Last week, I was in Amsterdam at the Next Web conference, giving a talk about "Purpose, Mission and Strategy" -- how companies can strengthen the connection between these to align efforts and make tough calls more easily (will post video when it comes online). From that talk:
The idea here being that there are tough, tough calls to be made every day, whether that's what feature to prioritize, who to hire, what market to enter, what policies to enact, or whether to back down in the face of conflict or stand up and fight. When I think about the connection between purpose, values and strategy, one of the companies that always stands out most brightly is Cloudflare. Anyone who operates a website or app probably knows Cloudflare but regular folks may not -- they provide performance and security services for millions of websites, and currently handle over 10% of global internet traffic. Sitting in that privileged position, they must have a strong sense of their purpose and values, and strong backbone when it comes to living up to those. This comes up in all kinds of ways. For example, it was recently revealed that Cloudflare had been fighting an FBI national security letter, under gag order since 2013, and even after the NSL was rescinded and no data was handed over, they continued to fight for the right to be transparent about the process:
"Early in the litigation, the FBI rescinded the NSL in July 2013 and withdrew the request for information. So no customer information was ever disclosed by Cloudflare pursuant to this NSL.Even though the request for information was no longer at issue, the NSL’s gag order remained. For nearly four years, Cloudflare has pursued its legal rights to be transparent about this request despite the threat of criminal liability."
I call that dedication to purpose and values. At the USV CEO summit a few weeks ago, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince made the comment that one way to "tell the story" of your company, both internally and externally, is to talk about things that you do or did, that others wouldn't. In this case, the story is that Cloudflare is willing to stand up and fight, even when it's well beyond their short-term corporate interests. Today, this is playing out again in the context of patent trolls. Those outside the tech industry might not be aware of the detrimental impact of this activity on the tech ecosystem and startups in particular. In a nutshell, these Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs), aka "trolls", will buy the rights to patents purely for the purpose of shaking down operating companies for settlements. The claims are almost always specious, and the strategy is to get startups to settle for just below the cost of litigating. Pay me to go away. It's a huge problem: at best an expensive distraction and at worst a company-killing scenario. That's why I am so proud to see that Cloudflare, in the face of an assertion from a patent troll, has decided not to settle, but instead is standing up to fight. And they are not just doing the bare minimum, they are going fucking nuclear. Rather than do what many or most companies would do, just to get the troll to go away, they are standing up, not just for themselves, but for the whole ecosystem. For more on the story, first read this, and then this. Cloudflare is not only going to litigate this case the full distance, but are also:
crowdfunding research to invalidate **all** of blackbirds patents
investigating blackbird's business operations to expose some of the opaque and untoward inner-workings
filing ethics complaints in IL and MA regarding the unusual and likely unethical structure of blackbird (more detail in the posts)
To tie this back to purpose and mission, here is Matthew's take on why they are digging in here:
"Cloudflare’s mission has always been to help build a better Internet. So it won’t be surprising to frequent readers of this blog that Cloudflare isn’t interested in a short term and narrow resolution of our own interests. We’re not going to reach a settlement that would pay tens of thousands of dollars to Blackbird to avoid millions in legal fees. That would only allow patent trolls to keep playing their game and preying upon other innovative companies that share our interest in making the Internet work better, especially newer and more vulnerable companies."
Kudos to Cloudflare for standing up here and doing more than they need to. If more companies follow their lead, we stand a chance to make a dent in this issue.
