#Ben Werdmuller
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It’s genuinely refreshing to see how non-profit newsrooms have been embracing the open web and the spirit of collaboration over competition. These are often resource-strapped organizations shedding light on underreported stories, many of which are local or apply to vulnerable communities. They’re usually donation-supported rather than paywalled, and the primary goal is to get the journalism out and serve the public. They’re public service organizations first and foremost.
Ben Werdmuller. How open content is transforming American journalism
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Web 2.0 as a business model only works if the crowds making and categorize information agree to be a part of the machine. Lately, they won't.
Ben Werdmuller
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ShareOpenly: Now for WordPress
Ben Werdmuller, a developer and startup founder, has recently launched ShareOpenly, a method of adding sharing links to your website content but for the modern, open, social web.
You know all those “share to Facebook” / “share to Twitter” links you see all over peoples’ websites? They’re all out of date.
Social media has evolved over the last year, yet nobody has “share to” links for Mastodon,…
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What I saw somewhat recently #97: November 22, 2022
Enjoying a martini and Leon Bridge’s Tiny Desk concert
There aren’t enough links in the world to describe the amount of information I’ve been ingesting lately. The Twitter takeover, the FTX fraud, the hacking of FTX, and the crypto winter. All while maintaining my steady diet of whacky ephemera and art inspiration topped with a dose of Mastodon and the indieweb. Phew.
PO-80 – Teenage Engineering made a vinyl record cutter in collaboration with Yuri Suzuki.
Ezra Klein interviews Patrick Collison – (Wayback link cuz paywalls) An interesting interview with the Stripe CEO, also available as a podcast episode.
Daily Routines – Readymag, which is pretty cool, asked 5 designers to describe their daily routines. Sort of a visual representation of the typical day series of posts we all did last year.
Get Blogging! – Ben Werdmuller’s call to, well, blog. I linked to it already but it bears a repeat link.
whitespace – Molly White’s newsletter. She’s been busy this year, oof.
Me, on Mastodon – I somehow feel like now is a good time to remind you that I’m on Mastodon. I don’t know why though.
Mac Miller doc – This documentary about Mac Miller is a good background. I didn’t know anything at all about Mac until recently.
Marc Rebillet’s cameras – I only recently came across this series on Youtube and, subsequently Rebillet’s fever dream of an account. Wowza.
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Get Blogging
Ben Werdmuller put together a nice site laying out current tools for blogging, and why you might want to start. If you wanted a good summary of the state of things and what to try, it’s a good site to check out!
Not much to add in, other than that I agree, it’s nice to do and it’d be swell to see more folks blogging again. Do you run a blog? Let me know, I’d love to add it to my rss feeds!
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Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
New Post has been published on http://brummy80.com/techs-ethical-crisis-over-venture-capital-goes-beyond-saudi-arabia/
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. More broadly, some founders, venture capitalists, and other investors are beginning to ask a simple but often neglected question: Where is our money coming from?
Saudi Arabia’s massive investments in American tech companies have been hard to ignore. The kingdom contributed $45 billion to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has invested in American tech companies like Doordash, Wag, WeWork, Slack, and Uber. Saudi investors have also directly joined fundraising rounds totaling $6.2 billion over the last five years, according to data gathered by Quartz, though their exact contributions were not disclosed. In the last two years, those investments have included Lyft, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company), and the virtual reality startup Magic Leap.
In 2016, when the Saudis financed $3.5 billion in Uber, gaining a board seat at the company, the investment was criticized because Saudi Arabia still forbid women from driving at the time. Otherwise, though, the kingdom wasn’t scrutinized as a major source of Silicon Valley’s wealth, despite numerous human rights abuses. (The tech industry is not alone in this regard; since Khashoggi’s murder, Saudi money in Washington DC has also attracted attention.)
