Thoughts Archive

Being Alive

He could not deal with people talking about him. It’s taken me some time since he died to get used to talking about him because I was under such strict instructions not to. But he fucked up something really major. He made a really dumb, bad decision. And it’s my right now to ignore all the other things that I thought were dumb, too. Maybe if I hadn’t felt I couldn’t talk about him to other people this wouldn’t have happened. I’m not going to let those preferences that led, in one way or another, to him killing himself guide my life anymore. I reject them.

- Taren Stinebrickner-Kauffman, Aaron Swartz’s girlfriend

The New Yorker article on Aaron Swartz is one of the best out there.

I don’t know what it is about Aaron’s story that plays on the emotions as deep as they do, stronger than so many of the other horrible injustices in this world. Perhaps it is the young genius laid to rest so young (he didn’t even make the 27 club). Perhaps it is the injustice of our aptly named justice system. Perhaps it is the death of idealism in the sordid face of reality. Perhaps it is because he wasn’t afraid to live and die as a pure soul. There will always be questions: Is it because he found it incapable of existing in his purest state? Did he choose to depart rather than stick around for the muddy and inordinate details? No one will ever know.

Is suicide an act of cowardice or bravery? The debate rages, but there is something particularly heart-wrenching when such an end is partially the result of a lofty, unattainable idealism. The world is full of corrupting influences, and to keep pure from such devices is a nearly impossible task. Most choose to let this corruption creep into their lives–ever so little at first, but eventually it consumes them. Throughout his life, Aaron had the courage to retain that sort of naive and incorruptible idealism that is the best part of what makes us human.

Montaigne says that you can’t really judge a person until you know how they acted when confronted face-to-face with death. When they killed Che Guevara–a man who Sartre called “the most complete human being of our age”–he supposedly said “Shoot me, you coward! You are only going to kill a man!” In his last moments, he bit his wrists so that he wouldn’t cry out in pain. Death is something we try so hard not to think about consciously, but it’s always there, lurking over our shoulder. Everything we do, the heights of our victories, the sufferings we endure, the lovers we take–secretly, deep down inside, we all realize our own mortality.

There is only one time in my life where I was completely convinced I was going to die. It came upon me quite unexpectedly, and in those final, painful seconds, I kept thinking how disappointed I was with my life– “Wow, this it,” I thought sardonically. I couldn’t help thinking how I’d be letting my family down by leaving so prematurely, and I regretted that I couldn’t tell my mom how much I loved her one last time before I departed. To perish thus seemed disgraceful yet anti-climactic, and it kindled within me a feeling of the most profound yet simultaneously ordinary disappointment — an odd combination that I have never quite encountered since. I realized I would have failed Montaigne’s ultimate test.

I survived, but I learned something valuable about myself through the experience.

Daily life is a grind. It is not glamorous. It is hard. It sucks. But every now and then, you see something beautiful, and it gives you the strength to keep on going. When I reflect on Aaron’s life, what he did, his ideals–it gives me that sort of courage. To keep fighting injustice, and to keep being a good person. It’s so easy to become bitter about one’s life–the person you loved left you, somebody jabbed you in the subway, or you only get two toppings on your Pinkberry when you asked for three. It takes a special kind of person to forget the banal injustices of quotidien life. How do we take a step back and realize how lucky we truly are to be living the way we do? No, we go out into the world and revenge ourselves upon innocent souls–maybe it is an arrogant stare at passersby, maybe it is the hidden political agendas we sow, maybe it is the way we treat those who have no power over us.

Whatever it may be, it is horrible, and it is wrong. It ever so slowly morphs us into sick little creatures that our childhood selves would find unrecognizable. When I sit back and truly think about all the little ways I’ve sold out in my life–all the ways I’ve abandoned the loftiest of my childhood sentiments–it makes me question things. Some days, I am paralyzed by these thoughts, and I waste away the morning and afternoon in useless contemplation on the person I could have been–the person I should be. Sometimes, I find myself wishing I had a tiny fraction of the courage and resolution to be a human being that Aaron had. On reflecting on his disgust at having power over others, he had this to say:

When I go to a library and I see the librarian at her desk reading, I’m afraid to interrupt her, even though she sits there specifically so that she may be interrupted, even though being interrupted for reasons like this by people like me is her very job.

