(Fall River, MA 2012)
Published in GOOD April 12, 2013)
“Can I tell you a secret?” Jake Bronstein says in the opening seconds of his 10 year hoodie Kickstarter video. “The clothes you wear were designed to fall apart.” He goes on to explain the definition of ‘planned obsolescence’—the…
Jules Pieri, who always write eloquently about her experiences interacting with lots of start-ups around the country, wrote tonight about how sometimes crowd funding can lead start-ups down a wrong street that they can’t find a way out from. I agree. She ends her post writing—
“Whether these crowdfunded “projects” have the resources and operating skill to survive and grow into companies is the critical question. Sometimes these projects are actually getting seriously over-funded on Kickstarter, before they have proven their operating mettle or go-to-market chops.
Time is death to these young companies and businesses like Grommet are forming to separate the wheat from the chaff and then accelerate their path to scale. Otherwise Kickstarter will be producing a lot of products that are just heart-breakingly DOA.”
and this was my response:
When we were in the early stages of Project Repat (last spring), we always talked about what was going to be our Air bnb. We used this term to signify what act would create a bridge to more funding or a better response from the market. ( In 2008, before Airbnb was the giant it is now, it was out of cash, and needed a few months of runway before they received the Y
Combinator cash- so they created two cereal boxes, Obama’s O’s and McCain mcrunches and sold $30,000 worth of them).
While Paul Pierce and Kevin Garnett are running away from father time, a consumer good/apparel company is always getting chased by how long monthly run rate will be less than monthly burn rate or in other words- can the bill monster be evaded.
When a company has success with kickstarter/indiegogo or any other crowdfunding site, it buys them more time, but you never have as much time as you would like to believe, but.. it is a lifeline. In our case, we also had the time to find out what product the market really wanted, not necessarily the one we thought they would want. But like you, I’ve also seen too many recent big hits in kickstarter struggle because the business can not adapt quickly enough. In a time that crowdfunding and ‘minimum viable product’ is en vogue, start-ups like us plan less. This is a good thing in some ways because we build, ship and test quickly, but we also don’t plan for scale from the start. The theory is; let the market validate and then think of scale, but with kickstarter, or in our case, groupon grassroots, what happens if scale happens over night? When you have to go from zero to sixty in less than a second, it’s not a smooth ride, and you now have customers who are chomping at the bit, wanting their product right away. Luckily, we were able to find a new production partner that allowed us to get our product to customers in less than two months, but the final product in its first iteration was not great. We learned the hard way that it takes time for a production partner to make top quality product, and only then, do you have the ability to properly take advantage of a large acquisition of customers from a crowdfunding site. We were on the verge of shutting down, but then it was christmas time, and then we got great PR, and then we had a chance to do another Groupon Grassroots, while at the same time our product was twice as good. So the lesson from our luck, and mistakes, is that if crowdfunding is step 1, you should also plan for what happens after your product becomes a hit. It’s a time of lean start-up and crowdfunding, but the ancient skills of entrepreneurship still exist: asking the right questions, planning, and adapting to changes very quickly, which as you say, tests ‘our operating mettle.’
Lakeview, New Orleans, March 2006
For thanksgiving 2006, I returned to Boston from New Orleans. I went to family and friends events, and as soon as I said these two words, ‘New Orleans,’ it triggered an automatic response; ‘why would people rebuild a city that is under water?” In my head, I wanted to ask, ‘if Lower Manhattan was flooded, would you be asking the same question?”
And now it has happened, the Lower East side is flooded, and the images of coastal New Jersey are eerily familiar for any of us who spent time in New Orleans post-Katrina. There are boats on freeways, houses torn apart, and families desperate to find loves ones.
But how things have changed, and also stayed the same. In New Orleans, America saw thousands of African-Americans on the streets headed to the superdome, and then were bombarded with stories of looting, and now, it’s mostly white people who were affected, and the only African-American on television is the President. He stands with the Republican governor, and they both stay on message, ‘it’s not a time for politics!” Six years ago, a Republican president did little to help a Democratic city run by a Democratic governor.
There’s a few different question we should ask after natural disasters: what did we do to cause this destruction and how do we prevent it from happening in the future?
It’s the same two questions Mayor Bloomberg asked himself before making the last minute endorsement of Barack Obama. Which political leaders are going to stand for bold leadership that works to use the federal governments powers to implement real change. For too long, we have neglected our national infrastructure, and have pretended like our actions don’t lead to climate change, but we can no longer overlook it. No longer can we try to justify why we don’t need action, like;’ well, it only happens in places like New Orleans…” It can also happen in the most densely populated area of the country, which causes billions of damages and puts a screeching halt to our financial markets.