In a recent blog post, Fred Wilson, the influential co-founder of Union Square Ventures, wrote how the CEO of a company he invested in asked about the identity of his partners and their interests. It was an inquiry Wilson doesn’t remember receiving in the past. “I expect to get more emails like this in the coming weeks as the startup and venture community comes to grip with the flood of money from bad actors that has found its way into the startup/tech sector over the last decade,” he wrote.
While startup founders are often very aware of the reputation of venture capital firms, they’re less likely to know who holds the hose spewing the cash VCs manage. That’s because firms aren’t under any obligation to disclose their partners. “They are often very secret,” says Ben Werdmuller, a founder and former venture capitalist at the media startup accelerator Matter.
Corporations, including tech firms, have long been criticized for operating in countries with authoritarian governments. Google has recently come under pressure by lawmakers and its own employees for reported plans to launch a censored search engine in China, for example. But accepting a major investment can be more extreme, says Kirk O. Hanson, a senior fellow at at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and a former Stanford Graduate School of Business professor.
“What’s new here is that it’s not doing business with certain people, it’s being funded, which implies that you are in a more permanent relationship with the funder than perhaps you would have been by selling products,” he explains. “If you have a major investment from someone, it becomes a part of your identity as a business.”
Many of these investments have been made through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, which have become major sources of capital in recent years.
“The problem with a sovereign wealth fund particularly is that the [government’s] policies change and the governments themselves change,” says Hanson. A fund might be “a very attractive source of investment today, but the prudent company needs to consider the ethics risk that the government will engage in questionable behavior in the future.”
State-owned Saudi funds aren’t even the half of it. The kingdom’s direct investments in American tech companies look measly compared to the $45 billion its Public Investment Fund has contributed to the $100 billion Vision Fund. Saudi Arabia reportedly wants to invest another $45 billion in a second Vision Fund, though the plan might fall apart amid the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder.
Saudi investments may also cause headaches for companies like Uber that are planning IPOs. “You have to remember that this is a story you’re going to be telling on Wall Street,” says Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, which helps institutional investors engage with companies in their portfolios. Minow says large banks look to help companies go public that have credible and sustainable investors, and that something like a major Saudi investment would be “a huge red flag.”
“That’s not just about Saudi Arabia, that’s about Russian oligarchs and whoever the next problem is going to be,” she says.
Now some founders and investors are questioning not only Saudi financing, but also other unsavory parties who may have invested in their companies and share in their wealth.
“‘Bad actors’ doesn’t simply mean money from rulers in the gulf who turn out to be cold blooded killers. It also means from regions where dictators rule viciously and restrict freedom,” Wilson wrote in his post. “It could also mean money from business interests which profit by poisoning us with opioid addiction or warm our planet with fossil fuels.”
Hanson says many startup founders have historically only considered the source of their financing in business terms, rather than ethical ones. “I would hope that Silicon Valley startups were always concerned about the source of the money, but my experience is that they most often have been concerned only if it threatens their intellectual property or creates an obligation for the right of refusal or potential acquisitions,” he says.
“We have to overcome that attitude, I think that’s very short-sighted,” Werdmuller says. “It’s actually becoming good business to be ethical, it’s become much more part of the conversation.”
Hunter Walk, a partner at the venture capital firm Homebrew, says he’s glad the origins of tech funding are being discussed, even if the catalyst for the conversation is horrific. “When Homebrew started in 2013, and through all three of our fundraisers, we’ve resolved to only take investment from [limited partners] who we believe share our values,” he said in an email. The firm has invested in successful companies like The Skimm.
Some founders think the reckoning in Silicon Valley has to go far beyond ensuring startups refrain from accepting funds from objectionable interests. Criticizing the morality of the current tech ecosystem is like “criticizing fire because it’s hot,” says Mara Zepeda, the co-founder of Zebras Unite, a movement that calls for a more ethical and inclusive startup and capital venture culture. She argues Silicon Valley VCs have always been upfront about their intention to put growth and profit above any espoused values.
