It’s not every day that an opportunity like this comes around.

After working at Twitter for years, I’m finally being asked to do more with less. I’ve always wanted fewer co-workers, a manic boss, reduced communication, and non-stop chaos. And if I do well, I’ll help save the richest person alive both money and pride! Can you imagine a better offer?

Let me explain. You see, there’s a man called Elon Musk. He’s very involved in a bunch of projects and doesn’t like to work in any single office. Heck, Elon doesn’t even work for just one company! He’s in charge of a bevy of concerns that keep him rather occupied. You can even track his jet as he flies about, busy as a bee. (It makes perfect sense that the leader should not have to work in an office while I am required to report to my cubicle daily — after all, the wealthy are our moral superiors!)

But after he corralled a host of rich folks to invest and underwrite his hostile takeover of Twitter, things got sticky for poor Elon. He’s a big tweeter, you see, and before he owned the website, he could post whatever he wanted and get away with it. Remember that time he tweeted that he had the capital to take Tesla private? That was a tiny error, but Elon is still in charge of Tesla, collecting the lion’s share of the wealth on the backs of others. So it all came out fine!

I volunteer as tribute! by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Imagine yourself working at Apple. It’s April 2022. You’re being told by the higher-ups that you’ve got to come back to the office — by which I mean you’ve read a Slack message on your laptop. You continue your workday, pissed that your bosses don’t seem to understand that you can do this job remotely.

Then somebody sends you a YouTube link to a nine-minute commercial for remote work, telling the story of a group of people who quit their company after being forced to return to the office. The advertisement is by Apple, which is currently telling you to go back to the office. You punch your desk so hard that your screensaver deactivates.

It’s strange that the companies that have made so much money off remote work seem to be the most allergic to its possibilities. Google, which literally lets you run a company in a browser, has been forcing workers back to offices three days a week.

Meta, which has lost billions trying to make us live in the computer, has also made people return to the office. In reading almost every remote-work article that has been published for a year for my research, I have yet to find a single compelling argument about why employees should go back to the office.

“In-person collaboration” and “serendipity” are terms that make sense if you live in Narnia and believe in magical creatures. In reality, office environments resemble our remote lives, only with more annoying meetings and the chance to smell our co-workers’ lunch choices.

The tech industry pretends to be disruptive, but is following a path forged by older companies like Goldman Sachs. How is it that Apple and Google, the companies that effectively gave us the ability to remote work at scale, sound like they’re reading from a generic New York Times anti-remote op-ed?

The tech industry needs a labor movement by Alex Wilhelm originally published on TechCrunch

Mozilla launched version 100 of its Firefox browser today, but more so than a day for celebration, it feels like a day for nostalgia.

That’s a nostalgia for a time when Firefox was truly revolutionary after it broke out of the Mozilla Application Suite back in 2002 and quickly threatened the hegemony of the utterly dismal Internet Explorer. But also a nostalgia for the open web, which Mozilla was able to champion when Firefox still had a dominant market share. It’s much easier to lead when your product has 30% market share and growing (like Firefox had around 2010) and your biggest competitor is declining quickly, but it’s hard to make your voice heard when you are under 4%.

Today’s Mozilla, after many lean years, seems to be on a path to a better financial future, but its dependence on Google makes for an uneasy alliance as Mozilla tries to champion online privacy in a world dominated by the giant advertising company it utterly depends on.

Firefox, too, is now a perfectly competent browser — but so is every other browser. It’s no secret that over the years, Mozilla got distracted. There were efforts to build a Firefox OS for affordable smartphones (which still lives as a fork under the KaiOS banner), VR browsers, arguments over whether there should be sponsored tiles on Firefox’s new tab page, a WebRTC video chat service and much more.

Today, with Firefox Relay and the Mozilla VPN, it seems the organization has refocused a bit. Its focus on privacy resonates more today than it ever did — but for now, that hasn’t changed the browser’s fortune. Even today, for most users, privacy is a nice to have but not a reason to switch browsers, especially when there are plenty of extensions that can essentially do the same (though Firefox’s Multi-Account Containers are a game changer and should be available in every browser, as far as I’m concerned).

Yet with all of the resources being poured into Chromium, it’s hard to see how Firefox and its Gecko engine will remain competitive in the long run. Browsers today are incredibly complex pieces of software. With Servo, Mozilla started a project to build a new engine from scratch. That was in 2012. Ten years later, we’re only seeing pieces of that in Firefox — and when Mozilla laid off many of its employees in 2020, that included the Servo team.

There also hasn’t been a lot of innovation around Firefox lately, all while Chromium-based browsers are finding their niches, with Vivaldi, for example, tapping into the market for advanced users who want endless customizability, Brave going for the privacy-conscious crypto fans and Microsoft keeping the Windows faithful happy after finally ditching Internet Explorer (despite occasional missteps into bloatware).

It doesn’t help that Mozilla never made it easy to build new user experiences around its browser engine while Chromium made it a core feature. Users may not care about the engine underneath their browsers, but developers who want to experiment with new browser paradigms will always opt for Chromium.

The web is better off today because of what Mozilla built with Firefox. I hope we’ll see version 200 eight years from now.

Once upon a time, a successful startup that reached a certain maturity would “go public” — selling securities to ordinary investors, perhaps listing on a national stock exchange and taking on the privileges and obligations of a “public company” under federal securities regulations.

Times have changed. Successful startups today are now able to grow quite large without public capital markets. Not so long ago, a private company valued at more than $1 billion was rare enough to warrant the nickname “unicorn.” Now, over 800 companies qualify.

Legal scholars are worried. A recent wave of academic papers makes the case that because unicorns are not constrained by the institutional and regulatory forces that keep public companies in line, they are especially prone to risky and illegal activities that harm investors, employees, consumers and society at large.

The proposed solution, naturally, is to bring these forces to bear on unicorns. Specifically, scholars are proposing mandatory IPOs, significantly expanded disclosure obligations, regulatory changes designed to dramatically increase secondary-market trading of unicorn shares, expanded whistleblower protections for unicorn employees and stepped-up Securities and Exchange Commission enforcement against large private companies.

