Meatspace is Lora and Sarah’s weekly digest of weird/wack/need-to-know tech news — and our warm takes on all of it.
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Dear friends,
Earlier this week, a hipster got mad at the MIT Tech Review for using his likeness in an article roasting all hipsters for looking the same. There was proverbial egg on his face tho, because the image the paper had used was not of him but in fact of ……. a different hipster that looked just like him!
Patterns exist all around us. Things happen in pairs, triplets, fractals (?) - everything old is new. In this week alone, we saw recurrence: Trump called the head of a company by the name of the company (see “Tim Apple” March 2019; “Marillyn Lockheed” in March 2018); convergence: Airbnb is acquiring HotelTonight, a bigshot in the industry it had hoped to unseat; uhh rearrangement: Mark Zuckerberg vision-boarded.
How to make sense of it all! And how to then invest in it. Sounds like a job for someone adept at finding, predicting and perhaps even DISRUPTING patterns….a venture capitalist!
We are v excited to present you now with an interview with Venture Capitalist Andy Weissman! Andy is a Managing Partner at Union Square Ventures; a co-founder of betaworks; and a person who is interested in music and books and many ideas as they do/don’t relate to VC.
Meatspace: Let’s start with the basics. Union Square Ventures focuses on investing in companies that promise to have “network effects." Can you explain, in layman's terms, what that means? What first excites you about a company, or makes you think it can grow?
Andy Weissman: Network effects relating to a service mean that said service becomes more valuable to a user with each new user that joins it. That being said, it can be hard to directly measure. Networks matter, to this investor, because the internet itself is a network - of computers, routers, people. So, network-based businesses should, in theory, be "native" businesses - they could not exist but for this network, and they use principles associated with it.
Taking that a bit further, what is interesting to me (us) right now ideas that broaden access to knowledge, capital, and well-being by leveraging networks.
You’ve been in this business for almost three decades now. What’s been the most heartening change in the industry? What’s been the most amusing change?
Most heartening change is no longer having to explain to our parents what this internet thing is. Which is also the most amusing.
One of the other most heartening things is seeing people beginning to experiment with taking agency over their technology (vs technology having agency over us). A form of culture hacking maybe in the spirit of Hoffman's Steal This Book
For example:
Obviously VCs have a way with numbers n data. But what are non-quant skills that make for unusually deft VCs?
AndyEmpathy, optimism and a sense of humor
What non-tech-related thing have you read that has most impacted how you do your work?
On the Road - because it's about freedom, spaces, music, friendships, struggling with friendships, making mistakes, a love story. But mostly it explores what it means to live life in an improvisatory manner. If you can't predict what the future is going to look like, you can surrender to the flow and just exist inside a present that is leading there, looking for clues.
Also - often we look from the outside at success and it appears to be fully formed, inevitable. What about the processes of what happened to get there? Artists and doctors are entrepreneurs - what can we learn from their journey?
These two books are particularly instructive:
Born Standing Up - Steve Martin. A craftsperson's long, detailed, struggle to find his craft and get good at it. One of the best books about "entrepreneurship" out there.
Do No Harm by Henry Marsh. What if you have achieved the pinnacle of being the best at your craft. Yet you are still haunted by the mistakes you have made. Marsh is one of the leading brain surgeons in the world.
Thank you so much, Andy!! We learned a lot from this convo and hope you all did, too! Follow Andy on Twitter here. Ty reader Nikita S for the intro!!
BAE IT’S A SNACK NO IT’S AN ENTREE
Okay one more thing on patterns then we will stop forcing this thematic frame: patterns can be comforting!! For, say, the apparent large numbers of people who plot and prep the same exact lunch every day. Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic follows some hungry professionals who reduce cognitive overhead (lmao) by prepping the same, like, salad or pb&j every day for many years. This works for some.
But at the same time…..whom among us has not eaten a tortilla with hot sauce for lunch? And/or a bowl filled with hummus and little bean chips from the office snack closet, followed by a yogurt with a Nature Valley bar crumbled in it and a banana that’s been browning in the communal snack bowl for six days? (We are just spitballing here). Improvisation, as Andy says, is key.
In NYT mag, James Lauren Keiles tracks some other hungry office nibblers who, too, craft lunches from the scraps of snacks in fancy workplaces. Read for insights into corporate culture, as well as, per Lora’s mom’s reading: “A lotta gross shit….office pizza.”
Don’t yuck this yum! Relatedly, almost as large as the divide btwn Leave and Remain is the gap between white meat and dark meat lovers; and pork loin versus pork shoulder lovers: Generally speaking, Britons gobble up the former, and the rest of Europe takes care of the rest. So, as Brexit looms, Britain leaving the EU will have implications for visas, international trade, internal governance etc but also... meat farmers’ ability to sell the whole proverbial hog. They’re quaking!
Buzzfeed made a print newspaper this week (Lora nabbed one!) and they published a lovely steak cooking spread. Buzzfeed also did the impossible and translated a Glenn Close GIF to print! But our two cents is that they should have made a flip book. Missed oppo! Next time.
