Berkeley Blog

Rise of the Tech Journalist Venture Capitalist

Om Malik, former Time Inc. reporter and founder of tech newsletter, event, and research empire GigaOm, retired today to devote his time as a tech investor to True Ventures. He's following the trajectory of former tech journalist  Stewart Alsop, who skipped from PC Letter and InfoWorld to NEA and then his own VC firm, Alsop Louie. And of course, there's the reluctant full-time VC, Mike Arrington, founder of Techcrunch and Crunchbase, its profitable research arm, who was forced by his new boss Arianna Huffington to quit the open conflict-of-interest journalism he practiced and become a full-time investor.

There's also the Techcrunch flotsam, former reporter M.G. Siegler, who probably saw a better chance at making his own fortune by joining Google Ventures rather than reporting on the success of others. The desire to make gobs of money based on insider contacts and the knowledge of how many startups have done so might become the postmodern path to gold for the modern-day journalist.

When will we see Re/code Investment Ventures? 

Perhaps former journalists might want to join forces and form their own venture fund: Jaded Journo  Investments. I'd invest in that.

 

Should I Care Whether It's Facebook or the NSA Spying on Me?

Since I really can't bother to figure out the privacy settings on Facebook or disable the cookies that follow my Google and other searches, everything I do online is transparent to these computer companies and more importantly, to the advertisers who pay to follow folk like me. So what if the NSA joins the crowd? Hey, folks, join in! Check out the details of my boring life and continue on with your boring job.

Snowden's revelations don't faze me. They don't outrage me. Maybe Angela Merkel and other world -- European -- leaders are miffed that the  British and U.S. governments can check their personal email, but then why didn't we know about Francois Hollande's affair with that youngish actress that's been going on apparently for two years until the paparazzi caught on? I guess the spy agencies were too busy checking out Merkel's comments on her wienerschnitzel and whether she was cooling off on measures to offset global warming.

Steven Levy has a feature article in this month's Wired magazine proclaiming how the U.S. government could kill the Internet by its invasion of privacy. It's a ludicrous argument because our privacy became moot as soon as Google installed AdWords, and even before that, when cookies were created by some evil marketing genius. 

Anyway, there's a positive side effect to this Normandy Beach of privacy-invasion. If celebrities  lives are always open for grabs, does that make all of us celebrities? 

 

Got Code?

Yesterday, Ali Partovi, who with his brother is cofounder of Code.org, a nonprofit that’s on the rampage to integrate computer science studies into every K-8 curriculum in the world, spoke at the monthly tech lunch I host at Berkeley Rep Theater in downtown Berkeley. Due to climate change and perhaps lunar cycles, sun flares, or Biblical prophesies, even though it’s January, it was so warm we met outside in the courtyard while stagehands shuffled behind us carrying segments of scenery for a new play, Man in a Case, starring a ballet dancer I presumed long dead but still alive – Baryshnikov.

Partovi said the majority of states in this most advanced of nations in the history of the western world (we don’t know that much about the east, which could have harbored a civilization if not more industrially advanced at least more civil and creative than ours) don’t give credit to students for taking courses in computer science. Even our esteemed University of California refuses to credit comp sci courses at the high school level for consideration to its undergraduate schools.

Why are educators the slowest to learn the lessons of the present and integrate them into what they’re teaching? Do they need 50 years of validation by academics and other pundits before they consider a new science worthy of study? Sometimes it seems as if the U.S. education system is a bottleneck to the advancement of equal opportunity rather than a promoter of knowledge – including knowledge relevant to 21^st century life – for all.

Code.org organized its first Hour of Code last December, and 20 million children participated in writing code of their own in schools throughout the world, although most of them in the U.S. As follow up, Code.org is making freely available 20 hours of computer science lessons for teachers on its site, and will be engaging in teacher instruction in three major cities, including Chicago and New York.

