Transformations: September 23, 2018 Snippets
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Over the last year in Snippets and at Social Capital more broadly, we’ve had an overarching focus on building tools to win for entrepreneurs all over the world. Our focus then, as it is now, is on the entrepreneurs and builders who are our customers: they are the ones who help create the future, and our job is first and foremost to help them do so. As we look forward to the next many years of helping to make a dent in the world’s hard problems, it’s worth reflecting on what has changed, what hasn’t changed, and what is needed next.
Silicon Valley is such a special place right now largely because of the intersection of three trends. First: those entrepreneurial tools to win are getting stronger and more democratized every year, at ever-cheaper prices. Think of the democratized entrepreneurial power unlocked by AWS, Shopify, Stripe or Intercom, and what happens when we continue accelerating this trend forward into the future. Second: the intensity of competition among startups who use those tools is getting more intense each year, and it’s unlocking new creativity and opportunity under heat and pressure. The great thing about Silicon Valley-style competition is that it’s never been a “one mistake and you’re dead” — type mindset, but rather “We’ve got to shoot for something more creative, ambitious and unanticipated than anyone thinks we’re capable of pursuing.” And third, the total size of the opportunity of tech is getting bigger, as the whole world gets lifted up on top of increasingly ubiquitous computational & communication infrastructure. Almost anyone in the world can have a cell phone. Everyone in the world is getting connected. What comes next is anyone’s playing field.
Put plainly: startups look differently than they used to, and we should expect this transformation to continue. The large companies they aspire to become look different than they used to, and we should expect this transformation to continue. The venture capital funding to get from A to B is looking different than it used to, and we should expect this transformation to continue.
One thing that’s pretty clear if we look at all of this is that the nature of challenge and success in Silicon Valley has evolved over the last decade. It’s never been easier to start a startup, but in some ways it’s never been harder to grow one. We’ve never had more powerful tools with which to do good, but in many ways it’s never been easier to accidentally cause harm. At Social Capital, we’re continually trying our best to look ahead and figure out what tools and resources entrepreneurs of the future will need to solve hard problems and win. Capital-as-a-Service is one of these initiatives: making early investment into small but growing businesses as ubiquitous as running water coming out of a tap. Automated diligence is another related bet: making the tools we use internally at Social Capital to refine data and see the emergent picture available to any entrepreneur, anywhere, for free.
Meanwhile, we’ve been working with a select number of early-stage companies solving incredibly hard technical, municipal and environmental problems on a new process for business creation. For these companies, Capital-as-a-Service isn’t what they need; what they need is time, space and room to focus on basic, fundamental advances that may take years, even perhaps a decade, to fully bring to fruition. These are different tools to win than the current venture ecosystem in Silicon Valley can fully provide. And we’re intent on providing them for any entrepreneur, anywhere, who is determined to solve a hard problem in the world. That means changing up from what we’ve done before, keeping focused on what’s important long term, and always reaching for what’s next.
The most interesting and inspiring opportunities often come in unlikely places, and from unlikely teams. As we look forward to the next decades of technological innovation and advancement, we actively embrace the fact that the future, and our future at Social Capital in particular, will never be static. It changes continuously, sometimes slowly in the background and other times to fanfare and speculation. But one thing we’ve always tried to do at Social Capital, and will continue to do in the future, is measure our progress in terms of real, authentic impact on the world that our portfolio companies and family members have helped create. One example, as we’ve included below in this week’s News and Notes section, is Syapse: earnestly plugging away, year after year, helping improve our oncology computing and data infrastructure to help fight cancer. After years of effort and investment, companies like Syapse are starting to impact the world in a big way. We’re humbled, proud and energized to help magnify and multiply that impact, find their next-of-kin, and continue to work hard towards our mission to help solve the world’s hardest problems. It’s what we’ve done over the last decade, and it’s exactly what we’re going to keep doing for the next. Onwards!