This position has also been gaining traction outside the ivory tower. One leader of this intellectual movement was recently appointed director of the SEC’s Division of Corporation Finance. Big changes may be coming soon.

In a new paper titled “Unicorniphobia” (forthcoming in the Harvard Business Law Review), I challenge this suddenly dominant view that unicorns are especially dangerous and should be “tamed” with bold new securities regulations. I raise three main objections.

First, pushing unicorns toward public company status may not help and may actually make problems worse. According to the vast academic literature on “market myopia” or “stock-market short-termism,” it is public company managers who have especially dangerous incentives to take on excessive leverage and risk; to underinvest in compliance; to sacrifice product quality and safety; to slash R&D and other forms of corporate investment; to degrade the environment; and to engage in accounting fraud and other corporate misconduct, among many other things.

The dangerous incentives that produce this parade of horrible outcomes allegedly flow from a constellation of market, institutional, cultural and regulatory features that operate distinctly on public companies, not unicorns, including executive compensation linked to short-term stock performance, pressure to meet quarterly earnings projections (aka “quarterly capitalism”) and the persistent threat (and occasional reality) of a hedge fund activist attack. To the extent this literature is correct, the proposed unicorn reforms would merely amount to forcing companies to shed one set of purportedly dangerous incentives for another.

Second, proponents of new unicorn regulations rely on rhetorical sleight of hand. To show that unicorns pose unique dangers, these advocates rely heavily on anecdotes and case studies of well-known “bad” unicorns, especially the cases of Uber and Theranos, in their papers. Yet the authors make few or no attempts to show how their proposed reforms would have mitigated any significant harm caused by either of these companies — a highly questionable proposition, as I show in great detail in my paper.

Take Theranos, whose founder and CEO Elizabeth Holmes is currently facing trial on charges of criminal fraud and, if convicted, faces a possible sentence of up to 20 years in federal prison. Would any of the proposed securities regulation reforms have plausibly made a positive difference in this case? Allegations that Holmes and others lied extensively to the media, doctors, patients, regulators, investors, business partners and even their own board of directors make it hard to believe they would have been any more truthful had they been forced to make some additional securities disclosures.

As to the proposal to enhance trading of unicorn shares in order to incentivize short sellers and market analysts to sniff out potential frauds, the fact is that these market players already had the ability and incentive to make these plays against Theranos indirectly by taking a short position in its public company partners like Walgreens, or a long position in its public company competitors, like LabCorp and Quest Diagnostics. They failed to do so. Proposals to expand whistleblower protections and SEC enforcement in this domain seem equally unlikely to have made any difference.

Finally, the proposed reforms risk doing more harm than good. Successful unicorns today benefit not only their investors and managers, but also their employees, consumers and society at large. And they do so precisely because of the features of current regulations that are now up on the regulatory chopping block. Altering this regime as these papers propose would put these benefits in jeopardy and thus may do more harm than good.

Consider one company that recently generated an enormous social benefit: Moderna. Before going public in December 2018, Moderna was a secretive, controversial, overhyped biotech unicorn without a single product on the market (or even in Phase 3 clinical trials), barely any scientific peer-reviewed publications, a history of turnover among high-level scientific personnel, a CEO with a penchant for over-the-top claims about the company’s potential and a toxic work culture.

Had these proposed new securities regulations been in place during Moderna’s “corporate adolescence,” it’s quite plausible that they would have significantly disrupted the company’s development. In fact, Moderna might not have been in a position to develop its highly effective COVID-19 vaccine as rapidly as it did. Our response to the coronavirus pandemic has benefited, in part, from our current approach to securities regulation of unicorns.

The lessons from Moderna also bear on efforts to use securities regulation to combat climate change. According to a recent report, 43 unicorns are operating in “climate tech,” developing products and services designed to mitigate or adapt to global climate change. These companies are risky. Their technologies may fail; most probably will. Some are challenging entrenched incumbents that have powerful incentives to do whatever is necessary to resist the competitive threat. Some may be trying to change well-established consumer preferences and behaviors. And they all face an uncertain regulatory environment, varying widely across and within jurisdictions.

Like other unicorns, they may have highly empowered founder CEOs who are demanding, irresponsible or messianic. They may also have core investors who do not fully understand the science underlying their products, are denied access to basic information and who press the firm to take risks to achieve astronomical results.

And yet, one or more of these companies may represent an important resource for our society in dealing with disruptions from climate change. As policymakers and scholars work out how securities regulation can be used to address climate change, they should not overlook the potentially important role unicorn regulation can play.

No single question bedevils American energy and environmental policy more than nuclear waste. No, not even a changing climate, which may be a wicked problem but nonetheless receives a great deal of counter-bedeviling attention.

It’s difficult to paint the picture with a straight face. Let’s start with three main elements of the story.

First, nuclear power plants in the United States generate about 2,000 metric tons of nuclear waste (or “spent fuel”) per year. Due to its inherent radioactivity, it is carefully stored at various sites around the country.

Second, the federal government is in charge of figuring out what to do with it. In fact, power plant operators have paid over $40 billion into the Nuclear Waste Fund so that the government can handle it. The idea was to bury it in the “deep geological repository” embodied by Yucca Mountain, Nevada, but this has proved politically impossible. Nevertheless, $15 billion was spent on the scoping.

Third, due to the Energy Department’s inability to manage this waste, it simply accumulates. According to that agency’s most recent data release, some 80,000 metric tons of spent fuel—hundreds of thousands of fuel assemblies containing millions of fuel rods—is waiting for a final destination.

And here’s the twist ending: those nuclear plant operators sued the government for breach of contract and, in 2013, they won. Several hundred million dollars is now paid out to them each year by the U.S. Treasury, as part of a series of settlements and judgments. The running total is over $8 billion.

I realize this story sounds a little crazy. Am I really saying that the U.S. government collected billions of dollars to manage nuclear waste, then spent billions of dollars on a feasibility study only to stick it on the shelf, and now is paying even more billions of dollars for this failure? Yes, I am.