Asked whether any attempt will be made to train teachers in the SF Bay Area, Partovi said they are talking to the City of Oakland but it takes time and money to further the effort. Right now, he is funding the organization himself as well as getting money from Microsoft, Facebook and Google, among other tech companies.

In support of the effort to introduce comp sci into classes, participants at the lunch said that coding taught them how to think logically and gave them control over a machine as well as control over their own work. Children, Partovi said, all enjoy creating a game and this is the best way to introduce them to computer science as well as other sciences like physics and biology, which can become part of their programs.

If Code.org’s goals take off, computer science could become the new Latin.

The Exhuberance of Educators

Just before starting my fourth year of college, my housemate and I decided to throw a party for the professors we admired and secretly lusted after. They were all male in those days (I had only one female professor my entire four years at Reed), and we requested they come alone, without their wives or whatevers, decades before the introduction of “significant others.” The party was to begin at midnight.

We cleaned up our one-bedroom, uninsulated house as much as it was possible. We had just furnished it from Goodwill, and my bed, situated in a corner of the living room, released its white gobs of stuffing whenever anyone sat on the Indian bedspread covering it. At midnight, our dream of creating the ideal salon began when our sociology professor and mentor sauntered in, as if this were just a classroom, except he wasn’t wearing his usual tweed jacket.

By 2 a.m., the room was buzzing with the bloom of ideas. The door opened and Galway Kinnell, our poet in residence, strode in as if he had been out foraging for a muse. He found one in our third hostess, a recent Reed graduate and friend of my housemate who was about to fly to graduate school that morning. Her natural blonde hair Rapunzeled down below her waist and seemed to beckon Kinnell, who spent the rest of the night at her side and later driving her to the airport.

Kinnell said to me during the night, “A man can be alone but he is never lonely.” I argued with him that a woman could also be alone without being lonely, but he wouldn’t concede.

That’s all I remember about that night, except for the palpable sense of earthly exuberance in the flow of ideas. And also the wonder at a great poet who could be so mistaken about the sexes.

Fast forward 47 years to the Big Ideas Fest 2013, an exhuberant convening of educators and anyone involved with learning that took place at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, where ISKME, the host, an education institute, is based. The fest felt like a three-day all-night party with purpose: to create and spread the best tools for learning around the globe. Indeed, much of the event takes place in workshops, where participants physically design and prototype a solution to an education challenge, such as making lessons more accessible to students in developing countries.

The first keynote was by Shiza Shahid, CEO of The Malala Fund, which seeks to support education for girls in developing countries. Most of the speakers and attendees, including a team of students from a low-income high school in South San Francisco, wove social and economic justice into the fabric of learning solutions. Until the final keynote when Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and new education company BrainRush, took the stand.

Bushnell bragged about his having eight children to counter the people who have hordes of “stupid” offspring. Not aware his remark might offend participants who came from large and poverty-stricken families, to which he was alluding, Bushnell went on to attack the usefulness of a college education.

What kind of job will a degree in women’s studies get you, he asked? The audience took a deep breath and the Twitter stream swelled.

Forty-seven years later and women are still being treated as separate beings, I thought. Whereas the opening keynote affirmed the right of girls to education, the closing keynote not only denied the merits of education but also the study of women’s contribution to the history of civilization.

Someone needs to educate the Kinnells and Bushnells of the world. I think the developing world might be no more advanced on this issue than those who presume to lead the world in brilliance, a brilliance that also serve to shed light on their ignorance. 

A Euphoric Week in the East Bay

The holiday season is upon us, and for an extrovert like myself, it’s the season when Berkeley seems most bountiful. My East Bay epicenter is Berkeley but this week included a field trip to downtown Oakland’s Preservation Village, a mock-up of what Oakland might have looked like when Gertrude Stein was gestating her syntax at the turn of the 20^th century.