People often ask me how I ended up working in venture capital, and more specifically in a role that deals with policy issues ("policy" broadly speaking, including public policy, legal, "trust & safety", content & community policy, etc.). Coming from a background as a hacker / entrepreneur with an urban planning degree, how I ended up here can be a little bit puzzling. The way I like to describe it is this: From the beginning, I've been fascinated with the "experience" of things -- the way things feel. Things meaning products, places, experiences etc. I've always been super attuned to the details that make something "feel great", and I'd say the overriding theme through everything I've done is the pursuit of the root cause of "great experiences". From there, I naturally have been drawn to design: the physical construction of things. I love to make and hack, and I geek out over the minor design details of lots of things, whether that's the seam placement on a car's body panels, or the design of a crosswalk, or the entrance to a building, or the buttery UI of an app. Design is the place where people meet experience. But over time, I came to realize something else: what we design and how we design it is not an island unto itself. It's shaped -- and enabled, and often constrained -- by the rules and policies that underly the design fabric. That's true for cars, parks, buildings, cities, websites, apps, social networks, and the internet. The underlying policy is the infrastructure upon which everything is built. This first really hit me, right after college (16 years ago now), when I was reading Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown
At this year's Personal Democracy Forum, the theme was "the tech we need". One of the areas I've been focused on here is the need for "regulatory tech". In other words, tools & services to help broker the individual / government & corporation / regulator relationship. In a nutshell: we are entering the information age, and as such our fundamental models for accomplishing our goals are changing. In the case of regulation, that means a shift from the industrial, permission-based model to the internet-native, accountability based model. This is an issue I've written about many many times before. In order for this transition to happen, we need some new foundational technologies: specifically, tools and services that broker the data sharing relationship between government and the private sector. These can be vertical services (such as Airmap
Last week, I was in Amsterdam at the Next Web conference, giving a talk about "Purpose, Mission and Strategy" -- how companies can strengthen the connection between these to align efforts and make tough calls more easily (will post video when it comes online). From that talk:
The idea here being that there are tough, tough calls to be made every day, whether that's what feature to prioritize, who to hire, what market to enter, what policies to enact, or whether to back down in the face of conflict or stand up and fight. When I think about the connection between purpose, values and strategy, one of the companies that always stands out most brightly is Cloudflare. Anyone who operates a website or app probably knows Cloudflare but regular folks may not -- they provide performance and security services for millions of websites, and currently handle over 10% of global internet traffic. Sitting in that privileged position, they must have a strong sense of their purpose and values, and strong backbone when it comes to living up to those. This comes up in all kinds of ways. For example, it was recently revealed that Cloudflare had been fighting an FBI national security letter, under gag order since 2013, and even after the NSL was rescinded and no data was handed over, they continued to fight for the right to be transparent about the process:
"Early in the litigation, the FBI rescinded the NSL in July 2013 and withdrew the request for information. So no customer information was ever disclosed by Cloudflare pursuant to this NSL.Even though the request for information was no longer at issue, the NSL’s gag order remained. For nearly four years, Cloudflare has pursued its legal rights to be transparent about this request despite the threat of criminal liability."
I call that dedication to purpose and values. At the USV CEO summit a few weeks ago, Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince made the comment that one way to "tell the story" of your company, both internally and externally, is to talk about things that you do or did, that others wouldn't. In this case, the story is that Cloudflare is willing to stand up and fight, even when it's well beyond their short-term corporate interests. Today, this is playing out again in the context of patent trolls. Those outside the tech industry might not be aware of the detrimental impact of this activity on the tech ecosystem and startups in particular. In a nutshell, these Non-Practicing Entities (NPEs), aka "trolls", will buy the rights to patents purely for the purpose of shaking down operating companies for settlements. The claims are almost always specious, and the strategy is to get startups to settle for just below the cost of litigating. Pay me to go away. It's a huge problem: at best an expensive distraction and at worst a company-killing scenario. That's why I am so proud to see that Cloudflare, in the face of an assertion from a patent troll, has decided not to settle, but instead is standing up to fight. And they are not just doing the bare minimum, they are going fucking nuclear. Rather than do what many or most companies would do, just to get the troll to go away, they are standing up, not just for themselves, but for the whole ecosystem. For more on the story, first read this, and then this. Cloudflare is not only going to litigate this case the full distance, but are also:
crowdfunding research to invalidate **all** of blackbirds patents
investigating blackbird's business operations to expose some of the opaque and untoward inner-workings
filing ethics complaints in IL and MA regarding the unusual and likely unethical structure of blackbird (more detail in the posts)
To tie this back to purpose and mission, here is Matthew's take on why they are digging in here:
"Cloudflare’s mission has always been to help build a better Internet. So it won’t be surprising to frequent readers of this blog that Cloudflare isn’t interested in a short term and narrow resolution of our own interests. We’re not going to reach a settlement that would pay tens of thousands of dollars to Blackbird to avoid millions in legal fees. That would only allow patent trolls to keep playing their game and preying upon other innovative companies that share our interest in making the Internet work better, especially newer and more vulnerable companies."
Kudos to Cloudflare for standing up here and doing more than they need to. If more companies follow their lead, we stand a chance to make a dent in this issue.
