I love San Francisco. I’ve called the Bay Area home for more than a decade — it’s an undeniably special place. Silicon Valley has been uniquely friendly to startups since the 1980s, but it’s likely not the place I’ll build my next company. It simply costs too much (clearly, prices in San Francisco have ramifications far beyond tech and startups, but that’s not the focus of this piece). Costs are raising alarm bells in the press and with almost every other entrepreneur I talk to: we tolerated high prices for a long time in order to access the best talent, but the numbers no longer make sense.

The course we’re on is to become an executive city, home to the headquarters of large tech companies but generally absent even high-skilled practitioners. New companies will build their talent bases elsewhere, even if a few execs remain in the Bay Area to access funders and partners. Many people will contend that this isn’t the right path for the city, but absent big changes or shifts in startup cost structures, it appears to be the path we’re on. In a remarkably short period of time, it seems our collective mentality has shifted from “it’s a risk to start a company outside the Bay Area” to “it’s financially irresponsible to build a startup here.”

There’s no way of knowing what a post-SF startup ecosystem looks like. Perhaps we discover that no other location can build the critical mass of capital, talent and culture enjoyed by the Bay Area, resulting in fewer, better-funded companies in existing hubs. Perhaps we embrace a distributed model, with startup headquarters in existing hubs but most talent scattered across the country.

But let’s assume for a second that a new hub — or a few — are able to emerge. Let’s assume that our SF issues don’t go away anytime soon, and startups migrate wholesale to places like Toronto, Denver or Austin. Any big industry transition will have its challenges, but there are reasons to believe that the startup ecosystem will be better off post-Silicon Valley:

Startups will be able to push through hard times

For the last decade or so, the “lean startup” methodology has encouraged new companies to pay what it takes for top talent, then get their products out the door, like, yesterday. You have a few months to run a bunch of quick tests, and if you can’t prove success, you die.

The problem is that even with a solid group of super-talented people, sometimes it takes more than a few iterations of a product to find something truly valuable. Stewart Butterfield raised $17 million to work on a failed video game for nearly four years before pivoting into Slack. A less credentialed CEO would have raised less and probably failed. In 2004, a small team in Ottawa built a site to sell snowboards online. They jammed on that concept for over two years, before discovering that the real value was in the shopping cart technology they’d built. The result is Shopify, now worth over $16 billion.

We have examples of startups that almost failed and didn’t, but what we don’t know is how many were close to a breakthrough when they shut their doors. You could argue that there are many more companies that are over-funded and should probably die, and that’s true. But either way, exorbitant SF rents are a bad destination for venture capital dollars. Startups with most of their talent in lower-cost areas will run leaner but may still be able to raise similar amounts, making them able to push through the inevitable challenges on the road to product/market fit. We may see startups succeed and grow in Columbus, Las Vegas or Salt Lake City that would have died in their infancy in the Bay Area.

Suffocating margin pressure will be released

The past 15 years in consumer tech — the social media, user-generated content and app era — has seen the creation of some largest-scale, highest-margin businesses in history. That wave has largely subsided, and it’s unclear whether future waves will be capable of the same effect. As startups attack areas like financial services, medical devices and mobility, capital requirements and gross margins may not look attractive as the software companies grown in the 2000s and 2010s. New startups are competing with tech giants for talent, but may never have the margins to support competitive salaries.

Today’s software giants are globally unique businesses, different even than other tech companies: Apple, making physical products, has gross margins in the high 30s. Meanwhile, Alphabet’s margin is 58%, even after all its investments in AI, self-driving cars and other moonshots. Salesforce doubles Apple at 74%, and Facebook clocks in at a whopping 83%. Let me say that again: more than four-fifths of Facebook’s forty billion dollars in annual revenue can go to salaries, gym subsidies or in-office massages. These are companies whose margins and scale may never be repeated, but who are setting the prices for Bay Area talent. Unless startups have a real shot at building an ultra-high margin business, they’re putting needless pressure on themselves by playing that game. A distributed startup ecosystem will help relieve that pressure.

The experience bubble will be broken

One of the most profound benefits of a startup diaspora from the Bay Area will be the problems that companies choose to work on. Many entrepreneurs gravitate towards problems that we ourselves experience. I am an entrepreneur living in San Francisco, and my problems are generally experienced by other entrepreneurs living in San Francisco. Therefore, we have VC-backed companies chasing our most trivial inconveniences, while huge issues experienced by the rest of the country are left untouched. A more distributed startup ecosystem might help.

The degree of this shift will depend on how wide the startup ecosystem spreads: if most startup activity remains in SF/NYC/LA/Seattle, the change will be minimal. But if we see the likes of Denver, Salt Lake City or Raleigh start to rise, I hope that the types of companies being started will also change. A breakout winner in one of those cities will help cement its future.

A common argument I hear is that there’s some “X factor” to the Bay Area — universities, culture, funding, connections or some combination — that has allowed it to become home to such a vibrant ecosystem and prevented other areas from replicating its success. I wonder if that X factor is nothing inherent to the region, but is rather a self-fulfilling prophecy: with the Bay as a viable option for the best companies and the best talent, why would they build elsewhere? If VCs know the best companies will build here, why would they fund startups in other areas? But it seems our outlook has shifted, and SF is no longer the top pick for top startups. If promising companies are forced to start moving, the money will follow. Perhaps that was the X factor, and it has already changed.

I can’t help but feel deeply sad that the Bay Area may not hold its place as the undisputed startup champion for much longer. There’s a culture, talent base and willingness to help here that is not easily replicated. And I could be completely wrong: it could be that no other location will be able to build the critical mass of people, capital and connections necessary to produce winners. But if other ecosystems do emerge, it’ll be exciting to watch the new breed of startups they produce.

The ICO craze over the past six months has been wild: $6 billion in non-dilutive capital contributed to highly speculative startups, many with little more than a whitepaper and a website.

Startup founders around the world have started frantically brainstorming ways to integrate tokens into their products so that they can cash in while the speculation is hot. We’re starting to see tokens shoehorned into products they have no business being in, just so the company can put “blockchain” in its name and watch the money pour in.

The current nutzo market is temporary, but the longer-term role of tokenized company funding is the subject of a lot of debate. We may decide the whole thing was a big mistake and return to good ole VC fundraising. We may also start trading startup equity as tokenized securities, rather than just the non-equity utility tokens that are being traded today.

