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Month: October 2020

I’ve Got 14 Billion Problems with Politics and This Ain’t One

by Charlie O'Donnell

$14 billion.

That’s how much money was spent across federal and congressional races in 2020 and that’s not even counting local elections.

Is it any wonder people are saying they’re tired of politics?

Just today, I turned on the radio in the car and heard an add bashing a local politician that I know well. It was full of gloom and doom about New York City—a vision of crime and despair that just doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening here on the ground. It was paid for by “Safe Together NY, Inc.”

I was curious who Safe Together actually was, and couldn’t find the names of the people involved very easily. All I found was a Treasurer, Cabell Hobbs, who seems to be putting up a lot of these shadowy groups all around the country, and a mention that a billionaire donor made a $1.7mm donation in order to flip the state senate in a way that doesn’t actually reflect the population base of the state.

I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on—it’s tough to be for blind pools of money buying up radio ads against local candidates without someone’s name attached to them.

You’ve got a problem with politics? Think all candidates are corrupt?

It’s the money, not the politics.

And it’s not just the ad buys.

It’s the business of political news as well. Whether it’s Facebook or Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, YouTube, Twitter or Spotify—there’s a lot of money out there being made keeping us (Read more...)

I’ve Got 14 Billion Problems with Politics and This Ain’t One

by Charlie O'Donnell

$14 billion.

That’s how much money was spent across federal and congressional races in 2020 and that’s not even counting local elections.

Is it any wonder people are saying they’re tired of politics?

Just today, I turned on the radio in the car and heard an add bashing a local politician that I know well. It was full of gloom and doom about New York City—a vision of crime and despair that just doesn’t reflect what’s actually happening here on the ground. It was paid for by “Safe Together NY, Inc.”

I was curious who Safe Together actually was, and couldn’t find the names of the people involved very easily. All I found was a Treasurer, Cabell Hobbs, who seems to be putting up a lot of these shadowy groups all around the country, and a mention that a billionaire donor made a $1.7mm donation in order to flip the state senate in a way that doesn’t actually reflect the population base of the state.

I don’t care which side of the aisle you’re on—it’s tough to be for blind pools of money buying up radio ads against local candidates without someone’s name attached to them.

You’ve got a problem with politics? Think all candidates are corrupt?

It’s the money, not the politics.

And it’s not just the ad buys.

It’s the business of political news as well. Whether it’s Facebook or Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, YouTube, Twitter or Spotify—there’s a lot of money out there being made keeping us (Read more...)

Market definitions and tech monopolies

by Benedict Evans

One of the basic building blocks of any competition case is market definition. If you’re claiming that a company has market dominance, and that it’s abusing that dominance, what market are we talking about? Very obviously, the company being prosecuted tries to draw the definition as widely as possible - ‘we compete with the entire planet!’ - and the prosecutor tries to draw it as narrowly as possible - ‘Ferrari has a monopoly of rear-engined Italian sport cars with horse logos!’

The fun part of this is that both of these definitions are true, and so you have dig rather deeper and work out what problem you’re trying to solve to work out what definition to use, because very often, picking the definition decides the outcome of the case, before it’s even started.

These questions come up a lot in talking about Amazon. If you read the accounts and do the numbers, you can work out that it has about 40% of US ecommerce (I wrote about this here). But US ecommerce is only part of total US retail - it was about 16% in 2019 and this year, with lockdown, it’s spiked to a bit over 20%.

2020 09 New Normal.001.png

So, does Amazon have ~40% of ecommerce or ~10% of retail? Amazon’s lawyers would argue, entirely reasonably, that Amazon competes with Walmart, Costco, Macy’s and Safeway - that it competes with other large retailers, not just ‘online’ retailers. Indeed, many people who argue most strongly for antitrust intervention against Amazon do (Read more...)

Market definitions and tech monopolies

by Benedict Evans

One of the basic building blocks of any competition case is market definition. If you’re claiming that a company has market dominance, and that it’s abusing that dominance, what market are we talking about? Very obviously, the company being prosecuted tries to draw the definition as widely as possible - ‘we compete with the entire planet!’ - and the prosecutor tries to draw it as narrowly as possible - ‘Ferrari has a monopoly of rear-engined Italian sport cars with horse logos!’

The fun part of this is that both of these definitions are true, and so you have dig rather deeper and work out what problem you’re trying to solve to work out what definition to use, because very often, picking the definition decides the outcome of the case, before it’s even started.

These questions come up a lot in talking about Amazon. If you read the accounts and do the numbers, you can work out that it has about 40% of US ecommerce (I wrote about this here). But US ecommerce is only part of total US retail - it was about 16% in 2019 and this year, with lockdown, it’s spiked to a bit over 20%.

