Building an Ecosystem

I've been doing some research into how to build an entrepreneurial ecosystem - something I have been tasked with for one of the many projects I seem to have stumbled into. I came across this great list of values that should be embedded into an ecosystem. But, as I read the values, it really seems like these are good values just for life in general. But, that makes sense, doesn't it? We're all creating our own personal ecosystems and if we want them to work and be successful, well, we need an ecosystem built on good values.

from the Kauffman Foundation's, Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Building Playbook (seems like a rather obvious title, doesn't it?)

Did You Know? Blockchain + Cheese

Did you know that the first international commercial transaction to use the blockchain as a verification mechanism was for cheese?

Back in September, Irish cheese cooperative Ornua (purveyors of Kerrygold for those hip to the know here in Wisconsin), sold a $100,000 letter of credit for cheese and butter to Seychelles Trading Company using the blockchain.

How did it work? The blockchain is a secure and inherently authenticated record-keeping mechanism. Thus, much of the lengthy contract due diligence of confirming who the parties are is short-cut merely by using the system. Second, now that the parties are authenticated, secure documents can be transferred digitally. Finally, the transaction is posted to the blockchain ensuring transparency and confirmation of the transaction.

[S]uch transactions typically involve a complicated paper trail that requires international courier services, is vulnerable to document fraud, and can take as long as a month to be completed. ... [U]sing blockchain technology, [] a process that normally takes between seven and 10 days [was cut] to less than four hours

Non-Lawyering Skills for Lawyers

Technology is and will continue to disrupt the practice of law for transactional attorneys. Where the focus of legal education has been on the fundamental building blocks of legal thinking and, to some extent, legal drafting, the latter skill is likely to be less and less necessary as technology improves.

Technological innovation in the areas of Artificial Intelligence, Encryption, Blockchain, and bot interaction are likely to change the nature of the provision of legal services. Clients will no longer need lawyers to draft documents or provide recitation of statutes or manage deadlines - all things that are susceptible to automation. However, these technologies rely on concepts such as modularity and community organizing to build models and create consensus to implement industry standards.

The role for lawyers will stop being drafters, and being instead counselors. Being a counselor requires skills such as understanding organizational dynamics, strategic planning, project management, and operational scheduling. None of these subjects are currently taught in any law school that I am aware of.

I propose that we to our teaching schedule a class (or two or three) in Non-Lawyering Skills for Lawyers, with subjects like:

• Community Organizing 
• Programming/Software Development 
• Project Management 
• Strategic Planning 
• Interpersonal Communication 
• Organizational Dynamics and Structure 
• Customer-oriented Design

On MLK: Diversity in Craft Beer

I'm a white guy (see picture over there to the right). It's somewhat awkward for me to talk with any authority about race and gender. I'm a thoroughly modern male; I have a number of black and female friends. I support the Black Lives Matter movement and I've been involved and outspoken at times regarding poverty and race issues in Madison. All of this is to say that I don't think I'm a racist, sweatshirt slogans notwithstanding.

 Somewhere out in the interverse is some video of me talking about race and craft beer. I've spent a lot of time at craft beer festivals; I've been involved in the craft beer industry for over a decade. It's sad to say, but I could probably count the number of african-americans specifically, but non-whites in general, that I've run into on a small number of fingers and toes. It is a predominantly white industry; an uncomfortably white industry. Do I think it's an intentional practice of exclusion? Of course not. But unintentional racial effects are racial effects nonetheless.

So, I was glad to see Chauncey Jackson take up the discussion.

Dr. King was–and the living idea of him is–as close as we have ever come to the human embodiment of equality and inclusion in America. Unfortunately, when it comes to craft beer, those two concepts are pretty foreign. And that doesn’t just apply to black people, but women as well. Although, in recent years, we have seen a significant increase in the amount of women participating in both the industry and craft beer community alike. But, as you likely can see for yourself, those same strides of diversity haven’t crossed over into how the beer scene interacts with black Americans.

This article is a wraparound to Mr Jackson's video. You should watch it and think about the issues he raises.

Madworks and SlowMoney and Food and Beverage

First, the important stuff. If you are a food and beverage startup, Madworks Accelerator's spring cohort will be dedicated to food and beverage. YOU SHOULD APPLY. This Spring cohort is in conjunction with Slow Money Wisconsin; the companies participating in MadWorks will also be invited to pitch at the Slow Money Wisconsin Investor Showcase.

OK; with that out of the way, what's going on here?

I have been peripherally involved in both Madworks and Slow Money for the last ... ummm ... I don't really know to be honest. We'll call it the last "few" years. Both are wonderful programs.