Either of those outcomes may occur, but there’s a deeper truth to be learned by studying this weird new fundraising vehicle. It won’t look the way it does today, but within the wild speculation of ICOs could lie the beginnings of a new compensation model for developers — one that could reshape the way software is built and funded.

The Project Economy

Open-source software has come a long way since Steve Ballmer called it a “cancer” in 2001. Modern computing would not exist (or would at least look very different) without the open platforms we all rely on. While many companies contribute paid resources to open-source development, the ecosystem still relies to a large degree on the benevolent contributions of a large network of individuals. Today, unless a company decides that contributing to a project is in its best interest, those contributors don’t get paid.

But what if developers could make a living contributing to the projects they already choose to work on for free?

An evolution of the ICO framework could provide the mechanism for that to happen. Token sales fund individual projects, independent from any company or other legal entity. Many ICOs today are run by companies, but the success of the token is distinct from the success of the company (for that reason, many developers for blockchain companies are demanding tokens instead of company equity). If the project and its associated network become useful and grow, the market should value the associated token accordingly. Owners of tokens related to that network stand to benefit, regardless of company affiliation.

If we apply that concept to open-source development, the implications don’t stop at just increasing the speed of project development. With the right incentive structure, the project would replace the company as the primary organizing force for economic progress. Imagine if the Git project had been started today as a distributed application with an integrated token, which we’ll call XGT.

The project code is freely available and open-source, but is structured so that it rewards contributors to the project with XGT (like bug or feature bounties, but for everything). Each successful commit is rewarded with cryptocurrency that is independently valued by the market.

The token could be worthless, but in theory, the value should increase as the project is adopted (I don’t cover crypto valuation here, but this is a good overview).

Let’s say you’re a developer who wanted to contribute to Git. You’d look at their published list of desired features or bug fixes, and earn XGT by committing accepted improvements. Git would use a “proof-of-contribution” protocol to issue XGT based on a tangible metric like number of commits or issues resolved, or it could be divided up based on a consensus of those involved in the project (Colony’s “reputation mining” concept to solve that problem is fascinating).

You can immediately cash in your earned tokens at the current market rate, or assuming success, you can ride the growth of the network to greater returns.

Eventually, a company like Github could determine that the project is worth working on. They direct their full-time developers to build the Github proprietary interface, but they also want to make enhancements to the core project to support their needs.

So they might offer you a market premium in exchange for a portion of your compensation tokens and the ability to direct you towards issues that matter to them. The company thus has a vested interest in not only their own product, but in the foundational projects they use and the communities that contribute to them.

Let’s say that our new-world Github does as well as the original, building not only a successful enterprise but also dramatically increasing the market value of XGT. Early employees of Github do very well based on their company equity, but you, as an early holder of XGT, could stand to do even better.

In a token-based world, open-source contributors could become the most influential and well-compensated developers in the world, without ever working for a company.

The Sovereign Individual

With a token-based model, we’ll see the emergence of the “sovereign individual”, who would be able to contribute to crypto-based versions of Unix, Apache, Docker or Chef and get rewarded for doing so, completely independent of any organization.

The companies involved in those projects would stand to benefit too, but on an equal playing field with distributed developer communities. The resulting Project Economy is a collision of the crypto, open source and gig employment trends that have all been years in the making. Companies will still exist, but they won’t be the only vehicle for individual success.

More subtly, the project economy also takes huge advantage of censorship resistance, the primary benefit of being on a public blockchain. In this case, the “censors” are not authoritarian governments, but large acquiring companies with near-monopolies on startup liquidity.

The long-term options for startups and their projects are generally to either become big enough to IPO or to align themselves with the interests of Facebook and hope to get bought. Unix was marginalized for years — much longer than a traditional company could sustain it — before it became one of the core building blocks of modern computing.

Cryptoassets provide a way for world-changing projects enjoy independent longevity and to reward its contributors without requiring an IPO or exit to a FAANG company.

A couple of big challenges emerge from a Project Economy:

• Turns out that hierarchy in companies is pretty effective, and organization and management of decentralized projects is notoriously difficult. For many projects, centralization is just a better option. Smart contracts can help a bit here too: governance, decision-making, organizational structure and parameters of cooperation can all be baked into the token being traded. Once you own your piece of the project, you can influence its direction or outputs to whatever degree the contract allows. Decisions won’t necessarily be consensus-driven, either. The project ownership structure can appoint decision-makers to make tough calls and drive the project forward.
• Today, cryptocurrencies are only available to projects with embedded networks and associated tokens, which would exclude the vast majority of open-source projects. If a non-network-based project wants to issue an associated token, that token would likely be classified as a security and be much more restricted.

Venture investing in a project economy would have to change dramatically. VCs can still invest in companies the way they do today, participating in the upside of a specific entity in a traditional structure. Or they can invest directly in fundamental projects, betting that the project will be used by many companies or grow independent of any of them.

Or they can invest directly in individuals, taking a share of future compensation tokens. VCs often say that seed investments are mostly in the team rather than any particular concept — the project economy allows “people investment firms” to actually exist.

Let’s get philosophical for just a second. The book Sapiens (is it cliche to reference Sapiens? Whatever I’m doing it) speeds through the history of humankind but points to our ability to create “collective fictions” as a watershed moment.

Countries, religions, and companies are all just fictions; they’re ideas with stories and structures that allow humans to work together. Our idea of a company contains its assets, its employees and its financials — but it’s also none of those things. The company is the imaginary entity that binds all of those elements together.

It’s much too early to declare that the advent of decentralized networks is comparable to our invention of the company, but they’re a fundamentally different idea about how to allow humans to cooperate.

With that said, decentralization for its own sake is not an advantage. If decentralized organizations work, they’ll work because it’s way better. Yes, tokens allow investors to speculate and startups to raise easy money. But what we’re seeing could become much, much bigger than a better fundraising vehicle. For certain types of projects, decentralization is and will be the only way to survive.

For other projects, an a open, distributed community working in lockstep can be more powerful and flexible than its centralized cousin. If it works, the Project Economy could mark the final step in the refragmentation of the Almighty Corporation, replaced by networks of sovereign individuals organizing and cooperating in ways that just aren’t possible today.

The ICO Craze Contains the Seeds of an Open-Source Economy was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back in 2010, amid declarations that “software is eating the world,” it seemed like the combined waves of mobile devices and cloud computing would change everything.

