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NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Resolved: I'm Going to Do More by Doing Less

Instead of those typical New Year's stretch goals, for me the plan is to be more strategic with my time, attention and commitments. 

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

I wanted to get an early start on the utterly futile attempt I make annually to memorialize a few of my efforts to make my life a little better, so that I can eventually check back to see how I did. Hope that doesn't sound too selfish, self-centered, or, heaven forbid, "privileged" but, as Michael Jackson once said (when it was still in fashion to listen to him), it all starts with the Man in the Mirror.  For me, it's much more about the man sitting in front of the screens, slammed daily by spam, hype and hatred of all sizes and shapes, who's hoping to learn something, do something, and share the lessons as well.

Millions of words of wishful thinking will be spewed by blowhard, do-nothing politicians as we roll into the holiday season, so instead of piously pontificating I thought I'd just focus on sharing some narrow objectives and a few of my goals for the coming year. Talk is cheap, and you can't talk yourself out of problems that you behave yourself into, but identifying and acknowledging the issues is the first step in trying to improve upon them. And then, it's on each of us. As Walt Disney once said: The way to get started is to quit talking and start doing.

My personal resolutions are far more specific and pedestrian than Michael's great and timeless lyrics, but I imagine - especially if you're as surrounded and swamped by the "fruits" of technology as so many of us are - that you'll recognize and appreciate how some of my concerns and intentions may relate to your own lives as well. These are challenging times for all of us - young and old - who are starting a new business or running one that's been around for ages. Now is the best possible time to try to take a beat, catch your breath, and figure out how to move forward in a smart, effective fashion while avoiding the unbelievably powerful gravitational pull and the seductive power of the "always connected, always on" mobile devices that now dominate our waking hours.

There are plenty of more qualified and capable people who are actually working on making the world a better place and I've previously written about a bunch of them.  Flowers for Dreams,  Packed with Purpose, and Sweet Beginnings are a few relatively recent examples to recognize and reward this month. Others, like ReThink, are helping to save our kids from their worst selves, and the scourge of social media, in important ways. Getting helpful tools for our kids is critical, but - by and large - if you want out of the maelstrom, you're going to have to help yourself.

Here are five areas of action and improvement that I'm planning to address over the next year. Wish me luck.

1.  I'm not going to try to fill up my day.

Being the busiest body on the block no longer makes sense to me. Maybe that's a younger person's game or maybe being a non-stop, workaholic was never a smart bet. I've learned that it's not a race or a contest. It's about making time and space to reasonably address and deal with the matters that are important, valuable, and which are likely to make a difference in my life and the lives of those that I care for and care about. I'm over the idea that "too much is not enough." Enough of the right stuff is more than enough.

2. I'm going to look for opportunities to contribute, but only in certain cases.

There's so much to do and to get done out there that the opportunities for involvement and participation are unlimited. Getting sucked into doing useful and feel-good work (door knocking, food distribution, condo and school boards, envelope stuffing, fundraising) is valuable, but maybe not the highest and best use of your particular talents. Volunteering is a salve, but not necessarily an intelligent or ultimately satisfying solution. You won't end up doing it for long because, from a personal perspective, it's a waste of your time and energies. Find something that's challenging and important and that lets you demonstrate your abilities and make real contributions.

3. I'm going to filter my media inbox and follow a few regular writers.

This is advice that I covered in detail a few months ago.  The flood of information is overwhelming and largely unstoppable, but, with some effort, the bulk of the worst junk (and even some of the material worth reading if only you had the time) is avoidable. The trick is three little words. First, focus. Figure out what information is important for you to stay on top of on a regular basis. Then, filter. Determine a few key sources of accurate, objective, and current data on your topics of interest. Finally, flow. Set aside an uninterrupted, quiet period of time each day or week to carefully read or listen to the material. Slowly but consistently wean yourself from all other garbage. It won't be easy;  these platforms and channels are masters at mayhem, manipulation, and making money from selling your attention and messing with your head. 

4.  I'm never going to accept or normalize the craziness surrounding us.

Throwing out the trash and shutting the spigot of spam, slime, and sleaze that the social media platforms have become isn't the same as turning a blind eye and trying to simply ignore the crimes and lies of Trump and his cronies. Nor is it an attempt to dismiss or excuse the hypocritical MAGAs in Congress and the constantly hysterical press that will spend the next two years wasting our time and patience on stupid spectacles, fake investigations, and other showboating BS. These MAGA people are intent on destroying our democracy and the fact that they have been led largely by an incompetent clown is no excuse to permit them to continue to dictate the country's critical conversations and direction. Whatever your business may be, it's everyone's job to stand up and speak out about what's right for our own sake and especially for the future we have promised our children.