People often ask me how I ended up working in venture capital, and more specifically in a role that deals with policy issues ("policy" broadly speaking, including public policy, legal, "trust & safety", content & community policy, etc.). Coming from a background as a hacker / entrepreneur with an urban planning degree, how I ended up here can be a little bit puzzling. The way I like to describe it is this: From the beginning, I've been fascinated with the "experience" of things -- the way things feel. Things meaning products, places, experiences etc. I've always been super attuned to the details that make something "feel great", and I'd say the overriding theme through everything I've done is the pursuit of the root cause of "great experiences". From there, I naturally have been drawn to design: the physical construction of things. I love to make and hack, and I geek out over the minor design details of lots of things, whether that's the seam placement on a car's body panels, or the design of a crosswalk, or the entrance to a building, or the buttery UI of an app. Design is the place where people meet experience. But over time, I came to realize something else: what we design and how we design it is not an island unto itself. It's shaped -- and enabled, and often constrained -- by the rules and policies that underly the design fabric. That's true for cars, parks, buildings, cities, websites, apps, social networks, and the internet. The underlying policy is the infrastructure upon which everything is built. This first really hit me, right after college (16 years ago now), when I was reading Cities Back from the Edge: New Life for Downtown
At this year's Personal Democracy Forum, the theme was "the tech we need". One of the areas I've been focused on here is the need for "regulatory tech". In other words, tools & services to help broker the individual / government & corporation / regulator relationship. In a nutshell: we are entering the information age, and as such our fundamental models for accomplishing our goals are changing. In the case of regulation, that means a shift from the industrial, permission-based model to the internet-native, accountability based model. This is an issue I've written about many many times before. In order for this transition to happen, we need some new foundational technologies: specifically, tools and services that broker the data sharing relationship between government and the private sector. These can be vertical services (such as Airmap
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
The Slow Hunch by Nick Grossman
Investing @ USV. Student of cities and the internet.
, a book chronicling the revitalization of many smaller downtowns across America, written by my old friend
. Before I started the book, my main thinking was: "I want to be an architect, because architects design places". Norman had told me "you don't want to be an architect." But I didn't believe him. But I distinctly remember, about halfway through the book, having an a-ha moment, where I scrawled in the margin: "I don't want to be an architect! I want to do this!". Where
this
was engaging in the planning and community engagement process that ultimately shaped the design. It hit me that this is where the really transformative decisions happened. I spent the next three years at
, working on the design of public spaces across the US (including Times Square and Washington Square Park in NYC), with an emphasis on the community process that shaped the policies, that would shape the design, that would determine the experience. The goal was all about experience, but the guiding philosophy at PPS was that you got to great experience by engaging at the people/community/policy level, and letting the design grow from there. Being a hacker and builder, I've always been drawn to computers and the internet. During my 6 years leading the "labs" group at
, a now-shuttered incubator for software and media businesses at the intersection of cities, data, and policy, I made a similar journey -- from experience, to design, to policy -- but this time focused on tech & data policy and the underpinnings of that other world we inhabit: the Internet. I started out building product -- head in the code, focused on the details -- and emerged focusing on issues like open data policy, open standards, and how we achieve an open, accessible, permissionless environment for innovation. The most satisfying achievement at OpenPlans was working with NYC's MTA (which operates the buses and subways) to
. So the common thread is: great places (physical AND virtual) are a joy and a pleasure to inhabit. Creating them and cultivating them is an art, more than a science, and is a result of the Experience ↔ Design ↔ Policy dynamic. To apply this idea a little further to the web/tech world: I think of the "policy" layer as including public policy issues (like copyright law or telecom policy) which affect the entire ecosystem, but also -- and often, more importantly -- internal policy issues, like a company's mission/values, community policies, data/privacy policies, API policies, relationship to adjacent open source communities, etc. These are the foundation upon which a company (or community, in the case of a cryptocurrency) are built, and the more thoughtfully and purposefully designed these are, the easier time the company/community will have in making hard decisions down the road. So if you think of companies like Kickstarter, or Etsy, or DuckDuckGo (all USV portfolio companies), they've invested considerable effort into their policy foundations. But it's not just "feel good" or "fuzzy bunny", mission-driven companies that this applies to. USV portfolio company Cloudflare announced yesterday that they've been
from the FBI, under gag order, since 2013, in order to protect their users' data, reinforcing their longstanding commitment to their users. This **very hard** decision was borne directly from the hard work they did at the founding of the company, to ground their activities (and the subsequent design of their product, and the experience they provide to their users) in foundational policy decisions. Or look at all the trouble that Twitter has been having recently combating the abuse problem. Or Facebook with the fake news problem. Policy in the spotlight, with a huge impact on product, design and experience. Or look at the internal turmoil with the
communities over the past 12 months as they've dealt with very difficult technical / political decisions. Lucky for us, there is so much innovation in this space, and every new cryptocurrency that launches is learning from these examples -- take
, an emerging cryptocurrency that explicitly ships with mechanisms to handle future governance issues (democracy, coded). So I guess the purpose of this post is to draw that through line, from Experience, to Design, to Policy, and show how it actually shapes nearly everything we encounter every day. What a profound and exciting challenge.