As tech wrecked havoc upon transportation, hotels, and numerous other industries, Silicon Valley started salivating over its next target. It spied a crown jewel, a slow-moving, half-trillion dollar behemoth of an industry: banking.

The prize looked ripe and juicy, a thoroughly old-school industry with high fixed costs and collectively reviled by consumers even as its services remained ubiquitous.

We had also just recovered from the Great Recession, where we saw missteps by banks cause the largest financial crisis in recent memory. The time was right. Silicon Valley started moving in, VC checks chasing entrepreneurs in hope of transforming finance with technology.

Fintech was born.

Seven years later, Square and Stripe boom in merchant payments, Wealthfront and Betterment challenge asset management and the tech world is fixated on the price of Bitcoin, but the core of US consumer banking remains largely untouched.

In fact, over that period the strongest incumbents have become stronger. Once heralded as the stars of the space, Lending Club and Prosper are struggling. Winners certainly exist, but tech has yet to revolutionize banking in any real way.

The tone of the Fintech space has shifted from disrupting incumbents to partnering with them, and VC dollars have started to shift to more promising fields.

Perhaps we just haven’t seen the right company yet, but the oracles of disruption would have painted a very different picture for 2017 than where we are today.

We predicted mobile payments, all-digital banking, new credit models and a truly inclusive financial system. While the picture is not entirely bleak, it’s worth asking why were we so wrong (so far) about the potential for disruption in an industry that appeared so ripe for it. Here are some thoughts.

Checking, Saving and Personal Finance: The Vitamin Problem

Disruption grade: F (these grades are subjective, of course)

I’ll start with my own company: Level Money started with a budgeting application, a simple way for our users to view their finances as an ‘allowance for adults.’

We thought that we could use Level as a new front-end to banking, slowly integrating financial products into the application while maintaining a simple interface. But along the way, I wrestled with the question that sat at the core of our challenge in building a next-generation bank: “are we a vitamin or a painkiller?”

We tried to convince ourselves that we had a painkiller, a solution that solved a burning problem for lots of people. But in reality we were a vitamin, something that if taken every day would have long term benefits, but that doesn’t necessarily fix an urgent need right now.

While banking is certainly not loved by many consumers, improvements to the system (Simple, Moven, Digit, Check, Level Money and others) slam into the vitamin problem over and over again.

Consumers may have some latent desire to switch their bank at some point, but putting it off until tomorrow isn’t going to kill them. They also may nominally desire some greater financial clarity, but the path of least resistance is to maintain the status quo.

If it’s necessary to convince a consumer that they have a problem before you even start to tell them that you’re the best solution, you’re fighting a losing battle.

To date, no industry newcomer has succeeded in gaining significant traction in transactional accounts, even as countless startups and the likes of PayPal have tried.

Lending: Slow Money in a Fast World

Disruption grade: C

Banks don’t make their money with checking and savings accounts anyway; many treat transactional accounts as loss leaders for loans. Loans are the bread and butter of the industry, and there seemed to be huge room for improvement in lending using new data sources. Enter Lending Club, Prosper, SoFi, Affirm and many others.

As we later learned, the fundamental challenge with lending startups is time. A new lender’s competitive advantage will generally be how they separate good loans from bad ones, but that advantage only gets proven after years as customers pay back their debts.

In the meantime, lenders must be careful not to grow too quickly, because a bad tweak in the lending model may not have yet to show itself. That’s frustrating for a VC and startup industry accustomed to exponential growth and the returns that accompany it.

In addition, credit quality is highly dependent on the macro-economic credit cycle: we’ve been in a great credit environment for a number of years, which has been friendly to new companies in the space. It’ll be a very different story when the market turns.

Payments: Cards Work Pretty Well, Actually

Disruption Grade: B-

There are several bright spots to highlight in the payments space: Square, Stripe and Venmo have all made significant waves. Square sent the industry scrambling to imitate its mobile card acceptance platform, and Venmo prompted a comically bad attempt at a competitor from financial institutions.

But before we congratulate ourselves, let’s remember the scale of the original ambition in the payments area. Of all areas in financial services, this was the one where mobile devices should take over.

Mobile payments was the way of the future, before it ended in tears. Countless startups rode the hype then crashed hard (remember Clinkle?). Google Wallet rebooted and failed several times. Even Apple — almighty Apple! — saw its attempt at mobile payments fail to gain adoption.

We’ve seen lots of progress in payments, but it’s nothing near where the oracles of disruption predicted it would be at the beginning of the Fintech era.

After so many attempts by companies large and small to prompt a shift to mobile payments, the fact that little has changed is particularly frustrating. The reason is simple and its own version of the Vitamin Problem. Electronic payments are highly superior to cash, but payments via mobile device is not that much better than swiping a card.

Square and Stripe succeeded in allowing merchants to accept cards, where the alternative was cash or other forms of payment. Venmo did the same for person-to-person payments. But saving five percent at Target via Google Wallet is not enough to change a deeply ingrained habit.

People don’t use new technology because it’s new, snazzy or philosophically superior, they use it because its way better. That seems obvious in retrospect, but somehow we forget it all the time (see entries: Segway, Bitcoin 1.0).

Investment Management: The Robo Era

Disruption grade: B+

The area where we’ve seen real industry movement is in investment management. When Wealthfront was founded back in 2008, the investing space looked radically different.

By waging a war on high fees for low performance by active managers, robo-advisors have ridden (or created) a wave favoring passive management dominated by ETFs.

At the same time, Robinhood is attacking trading fees: it’s fee-free application has accumulated 3 million users (E*Trade has 3.6 million).

Still, it’s estimated that robo-advisors manage $182 billion in assets in the US. That’s a noble sum, but only a small chunk of the $20 trillion of retail investors’ total assets.

Change always takes time, but a true takeover in financial management will be a particular slog. Even if robo-advisors scoop up much more of the market, the race-to-the-bottom pricing structure will present long-term profitability problems.

However, real change has taken place in an industry not used to change, due at least in part to strong tech challengers.

Tech has certainly not given up on financial services, though the rate of VC investment in Fintech has cooled. Established companies like Credit Karma are expanding into new areas, and newer companies like Aspiration, Upstart and ActiveHours are showing promise.