Fortunately, all of the aggregated waste occupies a relatively small area and temporary storage exists. Without an urgent reason to act, policymakers generally will not.

While attempts to find long-term storage will continue, policymakers should look towards recycling some of this “waste” into usable fuel. This is actually an old idea. Only a small fraction of nuclear fuel is consumed to generate electricity.

Proponents of recycling envision reactors that use “reprocessed” spent fuel, extracting energy from the 90% of it leftover after burn-up. Even its critics admit that the underlying chemistry, physics, and engineering of recycling are technically feasible, and instead assail the disputable economics and perceived security risks.

So-called Generation IV reactors come in all shapes and sizes. The designs have been around for years—in some respects, all the way back to the dawn of nuclear energy—but light-water reactors have dominated the field for a variety of political, economic, and strategic reasons. For example, Southern Company’s twin conventional pressurized water reactors under construction in Georgia each boast a capacity of just over 1,000-megawatt (or 1 gigawatt), standard for Westinghouse’s AP 1000 design.

In contrast, next-generation plant designs are a fraction of the size and capacity, and also may use different cooling systems: Oregon-based NuScale Power’s 77-megawatt small modular reactor, San Diego-based General Atomics’ 50-megawatt helium-cooled fast modular reactor, Alameda-based Kairos Power’s 140-megawatt molten fluoride salt reactor, and so on all have different configurations that can fit different business and policy objectives.

Many Gen-IV designs can either explicitly recycle used fuel or be configured to do so. On June 3, TerraPower (backed by Bill Gates), GE Hitachi, and the State of Wyoming announced an agreement to build a demonstration of the 345-megawatt Natrium design, a sodium-cooled fast reactor.

Natrium is technically capable of recycling fuel for generation. California-based Oklo has already reached an agreement with Idaho National Laboratory to operate its 1.5-megawatt “microreactor” off of used-fuel supplies. In fact, the self-professed “preferred fuel” for New York-based Elysium Industries’ molten salt reactor design is spent nuclear fuel and Alabama-based Flibe Energy advertises the waste-burning capability of its thorium reactor design.

Whether advanced reactors rise or fall does not depend on resolving the nuclear waste deadlock. Though such reactors may be able to consume spent fuel, they don’t necessarily have to. Nonetheless, incentivizing waste recycling would improve their economics.

“Incentivize” here is code for “pay.” Policymakers should consider ways that Washington can make it more profitable for a power plant to recycle fuel than to import it—from Canada, Kazakhstan, Australia, Russia, and other countries.

Political support for advanced nuclear technology, including recycling, is deeper than might be expected. In 2019, the Senate confirmed Dr. Rita Baranwal as the Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy at the Department of Energy (DOE). A materials scientist by training, she emerged as a champion of recycling.

The new Biden administration has continued broadly bipartisan support for advanced nuclear reactors in proposing in its Fiscal Year 2022 Budget Request to increase funding for the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy by nearly $350 million. The proposal includes specific funding increases for researching and developing reactor concepts (plus $32 million), fuel cycle R&D (plus $59 million), and advanced reactor demonstration (plus $120 million), and tripling funding for the Versatile Test Reactor (from $45 million to $145 million, year over year).

In May, the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) announced a new $40 million program to support research in “optimizing” waste and disposal from advanced reactors, including through waste recycling. Importantly, the announcement explicitly states that the lack of a solution to nuclear waste today “poses a challenge” to the future of Gen-IV reactors.

The debate is a reminder that recycling in general is a very messy process. It is chemical-, machine-, and energy-intensive. Recycling of all kinds, from critical minerals to plastic bottles, produces new waste, too. Today, federal and state governments are quite active in recycling these other waste streams, and they should be equally involved in nuclear waste.

Imagine that you get a job offer at your dream company. You start to negotiate the contract and everything sounds great except for one detail — your future employer refuses to say in what currency your salary would be paid. It could be U.S. dollars, euros, or perhaps Japanese yen, and you are expected to take a leap of faith and hope for fair pay. It sounds absurd, but this is exactly how the startup equity compensation market currently operates.

The typical scenario is that employers offer a number of stock options or restricted stock units (RSUs) as part of an offer letter, but do not mention the company’s total number of shares. Without this piece of information, employees cannot know whether their grants represent a 0.1% ownership stake, 0.01%, or any other percentage. Employees can ask for this information, but the employer is not required to provide it, and many startups simply don’t.

But that’s not the end of it. Due to lack of proper disclosure requirements, employees are completely oblivious to the most salient form of startup valuation information — data describing the firm’s capitalization table and aggregate liquidation preferences (which determine, in case the company is sold, how much money will be paid to investors before employees receive any payout). By not accounting for the debt-like properties of venture capital financing, employees tend to overestimate the value of their equity grants. This is especially relevant to employees of unicorn companies because the type of terms that are common in late-stage financing have a dramatic and often misleading impact on the value of the company’s common stock.

What have regulators done to fix this? Not much. Under the current regulation, the vast majority of startups are exempted from providing any information to their employees other than a copy of the options plan itself. A small percentage of startups that issue their employees more than $10 million worth of securities over a year period are required to provide additional disclosures including updated financial statements (two years of consolidated balance sheets, income statements, cash flows, and changes in stockholders’ equity). These disclosures are likely to contain sensitive information about the startup but are only remotely related to the question of valuation that employees want answered. The company’s most recent fair market valuation and the description of the employee’s anticipated payout across various exit scenarios would convey far more useful information.

The problem with the current regulation is not merely that it provides employees with either too much or too little information—it is both and more. As the lyrics of Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams’ song go, it is “too much, too little, too late.” The regulation mandates the disclosure of too much irrelevant and potentially harmful information, too little material information, and the disclosure is delivered in a timeframe that does not permit efficient decision-making by employees (only after the employee has joined the company).

This situation is unhealthy not only for employees themselves but also for the high-tech labor market as a whole. Talent is a scarce resource that companies of all sizes depend on. Lack of information impedes competition and slows down the flow of employees to better, more promising, opportunities. In the long run, employees’ informational disadvantage can erode the value of equity incentives and make it all the more difficult for startups to compete for talent.

