Praise for my edupreneurship

From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon’s first Director of Personalization:

Frank, I just spent about an hour surfing around your website with a bit of amazement. I run a little company . . . We are a team of folks who worked together at Amazon.com developing that company’s personalization and recommendations team and systems. We spent about 1.5 years thinking about what we wanted to build next. We thought a lot about online education tools. We thought a lot about classified ads and job networks. We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems . . . . I guess I’m mostly just fascinated that we’ve been working a very similar vein to the one you describe, without having a solid name for it (we call it “the age of the amateur” or “networks of shared experiences” instead of CLLCS [i.e., customized lifelong learning and career services], but believe me, we are talking about the same patterns and markets, if not in exactly the same way). Thanks for sharing what you have — it’s fascinating stuff.

From a 2004 email sent to me by an analyst at top venture capital firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson:

Hi Frank, Thanks for your time today. If you would like to provide us with further information about your [business] plan, we would be happy to review it in more detail.

From a 1998 email sent to me by the then Manager of the Learning Science and Technology Group at Microsoft Research:

Frank, you are a good man. Have you thought about joining this team? Your only alternative, of course, is venture capital. But their usual models require getting rid of the “originator” within the first eighteen months.

Note

The below write-up is more facts-and-skeletal-logic than write-up. But it is available now, free of charge (i.e., I heeded the old adage: fast, cheap, good — pick any two).

Re: Americans’ desire today for political revolution

From a February 11, 2016 article on TheAtlantic.com:

If there’s one thing that fires up Bernie Sanders supporters . . . it’s his call for a “political revolution.”

Re: said Populist revolt (part 1 of 2)

From 2007 book The Populist Vision, published by Oxford University Press:

[T]he Populist revolt reflected a conflict over divergent paths of modern capitalist development. . . . By the 1880s, two firmly entrenched parties dominated the political scene. At the national level, Democrats and Republicans held much in common as they shared a conservatism that was acceptable to the financial and corporate establishment. . . . Progressive Era legislation in the first years of the new [i.e., 20th] century expanded the role of government in American life and laid the foundations of modern political development. Populism provided an impetus for this modernizing process, with many of their demands co-opted and refashioned by progressive Democrats and Republicans.

Re: Bernie Sanders’ savvy about Nordic capitalism

The main practitioners of Nordic capitalism are Sweden, Denmark and Finland.

From a February 10, 2016 article on Qz.com:

Bernie Sanders has also pointed to Sweden as an example of progress (and [to] . . . Denmark), as well as a model for the kind of society he’d like the US to become: A nation with . . . free markets restrained by government oversight and labor markets softened by a strong social safety net.

Re: Nordic capitalism

Is M-M-MUCH better for most workers, families and investors than US/UK-style financial capitalism.

From the cover of 2013 book What Went Wrong?: How the 1% Hijacked the American Middle Class . . . and What Other Countries Got Right:

Growth in Total Employee Compensation Since 1985 Denmark: 220% US: 0.47%

From a Summer 2013 article in The Journal of Economic Perspectives titled “Income Inequality, Equality of Opportunity, and Intergenerational Mobility”:

From a February 25, 2013 article on SeekingAlpha.com (my emphases):

Region | Stock Index | 1993–2012 USA | S&P 500 | 227.3% UK | FTSE | 107.2% Europe | MSCI | 162.3% Sweden | OMX | 515% Denmark | OMX | 563.5% Finland | OMX | 599.8% (Data source: Bloomberg Professional)

From the February 2, 2013 article in The Economist titled “The Nordic countries: The next supermodel”:

Smallish countries are often in the vanguard when it comes to reforming government. In the 1980s Britain was out in the lead, thanks to Thatcherism and privatisation. Tiny Singapore has long been a role model for many reformers. Now the Nordic countries are likely to assume a similar role. . . . The proof is there. You can inject market mechanisms into the welfare state to sharpen its performance. You can put entitlement programmes on sound foundations to avoid beggaring future generations. But you need to be willing to root out corruption and vested interests. And you must be ready to abandon tired orthodoxies of the left and right and forage for good ideas across the political spectrum. The world will be studying the Nordic model for years to come.

From a March 2008 article in Foreign Affairs magazine:

The World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index ranks Denmark third . . . Wages in Denmark are about 70 percent above the OECD average.

From 2010 book The Flat World and Education: How America’s Commitment to Equity Will Determine Our Future, by Stanford professor Linda-Darling Hammond:

Finland’s economy was transformed from a rustic agrarian society as late as the 1950s . . . to a knowledge-based economy ranked the most competitive in the world by the World Economic Forum in 4 out of 5 years from 2001 to 2005. Its recovery from a major banking crisis and near economic collapse in the early 1990s was accomplished by the emergence of new knowledge-based industries supported by a very high level of human capital . . .