EFF U PAY ME
“Happy International Women’s Day!” - La Croix, 2019
Ok you know our thoughts on corporate holidays. But we begrudgingly say: Let us celebrate! For there are many great women to celebrate//things to be mad about. First quick moment of silence to remember as we do every day that women get paid less than men for the same work (and importantly, women of color even less). This is fucked!
Aminatou Sow, in her The Cut piece about getting Paid, shares choice words on asking for money: “I don’t need to feel some sort of way about asking for $70,000 at work when Elizabeth Holmes is making hundreds of millions to kill people with her fake blood machine.”....LOL!
In an interesting twist this week, the news that Google was paying women more than men at some levels made headlines. The company then paid out raises to some men. But even if technically some women are paid more in some roles, critics still argue that this metric doesn’t address equity, or the hurdles women engineers need to deal with to rise at a place like Google. It also doesn’t address the apparently widespread trend at Google of more women getting hired into lower-ranked, lower-paid roles while more men are hired into higher-level, higher-paid roles. Will be interested to follow this more!
Also, a new study showed that women who crack jokes hurt their chances of being promoted because they are seen as disruptive…whereas men get fist pumps and economic opportunity! Banter misogyny smh.
But ultimately hooray for our friend Emma Goldberg, who wrote for the Daily Beast about how burnout culture -- and workism, and TGIM posturing -- “fries women first,” both inside and, crucially, outside of WeWorks.
MARK FACEBOOK
Mark Zuckerberg is someone who takes privacy seriously, allegedly. We know this because he uses a camera cover on his laptop. In a quick full-circle moment, Lora wanted to tell you all that she has a Lockheed Martin camera cover on her laptop, and it doesn’t matter why she has it. (Sarah uses a meatspace sticker to cover hers. Brand loyalty!)
You can also tell that Mr. Facebook values privacy because this week he said so in a treatise. We “wow”-reacted. Instead of thinking of itself as a “town square,” Facebook is pivoting to being the “living room” -- curiously, yet another basically obsolete space! (Millennials have killed living rooms.) In other words, the platform is doubling down on the things it thinks people want: Private messaging, end-to-end encryption, and ephemerality. Like secure Snapchat for words! Innovative stuff.
Ofc, many hot takes ensued. An incomplete roundup:
Axios wonders whether this private messaging emphasis will just allow already gross echo chambers to further fester
MIT Tech Review breaks down how Zuck’s definition of privacy is different from most
Wired points out the x-treme omission in Zuck’s treatise: he does not address how FB will approach ad targeting and related data collection, aka pursue the things that made it money!! (perhaps by sneaking in lil ads into our chats and/or reading them, which.... Though encryption is supposed to make that impossible, you truly never know)
The Economist writes on how the new way for FB to make money is getting businesses to use the increased “interoperability” of all FB’s platforms (like Insta, Whatsapp, and OGFB) to “provide services and accept payments” to users. Natch, “Facebook will take a cut.”
NY Mag’s Intelligencer points out that, once again, Facebook is approaching a problem only by determining more things it can do, not by eliminating problematic things it already does” (namely newsfeed)
To no one’s great surprise, this poll published on Axios shows that FB’s reputation continues to drop. :/ Amazon’s rep -- which has been shockingly high in past surveys -- stays p good. Even though it discontinued the Door Dash button :( Never let the button die!
But, in a Medium post and NYTimes scoop today, Elizabeth Warren says she would break up them all!! Big tech companies have amassed power by merging, and using proprietary marketplaces, she writes. As a result, “the number of tech startups has slumped, there are fewer high-growth young firms typical of the tech industry, and first financing rounds for tech startups have declined 22% since 2012.” She wants to bring back competition! She wants to strengthen anti-trust laws! She also dunks on Bing, because one must. Lots of people want these things, and lots of people want to fight them. We will see what Warren’s next move is.
TASTY BITES
Jeff Bezos lost control of himself when he started spending so much time with Hollywood types, apparently (NYTimes)
Bye Amazon pop-up stores! They are closing (CNBC)
But hello Amazon grocery stores (first one dropping in L.A. soon!) (WSJ)
And Amazon 4-star stores! Which inexplicably just sell random Amazon products rated 4 stars (h/t Annie P) and will expand in number (NPR)
Amanda Mull takes great look at egg freezing apps, a topic we find endlessly fascinating and odd!! (The Atlantic)
Philly banning cashless stores and New York may follow (CityLab)
Many youths were inspired to become urban planners after playing SimCity (LA Times)
These landlords are turning apartments into smart homes….whether u like it or not!! (Cnet)
Ugh tech ppl about to get so rich and prob be insufferable in SF after big IPOs. Stellar interview with ice sculptor who’s about to get a lot busier!!! (NYT)
Also, Zuck has a secret escape hatch maybe (Twitter rumor)
We read in Mel Magazine this week (again, amazing that this razor company content marketing publication is so good!) teens “fave” everything on their feed! Which is all to say: if you know any teens please ask them to follow us on Instagram!
Your faves,
Sarah and Lora