In an article I published in the Columbia Business Law Review, titled, “Making Disclosure Work for Startup Employees,” I argue that these problems have a relatively easy fix. Startups that issues over 10% of any class of shares to at least 100 employees should be required to disclose employees’ individual payout according an exit waterfall analysis.

Waterfall analysis describes the breakdown of cash flow distribution arrangements. In the case of startup finance, this analysis assumes that the company’s equity is sold and the proceeds are allocated in a “waterfall” down the different equity classes of shares, according to their respective liquidation preferences, until the common stockholders finally receive the residual claim, if any exists. While the information the model contains can be extremely complicated, the output is not. A waterfall model can render a graph where for each possible “exit valuation” plotted on the x-axis, the employee’s individualized “payout” is indicated on the y-axis. With the help of a cap table management platform, it is as simple as pressing a few mouse clicks.

This visual representation will allow employees to understand how much they stand to gain across a range of exit values even if they don’t understand the math and legal jargon that operate in the background. Armed with this information, employees would not need the traditional forms of disclosures now mandated by Rule 701, and startups could be relieved of the risk that the information contained in their financial statements would fall into the wrong hands. Critically, I also argue that employees should receive this information as part of the offer letter – before they choose whether to accept a job opportunity that includes an equity compensation component. 

Earlier this year, the SEC released proposed revisions to Rule 701. The proposal includes many developments – among them the introduction of an alternative to the disclosure of financial statements. For startups that hit the threshold of issuing employees over $10 million worth of securities, the proposal allows choosing between disclosing financial statements and providing an independent valuation report of the securities’ fair market value. According to the proposal, the latter should be determined by an independent appraisal consistent with the rules and regulations under Internal Revenue Code Section 409A.

This is a step in the right direction — fair market valuation is far more useful to employees than the firm’s financial statements. However, the disclosure of a 409A valuation in and of itself is just not enough. It is a well-known secret in Silicon Valley that 409A valuations are highly inaccurate. Because the appraisal firm wishes to maintain a long-lasting business relationship with the company, and given that the valuation is based on information provided by the management team and is subject to board approval, the startup maintains nearly full control over the result. Therefore, the company’s 409A valuation has informational value only when it includes the waterfall analysis that was used to generate the outcome. Moreover, the SEC’s proposal still allows the vast majority of startups (as long as they avoid the $10 million threshold) to offer equity grants without providing any meaningful disclosures.  

For over 30 years, the SEC has almost completely deregulated startup equity compensation in order to accommodate the ever growing need of startups to rely on equity in the war for talent. However, the SEC has and still is paying little attention to the other side of the employment equation—employees’ need for information regarding the value of their equity compensation. The time is ripe to revisit the protection of employees in their investor capacity under the securities regulatory regime.

In case you missed it: On Monday, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong wrote a company blog post titled “Coinbase is a mission focused company” which drew both praise and critique that has continued throughout the week. Personally, I wasn’t terribly impressed.

I limited my reaction on Twitter to one retweet, a couple of replies and some likes. But on Tuesday, a journalist asked if I had any comment to contribute to a piece she’s writing on the matter, so I tried to articulate a comment in one or two lines. The next thousand-ish words is what I ended up with.

This is such a sensitive, nuanced and personal topic, and I wouldn’t want to be irresponsible by making a quick off-handed remark or not taking enough into consideration.

However, I think it’s so important, it’d be irresponsible not to say something when asked.

I’d like to think I understood the intent — that Brian wants to ensure that Coinbase is inclusive of people who hold different views than what’s assumed to be progressive in the tech sector (or elsewhere) and avoid creating a workplace that is divided and too “distracted” (his word) by political causes or social activism.

However, what he’s really only done is highlight his tremendous position of privilege. Privilege doesn’t mean that he hasn’t struggled or hasn’t worked hard at being CEO of his company or in life. It simply means he thinks social activism can be a “distraction.” It means he thinks it’s a distraction to think about human rights and whether what’s happening around us is just or not.

It means he doesn’t wake up worrying about how institutional racism or systemic oppression might affect him. It means he doesn’t relate to the feeling that he could be the next driver to be unjustifiably stopped and searched, asked to get out of his car (or worse) for a broken taillight or verbally ridiculed or assaulted for someone else’s assumptions about his sexual orientation. It means he doesn’t think the rise of white supremacy in America is going to affect or diminish his ability to “stay focused” on his company’s mission. It means he doesn’t have to go to work wondering if he’ll be pushed aside, undermined or spoken over by a male colleague.

Brian’s statement made me think back to conversations I had with some friends over the summer who said they weren’t going to watch “every single video” of police brutality in the U.S. relating to the Black Lives Matter protests. It’s possible that I was watching too much because it was only increasing my frustration and feelings of powerlessness to help or change things, but I also realized that my friends admitting that they’d stopped watching each new video was a luxury and a privilege for them.

They didn’t have to watch them — no one is required to — but they were able to switch off because the injustice and inequity of it all doesn’t burn in their minds. It doesn’t affect them personally. It doesn’t impact how they walk down the street or conduct themselves around law enforcement. They have the privilege of not ever imagining or worrying if the victims of police brutality happened to be their family or close friends or even people they might know.

Brian Armstrong’s call to not engage in political discourse via his platform and his position as a leader is a privilege whilst others are compelled out of concern and fear to speak up for themselves, others, and those who have softer or even no voices.

In the memo, he takes time to reiterate the fact that the company will “focus on the things that help us achieve our mission,” including sourcing job candidates from underrepresented backgrounds, reducing unconscious bias and fostering an environment where everyone is welcome regardless of background, sexual orientation, race, gender, age, etc. While I‘m glad to see him recognize these areas of focus, immediately after that section he goes on to say that Coinbase won’t engage on “broader societal issues” or advocacy for political causes. From where does he think the first set of principles emerged?!?