 5. I'm going to reconnect with old friends whose views I trust and value.

Finally, in a post-Trump world where trust is as scarce and precious a commodity as time, I'm going to invest some of mine in renewed connection with old friends, partners, and mentors both (a) before it's too late and (b) because I hope that it's a realistic source of reassurance that some people can always be relied upon and that the most important things like care, concern, and connection are still valued by some in our crazed and chaotic world. Social media is toxic and painful in many ways, but the most perilous may be that it deludes us into believing that there is substance and real attachment in the plastic conversations and trivial back-and-forth that make up the bulk of what passes for communication on these sterile digital deserts.

Social media is as much about serious and sustained connection as the Olive Garden is about Italian cuisine.

AGELESS INNOVATORS VIDEO

 

 

David Broza at Flashpoint Media Arts Academy

 

Herschel Walker Is an American Tragedy

 

Walker stands up at podiums, and I feel shame and sorrow and resentment. He is incoherent, bumbling, oily. He smiles with a swagger that does nothing to disguise his total ignorance of how blatantly he is being taken advantage of by a party that has never intended to serve people who look like him. 

From where I sit, the election looks like a kind of grotesque minstrelsy. The Republican Party is saying that it wants power more than decency. It’s saying that race is a joke. We must all take note—it is willing to destroy a man to advance its cause. The party thinks he won’t break. And if he does, well, he wasn’t really one of them, anyway, was he? 

Herschel Walker Is an American Tragedy 

Black bodies, white agendas 

By Caroline Randall Williams 

 

Megan Varner / Getty 

DECEMBER 6, 2022, 12:32 PM ET 

 

Commodity. Chattel. Contraband. Capital. What is a Black body in the South? What is a Black southern man, carted out to work a white-owned field? 

It’s impossible today to talk about Black men and white agendas without talking about Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate for Senate in the runoff election in Georgia. But in order to talk about Walker, I’ve got to start in what may be his actual state of residence, Texas. 

Jemele Hill: Herschel Walker’s candidacy is just insulting 

I watched the film version of Friday Night Lights almost obsessively during my senior year of high school. My father had just died. He was a diplomat, a businessman, and the general counsel of the U.S. Army, and he loved conservative optics and southern spaces and all manner of iconic Americana, for good or ill. So the movie connected me to him, or something—offered me catharsis, or something. The movie immersed me in all of the hard, strange things about the South, the questions about achievement and race and class and excellence and objectification, and what it can mean to lose or win or talk to God about any of it. 

But there was one scene I hated to watch. 

Coach Gaines is getting ready for the start of the season, and attending a booster-club dinner with a table of wealthy white donors who presumably love God and football and Texas and not a whole lot else. It’s a subtle scene, the dinner party spliced with distracting clips of the players at a raucous high-school party. A woman talks almost salaciously about the physicality of the young men she saw on the field during practice: “What I saw was speed out there, but where’s the beef, Coach? I saw me some small boys.” The master’s wife, perusing the auction block. Then a cut to more beer guzzling, more Run-D.M.C., more teenage hijinks. And then it’s back to the elegant, sinister dining room. 

Quietly, the woman worried about how small the players are this year offers Gaines some advice. “You know what you should do?” she says. “You should play Boobie Miles [on] defense. Work him both ways.” 

Coach doesn’t quite see it that way—you don’t risk your prize thoroughbred on a recreational outing. “Well, see, the problem with that is,” he replies, “I don’t want to get him hurt. We need him to score touchdowns.” 

The woman doesn’t miss a beat. And her reply is seared forever on my brain. “Bullshit. That big nigger ain’t gonna break. You wanna beat Midland Lee, you play him middle linebacker.” 

That big nigger ain’t gonna break. Every time I watch one of these smug, jowly, dangerous Republicans sitting next to Herschel Walker, wheeling him out for their own designs, I see that dinner-table conversation in the background of my mind. Walker is a big, ball-carrying Black man, and these Republicans do not have an ounce of care for him. They are using him to advance their own Constitution-compromising agenda, the way conservative white people in this country have always used Black bodies when given half a chance. 