Madworks is a seed accelerator dedicated to nascent entrepreneurship. It has changed focus over time with the changing demands of the Madison entrepreneurial community. At first, it was dedicated to true, brand new, nascent entrepreneurship. Today, it focuses a little further upstream helping companies already in the "pipeline" so-to-speak to better understand nuanced governance issues that are demanded of young CEOs with small teams and limited budgets. In other words, these teams don't yet have a staff CFO to generate financial statements; they don't have a general counsel to call shareholder meetings and record board minutes; they don't have sophisticated brand managers to think strategically about marketing plans. So, Madworks helps to get them up to speed - getting them to at least speak the language and understand the obligations that their companies will need to undertake.

Slow Money Wisconsin is a regional network of the national Slow Money organization. It is a non-profit comprising investors throughout Wisconsin that are "dedicated to catalyzing the flow of capital to local food systems, connecting investors to the places where they live and promoting new principles fiduciary responsibility that "bring money back down to earth." In other words, not every business is unicorn. Indeed, to be a responsible corporate citizen you probably shouldn't be a unicorn. By definition, not every company can be a unicorn. More importantly: not only is it probably bad company policy to want to be one, it is better for society and the environment if you aren't.

In startup ecosystems, not aiming to be a unicorn is heresy. Most cogs in the startup ecosystem machine are built on the fundamental premise of delivering the unicorn to investors. I understand that; I'm OK with that. But, hear me out. Unicorns require growth - and not just steady you're-doing-great profitable growth, but crazy, if-you're-profitable-you're-doing-it-wrong growth. In other words, if you are going to be a unicorn, you are, by definition, losing (a lot of) money.

On the other hand, it's possible to take time and grow a company organically - to design a business model that is cash flow positive relatively early on. You can build a company that not just hires people, but makes a point of hiring diversely from your own community thus building capacity in the local employee base. Interestingly, local hiring also has the effect of keeping the money the company makes in the local economy, thus it builds sustainable economies. Agricultural companies can (and should) use regenerative (or at least sustainable) agricultural practices. The effect of building businesses in a fundamentally sustainable way, though, is to depress profitability at the expense of corporate, economic, and environmental stability. Slow Money recognizes that these companies are as important, if not more important, than the unicorns. Investors in Slow Money want to put their money into companies that build stronger systems for overall economic wealth, not just seek to exploit those systems to build shareholder wealth.

So, Slow Money and Madworks are teaming up for a cohort of food and beverage companies. It'll be a wonderful partnership and I can't wait to work with this next class!

Freedom of Information

Kregos v. Associated Press, 937 F.2d 700 (2nd Cir. 1991)(cert. denied)

The fundamental copyright principle that only the expression of an idea and not the idea itself is protectable, see Mazer v. Stein (1954), has produced a corollary maxim that even expression is not protected in those instances where there is only one or so few ways of expressing an idea that protection of the expression would effectively accord protection to the idea itself. Our Circuit has considered this so-called “merger” doctrine in determining whether actionable infringement has occurred, rather than whether a copyright is valid, see Durham Industries, Inc. v. Tomy Corp. (2d Cir. 1980), an approach the Nimmer treatise regards as the “better view.” See NIMMER ON COPYRIGHT § 13.03[B][3] (1990). Assessing merger in the context of alleged infringement will normally provide a more detailed and realistic basis for evaluating the claim that protection of expression would inevitably accord protection to an idea.

Wagner, R Polk. Information Wants to Be Free. Columbia Law Review. Vol 103 (2003).

To be sure, we can (and do, for good reason) grant creators of information certain rights; we can even allow these rights to be sliced, diced, poked, prodded, traded, rented, and sold; but we haven’t converted the intangible into the tangible. At the end of the day there remains something fundamentally different between Blackacre and a Britney Spears album.

...

While the holy grail of perfect DRM is plainly a major goal of at least some in the copyright industries, I deal in this section with reality. And there are very good reasons to doubt the meaningful impact of DRM anytime soon. 

 

Stallman, Richard. Free Software is Even More Important Now.

There are cases where using nonfree software puts pressure directly on others to do likewise. Skype is a clear example: when one person uses the nonfree Skype client software, it requires another person to use that software too—thus both surrender their freedom. (Google Hangouts have the same problem.) It is wrong even to suggest using such programs. We should refuse to use them even briefly, even on someone else's computer.

Swartz, Aaron. The Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto. 2008.

Those with access to these resources — students, librarians, scientists — you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not — indeed, morally, you cannot — keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world. And you have: trading passwords with colleagues, filling download requests for friends.

Katz, Jon. Birth of Digital Nation. Wired. April 1, 1997.

Ideas almost never remain static on the Web. They are launched like children into the world, where they are altered by the many different environments they pass through, almost never coming home in the same form in which they left.

...

Although many would balk at defining themselves this way, the digital young are revolutionaries. Unlike the clucking boomers, they are not talking revolution; they're making one. This is a culture best judged by what it does, not what it says.