Mid-City New Orleans, summer 2006
It’s been almost four years since we had to see Dick Cheney in the news everyday running the country, but back in 2005, he and his counterparts’ cronyism had appointed Michael Brown to run FEMA, which just months before, they had almost completed gutted out. Under a Clinton administration, FEMA was a respectable, and efficient government organization, but after 9/11, it was merged into an office of the Department of Homeland Security, and lost its clout. If anyone in the administration really cared about it, Bush would not have been able to put his college roommate in charge, who’s only credential was running the International Arabian Horse Association.
(Brown is now speculating why Obama responded to Sandy so quickly, further making him look like one of the world’s most dimwitted persons)
What New Orleans and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina made clear, to anyone who still believed in the Bush administration, and there was a lot of them, he had won the electorate 51-48 in 2004, that maybe, just maybe, he was an incompetent leader, and it was dangerous to have neo-cons like this in the oval office. When the stories started coming from Gentilly, the Lower 9th, Lakeview, and Broadmoor, and it took some rescue crews almost a month to get to certain neighborhoods, enough of the electorate started to understand the tangible repercussions of a Republican administration.
Mid-city New Orleans, Summer 2006
Millions of people came down to the city and saw the destruction, and lack of progress months and years later. The thought became, maybe we should not be at two wars, since we can’t even provide basic food and water to our own citizens. A year later, in the November election, the Democrats win back the senate, and then Barack Obama rises to the national stage, in part, by clearly articulating what went wrong in New Orleans, and why we need a strong government to provide a social safety net, not just when disaster hits but for every American to have the opportunity to live a life with dignity.
Fast forward to 2012, only days away from another presidential election, and the choice is now clearer than ever. The New Jersey shore filled with Reagan democrats who left the Democratic party decades ago, are seen on national television, asking for help, and the administration along with the republican governor are touring the state, finding ways to disseminate aid as quickly as possible.
The question is definitely not should these places rebuild, that is a fact, but what kind of government do we want?
We need a federal government that provides relief and shows not only compassion during a time of crisis, but also competence. It’s a government that cares for our most vulnerable, but also knows how to convene leaders to work towards a common big vision— that all Americans deserve the chance to live comfortably in their neighborhoods, whether they are in Lower Manhattan, the Jersey shore, or New Orleans.
That is why my vote is for Barack Obama.
Ross, my business partner, his title is CEO, and I were laughing the other day as we stuffed t-shirt scraps into trash bags,
‘Imagine if we wrote this in our job description: Cut thousands of t-shirts into square foot by square foot pieces, and then wait until t-shirt scrap pile took over too…
I wrote about Opportunity Threads and the state of textile manufacturing in North Carolina in Next American City. If you haven’t seen yet, their #longreads weekly called Forefront, you are missing out.
In Force of Nature: The Unlikely Story of Wal-Mart’s Green Revolution, author Edward Humes describes how Wal-Mart shifted their approach to find real economic value in baking in their sustainability plan into their business plan. No longer does one mean ignoring the other.
Humes also shows how coalition building and showing, not telling helped the former CEO of Wal-Mart, Lee Scott and his executives see the negative impact their business was making. When Jib Ellison, who was hired by Wal-Mart to lead their sustainability plan design wanted to make a point, he didn’t just show up in their office and give a power point, he made connections. He invited the Wal-Mart leadership team to meet with dairy farmers, see the effect of global warming in Iceland, and meet with cotton farmers. In one excerpt- the woman responsible for sourcing cotton got to experience the difference between the way organic cotton was made and the traditional methods of showering the plant with chemicals. She now could identify with the magnitude of the problem because it was her eyes that were burning from being exposed to all the pesticides. The hardship of others was now her reality.
In another example: when Lee Scott saw the outpour of gratitude after Wal-Mart spent more than $17 million on Katrina relief, he saw the importance of a company that can do good and how it can dramatically change people’s views. After coming to this conclusion, he decided to undertake a dramatic change in Wal-Mart’s core business. While Wal-Mart still has many problems (it could fix a lot of them by treating their workers with dignity) they are trying to change the status quo of the modern day behemoth company and their relation to the environment.
This book is a must- read.
Excerpt from the chapter: Questions are the New Answers from the book Little Bets by Peter Sims
He talks about how people who are creative and innovative are more like anthropologists— they put themselves in a lot of different situations and make connections that others don’t.