It seems outlandish to have to establish this, but it wasn’t always the case that sexual orientation, race, gender or age were awarded equal treatment in employment law. It was in my lifetime that women could be fired from work for being pregnant. It is precisely engaging in “broader societal issues” that brought about those points of legal fairness and equality — and those are incredibly vulnerable right now. How dare he say he’s willing to embrace and stand for what’s been established so far, but that there’s no reason to engage any further? What that tells me is that as far as he’s concerned, the debates and activism to date have achieved enough and the rest, now, is distraction.

That. Is. Privilege.

Obviously, I know Coinbase is Brian’s company, and therefore it’s fully his prerogative to lay out the “mission” and rules as he sees fit. But what bothers me is that he and others who are feeling emboldened to say they agree or even commend him for “being brave” enough for saying so won’t realize the extent of their privilege and may inadvertently walk back so much recent progress and positive dialogue in the tech sector and business more broadly. We’ve seen so much evidence in recent years that consumers and purchasing power gravitate toward brands and companies that articulate what they stand for.

No longer is it enough for brands to be likable or just upbeat. Their silence on social injustices is deafening. Their association with individuals who either contribute to or enable racism or oppression of people and groups is enough for customers to think twice about using them. Their public support of activism and human rights either in merchandise or TV advertisements drives up their stock price. As more and more products and services are increasingly commoditized, consumers have sought to align themselves with brands and products that reflect their ethos.

It was a free pass for too long for businesses and their leaders to say that they didn’t wade into politics. In recent years, for example, because of the U.K.-EU Brexit referendum, the 2016 U.S. presidential election, or other occasions, companies and brand values have been drawn out and exposed for good or bad. It would be a shame for consumers and all stakeholders to lose that trend.

I hope that investor shareholders and employees of companies where leaders might be asserting similar views of not wanting to get “distracted” by social action will help to demonstrate just how much impact can be achieved by dialogue and action.

People do their best work and form championship teams when they feel good about supporting their teammates and colleagues, not when they remain silent.

Editor’s note: Ryan Lawler is a writer and editor based in Philadelphia. After working as a journalist for publications like TechCrunch and Gigaom, he currently leads content strategy for Samsung Next.

I don’t remember the first time I went to The Creamery, probably sometime in early 2012.

I don’t remember the last time, either, although undoubtedly it was sometime last year, on a day when I had an extra five minutes to spare before boarding the Caltrain for my morning commute.

And I barely remember any of the other hundreds of times I stopped in to grab a coffee, have lunch with a friend or meet a possible source during my years at TechCrunch, which conveniently had an office just over a block away.

The Creamery was not a place you went for the memories. It was located firmly at the apex of convenience and comfort — which is why, for a certain period of about five years from the early to mid-teens of the third millennium, it was the perfect place for the SF technorati to see and be seen.

It’s also why, after 12 years of operating from one global recession to another, it’s shutting its doors for good.

I learned of The Creamery’s imminent demise through a friend, who forwarded me a connection’s Facebook post. “Hey I’ve got some sad news,” wrote John S. Boyd, CEO of Monolith Technologies. “The Creamery is closing this weekend.”

I was a little less nostalgic in sharing the news via a screenshot to Twitter.

What followed was a little surprising, though it probably shouldn’t have been. Dozens of people replied or quote-tweeted with their own condolences, memories and anecdotes of their time at the little coffee shop on the corner of Fourth and Townsend.

“Ugh! Institution,” wrote Redpoint’s Ryan Sarver.

“Got my first SF angel backer over coffee there. Sad stuff,” wrote Haven Coliving’s Ben Katz.

“Oh no where will techcrunch writers get their stories,” wrote Breather founder Julien Smith.

As a former TechCrunch writer, it was this last point that resonated with me — although like most things, the legend of The Creamery as a place to get scoops far outpaced its actual utility.

From the perspective of someone who found himself visiting The Creamery several times a week (sometimes multiple times a day), those concerns were probably overblown. That’s not to say there weren’t deals happening at the cafe’s wobbly wooden tables, but just that there really wasn’t much worth overhearing if you actually sat there and listened.

For all the outpouring of condolences that The Creamery has received since the news of its closing, I don’t recall that many people who actually loved going there. The coffee was terrible, the food was just okay and, as one Twitter user wrote, it was “chock full of VC assholes constantly.”

And yet, for a period of time, it was its own little social club, a place where you could go and reliably see at least one or two people you knew (and often a person who said they knew you but you didn’t remember).

As fintech investor and Justin Bieber music video star Sheel Mohnot notes, “Right [across] from Caltrain, it was a legendary spot – for a time most startups were in the city but investors still down south, so The Creamery was a great spot to meet VC’s, increasingly less important as VC’s moved offices to SF.”

To understand how all that changed, it’s probably worth noting that The Creamery was unpretentious at its core.

It was the type of place where Alex could order two shots of espresso over ice and no one would bat an eye or where you could find a couple of dudes drinking beers on the front patio at 8:00 a.m. The cafe had food, but it was all counter service, and if you weren’t an asshole you would bus your own table.

The food was better at the attached Iron Cactus, and there was more room to spread out, particularly if you planned to meet more than one person. If you actually wanted to have a discreet conversation, you sat at the back patio, which was frequently empty, barring the occasional lunch rush.

But you didn’t go to The Creamery for the food. You didn’t go there to have quiet conversations that couldn’t be overheard. You went for the serendipity, for the chance of running into a friend or acquaintance and catching up for five minutes before promising to schedule a longer meeting that never happened.

COVID-19 might have killed The Creamery, but its long-term health was compromised long before the novel coronavirus came into our lives. Changing times, changing tastes and growing professionalism around the industry that made it a destination all meant The Creamery was not long for this world.

As multithousandaires became multimillionaires and billionaires, the same comfort, convenience and unpretentiousness that defined the young tech industry evolved. Many techies outgrew their T-shirts and hoodies, decided they wanted something better than terrible coffee, and were no longer constrained by having to meet at the coffee shop closest to Caltrain.

After all, most of the people they were meeting now also lived and worked in the city.