FUN possibility

As president, Bernie Sanders routinely vetoes legislation that doesn’t include funding for a next-gen Populist revolt that seeks to establish a U.S. variant of Nordic capitalism.

Indicated by the success of the original Populist revolt

Much/most of the early funding for the next-gen revolt should be invested in U.S. startups that provide online markets for customized education (CE) and/or provide complements of these markets (e.g., CE).

Summary of my proof of the above claim (details follow)

Nordic capitalism features/enables a lot of CE consumption.

The U.S. variant of Nordic capitalism can be expected to feature/enable a lot of CE consumption.

A key to maximizing the quality of CE is facilitating the creation of a lot of information that doesn’t exist today.

I’ve open-sourced most of my planned tactics for facilitating this creation.

These tactics are part of my current business plan for establishing the most popular online market for CE.

The tactics center on launching and popularizing a next-gen variant of LinkedIn (hereafter Adver-ties) that will feature:

a particular type of online market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs)

a particular type of virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)

I’ve open-sourced my design of Adver-ties.

Forerunners of Adver-ties and forerunners of an online market for CE were KEY enablers of the success of the original Populist revolt.

Re: said forerunners

From The Populist Vision:

“The Farmers’ Alliance [was] the largest and most important constituency of what would become the Populist coalition [of the 1890s]. . . . From its earliest stirring [in the 1870s], the Farmers’ Alliance defined itself as an educational movement. . . . The farmers needed to organize for self-education to better engage the complex problems of modern society . . . To get people reading and thinking required what [Alliance president Macune] described as a modern educational machine. The engine driving this machine was the reform press. . . . By the late 1880s, the Alliance had grown to an intellectual enterprise that stretched across much of rural America . . . [The Alliance] built lecture circuits across thirty states, and a network of approximately one thousand weekly newspapers.” “The Farmers’ Alliance . . . realized that without the political levers of control, even the best-laid business plans would come to naught. . . . Convictions about . . . political action flowed directly from business strategies. . . . Most of the Populist ‘revolt’ took place not in the streets but in lodge meetings and convention halls, where participants pored over problems of commerce and government and adopted resolutions for the creation or expansion of state and federal agencies, institutes, commissions, departments and bureaus.” “A Texas experiment provided the most widely imitated prototype . . . The Texas Farmers’ Alliance Exchange . . . would offer Texas cotton growers all the advantages of a centralized and regulated market, with a rational structure and direct access to credit and to the commercial centers . . . From Georgia to California the Farmers’ Alliance set up state exchanges.”

Re: Adver-ties (part 1 of 2)

From the July 31, 2015 article in The New York Times titled “Finding a Career Track in LinkedIn Profiles”:

[M]uch of what we need to know about the changing labor market is crowd sourced in real time. And many of those digital breadcrumbs end up in LinkedIn profiles.

From a 2004 email sent to me by Amazon’s first Director of Personalization:

We thought a lot about reputation systems. We thought a bit about personalized advertising systems. We thought a lot about blogging and social networking systems . . .

Re: Nordic capitalism features/enables a lot of CE consumption

From a March 2008 article in Foreign Affairs magazine:

What makes [Denmark’s variant of] the flexicurity model [i.e., of Nordic capitalism] both attractive to workers and dynamic for society are . . . a set of labor-market programs that spend an astonishing 4.5 percent of Danish GDP on initiatives such as transitional unemployment assistance, wage subsidies, and highly customized retraining. . . . Denmark today has the world’s highest percentage of workers, 47 percent, in some form of continuing education.

From 2012 book Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland:

Personalized learning and differentiation became basic principles in organizing schooling for students across society.

From The Flat World and Education:

Finland has been the poster child for school improvement since it rapidly climbed to the top of the international rankings. . . . Over 50% of the adult Finnish population participates in adult-education programs.

Re: the U.S. variant of Nordic capitalism can be expected to feature/ enable a lot of CE consumption

From an October 29, 2013 article in The New York Times:

To be accredited, universities have had to base curriculums on credit hours and years of study. The seat-time system — one based on the hours spent in the classroom — is further reinforced by Title IV student aid: to receive need-based Pell grants or federal loans, students have had to carry a certain load of credits each semester. . . . In March of this year, the Department of Education invited colleges to submit programs for consideration under Title IV aid that do not rely on seat time. In response, public, private and for-profit institutions alike have rushed out programs that are changing the college degree in fundamental ways; they are based not on time in a course but on tangible evidence of learning, a concept known as competency-based education. . . . Frederick M. Hurst, who directs Northern Arizona University’s new Personalized Learning Program, says that competency transcripts do a better job of communicating a graduate’s value to employers.

