Hello, everyone, and welcome to the 5.30 to 6.00 p.m. session of the 2017 Open Simulator Community Conference. As a reminder to our in-world and web audience, you can view the full conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org and tweet your questions or comments to atopensimcc with the hashtag OSCC17. In this session, we are happy to introduce a wonderful session called Libraries and Learning and Literacy, Oh My! Our speaker today is Kevin Finen. Kevin is the president of Rockcliff University Consortium, a non-profit organization dedicated to the development of knowledge, creation, and the pursuit of innovation within the educational field. His 30-year career has included application architecture, business transformation, management consultation, and policy development for both private and public sectors. Welcome, Kevin. Let's begin the session. Great. Thank you very much. I'd like to start by thanking the OSCC for this opportunity to present here today on Libraries, Learning, and Literacy. My digital literacy is about understanding our relationship to how technology is at once shaped by technology and also influenced by society. Centers of Education, including libraries, museums, science centers, and others need to go beyond simply presenting facts and figures. The future of these institutions require that we broaden the mandate to create a culture of enablement as compared to being passive observers. This presentation will help to establish some of the challenges facing the future of education in a culture that is quickly realizing digital literacy as a necessary core skill. What is digital literacy? The answer depends on who you ask and the context of the question. In general, digital literacy is a confluence of citizenship, functional skills, critical thinking, and communications. For example, MediaSmart defines digital literacy based on more than 20 different factors. The government of British Columbia uses six, and ISTI standards for students in education include seven. Many of these different standards or best practices contain similar components. For our purposes today, I'd like to focus on the following six skills as specific to the future of libraries and literacy. These are Personal Responsibility, Social Responsibility, Functional Computer Skills, Social Reasoning Skills, Communications, and the ability to collaborate effectively with others. The reason for focusing on these six skills is that they affect disruptive technology and innovation as we will see in a moment. In order to understand why digital literacy skills are so important, we need to understand the context in which those skills exist. In his book on changing social innovation, Hallad noted that the majority of issues that motivate innovation are complex, messy, interconnected, and not amenable to one-dimensional solutions. As a result, the process of innovation is not simply a linear approach to problem-solving, but an iterative one that I will refer to as the technosocial innovation cycle. I refer to the life cycle as being technosocial in that the innovation process is both socially and technologically driven. Simple paradigms provide a shared language that allow us to define classes of problems. Those classes of problems that are true necessities drive personal ambition towards inventing or reinventing ways in which those problems can be solved. The act of invention requires a reassessment both in the way in which we describe the problem and how we apply the existing technology around us to envision the problem itself. It is important to note that by technology we are not simply just referring to hardware or software. But the aggregation of information management, processes, operating procedures, observations and measurements, and continuous improvement. Such innovation results in new ideas on how people, processes, and things may be combined in new ways to solve the problems at hand. This confluence leads to social change within cultures that must either adopt or adapt to the new technology's disruptive influence. Such adaptation changes the way in which our social conversation evolves resulting in new and more effective paradigms. Because this process of innovation is iterative, for each iteration classes of problems that were once nice to solve are now within our reach to overcome. Further, the number of problems now considered necessities are not just more complex but they are also greater in number. Concurrently, there is also a technological life cycle that runs in parallel and yet is separate and distinct. The technology life cycle is based on the processing of information management through either mechanical work, information technology, or people processes. Information management leads to some form of action which has an observable and measurable outcome. Such measurement allows us to establish the controls and boundaries of the technology which can then be evaluated to reduce the level of errors and overall continuous improvement of the innovation. It is the integration of these two models which are important for understanding how the world around us continues to evolve. Paradigm plus information management drives necessity. Technology plus processes drives invention. Invention plus action drives technology. Technology plus observation drives social change. And social change plus continuous improvement drives new paradigm. Taken together, the technosocial innovation cycles reinforce each other allowing our society to solve problems at an increasingly accelerated pace. The technosocial innovation cycle is connected to digital literacy in that each of the core skills acts as a catalyst reinforcing the transition points in the life cycle. While each digital literacy skill has applicability to all life cycle elements, some skills have greater influence as a catalyst during these transition points than others. So where I indicate that the paradigm plus information management drives necessity, such necessity is only driven in the presence of personal responsibility as a catalyst. It is that inner motivation which allows individuals to determine the difference between problems which are necessities and those which are nice to solve. Personal responsibility catalysts also help determine whether there is a perceived benefit to resolving such problems that will yield a more relevant and immediate result. In the second case, necessity plus processes drives invention in the presence of creative reasoning and social responsibility as catalysts. Creative reasoning is crucial as it encourages us to think outside the boundaries of the existing paradigms on which the problem is based. Such innovations, however, are often constrained by the audience at which they are targeted, requiring that we consider our own personal expectations and those of others. In the third case, innovation plus action drives technology in the presence of functional skills and critical reasoning as catalysts. Not all innovations are possible in the here and now. Some are thought experiments that require specific functional skills or require logical puzzles to be solved before the technology is viable. In the fourth case, technology plus observation drives social change in the presence of effective communication. In order to drive social change, the technology needs to be effectively communicated in terms of education, skills, investment, and other hurdles that may prevent others from taking advantage of the new solutions. And then finally, social change plus continuous improvement drives new paradigm in the presence of collaboration. Paradigm exists where there is a large enough culture of people who adopt the new technology and then create a bond through symbolism, language, cultural tradition, and collective expression. The need for digital literacy skills, therefore, is a self-reinforcing requirement of our modern age and how we develop innovation. The upper boundary of the nature and types of problems that we are capable of solving through information management and information technology is beyond our capability to predict with no signs of stopping. These impacts of innovation will affect everyone everywhere. So what does this mean for libraries and other centers of curiosity, such as science centers and museums? While many of these institutions are attempting to modernize the way in which they are interacting with the general public, the types of creative engagement practices seems to continuously fall back on four primary activities. These are self-directed reading, presentation of audio or visual materials, engagement through various self-assessment tools, such as visual matching and multiple choice, and various gamification learning models, including the technology-driven and the imaginative. For example, in a recent visit to the California Museum as part of Rockliff's Eridition Conference, the museum had set up an interactive gamified approach to health and wellness. This allowed museum visitors to solve many quests and compare their results with other visitors. The interactive displays were not simply a matter of engaging in solving simple problems, but also attempted to show the implications of various choices based on how these various systems interacted with each other. These types of learning activities can also be found in places like the Ontario Science Centre, the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, and many others. While these types of activities are novel based on their use of technology, they are still using an old paradigm to try to solve a new problem. I would put forward the idea that the innovation-driven economy and libraries and other centres of curiosity need to go beyond the simple presentation of information and need to help lower the barriers that prevent people from adapting to ongoing innovation. Better the citations from the Quorum Group that indicate the top 10 disruptive technology trends on the chart behind me. In my own work with healthcare, five of the 10 trends indicated are major areas of concern. Artificial intelligence, connected health, focused IT services, visual intelligence systems, and data security are all key areas where regulatory policy and public awareness are years behind where the innovation currently is. Many of these trends have started to see major impacts within the last two years, and very few outside of those companies, which are acting as innovators, are actively engaged in promoting digital skills in these areas. This will change. This is changing. The fact that there is a major gap between disruptive technology and innovation and public awareness simply underlines the fact that disruptive technology is now the norm, not the exception. This means our libraries and creative centres for learning and imagination now need to embrace a new paradigm. The future of research and education needs to be based on an understanding of what will be and to foster a culture of innovation to support that goal. The next step for libraries and other centres of creative engagement is to adapt the models of how we work with others to develop the path of least resistance. When faced with an accelerating innovation and disruptive technology, it is no longer good enough to simply present information and hope that our charges will make the connection on their own. The future of libraries and literacy needs to be one where the libraries of tomorrow take a leadership role in helping make these connections. The P21 partnership for 21st century learning has established a supporting model for those wanting to succeed in work, life and citizenship. It