Zepeda says Silicon Valley should take the current moment to reassess not only where the money has come from, but also where it goes—and who isn’t receiving a slice of the pie in the first place. All-female startups received just 2 percent of venture capital funds in 2017, while all-male teams received nearly 80 percent, according to data gathered by the VC and private equity database PitchBook. People of color have similarly been left out.
“Saudi Arabia is the tip of the iceberg if you want to follow the money in this story,” says Zepeda. “Who has access and privilege to those opportunities when it comes to capital? That’s the question we get to grapple with now.”
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Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
New Post has been published on http://brummy80.com/techs-ethical-crisis-over-venture-capital-goes-beyond-saudi-arabia/
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. More broadly, some founders, venture capitalists, and other investors are beginning to ask a simple but often neglected question: Where is our money coming from?
Saudi Arabia’s massive investments in American tech companies have been hard to ignore. The kingdom contributed $45 billion to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has invested in American tech companies like Doordash, Wag, WeWork, Slack, and Uber. Saudi investors have also directly joined fundraising rounds totaling $6.2 billion over the last five years, according to data gathered by Quartz, though their exact contributions were not disclosed. In the last two years, those investments have included Lyft, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company), and the virtual reality startup Magic Leap.
In 2016, when the Saudis financed $3.5 billion in Uber, gaining a board seat at the company, the investment was criticized because Saudi Arabia still forbid women from driving at the time. Otherwise, though, the kingdom wasn’t scrutinized as a major source of Silicon Valley’s wealth, despite numerous human rights abuses. (The tech industry is not alone in this regard; since Khashoggi’s murder, Saudi money in Washington DC has also attracted attention.)
In a recent blog post, Fred Wilson, the influential co-founder of Union Square Ventures, wrote how the CEO of a company he invested in asked about the identity of his partners and their interests. It was an inquiry Wilson doesn’t remember receiving in the past. “I expect to get more emails like this in the coming weeks as the startup and venture community comes to grip with the flood of money from bad actors that has found its way into the startup/tech sector over the last decade,” he wrote.
While startup founders are often very aware of the reputation of venture capital firms, they’re less likely to know who holds the hose spewing the cash VCs manage. That’s because firms aren’t under any obligation to disclose their partners. “They are often very secret,” says Ben Werdmuller, a founder and former venture capitalist at the media startup accelerator Matter.
Corporations, including tech firms, have long been criticized for operating in countries with authoritarian governments. Google has recently come under pressure by lawmakers and its own employees for reported plans to launch a censored search engine in China, for example. But accepting a major investment can be more extreme, says Kirk O. Hanson, a senior fellow at at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and a former Stanford Graduate School of Business professor.
“What’s new here is that it’s not doing business with certain people, it’s being funded, which implies that you are in a more permanent relationship with the funder than perhaps you would have been by selling products,” he explains. “If you have a major investment from someone, it becomes a part of your identity as a business.”
Many of these investments have been made through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, which have become major sources of capital in recent years.
“The problem with a sovereign wealth fund particularly is that the [government’s] policies change and the governments themselves change,” says Hanson. A fund might be “a very attractive source of investment today, but the prudent company needs to consider the ethics risk that the government will engage in questionable behavior in the future.”
State-owned Saudi funds aren’t even the half of it. The kingdom’s direct investments in American tech companies look measly compared to the $45 billion its Public Investment Fund has contributed to the $100 billion Vision Fund. Saudi Arabia reportedly wants to invest another $45 billion in a second Vision Fund, though the plan might fall apart amid the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder.
Saudi investments may also cause headaches for companies like Uber that are planning IPOs. “You have to remember that this is a story you’re going to be telling on Wall Street,” says Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, which helps institutional investors engage with companies in their portfolios. Minow says large banks look to help companies go public that have credible and sustainable investors, and that something like a major Saudi investment would be “a huge red flag.”
“That’s not just about Saudi Arabia, that’s about Russian oligarchs and whoever the next problem is going to be,” she says.
Now some founders and investors are questioning not only Saudi financing, but also other unsavory parties who may have invested in their companies and share in their wealth.
