Sam Birmingham
I am a young Australian who is passionate about entrepreneurship. This is where I share my inspirations and experiences on all things startup, tech and entrepreneurial.
I am a Corporate Strategist for iiNet, I founded the Perth chapter of The Hive and I curate the We Money newsletters, helping young Australians understand the world of money.
I keep a public diary, Lives Of Our Days, where I share stories, pictures and songs daily, to record my thirty-first year on this glorious planet.
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@sambirmingham
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Don’t worry, everything is going to be amazing!
Rosenthaler Platz, Mitte, Berlin
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“… and all of these big ad executives were talking about how there’s a shortage of digital talent out there. There are fewer people than ever...
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Earlier this week, the good people at iiNet published a blog that I co-authored on SOPA, PIPA and what the online piracy debate means for internet users around the world, with a particular focus on the implications for Australians.
The published version can be found here.
My original edit was apparently somewhat more *ummmm* political, with a working title of The Internet 1 - Corporate Lobbyists 0.
Here is my proposed conclusion, which is representative of my own opinion (and my own opinion alone) on this important topic:
Do you want to know why the battle is a long way from being won…?
First, look at the full names of these bills – the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect IP Act – and the way they seek to frame the debate in such a narrow, proscriptive manner; “Me: Joe. You: Jane. Copyright: Good. Piracy: Bad.”
Second, consider the way that Big Media is trying to raise the cost of copyright policing and putting that burden on third parties, rather than the copyright owners bearing the burden of protecting their own financial interests.
Third, think about the implications for free speech and how easily the complaint process could be abused, with a “shoot first, ask questions later” mentality winding back the centuries-old legal principle of innocence until proven guilty.
Fourthly, and perhaps most important of all, consider how the proposed laws would work in an online environment where we now freely share our opinions, links and photos– the only way that websites which enable user-generated content (ie. most of them!) could monitor potential copyright infringement is by keeping us under digital surveillance, 24/7!
Not for a minute am I endorsing piracy – I have great respect for anyone who creates something and seeks to preserve the value of their creation through the enforcement of intellectual property rights.
But I also have great respect for movements like Creative Commons, which are reinventing IP for a digital economy that wasn’t contemplated when intellectual property rights were first established.
And, above all else, I have great respect for the infrastructure of the internet – if you ask me, it is the greatest invention since sliced bread! What I love about the internet is that it gives us all a chance to create and share, to innovate, to start new businesses and disrupt the status quo. It gives us a chance to connect and communicate with millions of like-minded people all around the world. And this week those people have been heard.
Protecting intellectual property and encouraging digital distribution don’t have to be mutually exclusive. The sooner Big Media realises this, the better – both for consumers and the producers of information.
If you want to learn more about a topic that is near and dear to my digital heart, check out Harvard Business Review’s piece on The Real SOPA Battle: Innovators vs Goliath and watch this awesome TED talk by my favourite digital media commentator, Clay Shirky, explaining why SOPA is a bad idea (embedded above).
Now, let me leave you with some more choice insights on online piracy and the digital uprising that took place in recent weeks…
From Clay Shirky:
“The risk now is not that SOPA will pass. The risk is that we’ll think we’ve won. We haven’t; they’ll be back. Get ready to have this fight again.”
Fred Wilson’s brilliant Post-PIPA Post:
First, the Internet community’s opposition to these two bills was never coordinated by a central organization… We found each other over the Internet, coordinated efforts (or not) over the Internet, and used the Internet to protect the Internet. The opposition was chaotic, distributed, diverse, uncoordinated and extremely effective in the end. Just like the Internet.
And:
We need a new framework that is based on a shared set of goals and objectives. The tech industry will benefit if the content industry makes more money online. And though they seem not to believe it, the content industry can make a lot more money online. So we should be able to get alignment around that issue. We can help each other. The tech industry has already helped the content industy many many times. On that topic, I love this Nat Torkington rant:
All I can think is: we gave you the Internet. We gave you the Web. We gave you MP3 and MP4. We gave you e-commerce, micropayments, PayPal, Netflix, iTunes, Amazon, the iPad, the iPhone, the laptop, 3G, wifi—hell, you can even get online while you’re on an AIRPLANE.
Perspectives on SOPA, Internet Regulation & The Economics Of Piracy
:
Since the core function of copyright is to incentivize the production of creative works, it’s also worth looking for signs of declining output associated with filesharing. Empirically, it’s surprisingly hard to find an effect. Rather, a recent survey study by Felix Oberholzer-Gee of the Harvard Business School concluded that “data on the supply of new works are consistent with the argument that file sharing did not discourage authors and publishers” from producing more works, at least in the US market.
And last but not least, a little quote that I picked up from an article in the AFR:
“Copyright does not exist to prop up businesses with outdated business models”
“SOPA and PIPA are not dead: they are waiting in the shadows. What’s happened in the last 24 hours, though, is extraordinary. The Internet has enabled creativity, knowledge, and innovation to shine, and as Wikipedia went dark, you’ve directed your energy to protecting it.”
Many of you have asked, so here’s what’s going on with me.