combines knowledge and skills with the necessary support systems of standards, professional development and learning environments. The focus here is on lowering the barriers to skills development through real world connections and relevant personalised engagement. Libraries especially offer a unique space for such real world connections which can be nurtured and applied to authentic problems. This is after all the basis of our patron's interest in our services. Libraries offer a safe place to allow collaboration, connection communication and continuous perseverance towards realising new skills for tomorrow. The challenge is to extend our programs from simply being a space for curiosity and imagination to becoming a space for innovation and incubation of ideas. As a central goal, each catalyst in the technosocial innovation cycle needs to be supported by services that enable digital literacy skills in a way that reinforces active participation. Personal responsibility is enabled through a culture of life and career skills development. The more life and career skills we have, the greater our ability to recognise and overcome challenges as well as to take ownership over those challenges that we can control. Libraries and museums can help facilitate the development of skills by directing patrons to resources with partner groups to provide hands-on real world applications to nurture such skills. Social responsibility benefits from a sense of ownership within the community and shared sense of community values. For invention to be practical, there needs to be both an affirmation that the community will benefit from such innovation and a sense that one's contribution to it will be rewarded. Such rewards require having skin in the game, whereby ownership is legitimised through either expert knowledge of the innovation or referent power through interpersonal relationships in the community. Our libraries and museums can help facilitate interpersonal development through ongoing workshops and co-curated content that allows special interest groups a structure from which to organise a round. Functional skills are best developed through the apprenticeship and mentoring opportunities afforded through collaboration and engagement with other like-minded professionals. For any technology to be effective, whether it is the result of people, processes or things, functional skills of the underlying mechanics are essential. This requires opportunity to use both explicit, i.e. book smarts and tacit, i.e. street smarts, mechanisms to know and understand the craft on which the technology is based. Libraries and museums can help facilitate the exchange of knowledge through engagement of makerspaces, bringing specialists and amateur inventors together who have a passionate interest in the technology. Developing communication, supporting social change, requiring access to appropriate information and media and the tools to use them effectively. We generally never pass new knowledge on to others in large numbers in the early stages of development. This often requires trial and error to determine the barriers of any new technology and use. This includes understanding key informational messages and media required to effectively transfer knowledge. Libraries and museums can help facilitate the communication of ideas through permission-free spaces similar to a sandbox. That allows innovators an opportunity to engage with others as a community to exhibit new technological ideas and innovative methodologies. And finally, collaboration supporting continuous improvement requires collective access to standards and assessments to make informed choices and decision-making. There is an old adage that what gets measured gets done. However, in order to measure something, you need to have an understanding of the standards by which that measurement needs to take place. Measuring the wrong thing or using the wrong assessment tools can result in misinterpretation of the technology, how it is being used and how to improve upon it. Libraries and museums can facilitate by opening up a dialogue not just on the substance of how technologies are used but also on the standards of quality in which it is used. In essence, we need to be more engaged, not just in whether a technology is fit for purpose but also to answer the question, what does good look like? Take it together, a culture of innovation helps establish a positive environment that benefits all those that participate in the culture at multiple levels within the integrated innovation lifecycle. This participation results in better prepared patrons, informed and capable of adapting to changing work and social circumstances brought on by disruptive innovation. For the past year, we at Rockliffe have been examining various libraries and science centers and museums and where they can make more effective use of virtual and augmented reality. During this time, we've come to realize two essential concepts. One, while libraries and museums are embracing new technology, it is still being applied based on an old paradigm. That is, information and data are the same thing. And two, that the innovations in virtual and augmented reality have the greatest benefit when they streamline complex data, trending and forecasting rather than forcing it. This is a double-edged sword as too much reliance on technology can dull the senses and the capability to critically assess technology's implications. At the same time, information overload is making it more difficult to separate information from data. The Rockliffe Library and Avocon is a space where we would like to prototype these ideas to resolve this discrepancy. By using the Technosocial Innovation Cycle as a guide, we will be turning our library sciences program from a simple research tool into a center of innovation. Over the next year, Rockliffe will be developing new programs to leverage our digital collections to integrate new methods of remixing and our approach to library sciences. We have been delivering, sorry, we have been developing the needed technologies and back end infrastructure to make this a working concept. We are eager to engage with our members and others to help develop this concept. I would like to thank you for your time and I would appreciate any comments or feedback you may have on this presentation. Likewise, if you would like to collaborate with us to help move our future plans to innovate the Rockliffe Library, we would welcome your expertise, your experience and insight into re-envisioning what the future of library sciences could become. Thank you. Thank you, Kevin. We are out of time for questions, but you can always take your questions to text chat and continue the discussion there. Thank you, Kevin, for a great presentation. That was very interesting. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC-17 poster expo in the OSCC-Expo 3 region to find accompanying information on presentations and explore the hypergrid tour resources in OSCC-Expo 2 along with sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC-Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and the audience. Our next session coming up is begin at 6 p.m. in this keynote region and is entitled the Digital Art Museum. Thank you again to our speaker and to our audience.


To talk to us about the power of networks, we are very fortunate to have Yochai Menkler with us, who is a co-director of the Berkman Center, author of one of the best books about the internet age, The Wealth of Networks, and a sought after speaker and opiner on all things digital. So please join me in welcoming Yochai Menkler. Thanks, Susan. We're extremely lucky to have you. I think Jenny probably wanted about three slides. I figured in my case that meant not much more than three per minute. I want to tell you four stories from my research and our research here in the last two years that exhibit different aspects of both the problem and at least classes of solutions that we see in the net. So the first one is this one. Question of national security and government propaganda and misinformation. This happens to, by the way, no earth-shaking revelations, but offer inside picture and context as the New York Times versus a protocol of barbarity by the Spiegel and huge WikiLeaks releases shows U.S. ignored Iraq torture. It's just a question of framing, really. But let's set that aside. The question of this, one of the major leaks and news stories and how it was treated by the administration. So Admiral Mike Mullen, WikiLeaks and Assange might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family. Secretary Gates, the battlefield consequences are potentially severe and dangerous for our troops, et cetera, intelligence sources and methods, et cetera. When actually required by the Senate to write down what the problems were, the basic answer is the review to date has revealed, has not revealed any sensitive intelligence sources and methods compromised. We'll see what comes out in Bradley Manning's trial as they try to actually make the damage case. Secretary Clinton, let's be clear. This disclosure is not just an attack on Americans' foreign policy. It's an attack on the international community. Vice President Biden, I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers and so on and so forth. Well, at least we have the fourth estate. Two-thirds of stories in the first two weeks in national security from the Lexis database have some version of a story of WikiLeaks showed relatively little discretion in its online posting of more than 250,000 cables. Only one sixth had roughly the shape of WikiLeaks' 272 diplomatic cables from a trove of over 250,000 that remained to be dribbled out for greater effect. Vastly different effect. The different effect allowed this to happen, which is to say Senator Lieberman with quiet acceptance from the government basically says the companies stop serving WikiLeaks.   