Sims quotes Steve Jobs saying—“A lot of people in our industry haven’t had very diverse experiences. So they don’t have enough dots to connect, and they end up with very linear solutions without a broad perspective on the problems.”
There’s always more questions to ask, and more people in which to ask them.
Douglas Brinkley starts his sweeping historical account of the Ford Company with these three quotes:
“Every institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.”— Ralph Waldo Emerson
..a person educated entirely through books is only half educated…The genius of America is production; and a large percentage of our productive enterprises are headed by men who have come up from the worker’s bench.”— William Knudsen
Businessmen go down with their business because they like the old way so well they cannot bring themselves to change. One sees them all about—men who do not know that yesterday is past, and who woke up this morning with their last year’s ideas.”— Henry Ford
It is nice of Scott Lehigh to mention in the Boston Globe today that young people are more supportive of gays than people over 40. No shit. Why should we care, with all the problems that are happening around the world, what two people do in the privacy of their own home (or in public)?
What is even more difficult for me to understand is Ron “I don’t read my racist newsletter” Paul’s theories on government, and I think most young people do not find any sanity in his beliefs.
Lehigh is right to say that people under 40 are more progressive, but he is wrong to think that a majority of young people would support Paul over Obama. It is true that we have grown even more disillusioned by the political process and a president who has been bullied by freshmen congressman who feel it is evil and unholy to compromise, but I do not like being associated with Paul fans or any of the others that voted for him.
If the Republican presidential nomination process were not such a joke, Paul would not get any attention for actually suggesting solutions to problems. For most of the candidates, they are still campaigning like its 2000 and we have not experienced the Great Recession and had to fight two wars. Paul actually addresses our debt problem, but his solutions are delusional and even though we are young, we know that they aren’t viable.
Next time Lehigh writes about young people and what they believe, he should note that almost 60% of people between the age of 18-29 voted for Obama in 2008, and I assume a similar amount will strike the lever for the president in ‘12. Yes, Paul and his fringe voters have their time in the sun, but they definitely don’t deserve to be idealized in the Boston Globe.
Last summer, Brian C. Mooney, untangled the web of policy and politics and told a clear story on how health care reform happened in Massachusetts. This week, Michael Kranish and Scott Helman, two Globe writers, told a similar story in their new book The Real Romney. The clip I created is more about the politics and the cast of characters that were involved in pushing the bill forward, and it’s worth reading more to fully understand the complexities and results of the reform. The next step is to reign in the costs, but in 2012, 99% of people in Massachusetts have health care and more businesses are providing care to their employees.
I spent some time watching Khan Academy videos this weekend, and was impressed with Khan’s teaching ability. The dashboard feature that teachers can use to track students progress has the potential to transform the traditional education methods, and Khan, deservedly so, is getting a lot of attention and money for his innovative approach.
For math this is a superb approach. As Khan alludes to, the last thing you want when you are trying to understand something is having someone standing over you asking, “Do you get it?” This way, students can learn at their own pace, and can come to class to work in groups or do more creative exercises that make the subject applicable to real life.
To teach history, and get students excited about a story, a presentation with more photographs would be useful. In the video above, I created a preview for the book Going Down Jericho Road by Michael Honey. I am hoping it can teach people a relevant story about why King was in Memphis at the time of his death and shine a light on some of the extraordinary people who fought for the rights of workers, and get people interested in reading Honey’s book.
I was struck by some of the comments from my New Prosperity article. I like the question from Rick Riker— “If you were going to build an educational system from scratch, would it look like this? We both seem to think no.” Yes, we would never create a system that doesn’t work for such a large part of the population.
Chet Ensign, 60, writes, “Don’t look at the world like it’s a peg board and try to shape yourself to fit one of the holes; look at the world like it’s a lump of clay and try to turn it into something more to your liking.”
Aaron Gerry says “ I am a firm believer that you learn best by doing. Put another way, a well-rounded education involves experiential learning; coupling theory in the context of what you know with real world practice.
The Times had a superb #longreads piece on the scam of the online cyber schools. Students are not learning, the software is faulty, but these for-profit companies continue to grow. They target low-income school districts where they can get more money from the government per pupil, and then offer a low quality product, and take the profits to their shareholders. The CEO makes 5million dollars. This is not the way to use technology for education, and hopefully this company will get brought down as more people are aware of the exploitation.
