Today is the last day of September, and I’m happy and relieved to see it go. I’ve been holding my breath. September is a violent month. That may seem like a ridiculous thing to say, but I think there’s some truth in it. Something about the end of the summer and the abrupt change to the fall causes some trauma. A lot of pent-up energy on the planet. September is hurricane season, and this one has been particularly bad.

A year ago yesterday, my wife’s parents were hit by a truck while crossing the street. The accident happened at 7pm, which in September, in Boston, is dark — a time of day when it wasn’t dark just a few weeks earlier. My mother-in-law spent 4 months in the hospital, most of that with her skull partially removed to relieve the swelling and hopefully stave off extensive` brain damage. A year ago today we were in a state of full shell-shock.

In the past year, she has had a miraculous recovery, and this month she actually went back to work. She’s driving, and taking care of herself. If you didn’t know her and didn’t know about the accident, you’d never suspect anything happened. It’s amazing really. The doctors have been in awe of the recovery.

We’re so thankful. And so exhausted and traumatized from the past year. And we’ve been walking on eggshells all month, feeling the season change — the air getting crisper, the night coming earlier. Feeling the feelings we felt last year at this time, and having this unconscious expectation of impending doom. I’m knocking on wood as I write this, that we’ve made it through.

It’s also Yom Kippur today — the day of atonement, the holiest day of the year, and the end of the high holidays. A time to turn the page, look back at the last year, reflect on our actions, and look forward to the new year. I like that. I’ve always liked formal turning points; somehow they make it easier to find some clarity amidst the mess.

I guess I don’t really have a point to this post, except to point out the change in the air, and wish everyone the best as they navigate the coming season.

Yesterday, in the process of cleaning out my closet and donating a bunch of old clothes, I did something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: got going creating a t-shirt quilt for my old “sentimental” t-shirts. I’m a bit of a t-shirt hoarder, especially when it comes to shirts that memorialize some special place or time in my life. I’ve got shirts from basketball tournaments in high school, the video rental store where I worked in high school (long gone), the restaurant I worked one summer during college (also out of business now), bachelor parties, Clarence’s 40th birthday, from the “Free Bieber” campaign during the SOPA/PIPA protests, etc. Lots and lots of shirts. I can’t bring myself to get rid of them, and I also never wear almost all of them.

Step in Project Repat — as the name suggests their mission is to re-patriate textile jobs. And the way they do it is by recycling people’s old t-shirts into quilts. They’ve got two factories in the US (one in VA and one in MA), where they employ full-time factory workers who convert sentimental (but useless) piles of old shirts into useful and even more sentimental and actually useful quilts. The quilts are the output, but the mission is really about creating high quality textile jobs here in the US.

Of course, this is a relatively niche business and a niche product, but they’ve scaled nicely, and according their website, have made over 175,000 quilts since 2012:

Project Repat co-founder Nathan Rothstein lays out some of their philosophy of building a successful online business — that’s appealing to consumers, competitive in the midst of Amazon, and fair to workers — in this post.

Clearly, t-shirt quilts are not the complete answer to bringing quality labor back to the US, but Project Repat seems to be doing a great job finding a niche where they can offer something unique and really excel.

In the world of startups and investing and ideas, things are always chaotic and fluid, and as such a key skill is to somehow cut through the noise and find focus. That’s on a micro level, like what do I do for the next five minutes, and on the macro level, like am I (or are we) heading in the right direction?

This may be true in other fields, but I find it to be especially true on the investing side, where situations are undefined, and there are infinity ideas and directions to explore. On the operating side, things are slightly more bounded, but there are always large questions about direction and focus.

So I find myself spending a lot of personal time working on my own mindstate, and trying to find ways to help with this challenge. One thing I have tried this year is to use a Volt Planner, which helps you structure goals on a weekly, monthly and yearly basis. I have found this to be incredibly useful, and I can write more that later. One immediate observation from using the Volt Planner is that I emerge from each session (on Monday each week) feeling a rush of energy, paired with an increased sense of focus. It’s really nice.

And that energy is really the important thing. It’s the foundation for all of the moments and decisions that happen, all day every day. The more of it you have, the better. It’s foundational.

So a little more broadly, I’ve been thinking about how important it is to optimize for energy in life. I think that is some combination of exercise, diet, sleep, and writing. Maybe that’s obvious, and the first three are things that anyone would tell you are good for your health. But “health”, while obviously good and positive (especially compared to major injury or illness) is a little abstract, and for me at least, a little hard to motivate around on an everyday basis. I suspect that will change as I get older.

