There isn't too much to say about this unique sculpture sitting out here in South Korea. Other than the human jaws, I guess.
JAWS – Coming to a Theater Near You! Photo taken from 시사주간.
One plastic surgery clinic in Gangnam, in order to demonstrate its extensive patient list, received more than its share of marketing publicity after commissioning this scupture made from human jaws. Gangnam is a popular area for plastic surgery, and advertisements are nearly overwhelming when walking through its busy streets. Clinics are always looking to get one jawbone, er, leg up on the competition.
Police here in Seoul are investingating the clinic to determine if the clinic failed to properly dispose of any of the remains, a violation of the medical health laws.
Ironically, the fact that they have removed so many jaws doesn't really demonstrate their capability of building beautiful faces. After all, the fact that vampires drink blood doesn't make you an expert serologist, nor does getting a Communications degree from Stanford mean you can give post-game football interviews in any sort of fluent way.
In a famous routine from 1972, comedian George Carlin presented the "seven words" you can't say on television (ironically, you also can't say them on this blog!). Carlin was lambasting the FCC's censorship regime, which at the time felt more reminiscient of the 1950s than the far more permissive culture of the 1960s.
Here in Seoul, such controversies are fairly frequent given the tighter sexual mores on the public airwaves. Still, a controversy this week over the movie poster for Pompeii has had many here questioning where censorship builds a safer public discourse, and where it flagrantly denigrates the fundamental right to freedom of speech.
In Korea, all movies are expected to go to the Korea Media Rating Board, which determines the ratings for domestic and foreign films and posters, as well as other types of media. Unlike in the United States, where film ratings are handled by the Motion Picture Asssociation of America (which is privately owned by the six major motion picture studios), Korea's rating board is publicly owned and operated by the national government.
So, what do the film judges have to object to? Take a look at the poster for Pompeii that was originally submitted in Korea:
The originally submitted poster for Pompeii
You might be wondering, what exactly is the problem with the poster? According to the translator of the film, the issue is that the couple is too intimate in the picture, foreshadowing that most horrible of actions, S - E - X (got to watch those censors!). Here is the new poster, which presumably I will start to see in subway stations all over Seoul:
The modified poster for Pompeii
I am almost certain my high school prom allowed a shorter distance between opposite genders than what is depicted in here
Oh no, the barbarians are entering the sacred domain! The Securities and Exchange Commission has truly opened the floodgates with the repeal of the prohibition on general solicitation, so I expect to be completely destroyed in T-Minus 60 days. I guess I am supposed to feel some sort of fear from startup crowdfunding platforms, considering their ultimate goal is to disrupt venture capital, and by extension, me.
And yet, I have no fear.
I do not doubt that crowdfunding investment platforms will have an impact on venture capital. I strongly support allowing anyone to invest in a broad range of private securities. Democratizing finance means making finance open to more investors, even those who are supposedly less sophisticated because they don't already have money (the definition of an accredited investor). Start-ups will ultimately be the beneficiaries here by allowing non-traditional investors into their rounds who might offer special skills, networks, or ideas to propel a fledgling company forward.
But the "secret" to this industry is that it is fundamentally a hits business.
This is very different from investments like equities, where returns on index funds are often quite compelling. Sure, one can dump all of their money into Facebook, or Amazon and reap a great reward. Yet, it is just as easily to lose massively with such a strategy, which is why research continually shows that most people are better off picking a stable index fund to hold over the long-term.
Venture capital investing is the complete antithesis of this approach. Returns in venture are marked by a power law, in which one or two investments out of 30 will often carry an entire fund. Placing your capital in fewer, but higher quality companies can actually create significant increases in returns. This is the reason why funds that
One of the most rewarding, yet peculiar, learnings about working as an investor in venture capital is that you constantly see clusters of start-ups spring up around the same problem. Indeed, one of my proofs that Silicon Valley is an efficient market is that these problems are seemingly identified by everyone at the same time, and so the difficulty in investing is simply choosing the best of the breed and moving on.
In the past year, I have seen clusters form around loyalty cards in local businesses, analytics APIs for mobile, and new designs for resumes, just to name a few that come to mind. None of the founders I have met in these clusters are “me-too” – they seem to have legitimately all come to the same problem from personal experience or through asking the right questions to a target customer. That’s innovation working correctly.
The peculiar part of this observation is how many obvious problems don't seem to get a cluster of start-ups at all. Sometimes these problems, some examples of which I’ll discuss shortly, are not small at all. In fact, I would go so far as to say that these blind spots in the market are where all the future value will be made in innovation. Many of the category-defining companies of the past few decades were all built around problems most people didn’t even know they had.
Why do some problems get a bevy of start-ups, and others seem to languish untouched? I think there are several key reasons, including that some problems are actually quite difficult, and founders lack specific experience in that area.
The one that bothers me most though is blindness. There are problems that have been here for years, that lack high quality solutions, and that have huge markets.