2020 09 New Normal.001.png

So, does Amazon have ~40% of ecommerce or ~10% of retail? Amazon’s lawyers would argue, entirely reasonably, that Amazon competes with Walmart, Costco, Macy’s and Safeway - that it competes with other large retailers, not just ‘online’ retailers. Indeed, many people who argue most strongly for antitrust intervention against Amazon do (Read more...)

How Business Leaders Can Contribute to Civic Engagement This Election

by Reid Hoffman
This post is by Reid Hoffman from Reid Hoffman

Since states around the country began offering early voting in mid-September, inspiring images of citizens lining up to exercise their franchise have become commonplace. In some cities, they’re showing up well before dawn to claim their place in line. In others, they endure rainstorms or turn the wait in line into an outdoor dance party. 

The electorate’s enthusiasm extends to mail-in voting as well. According to the U.S. Elections Project, more than 90 million Americans requested absentee ballots this year, and as of October 30th, more than 55 million of them have already been returned.

All told, we’re seeing massive voter engagement, with predictions that “a record 150 million votes may be cast and turnout rates could be higher than in any presidential election since 1908.” 

This year, I hope business leaders in communities across the U.S. mirror this engagement. While many businesses and business leaders understandably refrain from explicit partisan engagement because their ultimate goal is to serve their communities at large, the current moment offers a clear chance to do that. And there’s a real need to do so as well.

In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic and the massive commercial shutdowns that have arisen because of it, the central role that business plays in America’s civic life has never been clearer. While business obviously forms the basis of our economic prosperity, our jobs and workplaces also create the relationships and routines that form a substantial part of our individual identities. In any (Read more...)

The Coming Fight for Control of the Internet

by Continuations by Albert Wenger

I have been blogging very little, as I have been swamped with a big and exciting work project. As the peak effort on that is now past, I look forward to writing more on Continuations again, as well as taking another turn revising my book The World After Capital. In the meantime, here are some observations on the most recent iteration of the debate around regulating large tech companies generally, the role of Section 230 specifically and how these relate to speech on the Internet. Topics that I have been writing about for many years.

First, information cascades are real and have been known to be a problem for a long time. Both through low effort enduser actions (such as a retweet) and through algorithmic amplification (one user’s like winds up on others’ timelines) “news” travels fast. As has been well studied the more outrageous it is, the faster it travels.

Second, this problem has been known for a long time and one of Twitter’s and Facebook’s biggest failings has been to do nothing about it, while at the same time suppressing third party efforts. Twitter’s handling of some links last week by simply not allowing them to be posted was a ham fisted attempt to rectify this last minute before an election. A later and broader iteration aimed at slowing down retweets is more of a step in the right direction.

Third, it is clear that Facebook is back to selling out everyone else with Zuckerberg’s support for undoing (Read more...)

Investor Stories 164: Post Mortems (Tunguz, Isford, Casnocha, Reum)

by Nick Moran

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:

  • Tom Tunguz
  • Grace Isford
  • Ben Casnocha
  • Courtney Reum

Each investor discusses a portfolio company that did not survive and why it was that they failed.

Investor Stories 164: Post Mortems (Tunguz, Isford, Casnocha, Reum)

by Nick Moran

On this special segment of The Full Ratchet, the following Investors are featured:

  • Tom Tunguz
  • Grace Isford
  • Ben Casnocha
  • Courtney Reum

Each investor discusses a portfolio company that did not survive and why it was that they failed.

Rockset | The Data-Driven Future

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

The ability to derive insights and take action from an ever-increasing volume of data has become a critical success factor for organizations across every industry. But as business operations become increasingly digitized and move to the cloud, first-generation analytics systems struggle to deliver insights at the scale and speed necessary to build modern data applications. That's why Rockset built a distributed SQL database that can return queries in milliseconds, but has a storage architecture more closely related to a search engine like Google or Facebook newsfeed. In this episode of Greymatter, Venkataramani sat down with Greylock general partner and Rockset board member Jerry Chen to discuss how his team is approaching the new era of cloud-only infrastructure.

Rockset | The Data-Driven Future

by Greylock Partners
This post is by Greylock Partners from Greymatter

The ability to derive insights and take action from an ever-increasing volume of data has become a critical success factor for organizations across every industry. But as business operations become increasingly digitized and move to the cloud, first-generation analytics systems struggle to deliver insights at the scale and speed necessary to build modern data applications. That's why Rockset built a distributed SQL database that can return queries in milliseconds, but has a storage architecture more closely related to a search engine like Google or Facebook newsfeed. In this episode of Greymatter, Venkataramani sat down with Greylock general partner and Rockset board member Jerry Chen to discuss how his team is approaching the new era of cloud-only infrastructure.