This week’s must-read article comes from Hello Angels (who you may also know simply as #ANGELS), who published a definitive report on male versus female representation in Silicon Valley cap tables. The cap table has always been the true source of power in Silicon Valley, and in many ways it’s the least biased and most stark picture of where we’ve made progress in our inclusion and representation as an industry versus where we haven’t. With help from Carta, Hello Angels put together the first systemic, comprehensive public study of cap table representation by gender.
Silicon Valley’s Equity Gap | Hello Angels
The results speak themselves. For founders: Women represent 13% of all founders but own just 6% of all founder equity value. In dollars, the average female founder on Carta owns just 39 cents of equity for every dollar the average male founder owns. How come? They show several factors: lower valuation and higher dilution; less capital for women; investor underrepresentation, negotiation of equity allocation, and more. For employees: Women make up 35% of all employees who hold equity, but capture just 20% of the employee equity value. In dollars, female employees on Carta make just 47 cents for every dollar of equity male employees get. Again, how come? They show three major factors: a disproportionate gender balance among the early (first ten) employees who get the most equity shares; engineering, and senior leadership. Make sure you read this report, and give it some real thought before moving on. We all have a lot of work to do.
Some great interviews worth reading and listening to:
Slack’s April Underwood on her trusted advisors | Laine Higgins, WSJ
Silicon Graphics with John McCrea (Part one) | The Internet History Podcast with Brian McCullough
Fascinating oral histories:
An oral history of Apple’s Infinite Loop | Stephen Levy, Backchannel
The definitive oral history of online travel | Dennis Schaal, Skift
Natural evolution:
Carnegie Mellon is saving old software from oblivion | Mahadev Satyanarayanan, IEEE Spectrum
We are what we do:
The price of relevance is fluency | Anil Dash
Eliud Kipchoge, and knowledge versus skill | Ben Carlson
Media manipulation, strategic amplification, and responsible journalism | Danah Boyd
Other reading from around the Internet:
Revamped US biodefence strategy adds natural disasters and lab accidents | Sara Reardon, Nature
From private to public: how to read an S-1 | Alex Wilhelm, Crunchbase
Amazon dominates as merchant and platform. Europe sees reason to worry. | Adam Satariano, NYT
And, finally, some great news to close out the week:
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, Syapse participated Friday in the Biden Cancer Summit in Washington DC, announcing new commitments to data sharing in their quest to conquer cancer. Syapse’s president Jonathan Hirsch spoke alongside the Henry Ford Cancer Institute’s Steven Kalkanis in the morning session: “Commitments to Doubling the Rate of Progress”. They spoke about the importance of data sharing in the oncology community, and alongside their remarks, announced two major data partnerships worth acknowledging and celebrating.
First, six new health systems have committed to sharing data as they join the Syapse Learning Health Network. Those health systems — Ascension, Banner Health, Inova Health, LSU Health, OhioHealth, and Seoul National University Hospital. This brings 412 new hospitals and 215,000 new cancer cases into Syapse’s network each year, across the United States and South Korea, meaning hundreds of thousands of cancer patients will have access to better precision treatments, and Syapse’s data-sharing network can become more intelligent and more valuable to the medical community at an even faster rate than before. Second, Syapse is also announcing a commitment to share data with the National Cancer Institute Surveillance, Epidemiology, and End Results Program (SEER), which brings even more data into Syapse’s network and helps liberate data that is difficult to capture through traditional methods to become broadly and usefully available to all.
Former United States Vice President Joe Biden was on hand to celebrate these new commitments, and helped promote a genuine spirit of optimism in today’s oncology community towards the future: “We are at an inflection point in the understanding and treatment of cancer and are starting to break down barriers and change hte culture in ways that are needed to deliver what patients deserve — a cancer research and care system that puts saving lives above all else. The commitments we have received, including the Syapse Learning Health Network, bring us closer to developing the right systems, the right culture to get us there.” Congratulations to the team at Syapse on the new partnerships, and thanks for all of the work you do to make cancer easier to fight tomorrow than it is today.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team from Social Capital