“‘Bad actors’ doesn’t simply mean money from rulers in the gulf who turn out to be cold blooded killers. It also means from regions where dictators rule viciously and restrict freedom,” Wilson wrote in his post. “It could also mean money from business interests which profit by poisoning us with opioid addiction or warm our planet with fossil fuels.”
Hanson says many startup founders have historically only considered the source of their financing in business terms, rather than ethical ones. “I would hope that Silicon Valley startups were always concerned about the source of the money, but my experience is that they most often have been concerned only if it threatens their intellectual property or creates an obligation for the right of refusal or potential acquisitions,” he says.
“We have to overcome that attitude, I think that’s very short-sighted,” Werdmuller says. “It’s actually becoming good business to be ethical, it’s become much more part of the conversation.”
Hunter Walk, a partner at the venture capital firm Homebrew, says he’s glad the origins of tech funding are being discussed, even if the catalyst for the conversation is horrific. “When Homebrew started in 2013, and through all three of our fundraisers, we’ve resolved to only take investment from [limited partners] who we believe share our values,” he said in an email. The firm has invested in successful companies like The Skimm.
Some founders think the reckoning in Silicon Valley has to go far beyond ensuring startups refrain from accepting funds from objectionable interests. Criticizing the morality of the current tech ecosystem is like “criticizing fire because it’s hot,” says Mara Zepeda, the co-founder of Zebras Unite, a movement that calls for a more ethical and inclusive startup and capital venture culture. She argues Silicon Valley VCs have always been upfront about their intention to put growth and profit above any espoused values.
Zepeda says Silicon Valley should take the current moment to reassess not only where the money has come from, but also where it goes—and who isn’t receiving a slice of the pie in the first place. All-female startups received just 2 percent of venture capital funds in 2017, while all-male teams received nearly 80 percent, according to data gathered by the VC and private equity database PitchBook. People of color have similarly been left out.
“Saudi Arabia is the tip of the iceberg if you want to follow the money in this story,” says Zepeda. “Who has access and privilege to those opportunities when it comes to capital? That’s the question we get to grapple with now.”
More Great WIRED Stories
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Text
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
New Post has been published on http://brummy80.com/techs-ethical-crisis-over-venture-capital-goes-beyond-saudi-arabia/
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. More broadly, some founders, venture capitalists, and other investors are beginning to ask a simple but often neglected question: Where is our money coming from?
Saudi Arabia’s massive investments in American tech companies have been hard to ignore. The kingdom contributed $45 billion to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has invested in American tech companies like Doordash, Wag, WeWork, Slack, and Uber. Saudi investors have also directly joined fundraising rounds totaling $6.2 billion over the last five years, according to data gathered by Quartz, though their exact contributions were not disclosed. In the last two years, those investments have included Lyft, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company), and the virtual reality startup Magic Leap.
In 2016, when the Saudis financed $3.5 billion in Uber, gaining a board seat at the company, the investment was criticized because Saudi Arabia still forbid women from driving at the time. Otherwise, though, the kingdom wasn’t scrutinized as a major source of Silicon Valley’s wealth, despite numerous human rights abuses. (The tech industry is not alone in this regard; since Khashoggi’s murder, Saudi money in Washington DC has also attracted attention.)
In a recent blog post, Fred Wilson, the influential co-founder of Union Square Ventures, wrote how the CEO of a company he invested in asked about the identity of his partners and their interests. It was an inquiry Wilson doesn’t remember receiving in the past. “I expect to get more emails like this in the coming weeks as the startup and venture community comes to grip with the flood of money from bad actors that has found its way into the startup/tech sector over the last decade,” he wrote.
While startup founders are often very aware of the reputation of venture capital firms, they’re less likely to know who holds the hose spewing the cash VCs manage. That’s because firms aren’t under any obligation to disclose their partners. “They are often very secret,” says Ben Werdmuller, a founder and former venture capitalist at the media startup accelerator Matter.