There are solutions where the solution is not informational, it's simply resistance. Making the information persistent despite efforts to shut it down. That can't work for everything, payment systems. It is still the case almost two years later, no known effect and no money sent to WikiLeaks. Here the question is what forms of resistance to action are feasible in a context of a supine traditional medium of national security from statements from the state? When I say supine system, we look at roles of media as well. So Bill Keller ends his story in the New York Times magazine as if Assange were an understated professorial type rather than a character from a missing sneak Larson novel and if WikiLeaks were not suffused which would glib in sympathy toward the U.S. with the reaction to the leaks be quite toporoshes. Good question. Who's responsible? Half an article before Keller says, I came to think of Julian Assange as a character from a Steve Larson movie. So where do we look at the media? On the same day that the Iraq-Log Wars comes out, we have this front page story of WikiLeaks founder on the run, Trailed by Notoriety. If you look at frequency of terms from our media cloud database of Iraq and embassy and rape and molestation, you see a persistent interference pattern by looking for the sex and the violence rather than the violence and the torture. Story one. Story two. A couple of years ago the FCC asked us to help them with a national broadband plan and the Ford Foundation funded us to do this major report. One of the core problems in understanding what's going elsewhere and importing it here was the fact that for a decade over half the econometric studies about the effects of the most important policy option that the U.S. decided not to take were funded by industry and came 100% on the side of whoever funded them. This took the really interesting policy question and made it so that serious people in the U.S. couldn't say it's feasible because all the evidence is against it. You begin to map, as this is work with Laura Miakawa when she was still here, you begin to map the papers and the funding. What you see as a combination of consultancies like criteria in economics or the analysis group together with accreditation of Brookings Institute and American Enterprise Institute with authors who are both in the consulting world and in the think tanks as well as the universities and you get the funding and the accreditation coming out with a persistent set of answers that are always on the side of whoever funded them. The answer to this, if we can develop something on the net, has to be some form of peer review, whether it's a website that gets graduate students to look at this data, whether that's the model or something along those lines. Story three. The sixth most searched term which was followed by a click on the right-wing blogosphere in 2010 was a search for the cost of Obama's trip to India. The major point of claim that the trip cost $200 million a day, it started out, so this is a great candidate for the web spreads fear and indeed Tom Friedman writes to us, too good to check. The story is too good to check. Anderson Cooper did the country a favor. He expertly deconstructed on his CNN show a bogus rumor that President Obama's trip. Where does the rumor come from in case you missed it? A story circulated around the web, etc. Indeed, two blog posts on November 2nd linked to one of India's most respected news sites claiming this story. These two top sites plus three small sites. Three hours later, however, it was Rush Limbaugh and that night it was Mike Huckabee on election night reports who amped things up. So then who deconstructed it? Well, it wasn't traditional media. This is the next day major piece on the new Obama royalty on Fox News. Hours after these had already come out on the web, so fact check goes and does a very careful analysis, factcheck.org, media matters does, snopes.com does, so academically based non-profit supported organizations as well as a commercial website all debunked such that by the middle of the day on November 4th, seven or eight hours before Cooper's response, we already have a Wall Street Journal blog post that includes the debunking and directly sites both the snopes and the factcheck with links. One who did the research, as Tom Friedman says, too good to check that the story is that the web is nonsense and traditional media and reporting is good. So in fact, Anderson Cooper seven hours later has this story. As you see, he's comparing it to the Clinton trip in the late 90s, which is a great way of doing it just like factcheck.org did a day and a half earlier just without citation. The web, on the other hand, hours before Cooper, in our set at least half the blogs, including the top at the right wing, were already linking to the debunking. It was only Glenn Beck who kept repeating the lie. So where lying is easier or harder is a different question. Story four, and it's a completely different story and a completely different understanding. And that's the story of the SOPA PIPA organization. And it goes not so much to factchecking as the basic framing of a core policy question through a mobilized network of political and informational work. So you start when the bill gets introduced. In this story in the hail in September of 2010, a bipartisan bill unveiled Monday would make it easier for the Justice Department to shut down websites that traffic pirated music, movies, and counterfeit goods. Members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Chairman Patrick Leahy and Aaron Hatch, etc., introduced, etc., etc. Quote, each year, online piracy in the sale of counterfeit goods costs American business billions of dollars and result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, Leahy said in a statement, protecting intellectual property is not a uniquely democratic or republican priority. It is a bipartisan priority.  How did this piece of legislation move from being something that is neither a democratic nor a republican story to imagine a world without free knowledge? That's a story. One version of the story is a simple debunking story like, and you can tell that. So, for example, the $58 billion that's claimed that the industry is losing $58 billion from piracy, that was debunked. It was stated in the hail in that particular story. It's later repeated in various places, including the New York Times. It gets debunked online. So you've got this particular story in Cato linking to the New York Times story and saying, here are the problems. Here's the actual original article by the consultancy firm, as we saw in broadband as well, making these focus numbers. Here are the links to all of the figures, et cetera, that make it wrong. Here's a link to the GAO report that a year and a half ago already debunked this. But Cato is not very well known. However, there's an attention backbone. TechDirt, which is very highly connected in this network, links to Cato, and the story goes from there, as does a debunking of the same story on Reddit. So we see very highly connected nodes producing the debunking. But that's a less interesting version of the story. The more interesting version of the story is the development of network organization. So this is a snapshot out of about 13,000 stories over the last year and a half related to SOPA and PIPA. This is a snapshot of how they're connected and cite each other as of September, October of 2010 when Koika comes out. What you see here is that it's very much a tech media, a professional tech media story, TechDirt, CNET, and EFF, as well as obviously a connection to the actual source. By the time PIPA comes out, by the time the Protect IP Act comes out in May of 2011, it shifts to being something central in DC with Senator Ron Wyden playing a real role in trying to push this as a problem. I can't hold on much longer. Some interesting things when you zoom in, so Wyden seems to be connecting very heavily to the New York VC community, Union Square Ventures, Fred Wilson over there, as well as to the left, you've got Democratic Underground, you've got Demand Progress here. You also see public knowledge emerging up there as a major site, and the beginning's up there of Don'tCensorTheNet.com, which is really the approach that starts taking over by the time you get to the introduction of SOPA. Something that wasn't there before at all, AmericanCensorship.org, which is direct action. A site that calls people to write their senators emerges out of nothing. The whole notion that you can't have visibility on the net emerges out of nothing. And if we zoom in on this sort of center area, what we see is direct action on the web to try to get people to write their senators against these best-moneyed lobbies supported by both parties. So you see OpenCongress.org, a project of the Sunlight Foundation or funded by it, and Participatory Politics Foundation. You see Fight for the Future, behind AmericanCensorship.org, and you see the emergence of Wikipedia. As that introduction and that particular first set of mailings goes out and we move on to the next day, you notice that the different sites have different roles. So AmericanCensorship.org is just an action site. All of the sites, this reflects how many discrete pages or stories each site has links to. We see all of the sending over here to one action site. This is to primary materials primarily. What's that site? Call Congress right away. Call my representative. A direct action site. This is what everybody is linking to. Let's act. When you look at Wikipedia, you see a combination of both information. A lot of the links are to just what on Earth is SOPA. Here Wikipedia's got its neutral hat. But you also see organizing over here four political actions. So this is Jimmy Wells' user talk page where he sets up and says, let's do something together. Let's open up a poll and 1,800 people start debating about what Wikipedia should do. TechDirt, on the other hand, has lots and lots. 937 different factual stories. This major story from November that tells all the details turns out truth is strange as in fiction. On January 20th, after SOPA and PIPA fail, Google gets a DMCA takedown notice that says there's copyright infringement in these hundreds of sites. And number 253 on this list is this TechDec story, which was the most cited during this period, which is a purely factual story. For a month, you wouldn't get it from Google's search results until Mike Maznik happened to notice by chance that this was the case and told Google, stop blocking me. But for a month, it was blocked. By December, actions subsided a little bit. TechDirt again became story. People were looking for things. Reddit began to be more significant and you had more time for organizing on Wikipedia. By January, action comes back to the center. We see Wikipedia. We see American censorship coming up again. We see all sorts of particular groups. The New York Tech Meetup. You see ProPublica setting up a site to show who's on which site and what money they have. You see the right-wing blogosphere over here, also connecting to this set of materials. And by February, look, it's completely changed. All of the action sites, particularly American censorship, we've won, have gone. And the action has shifted to Europe as the Europeans try to import the same model into Acton. You've got street protests in Poland. And you've got Polish legislatures donning anonymous masks to stay, stop this international treaty. It's worse than SOPA. What's the story? To me, the story is not mainstream media which persist here but are relatively small. And it's not necessarily blogs which are also pervasive and everywhere. What's interesting here is the particular surgeon role of technology media in feeding the story is the online dedicated tech media of standing long-term organizations dedicated to the area which are much more effective and important in this field and a surprisingly large and important number of action item specific sites where people ramp up, have direct action with the website. These are all sites that are specifically dedicated to this particular battle. And most interesting, it's this crazy quilt. It's the fact that you have all of these different players, all of these different kind of players, blogs and mainstream media organizations online and all working together to completely shift the frame. This isn't about fact-checking, it's about frame-shifting through a combination of information, research, both neutral and activist as well as direct action. So this was an amazing team that pulled it together since and thank you to them here at Berkman. The four stories to me capture the problem of the state and its information particularly in the context of national security, the problem of money in research about what the facts are, the problem of a discreet misinformation campaign that Fox News represents and it's not just a neutral thing, it's a particular instance and the importance of nonprofit standing professional fact-checking and the possibilities for network organization and the ability to actually come together as a network public sphere to shift the frame over a period of over a year in the teeth of money and accepted wisdom in the opposite direction.