But I hope we’ve also learned the degree of the slog that awaits. To truly attack an area like lending, VC dollars must do what they’re very bad at doing: wait. The market will need to back a seasoned entrepreneur who’s willing to slog it out with large financial institutions long enough for the model to prove itself (for lending in particular, my bet is that Max Levchin will be that person).

As the world becomes fixated on cryptocurrencies and other technologies, we’d do well to learn a lesson from the first waves of Fintech: when you have a good hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Just a few years ago, that hammer looked like cloud computing and mobile devices. Now that we’ve seen that cycle play out, we’re all looking for the Next Big Thing. Not wanting to miss the next wave, Silicon Valley too easily buys into the “this changes everything” storyline.

We often forget when we’re wrong, discounting how much better new products truly need to be to change the status quo. Let’s not just celebrate when we’re right, but carefully think about why we were wrong before we jump on the next hype train.

Fintech, a Failure? was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In the days after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, news and images started to trickle out indicating just how bad the situation is down there. Half the island doesn’t have clean water, hospitals are overloaded, and damaged infrastructure is limiting the movement of supplies. Particularly hard-hit is Puerto Rico’s electrical grid: in a world where we take power for granted, the notion that it’s going to take months to restore service to most homes is nearly unimaginable. Relief efforts are underway, but it’s an enormous task to get Puerto Rico’s legacy infrastructure operational again.

There has to be a better way to get Puerto Rico’s power network up and running again. Turns out, there might be one. The technology is probably too new to be realistically used on the ground today, but it serves as case study for where decentralized solutions can win in the future.

Let me pause before going further: I’ll describe a thought experiment here that imagines a different way of solving the issue of electricity on the island using new technology, but let’s remember that the disaster in Puerto Rico is very much not theoretical. There is surely a long list of reasons — political and otherwise — that this wouldn’t actually work. If you take the time to read this, please also take time to help the victims of Hurricane Maria here.

Here’s the major issue: Puerto Rico’s power generation facilities are largely intact, but up to 80% of transmission lines — the giant towers that haul electricity over long distances — are down throughout the island, with scenes like this:

Most smaller power lines in residential areas are likely damaged as well.

It’s going to take months to rebuild the transmission lines to get electricity from power plants to hospitals and homes. While they’re rebuilding, another solution awaits: create a distributed network of electricity on the island independent of the centralized grid. These “microgrids” are not a new concept, but they have always relied on central utilities to maintain the larger system and set the price of power. It turns out that we may not need the central actor: a decentralized, blockchain-based pricing system can set up incentives, broker deals and allow interconnectivity automatically and efficiently. Simply by plugging into the network, anyone can buy, store, generate and sell power to and from each other, all without involving a central utility. Here’s how it could work (Note: I don’t cover the basics of coins or the blockchain here, but this is a good primer):

1. The Puerto Rican Power Authority, SolarCity, or any interested party would start by issuing blockchain-enabled power meters. These meters would do two things: measure power going in and out, and tie that power transmission to a coin on the blockchain, which we’ll call a PowerCoin. If you consume power, you’re charged PowerCoins. If you generate it, you’re paid PowerCoins by those that consume it. The price of PowerCoins is completely dynamic, allowing electricity to be traded on a free, decentralized market.
2. The power meters would be connected together in what would start as a small network. A few solar panels on a roof or an industrial generator outside a warehouse would be connected to a residential refrigerator or a cell tower, each connected by a meter. Every node starts with zero PowerCoins, so to draw power from the grid, each connection must first either generate power (rewarded with a mixture of purchased and newly created PowerCoins), or purchase existing PowerCoins at the market price. Relief efforts can plug in, pumping power into the network and giving away their earned PowerCoins to those that need them. Solar panels or other forms of generation can also be donated, allowing people to create PowerCoins on their own. All the while, there is no “central node” — both the power and the PowerCoins are distributed.
3. Slowly, the network will grow. Because the price of power is dynamic, the price will go up when the network is strained and down when there’s excess power. That incentivizes battery banks to be installed, buying power when prices are low and selling it when it’s high. As the network expands, the price and reliability of power will stabilize.
4. The PowerCoin system sets up incentives not just for those generating and consuming power, but also for those doing the work to make sure others are connected to it (a power network would definitely fail if everyone had to hang their own power lines to plug in). The PowerCoin smart contract can solve that, too. If a third party helped you get connected to the network, they can charge a connection fee tied to your meter. That fee can be a portion of power consumed, a flat fee, or zero — it’s all possible. It’s even ok if many small, different networks are created with different types of meters and PowerCoins: the networks can be tied together and the coins traded for each other at their respective market prices.
5. Eventually, a big power plant will plug in, flooding the network with power and driving down the price of PowerCoins to “normal” levels. Great! Relief operations that have been generating power and giving away PowerCoins no longer have to do that. The big difference is that the utility now influences the price of power, but it no longer controls it. They’re competing on a level playing field with a network of distributed power sources, with a completely transparent pricing mechanism.

The PowerCoin solution is not without its issues: grid planning and standardization, power theft, and blackout prevention are all real problems. It’s particularly unlikely that any solution like this will actually be implemented in response to Hurricane Maria, unless someone has already built a blockchain-enabled power meter I don’t know about (EDIT: Looks like a similar concept is being tested in New York). Existing rebuilding efforts will probably be done by the time those are created. But I hope the example is instructive on how distributed networks can fill the void left when centralized systems fail.

Finally, I need to come back to the American citizens that are suffering greatly as a result of this disaster. It’s fun to think about new ways of solving old problems, but unfortunately the need is too urgent for R&D. We (probably) won’t be able to actually implement a cutting-edge distributed power system for the island, but we can do our part to help.

Most VCs market themselves as “more than just a check” — often creating unrealistic, dangerous expectations.

“How can I be helpful?” 👈

That question is even more stereo-typically venture capital than zip-up sweater vests and soft rejection emails. If you’ve gone an entire meeting with a VC without hearing that phrase, something’s gone terribly wrong.

Every investor wants to be helpful to the startup ecosystem and especially their portfolio companies. It’s what they do: if they can make even a marginal positive impact on the success of their companies, they stand to reap huge returns on their efforts.

Most investors are genuinely passionate about the bets they’ve made and the industry in general. They do want to help. But more than their actual incentives to do so, “being helpful” is how VCs market themselves to potential companies. Every investor will come to a pitch meeting loaded with examples of how they’ve helped companies in the past. Since cash from all VCs is the same legal tender, they need to find ways to differentiate themselves — and yet somehow it still all sounds the same.