WHAT HAPPENED BEFORE
- 8/1979: Born. Grew up in CT, built a killer eraser collection, fell in love with computers.
- Left college to start a company. Fell hard. Fled to India for 3 months.
- Started 2nd company. Learned to be an adult. Fell in love with NYC.
- Moved to SF, discovered burritos & some of my fave people on Earth.
- 9/2011: Got diagnosed with Leukemia!
- Cried. Went through 3 cycles of chemo. Hurt. Thought hard about what I want out of life. Grew up a second time.
TODAY
… After over 100 drives organized by friends, family, and strangers, celebrity call-outs, a bazillion reblogs (7000+!), tweets, and Facebook posts, press, fundraising and international drives organized by tireless friends, and a couple painful false starts, I’ve got a 10/10 matched donor!
You all literally helped save my life. (And the lives of many others.)
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT
Tomorrow, I’ll be admitted to Dana Farber in Boston for 4-5 weeks.
First I’ll get a second Hickman line to allow direct access to my heart (for meds and for nutrients if I’m not able to eat). Over the next week, the docs blast my body with a stiff chemo cocktail to try and eradicate all traces of cancer cells. In the process, the immune system I was born with, and my body’s ability to make blood, are destroyed.
Next Friday, I get my donor’s stem cells by IV. I start on immunosuppressants to prevent my body from rejecting them (I’ll be on them for 12-18 months). For these weeks I’ve no immune system, so I’m severely vulnerable to viruses and bacteria. My hospital room and hallway become my world.
Meanwhile, the stem cells make their way to my bone marrow and, with some luck, start producing platelets, red blood cells, and white blood cells. At this point, my blood type changes to the blood type of my donor. And my blood will now have my donor’s DNA, not my own.
This is science fiction stuff. I can hardly believe it’s even possible, and there’s lots of chances for things to go wrong. It’s frightening.
AFTER THE TRANSPLANT
Recovery to a new state of “normal” takes about a year, but there’s a few storm clouds hovering:
- My immune system is new, like a baby’s. I’m prone to getting sick.
- Just as with any organ transplant, there’s a chance of rejection. Except in this case, it’s my blood that’s the foreign body, and it touches every organ. They call it graft-vs-host-disease and it can cause health issues and organ complications for the rest of my life.
- Successful transplant or not, Leukemia can relapse. Stubborn mofo.
Overall, 75% of AML transplant patients survive year one, 50% make it through year five. My odds are a little better since I’m young.
THE GREAT NEWS
I’ve got a long road ahead. But I’ve got a donor & amazing family & friends. A few months ago I didn’t have many options. Today I have a plan.
I am alive. I start tomorrow. Wish me luck!
Thank you.
I am sure there was a time when scarcity was a good business model for the film industry. And I am sure that many of the leaders of the film industry came of age during that time. I understand their muscle memory in terms of the scarcity business model. But restricting access to content is a bad business model in the age of a global network that costs practically nothing to distribute on.
I’ve argued this point many times with film executives. They insist that they need their windows. They argue they need to manage access to their films to extract every last dollar from the market. That just doesn’t make sense to me. If they went direct to their customers, offered their films at a reasonable price (say $5/view net to them), and if they made their films available day one everywhere in the world, I can’t see how they wouldn’t make more money.
I understand that many participants in the broader film ecosystem might do worse under this model. And I understand that moving to such a model will cause great disruption and pain to the broader film industry. But the studios themselves are likely to do better in a direct distribution model where they reach a broader market at lower effective prices to the end customer. This is what happens in digital distribution. Prices come down, markets expand, customers see lower prices and broader availability. Producers do better. Everyone else does worse.
But for some reason the fim industry doesn’t want to move to the new model. They want to stick with scarcity. So they lost a transaction last night. And they lose transactions every night, to piracy, to competing forms of entertainment, and possibly to apathy brought about by frustration. Such a shame.
Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas helps form an powerful set of hypotheses and when married with Customer Development it produces a useful scorecard called the Pivot. Customer Development forces you to get out of the building and discover and validate each one of the assumptions behind the…
Last month I was involved in a discussion about the prospect of establishing a startup incubator/accelerator in Perth… A lot of thought had gone into the structure; models applied successfully elsewhere in Australia and around the world had been borrowed from; and, most significant of all, everyone agreed that it was important to stimulate Perth’s entrepreneurial ecosystem.
To be honest, though, the response from the “big end” of town was pretty disappointing. Not because they couldn’t see the opportunity, but because they wanted someone else to do all the heavy lifting.
If only more of the people in that room were on the same wavelength as TechStars founder/CEO David Cohen and awesome innovator/VC Brad Feld.
A few choice excerpts from their interview:
@ 5:05 - Does this remind you of anywhere?
When I looked at Boulder as a community… it’s small enough that you can really understand what’s going on in the ecosystem but it’s big enough to be interesting and relevant.
@ 5:25 - Again, does this remind you of anywhere?
I have been here 11 years and I have seen a lot of entrepreneurs create businesses and I have seen lots of people have success and failure in those businesses, but there wasn’t really a cohesive centre to the entrepreneurial community. There wasn’t really a thing that all the experienced people and the first-time entrepreneurs or new entrepreneurs could rally around. There were lots of people doing stuff, but it was very diffuse.