The cliche is that death gives meaning to life. One of the most memorable prose passages I have ever read is Dostoevsky’s account in Brothers about his meditations when he was on Russia’s version of death row in Siberia and was fully convinced that he was going to die:

at the beginning of the journey the condemned man, sitting on his shameful cart, must feel that he has infinite life still before him. The houses recede, the cart moves on- oh, that’s nothing, it’s still far to the turning into the second street and he still looks boldly to right and to left at those thousands of callously curious people with their eyes fixed on him, and he still fancies that he is just such a man as they. But now the turning comes to the next street. Oh, that’s nothing, nothing, there’s still a whole street before him, and however many houses have been passed, he will still think there are many left. And so to the very end, to the very scaffold.

We are all of us that condemned person, deluding ourselves throughout our lives. Most of us live as though we have so many houses and streets before us, and we live this way until we are faced with the brutal reality of The End. If we truly realized the meaning of the scaffold, many of us would live differently. The contemplation of human frailty when confronted with death is difficult, but that consideration ultimately makes us stronger people.

Accepting the fact that one is condemned can be one of the most liberating experiences in life. It makes us realize that the most important things are kindness, humanity and the way we treat those around us, whether kin or stranger. It makes us realize that we can make a positive difference for others, and it makes us think that perhaps there is, in fact, a good reason to be alive.

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Filmmakers Will Become Hackers Once Again

An adaptation of this piece was posted today in Mashable.

passolini

When Seth MacFarlane takes the stage at the Dolby Theatre on February 24th to host the Academy Awards, it will be 84 years after the first such ceremony in 1929 and 44 days after the death of Infogami cofounder and anti-Hollywood / anti-SOPA activist Aaron Swartz.

I love films. My father, an opera singer, taught me at an early age to appreciate the dramatic arts, and I was a theatre actor in my youth. Some of my greatest heroes in life are filmmakers like Pasolini, who gave so much of themselves to their work. I’m an indie film director, and I’ve been on the other side of the spectrum in big budget filmmaking. I should be working in Hollywood today—but I’m not.

The Early Hackers of Hollywood

There was once a time when Hollywood was the wild west. In the early 1900s, a rogue group of artists, seeking to free themselves from the expensive yoke of Thomas Edison’s film patents, left the developed heart of the American Atlantic to settle in remote Los Angeles. These renegades would go on to form the foundations of Hollywood as well as herald an era of unprecedented creative experimentation. In many ways, these early filmmakers were the spiritual siblings of today’s hackers. However, watching the endless blush of red carpet, the matching Louboutins, and the immaculate costumes that each cost more than what many entrepreneurs bootstrap their startup with, viewers of this year’s Academy Awards will find it difficult to recognize any trace of this early Hollywood. But just as the hackers of today are disrupting everything from corporate America to venture capital, today’s indie filmmakers have the opportunity to unsettle Hollywood as we know it.

Currently, two distinct forces in content production are transforming film, television and the other industries that utilize the moving picture. The first is the decreasing cost to create video, a trend that has become so pronounced recently that there are comparisons to Gordon Moore’s 1965 observation about components in integrated circuits doubling every year. The visual quality of amateur video is improving rapidly, aided by cameras such as the Canon 5D Mark III ($3,499) which lend the common creative some of the visual power that would have cost several orders of magnitude more in bygone years. The second major force is at the other end of the spectrum in cutting-edge, high-cost innovation, marked in the past by technological developments such as synchronized sound (first exemplified in a feature-length film by Don Juan, 1926), Technicolor (Becky Sharpe, 1935), 3D animation (Toy Story, 1995) and countless others. The first disruption is a tool for the masses, the second a tool for the elect. Both have interesting implications for the established order.

Hollywood’s Sunset?

The declining cost per minute of producing video is rapidly upending the establishment. I was recently conversing with a veteran media executive who remarked: “I never thought in my entire career that I would say it is a good time to be in content. But now, I think it is a good time to be in content.” In many ways, this hearkens back to the freedom extant in the foundation of the industry over a hundred years ago. At the dawn of the new medium, both the artist (Georges Méliès) and the technologist (Thomas Edison) rejoiced—the former at the newfound creative freedom bestowed upon them, unfettered by modern bureaucracy, and the latter by the economic rents to be captured through endless patents. Pauline Kael had this to say about the early days of cinema:

“When Méliès photographed his magic shows, when D.W. Griffith recreated the Civil War or imagined the fall of Babylon… they were just beginning to tap the infinite possibilities of movies to explore, to record, to dramatize… movies were so inexpensive that they could be hailed as the great democratic art form. Then, as businessmen gained control of the medium, it became almost impossibly difficult for the artists to try anything new. Movies became in one way or another remakes of earlier movies, and until inexpensive pictures from abroad began to attract large audiences the general public probably believed what the big studios advertised—that great movies meant big stars, best-seller stories, expensive production. The infinite variety of what was possible on film was almost forgotten, along with the pioneers, and many of those who loved movies lost some of their own vision. They began to ask what cinema ‘really’ was, as if ideal cinema were some pre-ëxistent entity that had to be discovered; like Platonists turned archeologists, they tried to unearth the true essence of cinema.”