Here’s the problem: during the fundraising process, most investors will make you think they’ll be working tirelessly on behalf of your company for many years to come. That generally isn’t true, nor should it be.

Depending on the state of the company, the most helpful thing can be for an investor to sit back and let the company execute. But since sitting back doesn’t make a good marketing message, it’s difficult for first-time entrepreneurs to tell how involved an investor will actually be, and whether that involvement will be genuinely helpful.

All too often, I hear scary stories from entrepreneurs about their experience investors. In those cases, there was clearly a mismatch between the CEO’s expectations of their investor and the post-investment reality. VC marketing sets high expectations, when in reality VCs span a huge spectrum of involvement in the company.

Every investor will promise help with recruiting, connections to potential customers or introductions to fancy people. Some deliver, but introductions constitute a minor part of the investor role. The rest of the time, the investor is listening, offering advice and providing governance — the quality of which can be what makes or breaks the entrepreneur/investor relationship. For early stage companies, I’ve found most stories of frustration occur when wrestling with investors that are on extreme ends of a spectrum:

The detached analyst

On one end of the spectrum are the analysts-at-heart, whose only focus is making money for their LPs. These investors may have limited operating experience, and they’re heavily focused on the numbers, but they’re relatively detached from everything else.

They find great companies rather than make them, and they generally believe that investors have a minimal impact on their companies’ chances of success (on that front, they’re not wrong). They’ll market themselves on their connections, track record, or firm prestige.

In board meetings, analyst investor feedback boils down to: “your revenue is too low, your expenses are too high, fix it.”

Analyst investors are more common and generally fine for later-stage companies with established models and growth paths. But a surprising number of these investors do early-stage deals, and the analyst mentality doesn’t translate well to the massive uncertainty that surrounds startups still finding product-market fit.

The best outcome is that the investor is detached, allowing the investment alone to do its work. An involved, early-stage analyst investor is not a recipe for success.

The other major problem with analyst investors only rears its head when the incentives of the investor and the incentives of the entrepreneur inevitably diverge.

Most investors have models that rely on a few companies making 10x+ returns, anything less is uninteresting. As such, they’re reluctant to get behind anything less than the biggest returns. In those situations, analyst investors are less likely to detach themselves from their fund economics and do what’s best for the entrepreneur.

A friend of mine had a board member who torpedoed an acquisition deal because he would walk away with “only a few million.” The investor wanted them to swing for the fences or bust. The company had to liquidate a few months later.

The vicarious operator

At the other extreme, some investors treat the role like a part-time operating position. These partners are generally former operators and will sell themselves as being able to help with the day-to-day execution of the business.

These investors also have a strong thesis for the world they want to see exist, a world that incorporates a number of bets across their portfolio. To them, every company has a role to play in creating the future, and that future is going to make everyone a lot of money.

While a clear vision from an investor sounds awesome for an early-stage company, it can easily go too far.

The problem is a) their thesis for the future is probably wrong, just like everyone’s predictions and b) their version for what your company should be is probably slightly different than your version for what your company should be.

The vicarious operator will try to push the CEO towards their own version of what the company should be, rather than backing the company the CEO wants to build. The differences will probably be small, but they’ll be large enough to create major problems for the entrepreneur.

Startups rarely need investors who try to run the company from a board seat, but that situation is unfortunately all too common.

The loyal skeptic

Terrific investors are “loyal skeptics”, occupying a space in the middle:

1. They’ll truly, deeply strive to understand the company you want to create. However, they know that they’ll never be able to fully understand the dynamics of running the organization, and they’ll be passionate about the company you want to build.
2. They have enough relevant experience and foresight to help you step outside yourself and help you see around corners.
3. They’ll try to influence decisions before they’re made, but once they’re made, they’ll fully support execution in the best way possible.

Here’s a small example: about 6 months after our Series A at my last startup, I approached my investors stating that I wanted to hire a COO.

I thought we would need a seasoned operator to help us scale the company through its next phase and beyond. In retrospect, it was the wrong decision: we were still too small for a position like that and it would make the company too top-heavy.

One of my investors deferred to my judgement without asking many questions.

One fought me hard over the decision, claiming at one point it might cost me my job.

But one was in the middle: after digging deep into why I wanted to make that move, she suggested that I actually was looking for some strong, more junior product managers rather than an addition to the C suite. I insisted on my reasoning. She said she thought I was making a mistake, but she would support my decision. We made the COO hire. It turned out that she was completely right.

After several months, it became clear that the hire wasn’t having the effect that I wanted it to. I approached her again, asking for advice on what to do. Rather than say “I told you so” and try to unwind the decision she disagreed with in the first place, she offered advice on how to optimize the current situation to get as close as we could to a good outcome.

In that situation, the vicarious operator would have tried to slash through the entire org chart. The analyst wouldn’t have enough tools to determine what the real problem was.

Tough times and hard problems are where good, loyal and skeptical investors can add real value.

I’ve never heard of a VC firm whose message amounts to “we find great companies, write them a check, then go away and let them run their business.” I wish more would, because that may be both closer to the truth and exactly what some companies need.

Problems arise when there’s a mismatch between the entrepreneur’s expectations and the day-to-day reality after the check is written. Since nearly all investors market their added value, it’s difficult to project that reality accurately.

When raising funds, that means entrepreneurs need to be especially clear on what level of attachment and involvement they and their company need. Companies probably need less help than investors say they’re going to provide, but probably more than most VCs actually do. Setting clear expectations with investors produces the circumstances where they can be actually, truly, helpful.

Finding Investors Who Are *Actually* Helpful was originally published in Startup Grind on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

At any given time, I have a few dozen drafts of articles and essays lying around waiting to be finished. Most are random ideas and half-formed thoughts waiting for an epiphany, feedback or polish. They’re mostly about my work: startups, investing, finance and company-building. Lately though, posts about company culture, board management, and finding product/market fit seemed oddly unimportant. After November 8th of last year, I’ve only published pieces about politics and the ongoing drama in Washington DC. I’m not a political pundit by any stretch, but like so many others, my attention has been diverted from my areas of expertise to the unfolding events of the Trump administration.