Back to the Basics: Financial Literacy and Civic Engagement
I remember the moment I couldn’t be in high school anymore. It was the fall of my senior year, and my peers and I were doing the minimal amount of work possible in order to best prepare for college applications. The learning was over, and now it was simply busy work required to pass the state course credit regulations. My parents observed the way I would come home physically and emotionally drained, so we came up with a solution. At Lexington High School, only four credits were needed to graduate entering senior year, so technically one could leave after the first semester. And just like that, I left. In the spring semester, I took the History of Mexico and the History of the United State since 1945 at Suffolk. It was a pretty nice arrangement, and looking back, I have no idea how I got away with it. I took one class a day and came back for high school track. I was able to get college credits, learn what college courses were like, and not have to spend a majority of my time watching the clock tick away.
Ten years after my escape from high school, my generation faces a gloomy future. Almost once a week, The New York Times publishes an article analyzing the dire straits of generation Y, and the challenges it faces. One week it was the pipe dream of law schools. Law students are racking up six figures in debt, without a guarantee on a meaningful high paying job and the pension that comes with it. Another week, an article described how the “the best and the brightest” who headed to Wall Street now find themselves back at home, jobless, due to a first-in, first-out policy as the big firms shrink. This past week Adam Davidson wrote about what the people at Occupy protests already recognize: the social contract is over. “It used to be that if you worked hard, you were guaranteed a certain kind of life. There are reasons success is no longer a straight shot.” The average Gen Y person has $25,000 in college debt, and only one in five of us have a job.
The status quo is not working. Many high schools are not preparing students for college and/or financial success. When students drop out of school now, they are most likely going to end up being the financial responsibility of the federal and state government. I am proposing a different way for our country to do post-secondary education. It may not work for everyone, but we need to start the conversation somewhere.
Let’s start with the junior year of high school. This is an intense year when academic rigor increases. My U.S. history teacher helped me find my passion by encouraging me to learn the stories (and learn about the character) of the people who built this country. I learned the facts, and I learned how to research, develop, and put together my own arguments. I was lucky to have a great teacher, but in other subjects like math and science that were more challenging, I struggled. While it was important for me to be taking math, at the minimum I should have been taught basic financial literacy. How does the stock market work? Why do companies sell shares? What does a bank do and how does it make money? What are mutual funds? What is the benefit of car and life insurance? What do I need to know about student loans? What’s the difference between the debt ceiling and the deficit? Our country expects us to know this stuff, and then when we run up credit cards, take out predatory loans and foreclose on our houses, it’s our fault.
For others, the math comes easy, but they never learn civics. At some point in school, we are given an overview of the functions of our government, but by the time we can vote, we are expected to spend our time focusing on getting into college. As we get ready to make a voting decision, this is the time when civics education is crucial. We need to know what decisions our local government makes compared to the federal. What’s the difference between Congress and the Senate? How does federal policy affect our daily lives? What role do the courts play? How does a law getting ratified? The list goes on, but like sex education we get a few of the basics and are expected to make the right decisions with limited information about the details.
Once we hear back from colleges in the fall of our senior year, or whether or not we even go to college, rather than spend six months watching the time pass, how about high school students go through an extensive financial literacy and civics program? Whatever occupation we choose, these skills are necessary. Let’s not just stay the course because of tradition. Let’s shift from a rigorous testing environment to set education on a new trajectory.
When I visited my sister in the fall of 2006 at Yale, I was amazed by the resources at her disposal. Every day an amazing leader would visit the school, and pass along wisdom to the future leaders of the world. It was hard for me to imagine myself really taking advantage of this at 18 and 19. I don’t think I was alone to not really know what I was doing in college during those first few years. I was learning, but could have used some more real world experience. For many, college is the next step on a path that seems to be set by someone else. For many others, college is not even an option. Something has to give.
There are programs like Global Citizen Year, which gives high school graduates the opportunity to volunteer around the world. Students take a year off and come back more prepared to take advantage of resources at their school. Americorps programs likeCity Year give students the opportunity to do this work in American cities. We need more programs like this. The NBA makes players spend at least a year in college, while colleges should think about making it mandatory for students to spend a year volunteering before enrolling. There are many 18 year olds who are ready to begin a rigorous academic experience after high school, but this does not mean that they should not be exposed to the realities of a country that has real problems to fix.
If this shift happens, young people will show up for college more prepared, more focused and ready to build their skills. They will probably have already failed, learned from their mistakes, and be better able to deal with the stress of higher education.
I’d go further to say the undergraduate experience should not be more than two years. After two years, students will have a B.A. They will be 21 or 22, and then they can sign up for a new kind of service to our country by joining a program that will have them teaching financial literacy and civics to high school students. For two months, these recent grads might can attend an intensive financial literacy and civics training session. As part of the program they can learn teaching strategies. Upon completion, let’s deploy the new ‘experts’ as instructors around the country. For a year or two, these instructors can go and help other young people become active members of society.
