Last month, I went to the (most beautiful city in the world) Amsterdam, to speak at The Next Web Conference.  I did two talks, one at a sub-event focused on tech & social issues, on the topic of Data & Power, which I will post when it comes online, and a main stage talk on the topic of Purpose, Mission & Strategy -- how to connect the three to align efforts within a company. In the talk, I take examples from throughout our portfolio of how leaders define and communicate their purpose, within their organizations and externally, and then use that to make tough strategic calls.  For example, I wrote last week about how Cloudflare is fighting hard against patent trolls, and how deciding to do that is not just a narrow corporate decision, but a tough strategic call that draws from the company's sense of purpose and mission (frankly, I explain that example much better in the post than I did in the talk). For another example, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase just posted their long-term strategy yesterday, and this another example I discuss in the talk. I've been impressed by how Coinbase's efforts are aligned internally, and by the way Brian has connected the company's purpose and the strategy. You can watch the whole video (about 25 min) here: And you can see the slides here: This was my first time giving this talk, so of course there are things I'd tune for take two.  I would in particular like to thank the awesome folks at Praytell who hosted me for a dry run of the talk and gave me great feedback and questions.  And of course I would like to thank all of the USV leaders who, over the years, have shared their stories, which were the foundation of the talk.  

As more areas of our economy become computerized and move online, more and more of what regulators need to understand will be in the source code. For example, take the VW emissions scandal:

These days, cars are an order of magnitude more complex, making it easier for manufacturers to hide cheats among the 100 million lines of code that make up a modern, premium-class vehicle. In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests. But one problem regulators confronted was that they couldn’t point to specific code that allowed the cars to do this. They could prove the symptom (high emissions on the road), but they didn’t have concrete evidence of the cause (code that circumvented US and EU standards).

Part of the challenge here is not just the volume of code, but the way it's delivered: in the case of most consumer devices, code is compiled to binary, for competitive and copyright reasons.  So, in the case of the VW scandal, researchers had to reverse-engineer the cheating, by looking at outputs and by studying firmware images. By contrast, with cryptocurrencies and blockchains, everything is open source, by definition.  If you're curious about how the bitcoin, or ethereum, or tezos networks work, you can not only read the white papers, but you can examine the source code. Because the value of cryptocurrency networks is embedded in the token, there is no longer a commercial incentive to obscure the source code -- indeed, doing so would be detrimental to the value of the network, as no one would trust a system they can't introspect. This may seem like a minor detail now, but I suspect it will become an important differentiator over time, and we'll begin to see widespread commercial and regulatory expectations for open source code over time.

Last month, I went to the (most beautiful city in the world) Amsterdam, to speak at The Next Web Conference.  I did two talks, one at a sub-event focused on tech & social issues, on the topic of Data & Power, which I will post when it comes online, and a main stage talk on the topic of Purpose, Mission & Strategy -- how to connect the three to align efforts within a company. In the talk, I take examples from throughout our portfolio of how leaders define and communicate their purpose, within their organizations and externally, and then use that to make tough strategic calls.  For example, I wrote last week about how Cloudflare is fighting hard against patent trolls, and how deciding to do that is not just a narrow corporate decision, but a tough strategic call that draws from the company's sense of purpose and mission (frankly, I explain that example much better in the post than I did in the talk). For another example, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase just posted their long-term strategy yesterday, and this another example I discuss in the talk. I've been impressed by how Coinbase's efforts are aligned internally, and by the way Brian has connected the company's purpose and the strategy. You can watch the whole video (about 25 min) here: And you can see the slides here: This was my first time giving this talk, so of course there are things I'd tune for take two.  I would in particular like to thank the awesome folks at Praytell who hosted me for a dry run of the talk and gave me great feedback and questions.  And of course I would like to thank all of the USV leaders who, over the years, have shared their stories, which were the foundation of the talk.  

As more areas of our economy become computerized and move online, more and more of what regulators need to understand will be in the source code. For example, take the VW emissions scandal:

These days, cars are an order of magnitude more complex, making it easier for manufacturers to hide cheats among the 100 million lines of code that make up a modern, premium-class vehicle. In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests. But one problem regulators confronted was that they couldn’t point to specific code that allowed the cars to do this. They could prove the symptom (high emissions on the road), but they didn’t have concrete evidence of the cause (code that circumvented US and EU standards).

Part of the challenge here is not just the volume of code, but the way it's delivered: in the case of most consumer devices, code is compiled to binary, for competitive and copyright reasons.  So, in the case of the VW scandal, researchers had to reverse-engineer the cheating, by looking at outputs and by studying firmware images. By contrast, with cryptocurrencies and blockchains, everything is open source, by definition.  If you're curious about how the bitcoin, or ethereum, or tezos networks work, you can not only read the white papers, but you can examine the source code. Because the value of cryptocurrency networks is embedded in the token, there is no longer a commercial incentive to obscure the source code -- indeed, doing so would be detrimental to the value of the network, as no one would trust a system they can't introspect. This may seem like a minor detail now, but I suspect it will become an important differentiator over time, and we'll begin to see widespread commercial and regulatory expectations for open source code over time.