I am super excited to be backing our daughter Katie’s film project on Kickstarter. She is making a horror movie about what it’s like to be a teenager. Which sounds about right. Joking aside, here’s the premise:At sixteen, Amelia is almost free of the torment of her cutthroat New York City private high school. To her little group of friends, she’s the perfect student, bound for a prestigious Ivy League college, but beneath the surface things are bubbling over. Since her mother’s death, Amelia’...

I am super excited that Kickstarter is no longer an INC but rather now a PBC, a Public Benefit Corporation. This means the company has changed its Delaware charter to include its mission of supporting creators as pari passu with creating value for shareholders. I would encourage you all to read the new Kickstarter charter which lays out that mission and also this piece in the New York Times. Benefit Corporations are a topic I care a great deal about and if you have been a long time reader of ...

I am still working on my third post about employment. As part of that I have been reading up on the rise of inequality in the US and its effects on society. In that process I came across this interesting chart from a Morgan Stanley research report: It shows that rising income inequality has been highly correlated with increased political polarization since the mid 1970s (found via Business Insider). Then just a few minutes ago I saw in my Tumblr dashboard that Robert Reich is making a documen...

Yesterday, the New York Times announced its long awaited pay fence. Today, we announced our investment in Kickstarter. These two represent different models for sustaining efforts that are socially important but are having their previous financial models disrupted by the Internet: journalism in the case of the NY Times and creative projects on Kickstarter. While I am a fan of what the NY Times stands for and would like to see quality journalism exist going forward, I am not convinced that the ...