Writing in 1968, Kael’s sentiments about cinema’s aesthetic crisis sound as familiar to the modern ear as if it were written yesterday.

And yet, a disruptive startup that can capture and combine the most excellent cultural elements of both Hollywood and Silicon Valley is rare. These two crown jewels of American ingenuity—proud of their distinct achievements and distinct ways of life—do not co-exist well. Last year’s vitriol surrounding SOPA and PIPA is sufficient evidence of this. One of my friends at a large technology accelerator recently recounted to me the number of companies he has seen take on this Sisyphean task and fail. Regarding the success of a startup’s founding team, “it is better to have a team of two dumb jocks,” he said, “than to have a dumb jock and a smart nerd who have nothing in common.” He added that the problem was inherent in culture, some of which was encapsulated in the “pay me now” mentality of Hollywood versus the “pay me later” mentality of Silicon Valley.

The Coming Golden Age of the Indie Genius

In any art form, the curation function has always played a critical role. Living writers always find it hard to make a name for themselves because society wisely relies on the passage of time to decide which works are relevant and which can be discarded as ephemeral period pieces. Filmmakers today are more like the painters of the Renaissance, who relied on aristocratic patronage to make their living. Knowledge compounds, as any ambitious hacker who shuns corporate America knows today.[1] A Renaissance painter thus needed glory in this life to be remembered in the next (a fact not true of our best writers), for without the exponential growth bestowed by the financial patronage of aristocrats, their natural genius would have languished. The hermetic Thoreau could craft a masterpiece alone in the woods, but does anyone doubt the critical role of the Medicis and the Popes in the painting of the Capella Sistina?

Filmmakers have always been spiritually closer to hackers than the businessmen who run Hollywood. One of my most poignant memories of working on a big budget studio film was one day when I asked the film’s director to recount his meeting with our studio execs. He proceeded to grab a handful of coins nearby and pretended to vomit them out of his mouth—the coins scattering grotesquely across the table. For now, the most talented filmmakers are beholden to the aristocratic patronage of the studios, but eventually, cheaper production costs and unlimited digital distribution have the potential to usher in a new Golden Era for the singular creative genius in video. While Cervantes was the sole writer of Don Quixote, the French New Wave had to invent Auteur Theory to have a common language around what constituted film authorship. A modern Hollywood film cannot come into being without the labor of thousands. What happens, then, as films become as carelessly cheap as the writing of fiction? This admittedly ambitious asymptote has intriguing cultural implications, but for now, Hollywood sneers at the iPhone cat videos that plague YouTube.

This story has been written before. The broadcast networks held an oligopoly on television for some time, and when the premium cable channels first emerged, they were disparaged. A media executive I know compared our time with the early days of cable, citing the dubbed Jacque Cousteau videos (Discovery Channel), late night sex movies (HBO) and hurling (ESPN) that formed the content backbone of the early pioneers. At first scorned, the established order hastened to purchase these channels as content improved and audiences swelled.

Curation is King

Regardless of the many motley forms the future can take, curation and distribution will continue to be key. On this front, a titanic battle is currently being waged that includes the likes of Comcast, the Hollywood majors, News Corp, HBO (Time Warner), Apple, Google and many others. Google’s ambitious goal is to be on half a billion SmartTVs by 2015, and consumers and pundits alike eagerly await Apple’s much-promised television. The Asimovian vision of our technorati presumes the ascendance of hardware married with the internet. In the future, the narrative goes, we should be able to walk into our homes and say “Siri, I’m sad,” and Siri would light up our HD television with the latest funny viral video, or give us the most recent episode of our favorite sitcom. Instead of having to flip through channels, Apple would give us a stream of content catered to our tastes that we could change at a whim. “Siri, next. Siri, next. Siri, I want to watch the fifth episode of the first season of Game of Thrones.” In this world, the channel disappears, and the consumer ceases to differentiate between content that was streamed from YouTube versus content from primetime television.