@ 6:10 - Explaining the logic behind TechStars:
You were really describing this idea that was much more than just “hey let’s show up every now and then, and talk about doing something” or “let’s get together and host a party or an event”, you were really talking about “let’s go create a bunch of companies and let’s make sure we’re constantly getting new entrepreneurs into the mix, and I saw in that something that felt like it could really be the core in the centre. Not the thing that created all the entrepreneurial community, but something that really created some glue across that entrepreneurial ecosystem.”
@ 7:15 - This is the mindset that we need to see more of:
When you try to do something you should recognise “OK, what do I get out of this if it doesn’t work?” and I think our view when we first started talking about doing TechStars was “OK, it’s going to cost some money. We’re going to invest in these companies, let’s assume all of the companies are worthless. What do we get out of this?” I think we agreed that it would be fun, interesting and that we’d learn alot, but we also viewed it as a way to get 20 or 25 new entrepreneurs into Boulder and get them engaged with the people in and around the entrepreneurial community in Boulder. So we had a very clear sense as to what our downside case was, if things didn’t work out.”
@ 8:40 - An appreciation of this wouldn’t hurt either:
I have a very deeply held belief that the venture capitalist is actually not the generator of entrepreneurial activity - the entrepreneur is. I also believe that the venture capitalist is not the manager or the curator or that gatekeeper of the entrepreneurial community - the entrepreneurs have to do it. So I’m very attracted to entrepreneurs who want to drive that entrepreneurial community, where I can play a supporting role - which is what I think, fundamentally, the venture capitalist’s role is.
The entrepreneurial ecosystem doesn’t owe anyone anything; innovators don’t have a God-given right to find co-founders nor capital, and VCs don’t have a God-given right to “deal flow”.
If anything, I believe that we all owe something to the entrepreneurial ecosystem… We need to create some glue to bring it all together; we need to do more to connect the dots; we need to stop talking about doing stuff and actually do it.
According to Wikipedia, Boulder’s population is about 100,000. Perth is ten times larger and, as a result of the resources boom, significantly wealthier… If Boulder can build an inspiring entrepreneurial community then what are we waiting for?
Lots of pearls of wisdom in this piece by Clay Shirky on our changing media consumption habits, the challenges facing the media industry as a result, and why their responses thus far have missed the mark.
For some time now, newspaper people have been insisting, sometimes angrily, that we readers will soon have to pay for content (an assertion that had already appeared, in just that form, by 1996.) During that same period, freely available content grew ten-thousand-fold, while buyers didn’t. In fact, as Paul Graham has pointed out, “Consumers never really were paying for content, and publishers weren’t really selling it either…Almost every form of publishing has been organized as if the medium was what they were selling, and the content was irrelevant.”
And:
A printed paper was a bundle. A reader who wanted only sports and stock tables bought the same paper as a reader who wanted local and national politics, or recipes and horoscopes. Online, though, that bundle is torn apart, every day, by users who forward each other individual URLs, without regard to front pages or named sections or intended navigation. This unbundling leads to the odd math of web readership — if you rank readers by pages viewed in a month, the largest group by far, between a third and half of them, will visit only a single page. A smaller group will read two pages in a month, a still smaller group will read three, and so on, up to the most active reader, in a group by herself, who will read dozens of pages a day, hundreds in a month.
Paywalls were an attempt to preserve the old mass+mass model after a transition to digital distribution. With so few readers willing to pay, and therefore so few readers to advertise to, paywalls instead turned newspapers into a niche+niche business. What the article threshold creates is an odd hybrid — a mass market for advertising, but a niche market for users. As David Cohn has pointed out, this is the commercial equivalent of the National Public Radio model, where sponsors reach all listeners, but direct suport only comes from donors. (Lest NPR seem like small ball, it’s worth noting that theTimes ‘ has convinced something like one out of every hundred of its online readers to pay, while NPR affiliates’ success rate is something like one in twelve. Newspapers with thresholds now aspire to NPR’s persuasiveness.) Paywalls encourage a paper to focus on the value of their content. Thresholds encourage them to focus on the value of their users.
Threshold charges subject the logic of the print bundle — a bit of everything for everybody, slathered with ads — to two new questions: What do our most committed users want? And what will turn our most frequent readers into committed users? Here are some things that won’t: More ads. More gossip. More syndicated copy. This is new territory for mainstream papers, who have always had head count rather than engagement as their principal business metric.
“If you want to invest two years in something that will help you, you would do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA”
From the time I was very young goal setting has been a part of my life. Thinking about the future and planning is part of the culture here. Good planning is also in the DNA of successful companies big and small. So I am taking the next 5 days and clearing my head and my desk of work and work…
“A lot of us are too willing to accept roles as consumers in society. I understand the economic reasons for that, but I don’t think it leads to a fulfilling life or a sustainable community. The best way out of this is to deconstruct what you’re consuming, or better yet to become a creator yourself. I’m trying to help people see their own creativity.”
Douglas Roshkoff with one of RWW’s Top 10 quotes of 2011