Corporations, including tech firms, have long been criticized for operating in countries with authoritarian governments. Google has recently come under pressure by lawmakers and its own employees for reported plans to launch a censored search engine in China, for example. But accepting a major investment can be more extreme, says Kirk O. Hanson, a senior fellow at at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and a former Stanford Graduate School of Business professor.
“What’s new here is that it’s not doing business with certain people, it’s being funded, which implies that you are in a more permanent relationship with the funder than perhaps you would have been by selling products,” he explains. “If you have a major investment from someone, it becomes a part of your identity as a business.”
Many of these investments have been made through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, which have become major sources of capital in recent years.
“The problem with a sovereign wealth fund particularly is that the [government’s] policies change and the governments themselves change,” says Hanson. A fund might be “a very attractive source of investment today, but the prudent company needs to consider the ethics risk that the government will engage in questionable behavior in the future.”
State-owned Saudi funds aren’t even the half of it. The kingdom’s direct investments in American tech companies look measly compared to the $45 billion its Public Investment Fund has contributed to the $100 billion Vision Fund. Saudi Arabia reportedly wants to invest another $45 billion in a second Vision Fund, though the plan might fall apart amid the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder.
Saudi investments may also cause headaches for companies like Uber that are planning IPOs. “You have to remember that this is a story you’re going to be telling on Wall Street,” says Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, which helps institutional investors engage with companies in their portfolios. Minow says large banks look to help companies go public that have credible and sustainable investors, and that something like a major Saudi investment would be “a huge red flag.”
“That’s not just about Saudi Arabia, that’s about Russian oligarchs and whoever the next problem is going to be,” she says.
Now some founders and investors are questioning not only Saudi financing, but also other unsavory parties who may have invested in their companies and share in their wealth.
“‘Bad actors’ doesn’t simply mean money from rulers in the gulf who turn out to be cold blooded killers. It also means from regions where dictators rule viciously and restrict freedom,” Wilson wrote in his post. “It could also mean money from business interests which profit by poisoning us with opioid addiction or warm our planet with fossil fuels.”
Hanson says many startup founders have historically only considered the source of their financing in business terms, rather than ethical ones. “I would hope that Silicon Valley startups were always concerned about the source of the money, but my experience is that they most often have been concerned only if it threatens their intellectual property or creates an obligation for the right of refusal or potential acquisitions,” he says.
“We have to overcome that attitude, I think that’s very short-sighted,” Werdmuller says. “It’s actually becoming good business to be ethical, it’s become much more part of the conversation.”
Hunter Walk, a partner at the venture capital firm Homebrew, says he’s glad the origins of tech funding are being discussed, even if the catalyst for the conversation is horrific. “When Homebrew started in 2013, and through all three of our fundraisers, we’ve resolved to only take investment from [limited partners] who we believe share our values,” he said in an email. The firm has invested in successful companies like The Skimm.
Some founders think the reckoning in Silicon Valley has to go far beyond ensuring startups refrain from accepting funds from objectionable interests. Criticizing the morality of the current tech ecosystem is like “criticizing fire because it’s hot,” says Mara Zepeda, the co-founder of Zebras Unite, a movement that calls for a more ethical and inclusive startup and capital venture culture. She argues Silicon Valley VCs have always been upfront about their intention to put growth and profit above any espoused values.
Zepeda says Silicon Valley should take the current moment to reassess not only where the money has come from, but also where it goes—and who isn’t receiving a slice of the pie in the first place. All-female startups received just 2 percent of venture capital funds in 2017, while all-male teams received nearly 80 percent, according to data gathered by the VC and private equity database PitchBook. People of color have similarly been left out.
“Saudi Arabia is the tip of the iceberg if you want to follow the money in this story,” says Zepeda. “Who has access and privilege to those opportunities when it comes to capital? That’s the question we get to grapple with now.”