Starting in November, politics cast a pall over pretty much everything else. Since then, my “normal” work has seemed so… small in comparison. A large part of my headspace has gone to thinking about how the world has changed rather than continuing to operate within it. I don’t like that. In spite of the ongoing events in Washington, I really want to get back to work, to re-focus on my own mission and what I’m good at. I desperately want to get back to building companies and creating good in the world, without constantly checking in on the slow-motion trainwreck happening in DC. The consequences of that trainwreck are so large that it makes everything else seem trivial, but I’m conflicted in how much mental space it should occupy.

On one hand, the ability to focus on other things indicates that progress cannot be held hostage by politics. To some degree, we should trust that our system of government is sound, even in the face of an unprecedented character like our current President. We’ve seen our system of checks and balances work successfully in the past few weeks. As long as that continues, our government is working as expected.

On the other hand, the events of the last few months have sparked an enormous amount of positive activism from those typically disengaged from our political system — myself included. Isn’t that a good thing, and shouldn’t it continue? Could it be that we’re just getting back to “normal” levels of involvement in the government that we value so deeply? It feels right to have degree of involvement beyond simply voting, even if it isn’t our area of expertise.

Even more than that, what if Washington is really where our attention belongs right now? The “this is not normal” crowd argues that we have a critical situation in our government, and it deserves all the attention we can give it in this moment. Democrats are largely leaderless and Republicans have deep fractures, campaign promises have been deemed illegal, and the administration is under investigation by the FBI and both chambers of Congress for ties to a foreign power. No, this is clearly not normal.

But it’s equally clear that my time is poorly spent jumping from headline to political headline, breathlessly waiting for the next development. That kind of involvement isn’t productive. I’ll stay informed, but that doesn’t mean Trump should consume *every* article and cocktail conversation. We shouldn’t forget that there are all kinds of ways to create good in the world, and I cannot allow the presence of a new President to sideline everything else. There is a lot of work to be done and good to be created. At some point, we have to get back to work.

To me, it feels like the right balance is to settle on one or two concrete ways to be active in the current environment, then turn off the talking heads and continue to push forward. I believe each citizen should find a way to contribute that is both useful in the current environment and personally authentic. I’ve found my project — I can talk more about it more when it’s a bit more developed. From there, we can stay informed without being consumed by the news cycle. It’s always important for any member of the governed to maintain a healthy watch on their government, but that doesn’t necessarily mean getting hourly updates on the latest developing story.

We can’t go back to “business as usual”, but we must get back to business. Whatever work we return to, we must recognize that “progress” over the past decade has not felt positive to a large number of people. We also cannot return to the relative apathy that ensconced us before Trump sent shock through the system. But while the drama in DC is significant, the amount of headspace and airtime that it has consumed for the past few months is neither sustainable nor productive. Even when it feels like the new administration has sucked all the oxygen out of the room, we can’t keep holding our breath.

Thanks to Dan Pedersen for publishing earlier stories.

Back in 2010, Mitch McConnell said “Our top political priority over the next two years should be to deny Barack Obama a second term.” I remember thinking back then how short-sighted, myopic and petty that sounded. Really? Not a vision for the country, or a policy position, or even a personal agenda? Just Obama’s demise?

Clearly, the tables have turned. We now have a President with a very different agenda and potentially dangerous ideas for the country. The all-out onslaught by the Trump administration has left us reeling, scrambling to protect the institutions, policies and people we hold dear. The left has been #resisting with unprecedented levels of energy, and the resistance has been working shockingly well so far. But I fear that success is not going to last, because it’s not enough to just be against whatever Trump is for. The left, in only fighting whatever Trump has put on the table, has allowed him to set the agenda. That needs to change. We can’t keep playing his game: we need to go back to our principles and craft our own, new vision for what our country should be.

Fundamentally, politics is a battle of ideas. In spite of Trump’s incoherent speeches, his disregard for the facts or his obvious personal flaws, his idea for the United States has resonated with enough people to propel him to the Presidency. The Clinton campaign was not as clear about its idea for the country, beyond continuing what the Obama administration started. Remember her slogan, what was it? Stronger Together? Or was it Love Trumps Hate? Compare that to Make America Great Again or Obama’s Yes We Can, which eight years later is still stronger. Slogans are not the same as a cohesive idea, but still. Clinton didn’t have that clear, simple message.

Since the inauguration, the message problem has gotten worse. The contours of the progressive agenda have been drowned out by a resounding “not Trump”. The broad left has never been more unified on any one topic than its dislike for the current President. It’s natural at this point in the election cycle to focus on resistance, but powerful movements are almost always defined by what they are for, not what they are against. Operating without that competing idea has many perils:

• We’ll allow the other side to set the agenda. As long as we’re only resisting, we’re waiting for the Trump administration to launch another attack. Not only will we be always on the defensive, we’ll limit our imaginations to a reality within the boundaries of Trump’s world.
• We’ll lose. The chips are stacked in favor of the party currently occupying the White House and dominating both houses of Congress. Even with unprecedented levels of participation, it’s unlikely we’ll be able to effectively resist every move.
• We won’t heal a deeply divided country. If we are to take steps to mend the deep tears in our political fabric, we cannot be defined by what we are opposed to.

Winning this war is not impeaching Trump. That has its own problems. Winning is not about seeing your opponent bleed. Winning is far grander: channeling unprecedented levels of activism into an idea for our country that not only combats the corrosive policies we’ve seen, but can lead to a permanently better future. That idea will create lasting good well beyond the next four years.

… But what if we don’t have four years?

I’ve heard the argument that the damage Trump can do in four years will fundamentally and permanently alter our system of government, presenting an existential threat to the American experiment. That’s possible, and it’s why we must continue to forcefully resist moves by the Trump administration that push the boundaries of the governmental checks and balances we have in place. There will be policy changes put in place that not everyone likes. He can do that; he’s the President. But our system is also designed to limit the damage any one President can do, as long as the system works. We do need to make sure the system works.

I’m surprised that more politicians who oppose Trump have not come out with clear messages about how to advance a progressive agenda in our current system. Perhaps they’re just as taken aback by the Trump assault as the rest of us are. Even so, we need to start thinking about the good that can be done on climate change or education or women’s rights or LGBTQ+ equality, even on the state and local levels. Yes, much of that will be about preserving Obama-era policies into the current administration, but even that effort would be reinvigorated if we reminded ourselves why we wanted them in the first place.