has ascended the dials. Dear Mysoreans, grab this opportunity to extend a very warm welcome to our beloved Prime Minister to the Royal City Mysore with a thunderous applause. Interaction with the beneficiaries of varied schemes of the central government for the upliftment of the different classes of the society. Honorable Prime Minister is here for unveiling the play to mark the laying of foundation stone of Nadina Halli and Mysore coaching complex and dedication to the nation of centre of excellence building all India Institute of Speech and Hearing. Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri Basavaraj Bommay congratulates Honorable Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modiji on behalf of the state. Our audience salutations to Honorable Prime Minister for accepting the honour and our sincere thanks to the Honorable Chief Minister for extending this great gesture. Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri Basavaraj Bommay congratulates Honorable Chief Minister for extending this great gesture. Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri Basavaraj Bommay congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Speech, Cool and Minds Shri Prahlad Joshiji, please serve. 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Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka congratulates Honorable Chief Minister Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka congratulates Honorable Chief Minister Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka Shri congratulates Honorable Chief Minister of Karnataka


Great, thank you all for being here. I'm delighted to have a fabulous roster of panelists. And we will be talking about investing in the sharing economy, equity and ownership. But what we'll really be talking about is sort of sharing the wealth in the sharing economy and different perspectives on that. If you are watching the livestream and you'd like to ask us a question, because we will have a bunch of time for audience questions, tweet the question to me, Digital Arun, and use the Socap 14 hashtag. At some point in the middle of the panel, we will pause, take a look at these questions and ask a few of them. So we've got four amazing panelists. And what I'd like to do is to start by just having each of them introduce themselves in about 30 seconds. So we'll start with Lisa. Thank you, Arun. It's a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation. My name is Lisa Ganski. I'm a serial mischief maker, entrepreneur, and about. And I've been involved with the internet from the side of a startup for 15 or 16 years, possibly more, and then secondly, in 2010, I wrote a book called The Mesh, Why the Future of Businesses Sharing, mostly because I considered that I was a successful entrepreneur and a failed environmentalist. And I started to observe that the world was changing in important ways in terms of our ability to access talent, goods, and services. And so for the last four years, four and a half, five years, since I wrote the book and it's been a conversation, I've had the privilege of going around the world meeting a lot of really interesting people who are doing projects and startups, some of whom are on the panel, including Arun. And probably many of you who are watching or in the audience. All right. Thank you, Lisa. Mike? Mike Jackson, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm a partner at the Western Group. We're a clean tech focused venture capital fund. I've been investing since about 2007. I've made investments pretty broadly throughout clean energy and wind, solar, biofuels, electric cars. And more recently, over the last few years, placed a few investments in a couple of sharing economy companies so I can kind of hopefully share that perspective of an institutional investor. Not the least of which is Adam's company, who we'll be hearing from in a little bit, but investors in Yurtle, a company called Feastly, a company called Good Eggs, and a few others that touch on some of the aspects of the sharing economy. Hi, everyone. I'm Janelle Orsi. I'm a lawyer. And my focus is laying the legal groundwork of more sustainable and equitable economy. So I co-founded the Sustainable Economies Law Center. I give legal advice to a very wide range of things that I consider to be part of the sharing economy. And our organization writes a lot of laws to lower the barriers and pave the way for more resilient communities. Morning. I'm Adam Warback. I am the co-founder and head of product for Yurtle. Y-E-R-D-L-E sometimes have to spell it. Yurtle is a store where you give and get things for free. It's an app, an iOS app. There's about 150,000 members in the US right now. And our mission is to reduce the number of new things we all have to buy by 25%. We're set up as a California Benefit Corporation. And I'm excited to be with you all. OK, thanks, Adam. And over the last two or three years, I've participated in maybe 30 or 40 discussions about this emerging sharing economy and what it means for the future of business and the future of ownership. And I'm really delighted to have you guys here, because this is sort of among the smartest group of thinkers about the sharing economy and about the issues that we're going to discuss that I have encountered. So it's wonderful to have you all on the same stage. So I'd like to start by asking each of you in turn for your perspectives on what the term sharing economy means to you. Just to sort of set the stage, one perspective is that the phrase sharing economy reflects a set of business models and philosophies that provide what someone in Seoul a couple of days ago called a cloud lifestyle, capital goods and services on demand with lower levels of long-term possession of any of the associated assets, and lower or no long-term commitment to any specific supplier. And in parallel, a blurring of the boundaries between professionally provided services and goods and things that are provided personally, where we sort of shift economic activity away from direct corporate provision, a company sort of selling to a consumer, and towards either market mediated or community mediated peer-to-peer transactions. So that's sort of one perspective on what the label sharing economy might be referring to. And I'll stick with sort of the order in which we're arranged for now and start with Lisa to get your perspective on like, well, what is the sharing economy to you? First off, I would say it's a fundamental shift from what we have many of us grown up with as last century's model. We're moving away from, and fairly rapidly moving away from, this one-to-many bureaucratic top-down, don't worry, we have it handled, kind of mentality to something that's much more distributed and many-to-many the ability for us to reach out to the crowd and the necessity for governments and corporations to become porous, meaning that instead of being vertically integrated, talking into themselves and having corporate campuses, to start to understand that resilience of the brand and resilience of the planet comes from this meshing or integration, which is benefited by porosity or the ability for us to connect to each other. So for me, the sharing economy is a fundamental shift and the most conspicuous way for us to see it is that we're moving from a world where we were organized around ownership to one in which we're moving to access of talent, goods and services and that the second main tenant for me is that unused value is waste, that things that we value that are on the asset side of the balance sheet, when they're not being used in this second, they're wasted. That form of waste is excess, bless you, that form of waste is excess capacity. The other flavor of waste is kind of the stuff we throw away and that too is part of, for me, what I consider to be part of the sharing economy because we actually have the ability and some people call that the circular economy but we have the ability to now see things that we couldn't see before in what I call the blue dye effect that we effectively with technology sensors and the internet and mobile devices, we've made it much easier to track each other and things and so now we can see what was invisible before. Unused factory time, intellectual property sitting around, homes basically being wasted, lots of cell phones and lots of materials being thrown away, all of those things are waste that because of us being now connected in new ways and other demands like climate change and things is driving us to now rapidly think very creatively together to convert that waste to value and so for me that's a core of the sharing economy. Okay, that's great because you're sort of touching upon a theme that sort of resonated through your description was sort of increasing the efficiency with which we use the capital and the assets that we have sort of leveraging digital technologies in ways that sort of allow us to use this more efficiently towards sort of like multiple objectives including sort of like financial but also environmental. And the other thing for me, and I'd be interested to see what other perspectives is many years ago E.F. Schumacher wrote a book called Smaller's Beautiful and one of the things in the book which is very for me core is that what we have considered to be revenue in many companies actually isn't its capital. Capital is not supposed to be diminished as you generate the revenue and if you're using nature for example, you're diminishing resources as a function of generating the capital that goes back to this conversation about shared value. You know, who created the value and who captures the value and how come? And so part of what I think we're hoping that we'll get into is this idea of the relationship in the sharing economy between created value and captured value is related a little bit to that idea of efficiency of capital. Absolutely. Okay, so Mike, does this sort of resonate with what your conception of the sharing economy is? Sure, yeah, absolutely. I think I agree with everything that Lisa just said. I think what I'd add to it from an investor perspective and one of the reasons why we're so excited about sharing economy companies is that the business models are extraordinarily scalable and they're very simple and elegant. So if you think about a company like Airbnb as compared to Hilton Hotels, they don't need to build buildings, they don't need to hire maids, they don't need to check people in. All of that is handled in a distributed fashion and so the level of complexity of what they have to do as a business diminishes incredibly while at the same time they can add a new building, a new hotel every week, every day. You think about Adam's business with Yurtle comparing it to a traditional commerce player like a Walmart, they don't own trucks, they don't have to take the risk of building a big store in a small town and hope it works out. And so that ends up being a really scalable and as we've seen very, very disruptive model when it's gone into different markets and so that's particularly interesting to us as we think about how these companies have the ability to create a huge amount of change and a huge amount of value in a pretty short period of time. Okay, interesting. Janelle? Yeah, I'm glad these two went first because I could also say I really like, especially the way Lisa that you described it and break it down and I was thinking maybe I will just add one more thing on top of that which is maybe my hope for the sharing economy is for it to be the response to realizing that what