From an April 15, 2015 article on InsideHigherEd.com:

The U.S. Department of Education has granted federal aid eligibility to two new academic programs that do not rely on the credit hour — a form of competency-based education called direct assessment. So far six institutions have earned approval from the department and regional accreditors for direct-assessment programs.

From an October 26, 2015 article on InsideHigherEd.com:

In just two years, we have gone from a handful of CBE [i.e., competency-based education] programs and almost none offering direct assessment — the unwieldy name for CBE programs not tied to the credit hour — to more than 600 institutions working on such offerings.

Re: online markets for CE

From 2008 book Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns:

Students need customized pathways and paces to learn. . . . The second [phase of the disruption of standardized education] will be the emergence of a user network, whose analogues in other industries would be eBay . . .

Disrupting Class was co-authored by Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, originator of the canonical models of disruptive innovation.

From 2015 book The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere:

“I asked Michael [Staton, a partner in a venture capital firm that focuses on education and technology] to introduce me to some of the startups that he found most exciting . . . [Clayton] Christensen was cited ad nauseum by everyone we met.” “The University of Everywhere will solve the basic problem that has bedeviled universities since they were first invented over a millennium ago: how to provide a personalized, individual education to large numbers of people at a reasonable price.”

Re: a key to maximizing the quality of CE is facilitating the creation of information that doesn’t exist today

From an October 15, 2015 fact sheet published by the U.S. Department of Education:

For students seeking access to these new models of education, there are two key barriers: financial aid and information about quality that can help students make a confident choice about where to go.

From 2009 paper “The Data Challenge: Bumps on the Road to Customization, ” by the Director of Harvard’s Center for Education Policy Research:

The challenges involved in bringing the current extremely inadequate levels of data management up to levels that could support decentralization and choice based on individual needs are substantial.

From a July 2015 interview of Michael Horn, co-author of Disrupting Class:

[W]e’re really in the early beginnings of the dramatic revolution that we’ve seen in a lot of other technology sectors where really smart recommendation engines come in and assist the student in picking and choosing their unique path. . . . In order to really go towards adaptive learning, you need huge numbers of students on your platform . . . We need platforms that can collect the data we need and can make better use of data so that we can figure out different ways to serve different learners.

From 2013 paper “Technology and the Labor Market: What We Know and How We Can Know More, ” co-authored by two Cornell labor economists:

How can we learn more about the way that technology is transforming the labor market? There are many answers to this question, but here’s a very important one: through better data. Many of the ways in which technology affects workers, jobs, and the labor market are inferred rather than measured. Firms, of course, have a pretty good idea of what their own workers are doing. Community colleges have a pretty good idea of what they are training workers to do. Workers typically know their own skills well. But putting it all together — even from the point of view of a sophisticated economic analyst trying to make sense of the labor market — is an exercise frustrated by the incompleteness of current data. Much of what each party knows is not reflected in any data set, and the information that is recorded is hard to put together across different data sources. . . . We need a way to pry open the black box of production. What is it that workers do at work? What do workers contribute to the production of goods and services? How do workers make these contributions? We need to be able to answer these basic questions through the direct measurement of economic data. Currently, representative statistics only have a small window on what workers do and how much they earn doing it and cannot reliably be linked to what firms produced. We only have a periodic small glimpse into that world, and it is incomplete. . . . Will a robot take your job? With better data, we could fill in the blanks in this answer: Well, the economy destroyed X million jobs over the last three years, and Y percent of those jobs were characterized by routine tasks. The economy created Z million jobs over the same time period, and W percent of those jobs were characterized by tasks which require creativity and judgment. There were Q million “stable jobs” — jobs which last a reasonably long time with steady earnings — in the economy over the last five years. Of those Q million, R percent of the stable jobs that were destroyed this year were characterized by routine tasks. Today we have crude measures of skills: median wage in an occupation and average years of schooling are two commonly used measures to define an occupation’s skill level. But if we knew the actual tasks a worker performs, then we could have a much more precise measure of the skill level of the job and of the worker. Today we know stock measures: Relative to 1980, low-and high-skill occupations are more prevalent than middle-skill occupations. We know a series of snapshots, but we don’t know the underlying dynamics. We can calculate net flows, but not detailed gross flows by occupation, skill, or tasks. Better data could tell us more about skills than occupation and wages. Better data could let us link workers and firms to see how tasks result in output. Better data could let us measure dynamics — the rate at which middle-skill jobs are being destroyed, the types of low-skill jobs that are being created, and more.