This was accelerated by growing competition as both Philz and Reveille opened cafes just a few blocks away from The Creamery, with better coffee — and in the case of Reveille, much better food. Meanwhile, the new hotspot for being seen talking to investors was the South Park Blue Bottle, which was attached to General Catalyst’s SF office and just a few steps away from VCs like Redpoint and Kleiner Perkins.

And for the folks who wanted the benefit of being able to have discreet conversations while also being seen among the tech elite, there was The Battery, which came to define the industry’s transition to excess.

At the same time, the idea of a one-story cafe sitting on a plot of mostly empty land seemed verboten in a city in desperate need of new housing. And building that housing across the street from the main access point to the South Bay made nothing but sense. As a result, developers had eyes on The Creamery lot as early as 2014, and plans to develop the corner of 4th & Townsend accelerated last summer.

Some have pointed out that before closing its doors, the owners were “partnering with Tishman Speyer to return to the new site.” But a Creamery with no front or back patio is no Creamery at all.

It’s a tale as old as time: Quaint neighborhood spot loved by locals gets swallowed up and destroyed as the city changes around it.

I’m not ready to say, “Bit by bit, the bohemian culture that has been the hallmark of the City by the Bay since 1945 is disappearing. San Francisco is becoming Manhattan West,” like some people are. After all, this sentiment ignores the fact that The Creamery was founded in 2008 and was fewer than five years old when the Chronicle named it “deal central.”

But I do think there’s something to the fact that, now that the industry has no need for it, the no-frills coffee shop will be bulldozed to make way for a gleaming high-rise.

Perhaps the best take I’ve seen on its closing comes from Can Duruk, who wrote:

“Kind of emblematic of the time when the early stage VCs are frolicking in the froth, the one meatspace small business most associated with it is going under.”

I couldn’t have said it better.

Ten years ago, the joke was: “It’s weird how, once everyone started carrying phones with cameras all the time, UFOs stopped visiting, and the cops started beating everyone up.” It was darkly funny, then. Now it feels something more like despairing.

Imagine pitching today as a setting for science fiction, back then:

“The year is 2020. A pandemic that will kill millions ravages the planet. America is masked: some because of the new virus, others as a ward against police surveillance. A global wave of implicit & explicit xenophobia and white supremacy has carried the UK out of Europe, and a narcissistic reality TV star to the presidency, where he fans the flames of America’s rampant police violence, and spars incoherently with the billionaires who control the tech megacorps that dominate the Internet and the economy. Meanwhile, America’s techno-militarized law enforcement agencies use drones, networked cameras, AI-powered facial recognition, and other police-state innovations to aid them in their running battles against an insurgent population which increasingly no longer sees them as legitimate.”

If you had pitched today only ten years ago, you would have been asked with genuine confusion whether it was intended as satire–and then, very possibly, more gently, if everything was OK at home. Yet here we are.

Six years ago I wrote a piece, “The techno-militarization of America” which concluded that “in juicing [the police] with the steroids of military technologies, rules, and attitudes, we have transformed them into a cure almost worse than the disease.” Looking back now, that ‘almost’ seems embarrassingly naïve.

I’ve seen multiple independent sources refer to the events of this week as a ‘legitimacy crisis,’ triggered by a common-knowledge collapse: a moment when everyone realizes that a belief they did not speak about, thinking it fringe and wild, is in fact also held by an enormous number of their peers. Nine years ago, when it was still possible to be optimistic about the effect Facebook would have on society, that sort of collapse is believed to have triggered the Arab Spring.

Here, the cultural collapse appears to be precipitating around the concept “all cops are bastards.” Once that catchphrase was something I only heard from my furthest of far-left punk and anticapitalist acquaintances. Let’s just say that the line of demarcation has moved in towards the mainstream a lot. As in the Arab Spring, this apparent common-knowledge collapse was catalyzed by a single awful death, then spread with remarkable speed, fueled in large part by social media.

Of course America is a huge and diverse place which includes many communities who have long–understandably–viewed the police as an illegitimate occupying army. (Often literally: “In about two-thirds of the U.S. cities with the largest police forces, the majority of police officers commute to work from another town.”)

What’s different is that this attitude seems to be accelerating nationwide. A few random examples from my own social media of late include — all white, since it matters — a battery researcher, a rocket technologist, and a middle-aged Minnesotan mother of teenagers describing the Minneapolis police as “a suburban occupying force.”

Those are anecdotes, so here’s some data: in 2007, Pew Research reported that 37% of black Americans, and a whopping 74% of white Americans, had “a great deal” or “a fair amount” of confidence in police to “treat races equally.” If you add those who indicated “just some” confidence, those numbers go up to 51% and 82%.

Twelve years later, the numbers who said that Americans of all races are generally treated fairly equally by police had fallen by more than half, to 16% and 37% respectively. In 2017, a sizable majority of all Americans agreed that “the deaths of blacks during encounters with police during recent years are signs of a broader problem”–while 72% of white police officers disagreed.

What do you think those numbers would be today? Given the scale of the disagreement, and the rapid loss of faith, is the prospect of a sudden legitimacy collapse really so surprising?

You’ll note that the Arab Spring didn’t last long, and was ultimately followed by bitter winter (except arguably in Tunisia where it began.) I’m not especially optimistic that this will be a profound national turning point in America. But I am hopeful it may shake the attitude among county and city governments that police and police unions should be treated as a local Praetorian Guard, to whom is owed unquestioning gratitude, a blind eye when a body camera happens to wink off before a suspect suffers an injury or death, and zero or toothless civilian oversight.

I’ve been to a lot of countries whose police are not perceived as legitimate; where it’s widely understood, across disparate communities, that whatever the situation, you think twice before involving the cops, because they’ll very likely just make things worse. America feels increasingly like such a country. Let’s hope the de-techno-militarization, and de-white-supremacization, of law enforcement happens before the nation spins into that kind of vicious cycle … because once there, it’s terrifyingly hard to break free. After the events of last night, you have to at least wonder whether it’s already too late.

Not long ago we lived in a world which kept getting better. Oh, there were tragedies and catastrophes, and there was profound inequality, but still, on a global scale, over the span of years, from before the fall of the Berlin wall until quite recently, most things were getting better for most people.