we have now predominantly is more of a taking economy. It's one where we've kind of set ourselves up to take from each other and to take from the planet and to compete and to extract and we're suddenly realizing, oh, this is not making us happy, we're destroying our planet. And so the sharing economy is the reaction that says, wait, we can take the resources that we have, we're in this together and we can work it out to make sure that everybody is provided for and in that respect, the sharing economy also incorporates elements of shared power and shared profits all with the goal of just making sure that everybody is fully provided for. Okay, so contrasting sort of the sharing economy with the taking economy. Sure. That's an interesting characterization, Adam. Yeah, I really like the we're in this together and I think the broadest thing we might talk about sharing economy is our aspiration for a better economy. And that's where the definition gets really hard sometimes because the aspirations and practically what it is sometimes differ and that's, I think, probably the nature of much of our conversation today. As a simple definition for me, the sharing economy unlocks unused value through the application of technology and community. So unlocks unused value, I think we sort of talked about that and I'm particularly interested in the application of technology and community. And some people would say that some things are part of the sharing economy that don't have technology, it's true. But I think a lot of the interesting things we're seeing right now are the technology application and in that communal desire, probably best expressed by Janelle, that we're in this together. This desire, there's something broader in this than just making money. There's a desire to actually solve something more fundamental. Okay, that's, you know, I mean, the reason why I started with that is that talking about the sharing economy often sort of, you know, I've had many conversations about the sharing economy but I've realized sort of midway through the conversation that I'm talking about something completely different than the person that I am talking to. And I'm also happy that we've sort of brought out a couple of key points sort of related to what we want to dive into in the panel that have to do with sort of equity of value distribution, like, you know, as the value is created and ownership models. And so, you know, I've been following a discussion that has sort of been unfolding over the last couple of years, I guess, but sort of seems to have intensified over the last few months in light of the sort of the stunning valuations that are associated with some of the sharing economy platforms. And it seems to me that in this discussion we paint a couple of sort of caricatures and I want us to sort of move past those. And so, one caricature that I see often is of the sort of the soulless venture capital backed Silicon Valley platform building one of like, you know, what Mike called one of those scalable business models sort of perpetuating what Janelle might refer to as the taking economy, pursuing sort of world domination with limitless capital and ruthless efficiency, creating sort of in the process underpaid and underprotected assembly line sort of labor. So that's that sort of one sort of picture of like, you know, how the sharing economy is unfolding. Guilty is charged. Well, you know, that's and sort of it contrasts with a picture that is also being painted of an alternative which is the benevolent worker cooperative where each of the workers is also an owner. They reap sort of their fair share of the value that is created. They're all sort of in this together. They wake up in the morning, hold hands and sort of sing the circle song. But this is sort of, but where this cooperative is sort of paralyzed in its sort of inability to raise capital using sort of like, you know, financial markets has inefficient organizational decision-making models. And so this is sort of the alternative picture that is painted. And so I mean, you know, I'd like to start with Janelle and like, you know, from your point of view and you've written a lot about this, what's wrong with this picture? Does this sort of reflect the reality of, you know, sort of VC backed private corporation versus benevolent cooperative? Is this the reality or is this in fact a caricature? I kind of think that both of those are real and I think the sometimes are so real I just get frustrated and want to cry especially the worker cooperative example. But I just think we can let those go a little bit because we've reached a point in history where we can just look at, well, what is possible? We can get beyond both of those and harness a lot of things that we just didn't have before. I mean, some of that is technology and we were mentioning the worker cooperatives and how inefficient they can be and frustrating especially in their decision-making and capital raising. Well, technology can change how we make decisions, how we get feedback from the people we're interacting with, how we, you know, create feedback loops and integrate ideas much more efficiently. We're also reaching a point in history where we can harness capital from the crowd and not just from the wealthy but we have crowd funding laws coming down the pike and platforms that enable us to raise capital that way. So I think it's kind of a breath of fresh air that we could just look beyond both of those and create organizations that harness the ideas of the crowd, that harness the capital of the crowd and that do so for the purpose of benefiting the crowd. Okay, Lisa, what do you think?  I think it's the polarity of the alternatives.  He took off the devil horn. Just before, just before he came because it bothered your microphone. You know, I think the idea of capturing all the value, squeezing all the juice from the fruit is certainly something that happens all the time on the way in. I heard on NPR that, you know, BP's spill in the Gulf was way worse and that now they're, you know, all this nonsense. I mean, the, there are big corporations and VC's fall into that sort of what I'll call extreme capitalism idea, which is the me model of, you know, I had the good sense to invest in this and therefore all of the value comes back to me. Whereas, for example, the sharing, what we're calling the sharing economy enabled by technology is really built on GPS, which was something that the Department of Defense did in the United States. It's built on DARPA's internet. It's built on a lot of technology and other things, including all of the natural resources and things that we use to power all this stuff. And so this is, I like what Adam said, which is a lot of what we talk about, what's now coming on under the moniker of the sharing economy is really the, hey guys, we're gonna reinvent something and what do we wanna reshape this to be? Because clearly we're way out of balance on what we are currently or historically as of a couple years ago calling the economy. And so a lot of, I think, what's happening under the moniker of the sharing economy is this kind of rebalancing of value creation and value capture. And also this idea that on the planet we have many talents, goods, and services that we aren't using, the ability for us to now see each other, to make those things blatant and to provide value and to stop subsidizing the waste that has happened with the last economy. All of those things are powering what we're calling the sharing economy and this emergence of many different kinds of platforms. And there's not that many business models, but there's a lot of instantiations or versions of like an Airbnb type offering or a Lyft or Sidecar or Yurtle. You'll see that around the world these sorts of things are being tried under different brand names with slightly different twists on the terms in which they engage customers. But fundamentally we're all doing experiments trying to rapidly learn and hopefully we'll learn together. Okay, and so you've got sort of like, as you said, like the sort of the polarity of the characterization of these two alternatives, but a point that we'll get to sort of like a little further down in the discussion is whether the objectives that are embodied in what we are calling the sharing economy do in fact offer by themselves sort of alternatives that wouldn't exist if we were talking about, for example, oil extraction or investment banking. I mean, Mike and Adam, do you have sort of anything to add to this picture before we sort of move ahead? Well, I'm a little curious how involved people here in the room are in this thing that we're talking about. I mean, how people here have participated in the sharing economy company or organization in the last year. Okay, so it looks like more than 50, 60%. And how people are professionally involved or volunteer for sharing an organization, so a few. Okay, I mean, I'll put my agenda out there. I'm recruiting, not just for your little, but really for like, for this space. And it feels to me a lot like, Lisa, you know I've taught this a lot, a lot like sort of sustainability was seven or eight years ago where there's a lot of opportunity. It's really interesting. There's technology taking off, there's kind of money coming in, but there's not enough people in it yet. There's really not enough of people who have time, energy, thought, great ideas, and sort of the passion to run something, start something, build something, whether it be a tool shed in their community or a startup or joining something else. So the thing that I think we need right now is people power. We have a lot of participant power and it's pretty amazing to watch how many people, there's some surveys that say 60% of Americans plan to use a sharing economy. Is that right, Chelsea? Some study like that. 60% of Americans plan to use a sharing economy company in the next year. So like there's an aspiration for it, but really they're among the kind of leadership and people, I mean all of us have been on panels or something like it before together. And it's actually just sort of remarkably small. What it desperately needs is more people to come in, own it and take a part of it and kind of make it their own right now. And there's a tension that I have perceived sort of recently in philosophy of the people who are in fact drawn to what is labeled the sharing economy, either as providers or as thinkers or as people who want to sort of nurture and grow the idea and grow the companies. And there seems to be a tension between people who are drawn to the fact that this seems to be a incredibly lucrative industry in which you can play. This is sort of the new hot sort of tech startup space and it attracts people who would have been attracted to Facebook a few years ago or Google a decade ago or Microsoft 20 years ago. And sort of in parallel what seems to be different here is that there seems to be a extremely large community of people who are drawn to it for the philosophical appeal, for the objectives that are embodied in that term sharing economy. Perhaps with a different conception of what the end goal is compared to sort of the former set of people who just sort of see this as the next wave of sort of Silicon Valley VC backed sort of. And so I think that we're all in favor of some form of sharing the wealth among the wealth creators. I think it's hard for me to imagine that we're not in favor of some form of taking advantage of the, at least in the United States, the market economy that has sort of nurtured the growth of business so admirably over the sort of last hundred years. Perhaps it hasn't sort of taken us to where we wanna be. But like, I'm a business school professor and so I think that capital markets generally are good for an economy, even though they might have sort of their downsides. And I, we'd probably agree also that there are trade-offs, you know, both for society in terms of like, you know, one model may sort of grow the size of the pie tremendously, but sort of lead us to a unacceptable division versus another model might sort of like, you know, provide equitable division that lead to a smaller pie. And so for any individual stakeholder sort of making decisions like in an environment like this where you've got a set of objectives that are often like, you know, multiple and this, you know, it could be a triple bottom line kind of set of objectives. It could be like, you know, but it's a broader set of objectives than would typically be characterized with I'm starting a tech company or I'm starting a new venture. It seems to me that these trade-offs are definitely different for a sharing economy platform and, you know, the way in which we decide to sort of structure the ownership of the platforms that we create will then influence how well we achieve each of these objectives sort of like, you know, the total value creation, the division of value and the objectives that are met as this value is created of like, you know, sort of financial returns versus environmental impact versus equity.  