Energy is the foundation of doing anything, and it feels like there are compounding / exponential results to having more. I am not saying I have figured out how to really rally myself behind this idea on a consistent basis (which is why I’m writing this), but I think it’s worth figuring out which activities give you more energy and which suck it away. Worth figuring out.

I was emailing with a friend recently, who asked:

“On the web, in order to build a platform you first need a hit app. Do you think this dynamic is different in blockchain?”

It’s a great question, and one I have been thinking about a lot lately. First, let’s unpack the idea that the way to make a “platform” on the web is by starting with a hit app. This has certainly been the case with Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, Salesforce and others — where a very successful application enabled either the consumer scale (FB and Twitter), enterprise scale (Salesforce) or infrastructure scale (Google and Amazon) for others to build on.

Identity is a particularly interesting example. To the extent that Google, Facebook and Twitter are the identity standards on the web today, those were obviously a second-order results from hit applications. So you essentially have the infrastructure or platform layer “falling out” of, or layering-under, the application layer.

But there are counter-examples, most of which are lower-level services and developer tools: Stripe, Twilio, MongoDB, etc. These are platforms first, by their nature — they exist only to have things built on top of them, and were able to achieve scale with that approach.

And thinking back to the creation of the web itself, I think it’s fair to say it was platform-first. The Internet protocol stack (TCP/IP, HTTP, SMTP, etc) is horizontal infrastructure, designed in a layered model that anticipated continued development by others (though perhaps you could argue that email was the app that drove development of that platform).

So, looking at the blockchain, what does it mean to build a platform? How will the important infrastructure features (e.g., identity, reputation, personal data, payments, etc) come to be? Will they be achieved platform-first, or will they be a second order result from something at the application layer?

In other words, will platforms on the blockchain be built bottom-up (like the original web protocols), or top-down (like the commercial web)?

In a lot of ways, the blockchain is like the original web: protocol-based and open source. Implemented by a group of collaborating peers. Dueling protocol design, white papers, and RFCs. Layered.

In other ways, the blockchain is like the commercial web: hyper growth fueled by powerful economic incentives. Economies of scale and network effects.

I don’t have a clear answer, and maybe it will be a combination of both. But it’s really interesting to think about.

The beauty, and the danger, of the internet is that it’s open to everyone. Anyone can put up a website, about pretty much anything. This “open platform” is an amazing thing, and means that innovation can come from all corners, without barriers or gatekeepers. It also introduces new challenges for how to deal with the inevitable bad things that come along with the good.

This past week, this question has come back to the foreground with the Charlottesville riots and the associated far-right websites that helped organize them. Particularly in focus has been the website “The Daily Stormer”, one of the most vocal/violent/awful neo-nazi sites on the internet. In recent days, all of the infrastructure providers that served the Daily Stormer have dropped it, and it has relocated to a Russian domain. As of this writing, it appears that Anonymous has already DDOS’d dailystormer.ru and it is offline.

One of the companies that initially resisted dropping the Stormer, but ultimately did, was (USV portfolio company) Cloudflare. Cloudflare has taken heat for some time now for its insistence not to drop the Stormer, dating back to this ProPublica article from May. In Cloudflare’s response to that article, CEO Matthew Prince included the following:

“Cloudflare is more akin to a network than a hosting provider. I’d be deeply troubled if my ISP started restricting what types of content I can access. As a network, we don’t think it’s appropriate for Cloudflare to be making those restrictions either.
That is not to say we support all the content that passes through Cloudflare’s network. We, both as an organization and as individuals, have political beliefs and views of what is right and wrong. There are institutions — law enforcement, legislatures, and courts — that have a social and political legitimacy to determine what content is legal and illegal. We follow the lead of those organizations in all the jurisdictions we operate. But, as more and more of the Internet sits behind fewer and fewer private companies, we’re concerned that the political beliefs and biases of those organizations will determine what can and cannot be online.”

This is a difficult line to walk, but it’s actually really important to the underpinnings of the Internet. To understand why, you have to think about all of the bad things that happen on the internet every day — from really bad things like neo-nazi genocide organizing (I am writing this as someone whose great grandfather was murdered for being a Jew) and child exploitation, all the way to marginally or arguably not-so-bad things like, “I don’t like what this person wrote on this website and I want it taken down”.

So, from the perspective of someone operating internet infrastructure, you are constantly bombarded with requests to take down things that people don’t like, for one reason or another. This is unsustainable for two reasons: 1) the pure scale of it, especially for larger properties handling millions or billions (or trillions, in the case of Cloudflare) pageviews and 2) platforms are almost always not in the best position to make a just determination about whether a given piece of content is legal or illegal. So the position of most large web platforms has been to delegate decisions about the legality of (user-generated) content to law enforcement, the courts, or other actors “at the edges” who are in the best position to make those determinations.