Reasonable people can disagree about when “quite recently was.” Personally, I put it the turning point at circa 2015, after which refugee counts swelled, talk of the “precariat” grew, xenophobia which often more-than-verged on neo-fascism began to rise around the world, and the growing threat of global warming became inescapable.

Others, more optimistic, would say the world kept getting better until this year. But I think few would dispute that we’re backsliding now, in the face of the pandemic. It’s not just its direct mortality, and its morbidity; it’s the skyrocketing unemployment rates — absolutely necessary lest the mortality multiply many-fold, to be clear — from which we won’t recover as soon as we hope, and the consequent global recession. Worst, it’s the projected massive rise in global extreme poverty.

We live in a world that’s getting worse, at least this year, likely next, and maybe even beyond. That’s awfully hard to get used to when you’re accustomed to justified faith that things are getting better. It’s been a long time — probably not since the mid-70s and early 80s, as I understand it — since we’ve collectively hit a ditch like this.

What changes in a world getting worse? Well, you have to be more careful about consequences, for one. During boom times there’s an unfortunate tendency write off any unpleasant side effects of a company’s success — or failure — as temporary friction, soon resolved, when a rising tide is lifting us all up, and those affected can (at least theoretically) easily find a new job. You can indeed make a case for that doing boom times. But it’s very different during an ebb tide with sharp rocks below, and people should adjust accordingly.

There’s another, more interesting and counterintuitive, lesson to be learned from the mid-70s through early 80s. That’s the era the birthed punk rock and hip-hop, both of which sounded almost indescribably strange by the aesthetic standards of the time. Those were Hollywood golden years, because, famously, “nobody knew anything.” And that was when Apple and Microsoft were formed, when personal computers were a weird curiosity whose very existence was somewhat obscure.

Maybe the lesson here is that this is the time to strive to do something weird — genuinely weird, not path-following, different-version-of-conformist weird. Maybe this is time to found your weird startup; or maybe startups are the mainstream engine of change now, and the truly weird thing is to forge something entirely different from a startup. Maybe it’s time not just to create art, but to invent your own art form. It’s an optimistic take on a worsening world, I know; but even a pandemic needs optimists.

I’m sure you’ve experienced it too. Some kind of discussion — perhaps a dispute, perhaps just a friendly exchange of ideas — arises online. People regurgitate what they know, or what they think they know. A few admirable souls even include links to sources. Those people tend to be more correct —

— unless their citation is a link to a video longer than a couple of minutes … in which case they are, almost invariably, completely wrong, and often far more wrong than even the wrongest of the people who cited nothing at all.

There’s no intrinsic reason for this. Video is as good a medium as any for supporting a viewpoint. Longer videos should if anything provide better material support. So why are such online citations always, almost without exception, made of ridiculously brittle clay?

Please note that I’m referring to discussions which involve some objective truth. De gustibus non est disputandum and all that, and videos are often one of the best ways to support subjective opinion. (“Honest Trailers” might be my favorite YouTube series ever.) And a sixty-second clip to illustrate a particular concrete point? Often easily worth a thousand words.

But when you’re linked to something ten minutes longer or more, especially with an exhortation to “watch the whole thing!”, you already know you’re entering the land of illogic and unreason.

Is this because videos are a “hot” medium, connected straight(er) to our limbic system, and therefore unusually well suited to covering up half-truths and specious arguments? Are people instinctively more inclined to give the benefit of any doubt to an impassioned or confident person or voice, compared the benefit of the doubt, compared to the written word?

Or is this a correlation-not-causation thing? Is someone who was willing to sit through a long video, almost by definition, someone who’s already internalized its arguments rather than think critically about them? And/or, someone who favors information absorption via long videos because they have a relatively low level of written literacy, and therefore have limited critical thinking skills full stop?

Or do people who link to long videos know that essentially no one has enough time and interest to actually wade their way through them? Are they just using their “citation” as a bad-faith smokescreen to pretend that they’re serious thinkers who have done their research? That strikes me as extremely plausible, a lot of the time. Some of the watch-this-half-hour-video people seem to be operating in good faith, though, just … misguided.

It’s not an inherent law of the universe that if you have to cite a 30-minute video, it means you don’t actually have any cogent arguments. But it does seem to be a law of the Internet. Perhaps that’s for the best, though; it means when the deepfakes arrive en masse, we — or, at least, the critical thinkers among us — will be suspicious already. Let’s hope automatic skepticism of videos spreads before then.

The entire world has run smack into the biggest economic wall since the Great Depression, and the US stock market is … above where it was this time last year. American tech megacorns like AirBNB, Lyft, and Uber have laid off 20% of their staff … and the Big Five tech companies are worth a record 20% of the entire market. What the hell?

Yes, those three cited companies are directly affected by the coronavirus pandemic, but so many sectors are — travel, retail, hospitality, entertainment, events, real estate, business services, to name only a few — that every other sector is inevitable indirectly affected too.

So what are the markets, in their infinite wisdom, collectively expecting? The old saw has it that the market is a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long run. What futures are being weighed?

I see seven possibilities bouncing around in time’s great lottery machine:

The Flying V

The future: In this, the best and laziest of all possible futures, we have beaten down the virus’s attack; a few easy countermeasures such as hand-washing, mask-wearing, and surface-sanitizing prevent future exponential growth, and when the lockdownss end, people flock back to their previous activities. Maybe a few extra months for some sectors, but come the autumn, schools reopen, flights resume, and life basically returns to normal. The economy and its jobs soon follow, and this short, sharp, V-shaped recession is behind us by November.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: Call it 40%.

Its actual likelihood: This is delusional idiocy. Even with strict lockdowns, case counts are only plateauing in many areas. Mask wearing and hand washing are good and important, but not enough, and Americans have committed murder rather than wear masks. Most importantly, there is no way in hell people will flock back to previous activities as before — data shows they actually abandoned them before lockdowns were introduced. Consumer spending, and hence jobs, and hence the economy, will continue to suffer, lockdowns or no, while the virus is out there and (very understandably) keeping people in their homes.