The Potemkin Oakland, initiated by then Mayor Jerry Brown, whose wish to draw 10,000 settlers to the city is now being fulfilled because of high rents in San Francisco, Preservation Village's Nile Hall was host to the launch of Oaktown Tech, a local Google map of tech players in Oakland, which includes companies, bloggers, open spaces, and whatevers. Mr. Lotus 1-2-3 Mitch Kapor, who runs the Kapor Center for Social Impact in Oakland, funded the venture. Susan Mernit, editor in chief of Oakland Local, an award-winning hyperlocal news site that trains and employs local journos, created an “ecosystem map” and database that might have blown Mercator’s literal-location-based mind.

I brought a bevy of clients (in high tech) to the tech-revival potpourri, including the formerly (and soon to be) famous Seymour Rubinstein, founder of MicroPro International, which developed the first commercially successful word processor, WordStar, and launched the PC revolution -- before WordStar, why would anyone want a personal computer? The Oakland technorati at this event included the politerati from Van Jones’s Rebuild the Dream and various nonprofits that bring computing to those who can't afford an Internet connection from the likes of ATT and Comcast, which monopolize the market.

Speaking of monopolies, I met a delightful author, Charlie Haas, earlier this week at a fundraiser for Arlene Blum's (my former Reed College housemate) Green Science Policy Institute, which has led the fight to eliminate toxic flame retardants in household products, such as couches. Jamie Redford’s movie, Toxic Hot Seat, about the fight to eliminate these toxins is debuting this Monday (Nov. 25) on HBO, but since I lack HBO – a monopoly on tasteful TV – I’ll wait to see it on the more democratic distributor of culture, Netflix. So I mentioned to Charlie that I bicycle, and so does he, and he recommended a mobile app called sworkit for doing a great, quick workout. He looked fit, so I checked it out and am still pleasantly aching from some of the moves.

Haas – an Oakland screenwriter and prolific, freelance magazine writer – has written the most hilarious, anti-establishment novel I’ve read since Catcher in the Rye called The Enthusiast, published in 2009 by HarperCollins. It follows the travels and travails of a college dropout who becomes an editor for a bevy of enthusiast magazines, from real ones like ultra running and spelunking to invented mix-and-match sports like kite buggying and mountain boarding. As each magazine folds or gets swallowed by Clean Page, a magazine magnate, we witness the current media disarray mirrored in the hobbyist magazine market. Haas’s attention to detail and sense of the absurdity of modern life – the name of an extreme- sports promotion company the protagonist’s girlfriend works for is called Hindenburg – makes this a rollicking read. I can’t wait for his next book, which he’s writing now.

“The real issue is politics,” said Robert Reich, a UC Berkeley professor in the Goldman School of Public Policy, in a discussion Nov. 21 with Dan Kammen, another UC professor -- of energy (didn’t know these existed!) -- who won a Nobel prize along with the rest of Al Gore’s organization studying climate change. Reich was talking about how climate change affects the poor more than the rich in a talk sponsored by CITRIS, a UC Berkeley institute focusing on science, IT, and social policy.

“Environmental degradation and inequality are responsible for much of the upheaval if not the warfare in this century,” Reich added. To resolve the crisis, which he says is immediate, “We need a new industrial revolution…and the scientific community needs to make this a frontline issue.” He urged the students in the audience to organize, mobilize, and energize. Like Charlie Haas, Reich pokes fun at the hypocrisy between our beliefs and our actions but leverages the laughs he gets to motivate his listeners to change the world. He’s a classroom comedian and one of the most loved teachers at Cal.

Finally, although I have had enough of cycling and drugs, I saw The Armstrong Lie, a documentary by Alex Gibney that was just released and only played one week in Berkeley theaters. The euphoria of bicycle racing is like the allegro con vivace in the last movement of a Beethoven symphony: it brings a rush like no other. Or maybe a rush similar to one induced by drugs. When people  don’t want to make a judgment, they say, “It’s complicated.” That’s the feeling this movie left me with. Basically, everyone is to blame: the coaches, the sponsors, the policing agencies, the media, the teammates, and Lance.