Thankfully, we’re not without guidance for what that vision could look like. The race for DNC Chair has evoked some powerful discussions about where we go next. Establishment candidates Tom Perez and Keith Ellison have both made cases for the future of the party, Perez emphasizing voter rights and Ellison fronting social justice. But my favorite articulation comes from South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose Letter From Flyover Country both emphasizes the deep goodness of many progressive policies but also acknowledges that the Obama era left many feeling abandoned. It emphasizes the beliefs in protecting freedom, family, fairness and the future — I won’t repost the entire letter here, but read it. It’s good.

The reality is that we all want to Make America Great. Whether it’s already great or not depends on your perspective; many of our fellow Americans don’t think so. Hillary’s version of Greatness was clearly insufficient. Trump’s version is a nostalgic return to a mythical Old Greatness that isn’t going to work in today’s world. We do need to resist the Trump agenda, especially when that agenda threatens the structure of the democracy we hold dear. In addition to resistance, we must also define the inclusive, moral, powerful New Greatness for this country that we want to see beyond these next four years. That New Greatness will not only carry us through an inevitably difficult Trump administration, but well into the future. It’s difficult to think that way right now, but it has never been more necessary.

Many thanks to the participants in discussions — both online and offline — that contributed to these thoughts. In today’s world, thoughtful discourse is immensely valuable.

When I read about the incredibly active first week of the Trump administration, I struggle with two competing narratives about what’s really going on. The first story is simple: the administration is just doing what it said it would do, literally keeping its campaign promises. Lots of people won’t agree, but it’s playing to its base. They’re also not really good at this whole government thing yet, so implementation is shaky. The second is more sinister: the administration is deliberately testing the limits of governmental checks and balances to set up a self-serving, dangerous consolidation of power.

A legitimate argument can be made for the former: a relatively extreme and inexperienced administration was just put in place, and they haven’t yet figured out the nuances of government. But a few of the events in the past 72 hours —the intentional inclusion of green card holders in the immigration order, the DHS defiance of a federal judge, and the timing of Trump’s shakeup of the National Security Council — have pointed to a larger story. Even worse, if that larger story is true, if the source of this week’s actions is a play to consolidate power, it’s going really well so far. And that’s because mostly everyone — including those in protests shutting down airports over the weekend— are playing right into the administration’s hand.

I obviously can’t pretend to know the intentions of the new President, but let’s pretend the power consolidation move is what’s actually happening. In fact, let’s pretend we’re the Trump administration (not necessarily Trump himself, more likely his inner circle) for a second. Here’s our playbook:

1. We launch a series of Executive Orders in the first week. Beforehand, we identify one that our opponents will complain loudly about and will dominate the news cycle. Immigration ban. Perfect.
2. We craft the ban to be about 20% more extreme than we actually want it to be — say, let’s make the explicit decision to block green card holders from defined countries from entering the US, rather than just visa holders. We create some confusion so that we can walk back from that part later, but let’s make sure that it’s enforced to begin with.
3. We watch our opposition pour out into the streets protesting the extremes of our public measure, exactly as we intended. The protests dominate the news, but our base doesn’t watch CNN anyway. The ACLU will file motions to oppose the most extreme parts of our measure, that’s actually going to be useful too. We don’t actually care if we win, that’s why we made it more extreme than it needed to be. But in doing so, the lawsuit process will test the loyalty of those enforcing what we say.
4. While the nation’s attention is on our extreme EO, slip a few more nuanced moves through. For example, reconfigure the National Security Council so that it’s led by our inner circle. Or gut the State Department’s ability to resist more extreme moves. That will have massive benefits down the road — the NSC are the folks that authorize secret assassinations against enemies of the state, including American citizens. Almost nobody has time to analyze that move closely, and those that do can’t get coverage.
5. When the lawsuits filed by the ACLU inevitably succeed, stay silent. Don’t tell the DHS to abide by what the federal judge says, see what they do on their own. If they capitulate to the courts, we know our power with the DHS is limited and we need to staff it with more loyal people. But if they continue enforcing our EO until we tell them not to, we know that we can completely ignore the judicial branch later on and the DHS will have our back.
6. Once the DHS has made their move, walk back from the 20% we didn’t want in the first place. Let the green card holders in, and pretend that’s what we meant all along. The protestors and the ACLU, both clamoring to display their efficacy, jump on the moment to declare a huge victory. The crowds dissipate, they have to go back to work.
7. When the dust settles, we have 100% of the Executive Order we originally wanted, we’ve tested the loyalty of a department we’ll need later on, we’ve proven we can ignore an entire branch of government, and we’ve slipped in some subtle moves that will make the next test even easier.

We’ve just tested the country’s willingness to capitulate to a fascist regime.

Assuming this narrative is true (again, I have no idea what the administration intends), the “resistance” is playing right into Trump’s playbook. The most vocal politicians could be seen at rallies, close to the headlines. The protests themselves did exactly what they were intended to: dominate the news cycle and channel opposition anger towards a relatively insignificant piece of the puzzle. I’m not saying that green card holders should be stuck in airports — far from it. I’m saying there might be a much larger picture here, and the immigration ban is a distraction.

So for those that believe that the power consolidation narrative is true and want to oppose it, how does that happen?

First, stop believing that protests alone do much good. Protests galvanize groups and display strong opposition, but they’re not sufficient. Not only are they relatively ineffective at changing policy, they’re also falsely cathartic to those protesting. Protestors get all kinds of feel-good that they’re among fellow believers and standing up for what’s right, and they go home feeling like they’ve done their part. Even if protestors gain mild, symbolic concessions, the fact that their anger has an outlet is useful to the other side. Do protest, but be very wary of going home feeling like you’ve done your job. You haven’t.

Second, pay journalists to watch for the head fake. That’s their job. Become a paying subscriber to news outlets, then actively ask them to more deeply cover moves like the NSC shakeup. We can no longer breathlessly focus media attention on easy stories like the immigration ban. The real story is much more nuanced and boring — until it’s not.

Third, popular attention must focus less on whether we agree with what the government is doing, and more on whether the system of checks and balances we have in place is working. It is a much bigger deal that the DHS felt they could ignore a federal court than that Trump signed an EO blocking green card holders in the first place. It is a much bigger deal that Trump removed a permanent military presence from the NSC than that he issued a temporary stay on immigration. The immigration ban may be more viscerally upsetting, but the other moves are potentially far more dangerous.