). You can see the video of the talk (10min) here: And the slides are here: The timing is apropos because here in New York State, the senate & assembly just passed a bill
. This is a very very coarse approach, that declines to regulate using an accountability-based model rather than a permission-based model. Now of course, this particular issue has been fraught for a long time, including
it shared with NYS regulators. But that situation is in fact a perfect example of the need for better tools & techniques for brokering a data-based regulatory relationship.
, a book chronicling the revitalization of many smaller downtowns across America, written by my old friend
. Before I started the book, my main thinking was: "I want to be an architect, because architects design places". Norman had told me "you don't want to be an architect." But I didn't believe him. But I distinctly remember, about halfway through the book, having an a-ha moment, where I scrawled in the margin: "I don't want to be an architect! I want to do this!". Where
this
was engaging in the planning and community engagement process that ultimately shaped the design. It hit me that this is where the really transformative decisions happened. I spent the next three years at
, working on the design of public spaces across the US (including Times Square and Washington Square Park in NYC), with an emphasis on the community process that shaped the policies, that would shape the design, that would determine the experience. The goal was all about experience, but the guiding philosophy at PPS was that you got to great experience by engaging at the people/community/policy level, and letting the design grow from there. Being a hacker and builder, I've always been drawn to computers and the internet. During my 6 years leading the "labs" group at
, a now-shuttered incubator for software and media businesses at the intersection of cities, data, and policy, I made a similar journey -- from experience, to design, to policy -- but this time focused on tech & data policy and the underpinnings of that other world we inhabit: the Internet. I started out building product -- head in the code, focused on the details -- and emerged focusing on issues like open data policy, open standards, and how we achieve an open, accessible, permissionless environment for innovation. The most satisfying achievement at OpenPlans was working with NYC's MTA (which operates the buses and subways) to
. So the common thread is: great places (physical AND virtual) are a joy and a pleasure to inhabit. Creating them and cultivating them is an art, more than a science, and is a result of the Experience ↔ Design ↔ Policy dynamic. To apply this idea a little further to the web/tech world: I think of the "policy" layer as including public policy issues (like copyright law or telecom policy) which affect the entire ecosystem, but also -- and often, more importantly -- internal policy issues, like a company's mission/values, community policies, data/privacy policies, API policies, relationship to adjacent open source communities, etc. These are the foundation upon which a company (or community, in the case of a cryptocurrency) are built, and the more thoughtfully and purposefully designed these are, the easier time the company/community will have in making hard decisions down the road. So if you think of companies like Kickstarter, or Etsy, or DuckDuckGo (all USV portfolio companies), they've invested considerable effort into their policy foundations. But it's not just "feel good" or "fuzzy bunny", mission-driven companies that this applies to. USV portfolio company Cloudflare announced yesterday that they've been
from the FBI, under gag order, since 2013, in order to protect their users' data, reinforcing their longstanding commitment to their users. This **very hard** decision was borne directly from the hard work they did at the founding of the company, to ground their activities (and the subsequent design of their product, and the experience they provide to their users) in foundational policy decisions. Or look at all the trouble that Twitter has been having recently combating the abuse problem. Or Facebook with the fake news problem. Policy in the spotlight, with a huge impact on product, design and experience. Or look at the internal turmoil with the
communities over the past 12 months as they've dealt with very difficult technical / political decisions. Lucky for us, there is so much innovation in this space, and every new cryptocurrency that launches is learning from these examples -- take
, an emerging cryptocurrency that explicitly ships with mechanisms to handle future governance issues (democracy, coded). So I guess the purpose of this post is to draw that through line, from Experience, to Design, to Policy, and show how it actually shapes nearly everything we encounter every day. What a profound and exciting challenge.
). You can see the video of the talk (10min) here: And the slides are here: The timing is apropos because here in New York State, the senate & assembly just passed a bill
. This is a very very coarse approach, that declines to regulate using an accountability-based model rather than a permission-based model. Now of course, this particular issue has been fraught for a long time, including
it shared with NYS regulators. But that situation is in fact a perfect example of the need for better tools & techniques for brokering a data-based regulatory relationship.