Re: Adver-ties and/or competing variants will facilitate the creation of a lot of the information needed to maximize the quality of CE

See pages 58–62 of the PDF linked to at the bottom of the web page at PostRomCom.com (Page 58 links to a second PDF with m-m-many more details).

An excerpt from said pages:

[The] 1.0 market can be thought of as a next-gen variant of LinkedIn. This LinkedIn variant will feature:

a particular type of online market for the advertisement spaces on solo-blogger blogs (e.g., portfolio blogs)

a particular type of virtual currency (cash transactions will be supported also)

Prices in this virtual currency will contain only truthful peer ratings of work samples. Ratings of this kind are a top predictor of work performance, according to a much-cited meta-analysis of 85 years of personnel-selection research (3155 citations as of August 12, 2015). So prices in said virtual currency will be ideal for ranking people within individual job/skill categories. These rankings will make it much easier for people who best complement each other to identify one another. The site will be named Adver-ties.

Precedents for Adver-ties:

Google’s PageRank search algorithm (first use of hyperlinks to inform search results)

Peer assessments associated with popular MOOCs

PageRank 1.0 was based on insights from social network analysis that were decades old when PageRank was conceived.

Number of search engines launched before Google: 20.

From 2013 paper “Tuned Models of Peer Assessment in MOOCs” , co-authored by several employees of MOOC startup Coursera:

Peer assessment — which has been historically used for logistical, pedagogical, metacognitive, and affective benefits . . . — offers a promising solution that can scale the grading of complex assignments in courses with tens or even hundreds of thousands of students.

IMPORTANT: Bloggers will be able to parlay a high and/or fast-rising ad rate in virtual currency into cash via sales of (other) ad spaces and subscriptions.

From a February 2, 2015 article on GigaOm.com:

Ben Thompson launched his site, Stratechery, in April of last year as a fairly unknown blogger — certainly not a household name, even in tech circles — with a tiered “freemium” subscription plan that was based primarily on long, analytical blog posts and a daily newsletter with similar content. Within about six months, he had over a thousand subscribers paying him $100 a year for access to his newsletter (the shorter daily posts on the website are free). That meant an annual revenue run-rate of about $100,000 — enough to make it a living, along with some speaking and consulting . . . Thompson says that he just passed the 2,000-subscriber mark, which means he now has a revenue run-rate of about $200,000 a year (the “churn” rate, or the rate at which subscribers drop off, is less than 10 percent he said). And this proves a niche model that serves a specific interest group will work, Thompson argues — as well or better than a model that relies on mass advertising revenue. . . . [Andrew] Sullivan’s own success helps prove this case as well: in just a year, the Daily Dish blogger managed to convince more than 30,000 subscribers to contribute money, and by last year was pulling in close to $1 million in revenue solely from subscriptions. That may look sad compared to the revenues of a site like BuzzFeed or Vox, but it’s an amazing success for a small blog.

Re: open-sourcing the design of Adver-ties

The above excerpt re: Adver-ties appears in the first “startup comedy,” my serial novel that:

showcases my current business plan for Adver-ties, etc.

is optimized to go viral, and to turn readers into equity-crowdfunders (i.e., part-owners) of my planned startup

Bonus motivation for Bernie Sanders and his supporters to act on the above information re: Adver-ties and CE

African Americans may decide the 2016 Democratic candidate for president.

Soon African Americans will start amassing competency-based education credentials via building a case for reparations.

During this building, African Americans will:

consume and supply A LOT of CE

make abundant use of (a variant of) Adver-ties

CE entrepreneurs will be VERY smart about managing the safety/security risks associated with facilitating said building (e.g., the risks to African Americans).

— Re: African Americans may decide the Democratic candidate —

From a February 17, 2016 article on TheGuardian.com:

Democratic hopefuls are crisscrossing the country . . . in a race to court black voters who may play a decisive role in the increasingly competitive battle for the party’s nomination.

From a February 22, 2016 article on Fortune.com:

[B]lacks make up approximately 20% to 25% of the overall Democratic primary electorate. And in states with large black populations — like Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — black voters can easily comprise upwards of 40% to 50% of the Democratic electorate.

— Re: African Americans will build a case for reparations soon —

From a February 13, 2016 article on HuffingtonPost.com:

From the June 2014 cover story of The Atlantic titled “The Case for Reparations”:

The movement coalesced in 1987 under an umbrella organization called the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA). The NAACP endorsed reparations in 1993. . . . For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.” A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions.