And so can you sort of give us a bit of insight into what your thought process there and why you ended up where you wanted to end, where you ended up? Sure. So we came up with an idea for Yerdl and then figured it had to make it into a company or an organization of some sort and called people like Lisa and talked about how we should do that. And the first need was some money. We had funded it ourselves but we needed to raise a seed round of capital. And as we began to look at incorporation, I don't know if you and I talked but I definitely was familiar with what your work you were doing at the time and definitely familiar with kind of co-op structures and had a bunch of conversations about all of the different models of doing that. And they rapidly became a sort of a swamp hole for us like really hard, no good models to point to, couldn't actually know what to do. And meanwhile, we were trying to build a product and organization. So we found as an option starting up a California Benefit Corporation which is basically a simple stricture that says that people are pretty familiar with Benefit Corpse. So this is a part of the California Corporate Law that allows you to set up a corporation and essentially say that your mission is your top priority and you can actually make a choice that would be non-economic in favor of your mission and your directors wouldn't be able to fire you for that or your shareholders wouldn't be able to sue you for that which is a basic protection essentially for the organization. So we set ourselves up like that. We raised our seed round with that and our seed investors including Lisa were fine. I think actually attracted to us because of that. Like it was a very popular thing and we were successful in growing and getting to it and we got to the point of having to raise an A round and then it sort of changed because we were immediately told that no one will fund us as a B Corp but you have to be set up as a, or you could be set up as a C Corp or a Delaware B Corp and a Delaware B Corp is sort of like, Delaware Corporate Law applied to everything so it sort of takes the fangs out of B Corp I guess and still allows all the things happen.  Do you actually turn away a lot of potential funders? Do you do that in order to maintain this social commitment or do you avoid it? And we were lucky enough to be relatively successful enough in our seed round that we were able to attract a great investor initially in Wesley. They were actually involved in our seed round, continued to the A round but we were, I mean obviously we were nervous. Like we thought it was gonna be, it was one of the deal terms that we were talking about and you actually had to, I mean I'd be curious how you had to run it up the flagpole and how you guys were able to do that because as we were told, we couldn't find another example of a venture fund A round in a California Benefit Corporation at the time but maybe there's been some since. So I'd be interested in what happened for you. Sure, yeah. So we, you were actually not the first B Corporation we invested in. We had previously invested in a company called Honest Buildings based in New York which was a B Corp and a lot of the way that we think about it is the way that I'd hope most people would think about with the B Corporation is that when you are focused on issues that are not necessarily trying to maximize short-term value, they maximize long-term value often and we're in the investing world as venture capitalists not to write Adam a check and try to sell it next week but to hopefully turn his small company into a very large one over six, seven, eight, nine years and so we're long-term investors and so we need to have a long-term perspective on what makes for good business and so I think that's how we get ultimately comfortable with that as a concept. I think one other piece I'd add to the equation which is one that I think Adam raised a bit in his conversation is I think most of the value that's created by sharing economy companies is already distributed. If you look at Airbnb and you spend $100 on a night hotel room, $85 of those dollars is going to some guy renting out his apartment so already 85% of the value has already shifted from Hilton Hotels to a guy at Bob. Then the company is hiring folks and growing in that capacity and so again more of that wealth has been distributed and so focusing on the corporate structure and how do we share that wealth I think is focusing on a very small slice of ultimately the value that's created by these companies. I'm all for trying to figure out how to make that more equitable, more distributed but I'm much more, I'd much rather make sure that we create more yurtles, more Airbnb's, more lifts because that's where the majority of the wealth will be spread and if we focus too much and as Adam saw in his fundraising process if it becomes too difficult to structure yourself that it maybe prevents you from starting the company that would be a, we'd lose so much of the value distribution that would have been created. No, I mean that isn't interesting and I spent a little bit of time trying to sort of look for historical examples of the ways in which we might anticipate companies like Airbnb sort of and Yurtle eventually spreading the wealth and Airbnb Yurtle's a little different I realize and so I looked at eBay's sort of most recent balance sheet and their marketplace business I believe generated last year $76 billion of revenue flowed through the marketplace of which eBay captured 9 billion which is somewhere between 10 and 15% and so it's sort of roughly consistent with the value distribution. Now the margins on these are potentially different sort of for eBay and for the person who's selling on eBay but those margins are probably going to be different for service providers that are leveraging existing capital relative to someone who is simply sort of selling a good on eBay and so the news I think is a little better for like service providers that service platforms in the sharing economy than even for eBay where I was sort of favorably inclined when I sort of looked at that value distribution picture. So that's sort of the corporate or the B corporation the Delaware B corporation, the California B corporation we're sort of preserving the structure of ownership by a relatively small group of stakeholders and value creation and capture through sort of transactions by a relatively large so I'm just going to jump to Janelle and then I'll come back to you Lisa because I wanted to ask Janelle what the alternatives if you were advising Adam at the time that he was sort of creating Yerdel I mean what alternatives would you have put on the table for him? Yeah I think anybody who really has a social or environmental mission when they're starting a company and I think a lot of people do I think my best advice is to just not allow the potential for limitless wealth accumulation to invade your company at all because the thing I've noticed about people in general is that it's very rare for a person to look at the money that they have and the wealth that they have and say all right that's enough now I don't need anymore there's this kind of tendency in this society to accumulate limitlessly it's kind of pathological and it's been such a process over the last say 150 years especially that wealth has like such a huge amount of wealth has accumulated in the hands of just a few people and that is going to make our society collapse I mean yes the ice caps are melting and I'm extremely worried about that I'm also like equally worried about the fact that we're gonna just have complete chaos when 80% of the people in the society really are working with only 7% of the wealth whereas the top 20% are controlling 93% of the wealth and you know that 10 to 15% that is being paid to Airbnb or that's being paid to the platform that's a pretty powerful chunk of money and I think at this point in history we don't have to pay that to these big platforms because ultimately we're paying it to people who already have money, they don't need any more money we can create new platforms that basically take all of the earnings and either reinvest them in the platform for the purpose of creating the world we wanna live in or distribute them back to the users in ways that incentivize good participation by the users and so generally it means that you can be a benefit corporation but I would actually say if you're gonna take capital from people just make sure that it's limited that the return is limited so that there's not always an investor voice in your head saying well if you do this we'll make more money you never get to the point where you feel like okay now I've earned enough for my investors and I can focus on my social mission there's always this voice well if you do this we can make a little more money and that voice is always gonna be in your head it's not good to have that voice in your head I think if your real goal is to change the world so cooperative corporations, non-profit corporations especially any entity that is democratic meaning that the participants say the users of Yerdal, the hosts of Airbnb the drivers for Lyft where they have a vote in the election of the board of directors and where their voice is actually taken into account in a wide variety of ways it means that the platform is gonna make decisions solely that benefit the users and it's not gonna be swayed by anybody who's on this wealth accumulation so you've sort of got a much more decentralized model of ownership in mind than any of the sort of corporate structures that we've discussed whether it be traditional, be Delaware, be so I mean Lisa moving to you is you know I wanna sort of as the final sort of structured point before we open it up for questions sort of explore what where the boundaries lie as an investor and so if you sort of take off your sort of entrepreneur hat and sort of thought leader hat and put on your investor hat and you invest in a number of early stage sharing economy platforms I'm just wondering