More Great WIRED Stories
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Text
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
New Post has been published on http://brummy80.com/techs-ethical-crisis-over-venture-capital-goes-beyond-saudi-arabia/
Tech’s Ethical Crisis Over Venture Capital Goes Beyond Saudi Arabia
The brutal murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi at Saudi Arabia’s Istanbul consulate this month, which Turkish officials say was carried out by Saudi agents, has sparked a reckoning in Silicon Valley. The kingdom has poured billions of dollars into the tech industry, and a number of prominent startups, including darlings like Uber, WeWork, and Slack, may now need to grapple with the consequences of enriching a brutal regime. More broadly, some founders, venture capitalists, and other investors are beginning to ask a simple but often neglected question: Where is our money coming from?
Saudi Arabia’s massive investments in American tech companies have been hard to ignore. The kingdom contributed $45 billion to the SoftBank Vision Fund, which has invested in American tech companies like Doordash, Wag, WeWork, Slack, and Uber. Saudi investors have also directly joined fundraising rounds totaling $6.2 billion over the last five years, according to data gathered by Quartz, though their exact contributions were not disclosed. In the last two years, those investments have included Lyft, Snap (Snapchat’s parent company), and the virtual reality startup Magic Leap.
In 2016, when the Saudis financed $3.5 billion in Uber, gaining a board seat at the company, the investment was criticized because Saudi Arabia still forbid women from driving at the time. Otherwise, though, the kingdom wasn’t scrutinized as a major source of Silicon Valley’s wealth, despite numerous human rights abuses. (The tech industry is not alone in this regard; since Khashoggi’s murder, Saudi money in Washington DC has also attracted attention.)
In a recent blog post, Fred Wilson, the influential co-founder of Union Square Ventures, wrote how the CEO of a company he invested in asked about the identity of his partners and their interests. It was an inquiry Wilson doesn’t remember receiving in the past. “I expect to get more emails like this in the coming weeks as the startup and venture community comes to grip with the flood of money from bad actors that has found its way into the startup/tech sector over the last decade,” he wrote.
While startup founders are often very aware of the reputation of venture capital firms, they’re less likely to know who holds the hose spewing the cash VCs manage. That’s because firms aren’t under any obligation to disclose their partners. “They are often very secret,” says Ben Werdmuller, a founder and former venture capitalist at the media startup accelerator Matter.
Corporations, including tech firms, have long been criticized for operating in countries with authoritarian governments. Google has recently come under pressure by lawmakers and its own employees for reported plans to launch a censored search engine in China, for example. But accepting a major investment can be more extreme, says Kirk O. Hanson, a senior fellow at at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University and a former Stanford Graduate School of Business professor.
“What’s new here is that it’s not doing business with certain people, it’s being funded, which implies that you are in a more permanent relationship with the funder than perhaps you would have been by selling products,” he explains. “If you have a major investment from someone, it becomes a part of your identity as a business.”
Many of these investments have been made through state-owned sovereign wealth funds, which have become major sources of capital in recent years.
“The problem with a sovereign wealth fund particularly is that the [government’s] policies change and the governments themselves change,” says Hanson. A fund might be “a very attractive source of investment today, but the prudent company needs to consider the ethics risk that the government will engage in questionable behavior in the future.”
State-owned Saudi funds aren’t even the half of it. The kingdom’s direct investments in American tech companies look measly compared to the $45 billion its Public Investment Fund has contributed to the $100 billion Vision Fund. Saudi Arabia reportedly wants to invest another $45 billion in a second Vision Fund, though the plan might fall apart amid the fallout from Khashoggi’s murder.
Saudi investments may also cause headaches for companies like Uber that are planning IPOs. “You have to remember that this is a story you’re going to be telling on Wall Street,” says Nell Minow, the vice chair of ValueEdge Advisors, which helps institutional investors engage with companies in their portfolios. Minow says large banks look to help companies go public that have credible and sustainable investors, and that something like a major Saudi investment would be “a huge red flag.”
“That’s not just about Saudi Arabia, that’s about Russian oligarchs and whoever the next problem is going to be,” she says.