I stayed to watch the credits and saw my friend’s name: Amy Smolens, fellow Albany Strollers & Rollers advocate and professional sports video producer, who was listed as associate producer.

“What did you do?” I asked Amy in an email after seeing the film Thursday night in a theater with all of two other people, who looked as if they had dropped in to kill time. She was elated to hear her name was on the screen. She’d driven the camera car when Lance’s team was training in Santa Rosa in 2009, and she said it was the scariest experience of her life. A fearless camera person herself, she had to weave between cyclists, oncoming cars, and make sure her camera person wasn’t going to fall over a cliff while she was shooting and leaning out of the car. She wrote up the experience in  http://pedalmag.com/cody-campbell-interview-astana-camp-photos/

The Reed-Apple Zeitgeist

Am reading Isaacson’s bio of Steve Jobs, which brings back disturbing memories of my years at Reed College, from which I graduated only a few years before Jobs attended. When Isaacson describes Steve’s food fetishes, I remember the students who chose to live on a macrobiotic diet my first year – 1963 – and became so ill, they ended up in hospitals with malnutrition.

My first year at Reed, I, too like Jobs, went barefoot as a way of shedding my former, clothing-constrained life to become more attuned to nature. It resulted in a plantars wart, which had to be burned out of my foot at least twice before it went dormant. I almost felt it throbbing again when reading about Job’s bare feet at Apple.

I remember Tim Leary coming to Reed, taking LSD on the stage at the Elliot Chapel, where we had lectures, with a glass of water, sitting like Gandhi with his legs crossed over each other, and repeating his mantra of “turn on, tune in, and drop out.” I walked out, and that year a friend of mine, after taking LSD, jumped out of a dorm window and died. Many years later, I helped Leary get a gig writing a column for a Japanese computer magazine, Eye-Com, when he was sick and broke and living in L.A.

My first and only job in tech was to head marketing for a Macintosh telecom software startup in Berkeley called Software Ventures in 1986. The company was the idea of William Randolph Hearst III and his parents put up the initial cash but then made him take over running the SF Examiner because they wanted him in the newspaper business. Having been a PC user (Multimate was the wordprocessor I used), at first I didn’t find the Macintosh intuitive, but I liked the spunkiness of the Mac community and was elected to the board of BMUG, because I knew how to bring in speakers for our weekly meetings on the UC Berkeley campus.

John Sculley was CEO of Apple then, and once after talking to him about our software at some event, I realized he didn’t know anything or even care about technology, which is what Isaacson confirms in this bio. Jean-Louis Gassee used to visit us frequently, and he was the first man I’d ever seen with a small earring – a diamond stud – in his ear. He was entertaining because he used French idioms that often made inadvertently great quotes in English, but to me he seemed more concerned about his image than about Apple. Isaacson confirms this impression.

In 1988, when the NeXT debuted, both my boss, the CEO of Software Ventures, and I wanted to meet Steve Jobs. The CEO just wanted to see what Jobs was like. I wanted a NeXT computer because I liked the way it looked and because I’d always wanted the OED but couldn’t afford it, and the NeXT included the OED. We contacted Jobs and said we’d like to port our telecom software to NeXT, and since Jobs needed such an app, he invited us over.

Jobs was dressed like a French fashion model – in some black designer suit, and his hair was cut in Beatles style. He didn’t make us wait, which is what we had heard he always did. Instead, he smiled and like Houdini, carried a black briefcase, which he opened with a flourish, as if we’d find cut-off body parts inside. Instead, there was a facsimile of a NeXT computer, and we gasped with delight as he gave us a mock presentation.

In exchange for agreeing to port our software to his platform, we asked him – and got – four NeXT computers, one part-time NeXT programmer, and a tour of the state-of-the-art NeXT factory in Fremont. It seemed as clean as an operating room, and reading Isaacson’s book, I now understand why.