The author of the cover story is Ta-Nehisi Coates, recipient of the 2015 National Book Award for Nonfiction.

— Re: African Americans will consume/supply CE, use (a variant of) Adver-ties —

From the chapter in 1995 book The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word that Moved America titled “Bearing ‘The Gospel of Freedom’: The Mass Meeting”:

[T]he mass meetings held throughout the South . . . provided a continuous social commentary on fast-breaking events, a forum for information and tactical planning, a school for correction and instruction in nonviolence . . .

— Re: CE entrepreneurs will be VERY smart about managing said safety/security risks —

I plan to manage these (and related) risks in part by creating lucrative opportunities for members of law enforcement, intelligence agencies or the military who want to moonlight and/or transition to the private sector.

To make some of said opportunities obscenely lucrative, I plan to part with much/most of my ownership stake in my company.

Importantly, said parting won’t demotivate me. Details:

From a September 6, 2011 article in The New York Times:

Ms. Daily searched a Web-based registry for other children fathered by the same [sperm] donor and helped to create an online group to track them. Over the years, she watched the number of children in her son’s group grow. And grow. Today there are 150 children, all conceived with sperm from one donor, in this group of half siblings, and more are on the way. . . . As more women choose to have babies on their own, and the number of children born through artificial insemination increases, outsize groups of donor siblings are starting to appear. While Ms. Daily’s group is among the largest, many others comprising 50 or more half siblings are cropping up on Web sites and in chat groups, where sperm donors are tagged with unique identifying numbers.

From an August 5, 2010 article on the website of Discover magazine:

1 in 200 men direct descendants of Genghis Khan In 2003 a groundbreaking historical genetics paper reported results which indicated that a substantial proportion of men in the world are direct line descendants of Genghis Khan. By direct line, I mean that they carry Y chromosomes which seem to have come down from an individual who lived approximately 1,000 years ago. As Y chromosomes are only passed from father to son, that would mean that the Y is a record of one’s patrilineage. Genghis Khan died ~750 years ago, so assuming 25 years per generation, you get about 30 men between the present and that period. In more quantitative terms, ~10% of the men who reside within the borders of the Mongol Empire as it was at the death of Genghis Khan may carry his Y chromosome, and so ~0.5% of men in the world, about 16 million individuals alive today, do so.

From 2004 book Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World:

Genghis Khan’s empire connected and amalgamated the many civilizations around him into a new world order. . . . As he smashed the feudal system of aristocratic privilege and birth, he built a new and unique system based on individual merit, loyalty, and achievement. He took the disjointed and languorous trading towns along the Silk Route and organized them into history’s largest free-trade zone. He lowered taxes for everyone, and abolished them altogether for doctors, teachers, priests, and educational institutions. . . . The only permanent structures Genghis Khan erected were bridges. Although he spurned the building of castles, forts, cities, or walls, as he moved across the landscape, he probably built more bridges than any ruler in history. . . . The Mongols deliberately opened the world to a new commerce not only in goods, but also in ideas and knowledge.

#comedygoldmine

Fun fact: The recent discovery of ovarian stem cells makes it at least somewhat likely that soon female edupreneurs will be able to supply as many eggs as buyers want.

Addenda

— Title of my novel —

— Re: the premise of PRC —

Winner-take-all markets are proliferating via infotech (i.e., technological change is often “superstar-biased”).

Winning 101: Be in the “flow” state of mind as much as possible.

Flow via collaboration often sparks romantic attraction (so Adver-ties will give rise to m-m-many flowmances).

Flowmance 101: Being polyamorous is often a key to maximizing one’s gains from collaborations.

For verification of these claims, see PRC’s prologue and first chapter.

— Precedent for startup comedy —

Gimlet Media has raised equity crowdfunding twice (i.e., two rounds of funding).

Most/all of this funding has come from the audience of the Gimlet podcast titled Startup.

Startup is hosted by a co-founder of Gimlet.

The podcast centers on business activities at Gimlet.

— Re: the making of PRC —

I have what some neuroscientists call comedy-writer brain (i.e., my neuroanatomy enables non-conscious processes of my brain to reliably identify associations that are comparatively remote). My entrepreneurial insights are products of my longtime effort to maximize the likability of my comic persona. Since 2006 my primary focus has been learning how to run marketing and site-user showcasing as a profit center. More precisely, how to manage an analytics-savvy variant of Alloy Entertainment, a book packager and television-programming producer that was acquired for $100M in 2012. In 2011 I became aware that the U.S. Congress was working to legalize equity crowdfunding.

Thoughts? Questions? Bug reports?

Bug fixes? :-)

My Twitter: @PostRomCom