After finishing this service, recent grads might enter into a trade school or an apprenticeship. For every year that they do a program like Americorps, their higher education is heavily subsidized—not just a $5,000 stipend as it is today. The best way to learn 21st Century skills—thinking critically, analyzing data quickly, interacting with diverse groups of people—is to go out and do it all everyday.
Let’s face it, our education system no longer works. Students are dropping out at record pace, and even if they make it through, they are in debt, and usually don’t have the skills that can get them decent-paying meaningful jobs. We have a school to prison or debt pipeline. Too many people are either behind bars or are figuratively locked up with debt and have no way of getting out. Only bold, revolutionary thinking will get us out of it. As Thomas Friedman said, “that used to be us.” We were the ones who built a society where every returning soldier had the opportunity to make their lives better for their kids. They came back from a war in Europe with money for school and a house. Now they come back from the Middle East with PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) and no job prospects. Let’s get back the basics by taking on the responsibility of preparing young people to become financially independent, civically and socially-conscious adults, able to make their own way in the world.
Nathan Rothstein himself is on a long windy path to success. He spent four years working on recovery projects in New Orleans, is an active member of the Boston entrepreneurship community, and now works at the DailyFeats. Nathan has been featured in The Boston Globe, USA Today, NECN, and The New Orleans Times-Picayune for his work. He has presented workshops on the subject of how young people can make a social impact at Yale, UMass-Amherst, Howard, MIT, Harvard, and Tulane University. He also volunteers at Charlestown High School with the Build program and is on the Public Policy committee for the Jewish Community Relations Council. Learn more at nathanrothstein.com.
I have a blockbuster deal in mind. It’s non-traditional, but I think it would satisfy many die-hard NBA fans. Here is the deal—the 2011-12 NHL season, the 2012 MLB season, 2012 Presidential election and throw in John Lackey for the NBA season to start on November 1st. Remember— Blake Griffin is playing at the (whatever bank paid this month) Garden in the second week of the season, and that is a must-see for all Celtics fans. We don’t need Theo Epstein to approve, let me just get one yay on twitter. Ok, I got a retweet— deal was approved.
Unfortunately, the 2012 presidential election will still make us all dumber as candidates will go down the slippery slope of trying to reach the elusive independent voter and sink to the lowest common denominator, and more hockey highlights will creep into the daily Sportscenter top 10. This gives me the chills. As the leaves turn orange, there is nothing I would rather be talking about than who the Celtics will sign with their five remaining roster spots, but I have to resort to a discussion on the lockout.
Every time I start reading a story on the lockout, I stop myself, and ask, “do I even care?” The answer is no- I just want my NBA back. Most of the owners have made a lot of money in their lives, and I always thought the reason you buy a franchise is to show off how much money you have, not try to make even more money. But I guess that’s why I’m not in their position.
I also think the NBA has a great leader in Derek Fisher . He’s a stand up guy and the owners would have nothing if Kevin Durant couldn’t excite fans around the world, and Nate Robinson didn’t wave his towel on the bench. After the 2010-2011, the NBA may have never been as well regarded. The drug problems of the early 80s were a distant after thought, the post-mortem depression of Jordan retiring and then being re-born was long gone, and the league had discovered and developed a new generation of stars. Despite the youthful influx of premier talent, an experienced team ultimately ended up the winner. The NBA was at its peak, but then fell off the cliff.
David Stern deserves a lot of credit as a businessman for helping to make the NBA a global, and very wealthy brand, but this nonsense has to stop. The millions that both sides are fighting for right now is an insult to the millions of Americans who will never make anything close to what these guys make. The NBA player at the end of the bench now makes $475,000, which puts him in the top 1%. For most people that is enough. While the owners need to realize that they are not what the fans come to see, the players should at least acknowledge how absurd it is, that someone like Brian Scalabrine can make $15 million dollars. Let’s get the NBA back, or all year I will just be working on my Pinterest board of 90s basketball players, and that won’t win me any friends.
I wrote yesterday about #occupyboston, and why it makes sense to go to the streets. It seems like every other action has led to compromise and Republicans winning the good sentiment/pr of the American people.
Krugman agrees, and gives a recap of what has happened in three short acts:
In the first act, bankers took advantage of deregulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating huge bubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — but bankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached, even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’ sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on the people who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they still possessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.
