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Jun. 8th, 2012 10:37 amThe Immodest Proposals mega-event was Wednesday. Probably 50 people, definitely the biggest ImP yet. The topic was titled "The Locationless Economy", and its focus was on start-ups, entrepreneurship (particularly ecommerce entrepreneurship), and its relationship with physical place. In particular, several of the panelists were advocates of a program called Start-Up Visa that would provide access to the US immigration system for would-be entrepreneurs wanting to start companies in America. The panel consisted of Alexis Ohanian, the founder of Reddit and Breadpig, Alex Torrenegra, a tech startup founder and Columbian immigrant, Jeremy Robbins, an official in the Bloomberg administration with a portfolio that includes startups, Craig Montuori from Politihacks, and Steve Berg from the blog Brooklyn startup. All of them were extremely thoughtful, extremely smart, and extremely well-spoken.
The panel part of the discussion went really well, though because the panel was so good and had so much to say there was a bit less give and take than usual with the audience. I don't think anybody wanted to stop them from talking. I definitely felt more hesitation when it comes to asking questions at certain moments, though ultimately I felt like I was active in shaping parts of the conversation through some of my questions. Immodest Proposals is so different from any other kind of political panel discussion I've been to because it gives you that opportunity to be part of the conversation from wherever you sit, and I'm always trying to take advantage of that both for my own enjoyment and to model that kind of participation for other people. The more people we have active in the conversation, the better, I think. At the midway point, we broke up into smaller groups, each with one of the panelists, and had a really good conversation about solutions for making America a better environment for business innovation.
The conversation began with the panelists discussing what they thought America did have to offer to entrepreneurs that set it apart. Generally speaking, this amounted to easy access to venture capital, a large, active, and technologically engaged market, access to skilled and educated workers, economic freedom, and in an idea we kept coming back to all night even though it was ill-defined, a culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking that made it more comfortable for people to take the leap. On the downside, we have an economic regulatory regime that is less aggressive in making company founders feel comfortable than other countries: Alexis discussed getting an offer from Singapore with incredibly generous subsidies to locate a Reddit office there, and others talked about programs in England, Chile, and a number of other countries to entice entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, if a foreigner wants to move to the US to start a business they face inordinate obstacles just from the immigration process, let alone regulatory hurdles, adjusting to a new legal system, and cultural challenges.
Historically the US has grown and prospered by integrating immigrants and their ideas, vigor, and desire for improvement into our culture and our economy. Someone in the audience was very careful to caution us against reading that narrative nostalgically as containing a golden age where immigrants were fairly treated and encouraged to participate in the economy, since that age never existed. I went so far as to wonder aloud whether it was in fact, in some degree, the pressure exerted on immigrants that encouraged their success.
But in our breakout session we brainstormed ways to reengineer our immigration system to better foster growth. We talked about moving away from country-based quotas to mimic countries with occupation based quotas, or even doing away with quotas altogether. We proposed economic asylum or entrepreneurial asylum, where prospective immigrants could argue that conditions in their native countries posed obstacles to their starting businesses, and America would welcome the opportunity to show that we could alleviate those obstacles. We discussed parcelling out quotas to each state or municipal region and letting them decide what kind of immigrants they wanted based on local needs, rather than a one-size fits all national system. We discussed ways to let immigrant startup founders into the country that recognized and dealt with the fact that most startups fail, and this isn't necessarily a problem with the startup model. Can you build a system that says "Ok, you want to start a business? Come here, give it a shot. If you fail, we won't deport you immediately, but we will put pressure on you to get back into being economically productive."? That's not an easy thing to engineer, especially because the looming underlying question is how do we handle providing the social safety net to an immigrant who we know for sure isn't yet economically contributing, and who may never economically contribute, to America?
And meanwhile in another breakout group people confronted the cultural problems, how to make Americans think of immigrants as contributors to American growth instead of as potential drains on our social services. How to address problems as simple as the audience member who spoke of mild harassment from immigrations officials who seemed hostile or skeptical about the reasons for her visit. They came to a number of conclusions, but most of them circled around the idea that continued advocacy is the only way to move the needle on this stuff. The more you talk about it, the more you make people think about the fact that America is being pressed by other countries with more competitive legislative regimes, the more it becomes part of peoples' awareness.
One of the panelists spoke about more global approaches to startup culture, too. He talked about his own experience running a startup whose founders had presences in Argentina, Columbia, and the United States, and how that both built on the patriotism of its founders in building local connections in all three countries, and helped establish the company as an international story for an international age of business, where computers connect everyone and the location of customers is often not the location of the business itself. Someone else followed this up by mentioning a program in Silicon Valley where governments like New Zealand, Canada, and others have created 'launch pads' to give businesses from those countries an office to work out of when they're trying to establish themselves in the US with Silicon Valley venture capital investors. It provides them a place with familiar cultural touchstones when they're out in unfamiliar territory, and again establishes a sort of linkage between the local and the international.
I tried to push this forward a little, with an Immodest Proposals-style leap into 'world government' and how this can have an impact on startup growth. It didn't really take off or go anywhere, unfortunately. I think there's a lot of good questions to be asked in this area. Companies that do business around the world may benefit from streamlined payment systems. In fact, when the panelists were discussing reasons why America is a good place to start a business, the fact that you don't need to design your payment system to accept each country's payment models as you might in Europe or Latin America was cited as an advantage. I am not a bitcoin user, but I find it or similar ideas interesting because I do think an international currency and internationalized payment mechanisms would go a long way to making it easier to establish new markets for your company. I know that Dreamwidth itself has struggled to find ways to accept international money for accounts- at some point the only way for a non-American to buy an account was to mail a check across the pond. This is just one example of a place where international leadership instead of just American leadership can improve the chance of startup success. We're going to see more movement in this direction in coming years on a lot of fronts, I predict, because economics will demand it.