A year later, we returned, this time to NeXT’s new headquarters in Redwood City. The outside of the building was white stone and glass, and it felt like entering a Zen monastery. Jobs kept us waiting, and when we went into the conference room, his bare feet were up on the table. His hair hadn’t been washed, his jeans were dirty, and he had a sneer of contempt on his face that I will never forget. He only looked at my boss, never at me, and I felt like a second in a shooting duel.

He screamed and cursed as if our software had destroyed the universe….at least his universe. Did we realize what a piece of shit we had produced? Reading Isaacson’s bio, I realize now he was in trouble with NeXT, because the computer didn’t really do anything. After a month or so of gracing my desk, all the NeXT could do was offer me the OED, the complete works of Shakespeare, and some Bach, plus some weird Unix code that made no sense to me.

Many years later, my former boyfriend Fred Davis and I held a Cybersalon – a monthly event at our home to discuss technology’s impact on some aspect of culture. We invited Alan Deutschman, who had just written an unauthorized biography of Jobs, and our topic that night was whether one had to be an asshole to be a great CEO. No one could think of a technology CEO who had placed nice and won in the marketplace, so at the end of the night, we agreed that assholes make successful high-tech leaders.

At Reed, we were trained to create beautiful and original contributions to the world based on our knowledge and understanding of the past. We were also asked to obey the school’s honor code, which was somewhat akin to Google’s original commandment: to take no action that would harm others. Jobs got the first part right but utterly failed in the second. The irony is that by capitalistic standards, he was a total success.

Would Isaacson Write a Bill Gates Hagiography?

Not after seeing the play FIRST, written by Evelyn Jean Pine and directed by Michael French, which just debuted in San Francisco at Stage Werx about the seminal moment in Bill Gates's 20-year-old life when he decides to quit Harvard and also antagonize home computer users by denouncing free software as piracy at the first Altair Computer Conference organized by tech publisher David Bunnell in 1976.

According to the single-minded college drop-out who would go on to become the planet's wealthiest philanthropist, anyone who didn't pay for using his BASIC software on the Altair, the first home computer, was a thief. Ironically, when confronted by a bill collector from Harvard with a $40,000 charge for use of the school's PDP computer to write BASIC, Gates refuses to pay.

The play captures Gates's epiphanal moment, when egged on by Valentine Smith, a Richard Stallman-predecessor who argues that software like ideas should be free, he realizes that not only can he earn gobs of cash by selling his software, he can also control the world...if his software is FIRST. Although the play doesn't really explain how Gates got this vision, he understands that the future lies in personal computing.

Plenty of hilarious dialog in this short play, written by someone who knows her code as well as her characters. The actor who plays Gates, Jeremy Kahn, is a dead ringer, hunching his slim shoulders and halting in his speech as if processing information like a computer on punch cards before responding to other characters, including a waitress, the Harvard bill collector, and an IBM executive who undergoes his own transformation after taking drugs on a reservation outside the Albuquerque conference. 

Actually, at age 20, most people aren't what they later become, so perhaps there's a chance that Gates might be next in line for an Isaacson bio.

Anarchic Education Models

Last night I went to an Education Innovation Meetup hosted by the Berkeley Startup Cluster, a coalition among UC Berkeley, the City of Berkeley, and a bunch of business orgs, to attract high-tech startups and keep them based in Berkeley. A panel of four innovators in education threw out some radical ideas, including the notion that getting institutional accreditation was a waste of time.

One panelist tossed out the proposition that students should take ownership of their educational institution. This proposal is already underway in the Oregon legislature, which would allow students to pay back tuition over the course of their careers and thus make them, in a sense, part-owners of the university or college they attended.

Two teachers mentioned that freebie programs on the Internet -- such as the Open Education Resources offered by ISKME.org, a client of mine -- are not good for small schools whose teachers lack the training needed to customize the resources for their curricula. Off-the-shelf programs usually need tweaking, and tweaking takes computer skills.

