Winter Recap: December 24, 2017 Snippets
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This week’s theme: recapping the last 6 months of Snippets, plus welcoming Kristin Baker Spohn to the Social Capital Venture team.
Welcome to the final, Christmas Eve issue of Snippets that is our last issue of the year — we’re off next week and will see you next in 2018. As usual, we’re back with a recap episode where we tie together many of the themes we’ve talked about in Snippets over the last 6 months. We hope this gives you some new ideas to think about now that you see everything together, maybe find an issue or two that you missed, and connect some dots that we’ll continue to build on next year.
In July and August, we talked about cryptocurrency: how proof of work and the original bitcoin protocol give us a new way to think about consensus, and what it means to have “skin in the game” as we contribute towards maintaining it. We compared proof of work and its energy-intense reality (which, we now know, is a feature and not a bug!) with newer ideas like proof of stake, Ethereum’s “Casper” proposal for a new kind of skin in the game, and other new proposals for how to get decentralization right. And finally, we looked at how different thought leaders’ definitions of “degrees of decentralization”, including Vitalik Buterin and Balaji Srinivasan, can help us not only understand decentralized systems better but also their centralized counterparts too:
July 16: Truth, Consensus and Skin in the Game
August 6: Degrees of Decentralization
Then, we talked about bubbles: why and when they form, how they serve a very useful role in the innovation economy, and how we can learn from parallel examples of “bubbles” in biology and the natural world. We learned about how the software industry has a few unique and interesting components — specifically, the open source software community and the VC community — that create special circumstances where opportunities can bubble up rapidly and interesting ideas can be tested rapidly, in parallel. And finally, we learned about how the redundancy and “waste” involved in trying so many ideas in parallel, even when most of them fail, is critical for building a future that we cannot foresee. As the computer scientist Alan Kay once said, “It’s easier to build the future than it is to predict it”:
August 13: Introduction to Bubbles
August 20: Coordination Failure
September 10: Learning From Biology
Starting in September, we continued our Bubbles theme to talk about non-linear situations and now they lead to distortions in “rational” behavior. We paid specific attention to Reflexivity, and how reflexive situations arrive in environments with natural network effects. Given how much of the tech industry revolves around network effects, we can now see how bubbles are, in effect, an essential feature of the software world that we should expect to occur more, not less, in the future. And finally (looking forward to next section),we introduced the topic of fake news, and how the spread of feelings can ride waves of reflexivity in a way that facts cannot:
September 24: Weighing Machines and Voting Machines
October 1: Reflexivity, Networks and Bubbles
October 8: Facts Versus Feelings
At the end of October, we had a special issue introducing Capital as a Service (you can read Ashley’s original post here):
October 29: Capital-as-a-Service
And finally, we closed out the year with several weeks dedicated to fake news, other new problems that are arising in the online era, and how we might deal with them. We learned how to think about large tech companies as “heavy” infrastructure on top of which “light” information (and also tribal behavior) can spread, not so differently than the railroads 150 years ago and other kinds of “platform” technologies. And finally, we wrapped up the year with a few stories from people who’ve been there, with their own skin in the game, and how they see both the past and the future of the internet as continually evolving stories:
November 5: Tech Goes to the Principal’s Office
November 12: The Original American Tech Giants
November 19: The Ultimate Consumer Products
November 26: Amusing Ourselves to Death
December 3: Dividing Up the Ether
December 10: The Four Quadrants of Bad Stuff Online
December 17: The Past is unpredictable
Finally, because no Snippets issue would be complete without some news from the Social Capital family, we have one exciting announcement to share. We’re delighted to welcome our newest member of the venture team: Kristin Baker Spohn, who will be joining as a health care investor.
Kristin joins the Social Capital team following an extensive career in healthcare, with operating roles at both Castlight Health and Collective Health, as well as at Goldman Sachs. So it’s a bit surprising that even someone like Kristin, with her extensive experience navigating the world of health care systems, reimbursement schemes and billing codes, has a health care horror story of her own. You can read Kristin’s story about it here, which makes clear not only how much perspective and empathy she brings to the health care venture world but also how lucky we are at Social Capital to have her on board moving forward. You can follow her on Twitter at @kbakes.
Have a joyful holiday season, a happy new year full of friends and family, and we’ll see you in 2018!
-Alex and the team from Social Capital