From the user/customer perspective, if you think about it, you really don’t want your ISP, or DNS provider, or hosting provider making arbitrary decisions about what speech is acceptable and what is not.

To further codify this general approach to handling content, we have something called Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act which grants internet intermediaries limited liability when it comes to handling internet traffic and user-generated content (e.g., the speech of others). Generally speaking (and I am not a lawyer) this means that companies are legally insulated from content that someone else publishes on their platform. If this were not the case, then it would be impossible, from a risk perspective, to operate any website that handled the speech or content of others (think Facebook, Dropbox, GoDaddy, etc). If you needed to be 100% certain that every piece of information that any user published on your platform didn’t violate any laws anywhere, you would simply not let anyone publish anything. Or you’d need to have some very draconian/slow editorial & approval process, so we’d have no Twitter, no Instagram, etc.

Over the years, every time a new wave of bad activity emerges on the web, there is the inevitable battle about who should be responsible for stopping it. This is what the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) of 2011 was about — this would have made internet platforms directly liable for any user-generated content that might have copyright violations in it (as opposed to the current situation where sites must comply with valid takedown notices in order to keep their immunity). This has come up again in 2017 with the introduction of the “Stop Enabling Sex Traffickers Act of 2017” that seeks to limit CDA 230 protections in the name of addressing child exploitation on the internet.

The really hard thing here, whether we’re talking about piracy, or child exploitation, or neo-nazis, is that tailoring a law that addresses those problems without having broader implications for free speech on internet platforms is really hard. And what we don’t want is a world where, rather than an environment of due process, we end up with either platforms making arbitrary, unilateral decisions about the validity of content, or we get the vigilante justice of DDOS attacks knocking websites offline.

Cloudflare has done the hard work of defending due process and freedom of expression online. It’s not easy to do this, and it is often unpopular (depending on who is doing the speaking). But in the end, they decided to drop the Daily Stormer from the Cloudflare platform. In his explanation of why he decided to make this call, Matthew Prince explained it this way, in an email to the Cloudflare team:

“This was my decision. Our terms of service reserve the right for us to terminate users of our network at our sole discretion. My rationale for making this decision was simple: the people behind the Daily Stormer are assholes and I’d had enough.
Let me be clear: this was an arbitrary decision. It was different than what I’d talked talked with our senior team about yesterday. I woke up this morning in a bad mood and decided to kick them off the Internet. I called our legal team and told them what we were going to do. I called our Trust & Safety team and had them stop the service. It was a decision I could make because I’m the CEO of a major Internet infrastructure company.
Having made that decision we now need to talk about why it is so dangerous. I’ll be posting something on our blog later today. Literally, I woke up in a bad mood and decided someone shouldn’t be allowed on the Internet. No one should have that power.”

This is intentionally provocative, and meant to help everyone understand why it’s dangerous to encourage large internet **infrastructure** providers to take editorial control. For while it may seem obvious that this is the right call in this case, there are literally millions of other cases every day which aren’t so clear, and around which we really should be aiming to have due process to guide decisions.

I would encourage you to read the follow-up piece on the Cloudflare blog discussing why they terminated the Daily Stormer – in it Matthew details out all of the kinds of players in the internet infrastructure space, what role they play, and how they impact free speech online.

In all of this, there is an important distinction between what platforms are **legally required** to preemptively take down, and what they are **within their rights** to remove. A tension in the industry is a hesitation to exercise corporate rights to remove content, at the risk of sliding towards a legal regime where platforms have a positive obligation to remove content — this is what introduces the greatest risks to free speech and due process.

Another key point, which is raised in the Cloudflare post, is the different roles played by various types of internet providers. There is a difference between low-level providers like DNS servers, backbone transit providers, etc.; and high-level applications like social networks, marketplaces, and other, more narrowly-focused applications. Generally speaking, the higher up in the stack you go, and the more competition there is at that layer, and the more specific your application or community, the more it makes sense to have community guidelines that limit or direct what kinds of activities can take place on your platform.

Lastly, none of this is to say that platforms don’t and shouldn’t partner with law enforcement and other authorities to remove illegal content and bad actors. This is actually a large part of what platforms do, every day, and it’s critical to the safe functioning of the internet and of social platforms.

But perhaps the big takeaway here is that, as we continue to discuss where enforcement and censorship should take place, we should fall back on the underlying belief that transparency, accountability and due process (and not arbitrary decisions by powerful companies or outside groups) are critical components of any solution.