Now some founders and investors are questioning not only Saudi financing, but also other unsavory parties who may have invested in their companies and share in their wealth.
“‘Bad actors’ doesn’t simply mean money from rulers in the gulf who turn out to be cold blooded killers. It also means from regions where dictators rule viciously and restrict freedom,” Wilson wrote in his post. “It could also mean money from business interests which profit by poisoning us with opioid addiction or warm our planet with fossil fuels.”
Hanson says many startup founders have historically only considered the source of their financing in business terms, rather than ethical ones. “I would hope that Silicon Valley startups were always concerned about the source of the money, but my experience is that they most often have been concerned only if it threatens their intellectual property or creates an obligation for the right of refusal or potential acquisitions,” he says.
“We have to overcome that attitude, I think that’s very short-sighted,” Werdmuller says. “It’s actually becoming good business to be ethical, it’s become much more part of the conversation.”
Hunter Walk, a partner at the venture capital firm Homebrew, says he’s glad the origins of tech funding are being discussed, even if the catalyst for the conversation is horrific. “When Homebrew started in 2013, and through all three of our fundraisers, we’ve resolved to only take investment from [limited partners] who we believe share our values,” he said in an email. The firm has invested in successful companies like The Skimm.
Some founders think the reckoning in Silicon Valley has to go far beyond ensuring startups refrain from accepting funds from objectionable interests. Criticizing the morality of the current tech ecosystem is like “criticizing fire because it’s hot,” says Mara Zepeda, the co-founder of Zebras Unite, a movement that calls for a more ethical and inclusive startup and capital venture culture. She argues Silicon Valley VCs have always been upfront about their intention to put growth and profit above any espoused values.
Zepeda says Silicon Valley should take the current moment to reassess not only where the money has come from, but also where it goes—and who isn’t receiving a slice of the pie in the first place. All-female startups received just 2 percent of venture capital funds in 2017, while all-male teams received nearly 80 percent, according to data gathered by the VC and private equity database PitchBook. People of color have similarly been left out.
“Saudi Arabia is the tip of the iceberg if you want to follow the money in this story,” says Zepeda. “Who has access and privilege to those opportunities when it comes to capital? That’s the question we get to grapple with now.”
More Great WIRED Stories
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A secularised Jewish American thinks about celebrating Christmas. As a secularized Jewish American, I relate.
Ben Werdmuller: Christmas, the eighth night, and me
I’ve had essentially no personal encounters with anti-Semitism in my own life—that I’m aware of.
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Unlock wants to rebuild your feed through a decentralized paywall
The feed has become the all-powerful determiner of success for creators. Facebook, Patreon, Medium, and other platforms have amassed considerable power over creation, determining what gets seen, by who, as well as the options creators have to get paid. Larger media companies struggle to stay independent against these platforms, complicating their relationships with readers and viewers.
There once was a wholly different vision of the web, one that was far more decentralized and independent. The feed wasn’t sponsored by a company, but rather was an open protocol known as RSS — one that has died, or perhaps has become undead. Yet, that vision of an open, decentralized world still animates some people, including Julien Genestoux.
Genestoux has worked for years to empower creators to spread their content and get paid in the process. He previously founded Superfeedr, which developed a “Feed API” that built upon RSS and Atom to make feeds more useful and real-time. The company was eventually acquired by Medium, which Genestoux joined as well. He also conceived the WebSub protocol, which has been recommended by the W3C, the international standards body behind the world wide web.
Now, he wants to rethink the ways that creators get paid through a new protocol called Unlock. His mission has quickly attracted the attention of venture capitalists, with the New York-based company behind the protocol announcing today that it has raised $1.675 million in pre-seed funding led by General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures.
Unlock’s protocol provides creators the ability to add “locks” (aka smart contracts) to their creations by adding a snippet of JavaScript to their website, similar to how one would add Stripe as a payment option today. The audience for that content then buys “keys” (aka tokens) to the lock. Creators control the economy around keys — whether they expire, how much they cost to buy, and more through their settings on the lock.