The Christmas Tree

The future: We live in a world of Green Zones and Red Zones. In green zones, case counts are kept to near-zero, outbreaks are tracked with frequent ubiquitous testing — for which people are paid $50/test, to ensure underclasses don’t go untested — and forcefully squelched by aggressive contact tracing and away-from-home quarantines. People coming from Red Zones are kept in quarantine buffers before entry is allowed. In green zones, economies are roaring, but in red zones, the battle against the virus continues, and economies remain semi-comatose. Red and green zones are roughly equally distributed, so the economy is only half as bad as it would be in an all-red world.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: Maybe 5%?

Its actual likelihood: I mean, we live in this already — Taiwan, South Korea, New Zealand, and (apparently) China and Vietnam are Green Zones. The likelihood of this extending to Europe and the USA, though … I don’t know. California moved fast and is competently governed, but now has roughly as many confirmed cases as all of China (allegedly) did. Hard to pack that mushroom cloud back into its uranium casing. But not impossible, with enough testing and tracing. Meanwhile, states with governments in denial will not dedicate the resources required to turn green. So, plausible, but IMHO not actually likely for the USA or Europe, much less South America or sub-Saharan Africa. I would think it a quite likely future for my homeland Canada … except we’re too tightly connected to fractured and incompetent America.

The Hammer And The Dance

The future: As described by Tomas Pueyo in a viral and pretty-good piece that came out a couple of months ago, the current lockdowns (The Hammer) are followed by the virus sine-waving indefinitely: it seethes, and from time to sporadic time erupts anew, and those eruptions are followed by localized screw-tightening including further lockdowns. But we keep it below health-system capacity, and we buy enough time such that when a vaccine is finally found and distributed, we haven’t come anywhere near herd immunity, and have thus saved many lives. The economy sine-waves too: surges of productivity followed by massive ebb tides through 2020 and well into 2021 at the least.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: Say 10%.

Its actual likelihood: I’d think reasonably high. We know lockdowns can plateau and reduce the virus; I fear that generalized incompetence and intransigence makes a Christmas Tree future implausible, at least in the USA, whose people and politicians tend to confuse organization with tyranny and favor crude instruments such as lockdowns: and given those circumstances, this is the least bad option. I fear dangerous overshoots during “The Dance,” but I don’t think they’re inevitable. However, from an economic POV, this is not a good solution. People will continue to feel unsafe, and the economy will continue to be hit by hammerblows, albeit lighter than the one we’re in now.

The Silver Bullet(s)

The future: We’d best conservatively assume that, even if accelerated by human challenge studies and simultaneously building factories for seven different vaccines, we’ll be at least well into 2021, and possibly some distance beyond, before we get a vaccine. But a vaccine is not the only possible medical solution. If we find prophylaxes or treatments which, singly or in combination, render the disease much less dangerous, that would be hugely beneficial to the world and also the economy.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: At least 35%. You can almost hear them screaming “Nerd harder!” at the doctors and scientists.

Its actual likelihood: Well, call me Pollyanna if you will, but I actually think this is fairly plausible. It’s still early but we’re already seeing (very initial) studies indicating that not just one, not just two, but a few different treatments may be beneficial. I want to stress again: very initial, and like hydroxychloroquine, may yet be ruled out by better data. But presumably the more we learn about this disease the better our treatments will get. The question is how much better, and how fast — but “much better, quite soon” is at least within the realm of possibility.

The Cattle Drive

The future: We basically give up on fighting the virus — while still trying to keep it from overwhelming healthcare systems and doing our level best to protect the elderly, the immunocompromised, the diabetic, etc. etc., with the fabled goal of Herd Immunity. Unfortunately we’ll almost certainly overshoot the actual Herd Immunity number, and it’s next to impossible to protect the elderly (“Who do you think works at those nursing homes? Highly trained gibbons?”), so this will almost certainly kill a lot of people who don’t have to die, while also not doing much for the economy since no one’s actually all that eager to rush out and catch a virus which has some chance of becoming the worst experience of your adult life even if it doesn’t ultimately kill you.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: I’d like to think they don’t give this more than a 10% chance, largely because they know it wouldn’t fly with the public and also wouldn’t be particularly good for the economy.

Its actual likelihood: This is kind of the worst-case “Hammer and Dance” scenario, in which we just barely keep health-care systems from bursting. People call it “the Swedish model,” and we’ll see what happens there, but note that Sweden’s population is roughly comparable to New York City’s, and “the NYC model” sounds a whole lot less appealing. I think the cautionary tales of New York and Lombardy will keep most of the West from trying to deliberately seek out herd immunity.

The Second Wave

The future: After we relax the current lockdowns, everything seems fine. A few sporadic outbreaks here and there, the virus continuing to smolder a little, but basically a fire which is guttering and going out. But it turns out that it’s seasonal — and then — come the autumn — a completely unexpected second wave, which nobody predicted or saw coming, hits! You know, just like the Spanish Flu!

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: 0%.

Its actual likelihood: I too actually think this is very unlikely. First, if the virus is susceptible to heat and humidity, explain Ecuador and Brazil. Second, and more importantly, unlike the Spanish Flu, we have the example of the Spanish Flu to be warned by. Come the autumn, and again the winter, half the world will be watching all the data with keenly twitching antennae. Surely we can’t be collectively dumb enough to be ambushed by a Second Wave again. Right? Right?

The Double Tap

The future: This isn’t so much a new future as an add-on to any of the above. In this future, the coronavirus triggers a chain of effects which cascade into another, different massive crisis, while we’re still dealing with this first one. Say, an attempt to postpone November’s presidential election, followed by a constitutional crisis and calls for the US military to intervene. Or a huge spike in food prices around the globe, followed by widespread famine, riots, and revolution. Or the fracturing of a major nation hit particularly hard by the virus, e.g. Brazil or Russia or India.

Probability apparently assigned by the market and many politicians: 0%; second-order effects are generally beyond their remit.

Its actual likelihood: Pretty small … but not zero, and definitely worrying.