Training computer engineers is the goal of Dev Boot Camp, which offers a 9-week course for $12,000 and claims that 95 percent of its graduates get jobs right after graduation. Shereef Bishay, a cofounder, says accreditation isn't needed because it's not the degree but the skills the students acquire that gets them jobs. 

Despite the hoopla about online education, particularly MOOCs, all the panelists downplayed the importance of Internet-based models of learning. Jake Samuelson with Learn Capital -- the world's largest education VC firm -- said the results for digital learning models are still not in, and it will take a few more years to determine what works and what doesn't. 

Dev Boot Camp's Bishay went even further, saying, "Online education is an impoverished education." He thinks that the future model of higher education will be similar to that of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, where authority is decentralized and learning happens in person. He says the age of the "sage on the stage" is becoming extinct.

Steven Crane, a finance teacher at the Presidio Graduate School, thinks education will become more hands on and personalized, similar to the way education works in Germany (and did in previous centuries), with internships and apprenticeships making a vigorous comeback.

No one I talked to at this event was a high-school or even a college drop-out. Many had master's and Ph.D. degrees. And even though they often dropped out of college and graduate programs, most of the high-tech CEOs today went to elite schools like Harvard and Stanford. In their attempts to scale the Ivy League education experience, companies like EdX and Coursera seem to eviscerate the essence of a personalized and one-on-one approach these institutions foster.

So Why Shouldn't Bezos Buy a Newspaper?

Tech billionaires are the new industrial tycoons, and like their predecessors, wealth derived from one commercial sector can be used to buy power and influence in the fourth estate. The Hearsts did it, the Knowlands did it, and so did the founders of the Washington Post, which Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos just bought. Tech magnates have invested in buying sports teams, movies, and foundations that are trying to restructure our education system, so why not newspapers?

Nothing is sacred except for money, and money's not sacred at all. To wit, Bezos could buy the Vatican if he wanted to and digitize the sale of penances worldwide.

On another note, it looks as if AOL Patch is in its death throes, with hundreds more layoffs being announced today. The Washington Post tried and failed at the hyperlocal approach several years ago, which should have been a warning to those who tried to follow. 

What's going to happen to the new round of unemployed journalists?

1. They write copy for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

2. They write copy for the Amazon Foundation.

3. They get paid to ghost write blogs for celebs who write for free for the Huffington Post.

4. They get paid to ghost write "auto"biographies of tech billionaires and multimillionaires like Jeff Bezos.

5. They write promos for politicans, or they run for office themselves.

 

 

 

Where in the World Will Snowden Go?

Now that the world's wackiest dictators -- Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Omar Gaddafi of Libya -- are dead, it doesn't seem any other national leader, elected or not, is willing to risk pissing off the U.S. by granting asylum to Edward J. Snowden. The no-man's-land situation applies as well to Julian Assange, another hacker who has liberated documents embarrassing to the U.S. government, and who has been holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London for more than year now. 

Given that both Snowden and Assange are hackers, and that Snowden's an avowed libertarian, it seems only fitting that Peter Thiel, champion techno-libertarian, should grant both refuge on the cruise ship he's planning to set up off the coast of the U.S. in international waters for entrepreneurs who lack U.S. visas. Thiel's said the ship is off U.S. territorial waters to facilitate startup founders without green cards but it also seems the ideal venue for harboring freedom-loving hackers. His boat -- call it the Hacker Haven -- could be the Greenpeace sanctuary for data liberators everywhere, both past and future.

Like most people who have lived at the outskirts of the McCarthy period, I'm not suprised by the revelation of broad government surveillance of personal data. Nor am I surprised that most Americans don't really care, because, I would surmise, they haven't been arrested or called to testify before grand juries or lost their jobs as a result of their digitally exposed lives. In fact, given the popularity of social media like Facebook, Americans and people across the world would seem to prefer to expose more of their lives rather than less. 

And most secrets -- like the documents spilled out by the Wikileaks channel -- are in the end what one would expect from the mouths of jaded diplomats. For the truth about the human condition, one is better off sticking to fiction.