what to you is the limit of decentralized ownership where you sort of stop and say well I'm not gonna get the kind of return on my investment that I want and so I'll help this company in other ways but not with my money like you know how decentralized can ownership be while you're still sort of participating as an investor. So I think there were two questions in there for me one of the things before I switched to the investor as an entrepreneur how many people in the room by the way consider who considers themselves a conspicuous entrepreneur meaning you're actively managing something, starting something or a closet entrepreneur because you're cooking it up as we're speaking if you follow in one of those two categories were you? It's a thin number yeah. Okay so you know as an entrepreneur I would just say courage is an absolute necessity always and one of the things that we see always is that investors will follow courageous entrepreneurs who are grounded dreamers you know the right amount of helium and Velcro kind of thing. And so if you, if entrepreneurs like Adam and Andy on the Yertle team and Dan and Billy on Solar Mosaic and a couple other companies I could think of honest buildings rigs you know come forward and say this is the vision we have and this is the way we wanna structure the company and here's why and the logic of what is being proposed from a business perspective makes sense especially as it starts to you know become a snowball downhill. Investors will follow things that work. That's the first spool and so entrepreneurs increasingly will begin to create and I think we're at the very beginning of as entrepreneurs experimenting with new kinds of forms of structures including ownership and so will some of the Solar Mosaic investors who are investing in solar on rooftops also be equity holders of the company at some point because the thing that we're talking about is there's two kinds of value capture. There's operational value capture as in 85% of the transaction when Arun stated Bob's house goes to Bob but there's another kind of value capture which is $18 billion of value for Uber. The people who invested you know a hundred or a million dollars very early are getting a disproportionate amount of on aggregate value captured from a market capitalization perspective that the people who have worked to build that network especially in something like Lyft or Sidecar where it's or UberX where it's individuals cars are not participating in that enormous value capture and that's where the wealth is being made. It's not happening at the lifestyle level. Bob gets 85% of the hundred dollars but more that such and such a firm is gonna have a $5 billion take away at some moment when the company goes public and so I think that that's part of what's being asked. As an investor, by full disclosure I'm invested in Yurtle and Honest Buildings and Solar Mosaic because for me I'm a distorted investor. I'm not really a good example because I'm also. That's part of the reason why you're on this panel. Yes, I'm distorted. We're all distorted in different ways. You know I have chosen to, I always invest in people not things, first of all. So every place I put my money is always because I think the people A, they laugh at my jokes and B, but more importantly, they're awesome entrepreneurs with a strong vision and they are people who are resilient enough to go through the whole ride of what it is and make a start-up work and so, and the idea is big and it's worth investing in, time and money and so from my perspective that's the fundamental deal. If the entrepreneur said we wanna make it this way or that way then they've hooked me with both the team and the idea that's the sort of irresistible offering. Even if it were a worker cooperative and they just wanted to borrow your money at the fixed rate of return. Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. I mean, would I do that always from a, if I was trying to invest in sort of a more risky thing, probably not, then I would have to turn to some other weird, you know, like wind power with kites and things that are really R and D. But I think the whole idea for me is, the idea of having a ceiling on a return, like the bank gives us some crap return for our money. If Yertle was giving me a five times or whatever, a two times my principle or whatever we agreed to in the beginning and it produced the social impact because this is like the big kind of bullshit thing which is social impact investing. We have all these cute words, patient capital and social entrepreneurs. If you're building a business that's changing the world you're a social entrepreneur, congratulations. You know, Uber, whether Travis knows it or not, is changing the way that we see transportation. Is he a social entrepreneur from central casting? Absolutely not, you know. But the impact of what they are doing is changing the way we see ourselves in cities all over the world. And so I think that we're seeing this, again, this kind of mushing together of a lot of things that we were very careful to make very distinct in the sustainability era. We're now seeing that entrepreneurship is social. Yeah, it makes me think of three things. One, there's sort of an interesting conflation between a model of wind power with kites and your earlier reference to helium and Velcro. I'd be interested to see how those two go together. But also making me think of Silicon Valley, the TV show, making the world a better place, for those of you who have seen that. I was on a flight from Seoul a day ago and I actually sort of watched all eight episodes when I was asleep, so it's very heavy on my mind. I'm sorry. But there's a third point that comes up because there's an inherent tension here between sort of Janelle's idea that we should cap the returns to investors up to a certain point because it creates distortions in society that are not good for society in the long run. And the philosophy of venture investing, as I understand it, which is sort of a portfolio approach where you expect that a lot of your investments will not turn a return, but sort of like the record label you are sort of gonna make the money back on your superstars. So just sort of the final point maybe from Mike and then we'll open it up to questions.  I mean, is that something that you'd consider? So I think it's important to, it's important to realize that, then this will be a- He didn't say no. Maybe controversial in the industry community, but entrepreneurs are the leaders and investors are the followers.  And then all of a sudden a really successful company shows up in this thing that they all said they wouldn't do and everybody wants to pile in and follow it and figure out how to possibly do that. Perfect example would be a company like Groupon where people said, you know, we just know barriers to entry, don't like it, don't, oh geez, let's fund 10 more Groupon competitors because that really took off. And so I think if companies can do it well and they're truly great companies, money will figure out its way to get to them. You may not be able to get existing structures into that. So we started a fund in 2011 that told the folks that invested in our fund, here's how we're going to operate. It's very difficult for us to change now in this fund structure. We're gonna throw that all out. We're gonna invest in it with a different set of constraints. We're not gonna try to get an enormous amount of upside. We're gonna be maybe a little bit lower risk, lower return investors. And so, but over time, if as those types of structures, if they become more popular, if they have successful stories they can point to, you will see money figure out its way to get into them. And so it's a big task for any one company to try to do. But if you do it, you'll see the money follow. Okay, yeah. One more quick thing is just the stories, you know, that if it leads, it leads thing in the news business, well it's also true, certainly around finance. And so the unicorn phenomenon of the three or five big companies that have billions of dollars of valuation and have raised a crazy amount of money has captured a disproportionate amount of the stories. The reality for most of us that do investment is that we actually rarely have the opportunity to invest in something that's a Google or a Facebook or a Tesla. And- Or a soon to be Yurtle. Or a Yurtle. My point is that we don't know it is until it is, that Yurtle becomes Tesla, but the strategy when you're making the investment is that it's filling out a kind of thesis that you have, you know, that you're seeing the world move in a certain way and you're betting on that. And so for me, and I'm sure for Mike and Wesley, and many of the VCs it's the same, is part of the early experiments allow for all of us to learn and that's why, again, there's value shared because we're all investing after we're learning what's working and not. Yurtle is not the first one to take this thesis, but Yurtle is the one that will succeed at a global level because they've actually been able to learn from a lot of other, no pressure, a lot of other people who have gone before them and so that's the phenomenon as we all stand on each other's shoulders, whether we make that explicit or not. All right, and so there may be a process of experimentation that we have to go through in order to sort of vet the alternatives, but if we find an alternative that works, the capital will flow there and it will flow there in part because the mythology of sort of all of venture capital goes sort of seeking the next Google or the Facebook may be actually sort of mythology and may not be reality. Yeah. We've got, since all of you are here, I'm going to sort of reward you for your presence by actually sort of looking for questions on Twitter. Before I, but like, you know, we have a hand up, but I'm gonna sort of toss two of the questions that I see out and sort of let them float here and then we'll take one more question or maybe a couple of questions from the audience and then I'll just sort of let the panelists sort of address all of the questions at once rather than sort of doing them sequentially. And I mean, one question comes from Rashmi Khare where she wants to know if there's anything that the government can do to sort of like, you know, facilitate better ownership structures that sort of lead to the kinds of outcomes that we want. Is there a role for government which I think of as the original, yes, cooperative? You know, anything that we can ask them to do to sort of make things better.  