Once again, I’m desperately hoping that none of this narrative is actually true, and that we merely have a well-intentioned administration with some execution problems. I’m also hoping and praying that the structure of our democracy is resilient even to the most sophisticated attacks. I’m hoping that the better angels of our nature will prevail. But with each passing day, the evidence tilts more in the other direction.

Pokémon Go has become, in the course of a couple of weeks, the most popular game in US history. The speed with which it took the world by storm is stunning: less than a week after it’s launch, it had blown out its predecessors on every conceivable metric.

But then, it seems that all hell has broken loose. The headlines have been filled with stories about the game causing people to fall off cliffs, crash into police cars, and get shot at all in pursuit of catching ’em all. You know, normal mayhem caused by virtual animated creatures. But through all the incidents of people breaking into zoos and quitting their jobs, we can start to see what a future with augmented reality looks like. It’s not as grim as you might think.

Worlds colliding

Critics of the game and of tech culture in general complain about the creation of iZombies, humans walking around in a beautiful place but enraptured their phones. They have a point:

Jonathan on Twitter

Pokemon GO is just insane right now. This is in Central Park. It's basically been HQ for Pokemon GO. https://t.co/3v2VfEHzNA

But think about that for a second. All we’ve done is taken people that would have otherwise been playing Candy Crush Saga on their living room couches and pushed them into the middle of Central Park. What Pokémon did was take virtual gaming from the isolation of an airport lounge or a La-Z-Boy into public, central places. It’s not there yet, but we can start to see a future that uses a virtual world to enhance our experience in the physical one. The problem is that the game relies on a tiny screen we hold in our hands, and it requires our full attention to play. But even then, all human interaction isn’t lost. Far from it, in fact.

Notice that the most meteorically viral game of our time has zero direct links to social media. There’s no way to find your friends on the app, or to compete against people you know. There’s no social leader board showing you who you can trash talk. It works because it relies on real, physical interactions between humans. Yes, there are a bunch of people obsessively glued to their phones instead of participating in a nearby conversation or checking for oncoming traffic. But people also show it to each other. They compare notes. A physical camaraderie gets built around a shared virtual experience. Victories happen in public, sometimes in massive herds:

Think about that. An online game just created an impromptu flash mob. In the real world. For a virtual object.

This is nuts. Never before has a virtual world been so simultaneously integrated with — but still separated from — the physical one.

Staring at phone screens won’t last

In many conversations I’ve had, talking about virtual and augmented reality turns to a fear of a Wall-E like dystopia, where we all sit on our technically-enabled asses and stare at a screen as our way of interacting with the world. That’s still possible. But I think it’s more likely that we’ll find a way to embellish our physical world with virtual elements, making the combined world better than either one on its own. This “mixed reality” experience is what companies like Magic Leap are building, but somehow a game company beat them to the first step.

It’s not enough to say “look up from your phones, there’s a great big world out there.” The thing is, the world can get bigger and richer when viewed through our technology. In a sense, there’s a great big world in our phones too. World of Warcraft showed us the world inside of a screen, Pokémon Go showed us our own world in a totally different way. Before too long, we’ll be able to view our virtual and physical worlds as one, and we won’t have to be staring down at our phones in order to see it.

Gotta go, someone told me there was Snorlax nearby.

I struggled with books. Don’t get me wrong: I read a ton. I read articles, blog posts, the Economist and the occasional guilty pleasure dive into a random subreddit. But somehow, books were different. I’ll routinely pick up a highly-recommended tome, make it about a third of the way through, lose interest, then decide I’ve gotten the point and pick up the next one. I have no idea what’s contained in back half of many books I’ve “read”. Because of that, I focus on books I think will be useful, so I can get as much value as possible before putting it down. For that reason, I haven’t picked up a novel for some time.

But then on a whim, I Amazon one-click-ordered Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One, a sci-fi novel that a friend said I just had to read if I wanted to understand the future of virtual reality. I get recommendations like that all the time, and sometimes I’ll just buy the book even if I won’t read it right away. Sometimes I’ll never read it. The book sat dormant in my Kindle library for a couple of months while I tried to finish Andy Grove’s legendary High Output Management, one of the most useful and information-dense — but driest — books I’ve come across. It’s great for bedtime reading: 20 minutes in I’m guaranteed to be asleep. At a chapter break, I convinced myself that I deserved a break from book boredom. I flipped through my library and tapped Ready Player One, having mostly forgotten why I bought it in the first place.

Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.

The next thing I know, it’s 2 in the morning, four hours later. The Kindle progress indicator said I had read 30% of the book, and the battery on my iPad was about to die.

What the hell just happened?

It had been a long time since I’d been sucked into a book like that. I used to read John Grisham and J.R.R. Tolkien novels when I was in high school, but I don’t really remember what that experience was like. But even so, it felt like this was different.

I think there’s a mental muscle, a piece of the imagination that allows the words to jump of the page of any book, creating a world that immerses the reader. Like any muscle, if gone unused it goes dormant. In all of the business books and non-fiction that I’ve read, I’d lost the ability to not just read and understand, but to truly imagine the contents of the pages. It’s one thing to comprehend what an author is saying, it’s quite another to see the words through their eyes, to immerse yourself in the world inside the pages. I think I needed a book so vivid, so mesmerizing, so completely relatable that it could touch that muscle again.

I ripped through the rest of the book that weekend. I thought that once I got back to more substantial books, the vigor I felt for the words would fade. I was afraid to jump back into High Output Management, fearing that the boredom would return just as quickly as it had left. I moved on to Moonwalking with Einstein, a true story about our ability to memorize things. Ripped through that one too. Then Confessions of an Economic Hitman. Then more meaty stuff: I picked up Superintelligence, a denser read about AI. By the time I re-tackled High Output Management, I felt that I could bury myself in any book with a fervor that I always wanted before but never could quite get. I felt myself soaking in the pages and imagining the world differently than I had before. Sure, the book was still dense and still pretty dry, but my experience with it was totally different.

I had fallen in love with reading again.

When we watch a video, all the imagining is done for us. We don’t have to visualize words, because someone else has already done that. When we read, we’re forced to visualize the words, to wrap meaning around the concepts that are being communicated. While I could understand what any author was saying, I had lost the ability to experience a book. It took a sci-fi adventure book to snap me out of that, to tickle the synapses in my head that can see a different world without putting a picture on a screen.

Ready Player One is about to become a movie, directed by Steven Spielberg. I’m going to go see it, but only out of curiosity. The world of that book — and many others — is already in my head.