for SVOD companies. Loving Fleabag means youâll buy your next toaster from Amazon, not Target or Williams-Sonoma.â
It was interesting to read Scott Galloway today talking about the winner-take-all effect of flywheels in the context of the streaming war macrocosm. As the cofounder of a mobile streaming platform, talking about the microcosm of the flywheel we built into the product fills my days. Those emotions that drive the flywheel in our patent-pending social discovery system drive viewers to share what theyâre watching, what they think of it, and invite friends to view with them.
I took a peek back at some of my own shorthand sources and insights on flywheels and growth loops captured on a Trello card. (Trello is my favorite productivity tool at the moment, and for quite a while, BTW. <More on that later.)
Readers' reviews are a gift that keeps on giving. Thanks, Leyla!
âThe book captures the essence of Turkey and especially Turkish women in a way I have never seen before- I got emotional almost every chapterâs end!â
You know, having a book in print that people keep passing on, and people keep finding on their own, is such a gift. I just ran across this recent review of Tales from the Expat Harem by Leyla Tural, and itâs so lovely.
Thanks, Leyla!
While weâre at it, here are some other fun ones.
âI have a feeling that in time this book will be seen as a classic, as it is a unique record and most unusual. Well done to the publishers for taking a chance on it!â
Thanks to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts after reading, even Roseleen who writes âI've read it and it's over now.â
Translation by Amazon: âThat's exactly what I expected: humorous, witty never boring. Dispel clichĂ©s on the Turkish mindset, sometimes sad, but never trivial. It is also a great exercise for anyone who wants to keep in training with English, as it is perfectly understandable for those who have a good level. Perfect delivery. See you soonâ
Here's the venture team I sent to the finals at UC Berkeley's school of engineering entrepreneurship bootcamp
Flashback to celeb-spotting a seafood bar in Montmartre
Come see 10 BLOCK on Product Hunt today & let us know what you think
SXSW 2019 named us a top-10 cutting edge company this spring. Now come see our direct-to-consumer mobile streaming platform like no other at the early adopter emporium Product Hunt today, watch our movies for free, and tell us what you think.
Speaking on a panel at Digital Hollywood's Creativity Festival
Will you be at Digital Hollywood's Creativity Festival next week in Los Angeles? As 10 Blockâs cofounder I will be speaking on a panel at the Women's Summit about content -- from film/TV, internet video and influencer campaigns to games -- Wednesday at 12:30.