And yeah, so those are two questions from the audience and just sort of state your name and state your question. We'll go around to maybe three or four people. Hi and truly. I'm setting up an unprofit to give free breaks to the ill, less able and unpaid carers using gifts from the shared economy. Should I partner with all the platforms as they are now to get the gifts flowing to an approved list of people who really need a break or should I go alone and set up my own nonprofits? Okay, so that's one question. Sorry, what was he, what is he getting? What is he giving? Sorry. It's kind of hard, it's hard to hear up here actually. We have an echo. We've got a lot of echo. I want to give free breaks to the ill and their unpaid carers, give them an eye to weigh, using gifts from the shared economy. Got it. Do I get the gifts through the existing platforms and give them to the people who need the break or do I go alone to the public and get the gifts directly to a standalone platform and give them to the people that need them? So do I ask homestay websites to ask their hosts to gift two nights a year and a car share company to gift some transport for the transport to get to the break or do I just go directly to the public? Right, okay, fair enough. Thank you. Hi, what do you think? Everything it's possible to share? Is it possible to share everything? Is that your question? Where are the boundaries? Where are the boundaries? Okay, so. I would love to hear from you that you have experience. All right, so anyone else with questions before we? This one. Go to the... Yeah, can you see this guy? Yes, yes. That's a good question. Okay. I'm curious if y'all are seeing any emerging trend. I'm not an accredited investor, but I am a consumer daily. And I am also an entrepreneur and the number one investor in my company is people who buy and wear our shoes. How can we value their contribution as an investor in our company in a way that actually maybe not builds them equity but builds them that sense of ownership and belonging in the company and respects the contribution that they've made as a self-funded business. They are the number one and only investor at this point. So how can we use a sharing economy to build that idea? So for people who are consumers of your company, you want them to sort of feel a sense of ownership. Is that the question? And how do we get people to feel a sense of ownership? Okay, and like why don't we take one final question and then we'll sort of recap and then go to answers. Did you have a question? Yeah. Well, I think mine was, I'm trying to figure out some of the line between, just to keep the line. Some of the rhetoric behind every entrepreneur or every business entrepreneur, like the revenue market in Goldman Sachs changed the way we see the world and made an impact. Was it positive? No. And as far as like a common ground between these two individuals of the two pictures you painted, there are other, that seems to be a dichotomy that there are many other options like New Belgium, Bob's Red Mill, other places where they've been able to figure out a middle ground between the two of these things. And I think that's, I guess my difference is telling the difference between yes, you're making an impact, is it positive and are there more interest to narratives? Okay, all right. So just to sort of recap real quick, we've got the question about like, what role can the government play? We've got a question about like, is there really the potential for sort of genuine sort of sharing of value through transactions or does it have to come through sort of sharing of ownership and wealth creation? We have the question from the gentleman here about like sort of like going to the public versus like going to a smaller group of people. We have the question from the gentleman here about the limits to what can sort of be shared sort of under a sharing economy model. The question about like, how do we give our consumers a better sense of ownership sort of in a sharing economy platform? And then finally the question about like, what are the realistic middle grounds between the two caricatures that I painted? So I'm going to let you guys sort of duke it out. I mean, I was hoping that you would start throwing things at each other at some point. Since we haven't gotten to that point, I'm just going to sort of turn it over to the floor of you to sort of take us out. Okay. What's your story in government? Government, well, you know, I think governments have a huge role to play in just making sure that everybody in society can make a livelihood and be sustained. And I think at some point, governments have just got to realize that certain legal entity structures are doing that a little bit better than others. And so cooperatives, I'm really hard pressed to think of really any type of business that can't or shouldn't be a cooperative. I think you could have a shoe company that's owned by the people who buy the shoes. You could have an Airbnb that's owned by the users or just the hosts. Just it's fun to get creative and think of what's possible. What the government can do, we need to change securities laws because right now if you're not an accredited investor there are a lot of barriers but I don't want to say that there are too many. I think people, every day people can sort through these laws in fact and do direct public offerings, use the new crowdfunding law when it's implemented and we can advocate in each state for crowdfunding laws that are narrowly tailored to the things that we want to do. Crowdfunding laws to finance solar projects, to finance farmland purchase, really anything. So hopefully everybody in this room will think of themselves as an investor no matter who they are and think about investing in entities that are going to generate the most wealth for your own community. I'll just add two quick things to that. One is that we measure gross domestic product, gross domestic product which doesn't include the $76 billion of transactions that happen on eBay. We don't measure gross domestic productivity and if we started doing that we'd actually begin to have some of the numbers to map some of these things. The second piece you asked about should you work with these companies? I think that's great. I think the ideal is that these companies are giving back by actually making the services available in ways that are beneficial to the community and a big challenge is actually the interoperability of them and that's a piece that we have to kind of work towards. Yeah, Mike, Lisa. I would say, well I agree with those two comments so no fighting so far, sorry. I think you can do both partner and explore not not, right? But I think the whole idea of one of my personal frustrations about the so-called sharing economy companies is that we don't share. And so, and I've been pretty vocal amongst us kids but I'm now saying publicly that the challenge is for somebody like you to come and say, wait, if I could just tap into the waste within the network or on aggregate value of all these sharing economy companies you could provide all this extra value. And so I think that that's a challenge that we as sharing economy companies should take on but I would say that one of the things that I think is an artifact of the VC funded winner take all I'm a unicorn I hope strategy is that the ideology around intellectual property and the need to be the winner often prevents the whole orientation towards building an ecosystem. And we see that with companies like Airbnb and Uber who are actually building their own reputation systems and all these things that the smaller companies will end up outsourcing and creating a different structure. In terms of the shoe company one of the models that I'm a huge fan of and unfortunately not an investor in is a company called Quirky. They're based in New York. They were started by a lovely guy named Ben Kaufman who himself is a product designer and basically the idea is that everybody can contribute to how products get designed and marketed. And so what they've done is they've created for example these consumer products that in some case 805 people contributed to and it could have been a room just said I like the blue one or why don't you let's use this packaging instead of that everybody gets their name on the package when it ships and everyone who participated and contributed to the project actually get a small percentage of royalty. And that's a system that I think is quite interesting when we look at how that could play out in other markets. The second thing about Quirky is that they were we shouldn't think that big corporations and governments don't have a role in the sharing economy. And so GE for example discovered that a lot of unused value in the form of waste was there are billions of dollars of intellectual property that they invested in over the years but decided they weren't gonna be in the consumer business and so they partnered with Quirky. And about two months ago, a month and a half ago the first product shipped which was called the Aeros Air Conditioner. It's beautiful, it looks like if Apple did air conditioners this is a window air conditioner. It was done by the main inventor from the Quirky platform using GE Aviation Intellectual Property was Dr. Garthyn Leslie who is a 68 year old retired department of energy worker who came up with the idea. It's a brilliant success for both companies. Dr. Leslie got a $750,000 check so it worked out well for him too. So there are these structures that we're again experimenting with and I would encourage all of you to dive in and start playing. Okay, any sort of thoughts, Mike, before I wrap up? Yeah, I mean I guess I would just close and answer the question of are there kind of limits to what can be shared is that I think as soon as you hear somebody say, here's where the line is drawn, the next great company is just right across that line. And we, I'm consistently amazed when you kind of think through, okay what can be shared, here's how it may work and then a company walks in the next day and blows your mind with a completely different way to think about that. And so I think that we will continue to be amazed at the creativity of entrepreneurs to come up with ways to share different pieces of our economy and so that's what makes this whole thing pretty exciting. Okay, I mean I think that we're almost out of time in my sort of fictitious clock. But like, so I just want to sort of close with a couple of thoughts. I mean like, I've had this picture in my mind of a two by two being a business school professor where you sort of got asset value on one dimension and fallowness or inefficiency of use on the other dimension and there's sort of this frontier that sort of, so the more valuable assets can sort of be shared even with a relatively low level of sort of lack of use. And so even if you're only not using your apartment 10% of the time or your house 10% of the time, a market will emerge to sort of share it for that 10% because the asset value is high. On the other hand, for products where the asset value is really small, you're going to have to have a really high level of fallowness like power tools and you'll see sort of markets for those emerge because it's sitting in your garage 99% of the time. And so it makes sense to sort of start to create a market. And I think we've also made a lot of progress in thinking about that middle ground between like the two caricatures that we started with and the Chelsea and her colleagues are sort of spending a lot of time thinking about alternative cooperative models as well. But I like the idea that we were often wedded to this notion that sort of capital only goes after or specialized capital goes after things with multiple objectives. So you've got sort of triple bottom line investors but sort of traditional capital goes after things where like there is no bound on the returns. But if you think about other forms of capital beyond venture capital that we have today, I mean like capital goes after the whole bunch of a spectrum of sort of profiles of return. And it's just up to us to sort of invent the ownership models and sort of demonstrate that they work and that the capital will then sort of follow them. There's a flashing sort of sign here that says please finish. I expect that at some point a giant hand is going to emerge from underneath the stage and pluck me off. So I'll stop before that happens. And so thank you guys for coming and thank you guys for wanting to do stuff with me. Thank you. Thank you.