The retort of the existing power players to such fanciful dreams is strong. Comcast argues that it still owns the coaxial cables, which it can use to throttle content delivered to a future iTV. The rise of 4G LTE will hardly put a dent in this fortress of pipes, as spectrum deficits loom large for the foreseeable future. The Hollywood majors and HBO still control the best content, and if the democratization of media has taught us anything, it is that blockbuster content (whether movies or TV shows) should play an increasingly more powerful role in the psyche of the global population. Americans now watch 33 hours of video per week, and in a world of free choice, it would make sense that a given person would allocate the large part of their time watching the “best” content available to them. With HBO serving as taste maker and the premier destination of scripted content for many of its over 80 million subscribers, it has the unique ability to produce high quality content at a lower cost per hour of subscriber viewership than others. HBO’s machine generates ~$5 billion in revenue, and the vast majority of that relies on the pipes of Comcast and its ilk, so what incentive do they have of sacrificing their golden goose? Reports of the death of the blockbuster are greatly exaggerated, and the ascendency of the long tail is premature. Disrupting Hollywood and the existing power players is thus a more difficult quandary than at first blush.

Hacker’s Revenge

Nevertheless, brilliant young hackers have solved harder theoretical problems than these by the time they finish grade school, and some of them are now dedicating themselves to turning the disruption of Hollywood from theory to reality.

On January 11, 2013, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his Brooklyn apartment in an apparent suicide. For months, he had been persecuted by the Federal Government for hacking JSTOR via MIT, an act rooted in his principled belief in Open Access. Since 2010, he had helped spearhead the fight against Hollywood to stop the measures that would eventually become SOPA and PIPA, a battle in which he lived to tell the tale. In both conflicts, his fundamental opponents were the perverse influences behind today’s copyright laws. Hollywood, the principal patron behind SOPA/PIPA, was first formed over a century ago because a few rogue artists wanted to get as far away as possible from the constraining influence of Edison’s patents. Dearest Hollywood, the irony is not lost on us, and know this: hackers and indie filmmakers alike are coming after you. Laugh at us, vilify us, persecute us with your mighty resources—it doesn’t matter. Because in the end, we’re going to win.

[1] Stephen Cohen, co-founder of Palantir, said it well: “We tend to massively underestimate the compounding returns of intelligence. As humans, we need to solve big problems. If you graduate Stanford at 22 and Google recruits you, you’ll work a 9-to-5. It’s probably more like an 11-to-3 in terms of hard work. They’ll pay well. It’s relaxing. But what they are actually doing is paying you to accept a much lower intellectual growth rate. When you recognize that intelligence is compounding, the cost of that missing long-term compounding is enormous.”

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A New Chapter

Today, I’m announcing that I will be joining TechStars as Managing Director in New York City.

I love New York. When I first moved to this city eight years ago, living on the sordid shores of 12th Avenue, I discovered a peculiar energy and vitality that I had never quite felt before and have never felt anywhere else since. Throughout my subsequent moves and journeys throughout NYC as well as places around the world, this is the city I’ve always considered home. At one point in the mid-2000s, Manhattan was on the verge of becoming an investment-banking dormitory, but a lot has changed since then, both in the world and in New York City itself. The tech community here has blossomed, becoming a powerful force in its own right. I’m excited to continue to play a role in fostering this incredible group of people, as I’ve been doing for the last several years.

These are exciting times for all of us – with the industry at an inflection point, entrepreneurs are nervous and commentators feed the echo chamber with every new article on the “Series A Crunch”. But the tide will eventually shift, as these macro pendulum swings have a tendency to do. Dry powder in the venture capital industry, which peaked at nearly $80 billion in 2001, has finally worked its way back down to the 1985-1995 trend line. While tech companies that have recently gone public are still on average 30% off their highs of last year, they have made steady gains since the depths that were reached in the latter months of 2012. The degree to which the valuation of private startups (and the industry as a whole) has been tied to the immediate state of the public markets has always been a mystery to me, considering the years it takes to build a great company can last longer than the average American marriage. Real returns in tech don’t come from hopping on the latest bandwagon. But fickle valuations are a fact of life. No one can predict with accuracy where sentiments will go—as the banks in Greece or houses in Spain have taught us—but the world is far from over.

Through all these ups and downs, great entrepreneurs just put their heads down and focus on building great companies, and I am as committed as ever to help build those great teams and nurture their great ideas. One of the most wonderful experiences in my life was in bringing together a community of talented people as director/producer of my first film, an indie documentary. It was exhilarating, and it was an early, intense lesson on how a small group of passionate individuals can work to create something valuable out of nothing. Over the years, as an investor at NEA and Warburg Pincus, I’ve had the privilege of helping to nurture the dreams of numerous teams and businesses, providing resources for them to flourish.

As I look forward to beginning this new chapter in my life with the amazing people at TechStars, I will forever be thankful to my mentors and colleagues at NEA. Above all, I look forward to continuing to foster the wonderful, burgeoning tech community I have come to know and love in New York City.

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