This basic framework has a couple of interesting properties. First, keys are tradable — they can be sold to other people. This creates a secondary market for content on the web, which is tough to build using today’s existing paywall technology. Like used books, Unlock’s keys allow users to get delayed access to content for perhaps a more affordable price.
Genestoux also envisions Unlock being the future syndication layer of the web. Here, you might have to stretch a bit to see it, but the idea is that if locks and keys are how access to content gets shared, then Unlock has the opportunity to be the core protocol for all sharing and distribution.
To accelerate that vision, Unlock allows a creator’s supporters to reclaim some of the value of their tokens when others buy keys on there recommendation, creating a referral economy. The hope is that the incentives encourage more sharing of high-quality content, avoiding some of the fake news and other opprobrium that has hit Facebook so hard in the past two years.
Perhaps the most powerful point though is that Unlock is not a centralized platform, but rather just a protocol. Anyone can implement it on the web, and there aren’t any gatekeepers or filters between a producer and a consumer of a creative work. In this way, Unlock tracks back to RSS and other open feed protocols.
It’s an ambitious vision, and one that up until now relied pretty much exclusively on Genestoux to see it through. Unlock also announced today that it has hired its first employee, Ben Werdmuller, who was formerly an engineer at Medium and then Director of Investments at Matter., the digital media accelerator. Unlock has also published the code for its protocol on Github.
In addition to GC and Cherry, Consensys Ventures, Kindred Ventures, Betaworks, 122 West, La Famiglia, and Coinbase Ventures also joined the round.
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Is The Stream As A Design Paradigm Over?
Om asking the question as he weighs in on Ben Werdmuller’s post asking whether the ‘stream’ needs to give way to a new way of organizing?
I think no - but I understand the challenge, which is why I have been going back over my old posts and trying to get rigorous with
Categories and
Search
.. so that I can find stuff (and I recognize that it is really only me that looks to navigate the 7,000 plus posts (I know - I know)).
This is also why I am looking for ways to bulk manage my posts - so i can recategorize, without going one at a time …
2023 post Jan 8th
2023 post Jan 15th
2019 post 1st July
AND - I am not the only one, @dave also posted this today
Would someone please make a ChatGPT product that can be pointed at specific websites, and allow intelligent queries against the contents. I’d love to explore the site I’ve been writing for 28.5 years, scripting.com. Let me know. It’s worth $ to me.
💬 Dave Winer
I have not been blogging for 28.5 years and what I have got has been - well, lets call it ‘distributed’ - but slowly bringing it all together to make more sense and a flow.
By the way - the reason I think that the stream should not go is because it works. It’s how the social world works, its how places like micro blog work - and it makes sense. You go to that person’s blog and you find the very latest thoughts right there at the top of the page.
I know that it is not only one way to organize your thinking - but if we also tag, categorize, highlight posts we want to share more and and and … anything else that you may want to use - it all helps - but no single process works because you don’t know what the person visiting your blog is looking for - so you can’t organize in anticipation.
Streams controlled by algorithms or selectively highlight just part of ‘the hose’ or offer no other way to get at the thinking - yeah - not good. But as a first port of call - I cant see a way to improve - until we all have our own person AI that can make sense of our blathering - no point in me asking - hopefully someone will listen to Dave:)
// @dave @benwerd
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Favorite tweets
This is so great. https://t.co/2WecQnCwTf
— Ben Werdmuller (@benwerd) July 30, 2020
from http://twitter.com/benwerd
via IFTTT
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Go Blog More
You should blog. Yes, you. It's really easy to get started. Use whatever platform you want. And you can subscribe to all your friends' updates too.— Ben Werdmuller (@benwerd) October 5, 2022
I obviously agree, seeing as I’ve been blogging for ~20 years now. But it did get me thinking about what I’d like to see out of a modern blogging system. (More specifically, self-hosted blogging systems.)…
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