What do we do when there is no path to building a career?
It wasn't so long ago that job training was a core component of almost any career path. When factories hired new grads, there was an expectation that the staff would train the new worker to use the machine tools, to properly evaluate the tolerances of finished goods, and to understand the overall process of how the factory operated. Indeed, unions often put heavy priority on training in their collective bargaining agreements.
The same pattern could be seen before in law, medicine, and other professions, where new graduates were often given years to build their skills and reputations under supervision in apprenticeship-like positions. Corporations built management training programs to ensure that in 10-20 years, they had talent coming up through the ranks that was prepared to handle the complexities of their businesses.
All of that is changing, and it doesn't bode well for younger workers just entering the workforce. In law, upwards of a quarter of graduates from the top 25 schools are underemployed. That is a staggering waste of talent. The same is true in financial services – Goldman Sachs permanently canceled its entry analyst program just a few years ago, and now only hires among its intern population. Factories are also refusing to train new workers, expecting them to have already received job training at specialized and expensive technical schools.
This is the problem I am calling the "disappearing ladder." The gateways to many careers have now largely disappeared for younger workers, and it isn't clear to me that any new system has replaced it. These ladders are disappearing across all industries, in both "middle class" and "upper class" professions.
The underlying causes of this labor shift are numerous and complex.
One of the most common questions I get as a VC from seed-stage company founders is "Should I take money from institutional VCs in a seed round?" That's a difficult question, and every start-up is going to have their own approach in answering it. I'll try to work through what to think about in this post.
Any time a company raises a venture round, investors are curious to know whether the current investors in the company are also participating. The reason is simple: the investors who probably know the company best are the ones already on the cap table. They get the investment updates from the CEO, and should be intimately familiar with the business and its future prospects. Thus, their further investment in the company sends a strong signal of how current investors see the business performing. If they are attempting to increase their ownership, it indicates they are bullish on the company. If they are trying to avoid putting more capital into the company, that is probably a sign that the company is no longer a good investment.
This is one of the most visible signals for a company raising capital. Its importance should not be understated.
When it comes time to raise a seed round, many company CEOs try to game this signal by placing only angels and micro-VCs in the syndicate – essentially, any investor that doesn't have the capital base to offer more money in a future round (or so little that it isn't material). In other words, they prevent their company from sending a negative signal, since none of their investors could participate in a future round even if they wanted to.
The downside to this approach should be obvious though – while you limit your downside, you also eliminate your upside. Angels are
Rumors continue to swirl that Facebook is currently negotiating a buyout of Waze, the popular social mapping app. The app was founded by three co-founders, Uri Levine, Ehud Shabtai, and Amir Shinar, and is based in Israel with an office in Palo Alto. As part of a potential Facebook acqusition, the Palo Alto team would be merged into FB's Menlo Park office, while the Israel team would be used as a launching point to launch Facebook's engineering efforts in that country.
Because, he says, although the Waze R&D center could be a beach-head for a full-blown Facebook R&D shop, and thus good for Facebook, “it could have catastrophic effects upon local early stage startups’ ability to compete on salaries and benefits.”
His argument is that if a big company like Facebook stays away, then the Israeli tech ecosystem is more likely to be able to “push more innovation” towards Silicon Valley, which would be in the “best interest of both the local startup industry and Facebook.”
Certainly, such a large acquisition inside such a relatively small country could well change the successful dynamics of the Israeli eco-system. If it became a mere engineering centre for Facebook, Apple and Google, the implication is that we might not see quite the same levels of startup activity as we’ve seen emerge in the past from Israel.
That is almost certainly overstating the ‘problem’. It’s more likely that the experience of being inside these big tech companies in Israel is more likely to create a virtuous circle of new entrepreneurs, spin-outs and new projects. Plus, more eyes and
Data is becoming the central force for change in society. As we increase the sophistication of our analytical tools, there is more and more pressure on decision makers – whether in companies or in government – to utilize data and "insights" in their deliberations. Unfortunately, this opens up many of these decisions to a dangerous hack: controlling access to data can easily determine the outcome of major decisions. Just take a look at some of the recent stories where manipulating data access was key to a decision:
Several states have or are considering passing laws that restrict the ability to film slaughterhouses. Perpetrators would be subject to punishment that could include being placed on a terrorist list. Video tapes of slaughterhouses are one of the key pieces of evidence for animal rights groups to push policies that encourage humane treatment of animals. By banning videotaping, these legislatures are trying to control the debate on animal rights by limiting the evidence that can be introduced.
For years, the National Rifle Association has used its lobbying powers to prevent the collection of gun data by the government. Furthermore, the Centers for Disease Control have been banned by law from considering any research into firearm violence and its effect on human health. Again, access to data becomes key to a major policy issue, in this case gun violence. Without gun data, policymakers are forced to choose actions based solely on argumentation and rhetoric, without the deep scientific research that would lead to the best outcomes.
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Head of Editorial at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