And then Alexis Ohanian closed off the night with a great little minispeech about the power of startups to change the world. He mentioned Skype, founded in tiny little Estonia. On the day of its highest valuation, it was worth one tenth the GDP of the whole country. That is a tremendous force for good and change, and all it takes, he said, is creative and daring people and the right support systems for them to try new ideas.
The panel part of the discussion went really well, though because the panel was so good and had so much to say there was a bit less give and take than usual with the audience. I don't think anybody wanted to stop them from talking. I definitely felt more hesitation when it comes to asking questions at certain moments, though ultimately I felt like I was active in shaping parts of the conversation through some of my questions. Immodest Proposals is so different from any other kind of political panel discussion I've been to because it gives you that opportunity to be part of the conversation from wherever you sit, and I'm always trying to take advantage of that both for my own enjoyment and to model that kind of participation for other people. The more people we have active in the conversation, the better, I think. At the midway point, we broke up into smaller groups, each with one of the panelists, and had a really good conversation about solutions for making America a better environment for business innovation.
The conversation began with the panelists discussing what they thought America did have to offer to entrepreneurs that set it apart. Generally speaking, this amounted to easy access to venture capital, a large, active, and technologically engaged market, access to skilled and educated workers, economic freedom, and in an idea we kept coming back to all night even though it was ill-defined, a culture of entrepreneurship and risk-taking that made it more comfortable for people to take the leap. On the downside, we have an economic regulatory regime that is less aggressive in making company founders feel comfortable than other countries: Alexis discussed getting an offer from Singapore with incredibly generous subsidies to locate a Reddit office there, and others talked about programs in England, Chile, and a number of other countries to entice entrepreneurs. Meanwhile, if a foreigner wants to move to the US to start a business they face inordinate obstacles just from the immigration process, let alone regulatory hurdles, adjusting to a new legal system, and cultural challenges.
Historically the US has grown and prospered by integrating immigrants and their ideas, vigor, and desire for improvement into our culture and our economy. Someone in the audience was very careful to caution us against reading that narrative nostalgically as containing a golden age where immigrants were fairly treated and encouraged to participate in the economy, since that age never existed. I went so far as to wonder aloud whether it was in fact, in some degree, the pressure exerted on immigrants that encouraged their success.
But in our breakout session we brainstormed ways to reengineer our immigration system to better foster growth. We talked about moving away from country-based quotas to mimic countries with occupation based quotas, or even doing away with quotas altogether. We proposed economic asylum or entrepreneurial asylum, where prospective immigrants could argue that conditions in their native countries posed obstacles to their starting businesses, and America would welcome the opportunity to show that we could alleviate those obstacles. We discussed parcelling out quotas to each state or municipal region and letting them decide what kind of immigrants they wanted based on local needs, rather than a one-size fits all national system. We discussed ways to let immigrant startup founders into the country that recognized and dealt with the fact that most startups fail, and this isn't necessarily a problem with the startup model. Can you build a system that says "Ok, you want to start a business? Come here, give it a shot. If you fail, we won't deport you immediately, but we will put pressure on you to get back into being economically productive."? That's not an easy thing to engineer, especially because the looming underlying question is how do we handle providing the social safety net to an immigrant who we know for sure isn't yet economically contributing, and who may never economically contribute, to America?
And meanwhile in another breakout group people confronted the cultural problems, how to make Americans think of immigrants as contributors to American growth instead of as potential drains on our social services. How to address problems as simple as the audience member who spoke of mild harassment from immigrations officials who seemed hostile or skeptical about the reasons for her visit. They came to a number of conclusions, but most of them circled around the idea that continued advocacy is the only way to move the needle on this stuff. The more you talk about it, the more you make people think about the fact that America is being pressed by other countries with more competitive legislative regimes, the more it becomes part of peoples' awareness.
One of the panelists spoke about more global approaches to startup culture, too. He talked about his own experience running a startup whose founders had presences in Argentina, Columbia, and the United States, and how that both built on the patriotism of its founders in building local connections in all three countries, and helped establish the company as an international story for an international age of business, where computers connect everyone and the location of customers is often not the location of the business itself. Someone else followed this up by mentioning a program in Silicon Valley where governments like New Zealand, Canada, and others have created 'launch pads' to give businesses from those countries an office to work out of when they're trying to establish themselves in the US with Silicon Valley venture capital investors. It provides them a place with familiar cultural touchstones when they're out in unfamiliar territory, and again establishes a sort of linkage between the local and the international.
I tried to push this forward a little, with an Immodest Proposals-style leap into 'world government' and how this can have an impact on startup growth. It didn't really take off or go anywhere, unfortunately. I think there's a lot of good questions to be asked in this area. Companies that do business around the world may benefit from streamlined payment systems. In fact, when the panelists were discussing reasons why America is a good place to start a business, the fact that you don't need to design your payment system to accept each country's payment models as you might in Europe or Latin America was cited as an advantage. I am not a bitcoin user, but I find it or similar ideas interesting because I do think an international currency and internationalized payment mechanisms would go a long way to making it easier to establish new markets for your company. I know that Dreamwidth itself has struggled to find ways to accept international money for accounts- at some point the only way for a non-American to buy an account was to mail a check across the pond. This is just one example of a place where international leadership instead of just American leadership can improve the chance of startup success. We're going to see more movement in this direction in coming years on a lot of fronts, I predict, because economics will demand it.
And then Alexis Ohanian closed off the night with a great little minispeech about the power of startups to change the world. He mentioned Skype, founded in tiny little Estonia. On the day of its highest valuation, it was worth one tenth the GDP of the whole country. That is a tremendous force for good and change, and all it takes, he said, is creative and daring people and the right support systems for them to try new ideas.