Walker stands up at podiums, and I feel shame and sorrow and resentment. He is incoherent, bumbling, oily. He smiles with a swagger that does nothing to disguise his total ignorance of how blatantly he is being taken advantage of by a party that has never intended to serve people who look like him. 

Walker’s candidacy is a fundamental assault by the Republican Party on the dignity of Black Americans. How dare they so cynically use this buffoon as a shield for their obvious failings to meet the needs and expectations of Black voters? They hold him up and say, “See, our voters don’t mind his race. We’re not a racist party. We have Black people on our side too.” Parading Walker at rallies like some kind of blue-ribbon livestock does not mean you have Black people on your side. What it means is that you are promoting a charlatan—a man morally and intellectually bereft enough, blithely egomaniacal enough, to sing and dance on the world stage against his own best interest. Is he in on the joke? Does he know they picked him to save money on boot black and burnt cork, this man who made his name by bringing the master glory on the master’s field, who got comfortable eating from the master’s table? 

For the record, Coach Gaines did play Boobie Miles, and Boobie Miles suffered a career-ending injury. And the team carried on. They left him and his broken Black body behind. His dreams, nothing to them. His legacy, utterly compromised. 

Devin Gordon: America ruined college football. Now college football is ruining America. 

Whether Walker wins or loses, whatever was good or valuable or worthy about his prior professional legacy has been utterly compromised. His many trophies are now and forever eclipsed by the humiliating spectacle of his political foray. He is ruined, and the party that propped him up does not care. 

From where I sit, the election looks like a kind of grotesque minstrelsy. The Republican Party is saying that it wants power more than decency. It’s saying that race is a joke. We must all take note—it is willing to destroy a man to advance its cause. The party thinks he won’t break. And if he does, well, he wasn’t really one of them, anyway, was he? 

I grew up in Tennessee and still live here. Although it has become obscure, in the South, if you listen closely in the right (wrong) crowd, you will still hear the term ofe thrown around to describe a Black person. Not o-a-f. Ofe, spelled o-f-e. Obsolete Farm Equipment. 

I’ll ask again: What does it mean to be a Black man in the South, working a white-owned field? 

I don’t particularly care that Herschel Walker doesn’t seem to know he’s being used. I care that America let it get this far, that this country has been wildly careless with Black bodies, Black stories, Black truths. I care that I’m watching the news every day with the foot of bigotry on my back and the noose of regression tightening around my throat. 

Whoever wins today, Walker’s candidacy is an American tragedy. 

Caroline Randall Williams is a poet, the television host of Discovery Plus’s Hungry for Answers, and a writer in residence at Vanderbilt University. 

 

Once Vices, Now Habits

We have come to the end of the 2022 midterms with a final contest in Georgia. By the time you read this, we will likely know whether Herschel Walker will become a United States senator. (I suspect he will not, but terrible things that seem improbable can still happen.) Yards of columns have been written about Walker’s palpable, cinder-block denseness; yesterday, he seemed confused about whether he was running for the House or the Senate. And, as my friend Jill Lawrence pointed out today, supporting an allegedly abusive rake like Walker makes a mockery of Republicans who once extolled virtue and character as the most important qualities in a public servant.

The larger problem, however, is that Walker’s candidacy is a reminder of just how much we’ve acclimated ourselves to the presence of awful people in our public life. Although we can be heartened by the defeat of Christian nationalists and election deniers and other assorted weirdos, we should remember how, in a better time in our politics, these candidates would not have survived even a moment of public scrutiny or weathered their first scandal or stumble.

And yet, here we are: An entire political party shrugs off revelations that a man running on an anti-abortion platform may have paid for an abortion (possibly two), has unacknowledged children, and may also be a violent creep. Not long ago, Walker would have been washed out of political contention as a matter of first principles.

Think of how much our civic health has declined in general. Only 35 years ago, during the long-ago Camelot of the late 1980s, Gary Hart had to pull out of the Democratic primaries for getting caught with a pretty lady on a boat named “Monkey Business,” and the televangelist Jimmy Swaggart stood with tears streaming down his face because he’d been caught with a prostitute in a Louisiana motel. In 1995, Senator Bob Packwood (again, more tears) resigned in the aftermath of revelations of sexual misconduct just before being expelled from the Senate.

The Republicans were once an uptight and censorious party—something I rather liked about them, to be honest—and they are now a party where literally nothing is a disqualification for office. There is only one cardinal rule: Do not lose. The will to power, the urge to defeat the enemy, the insistence that the libs must be owned—this resentment and spite fuels everything. And worst of all, we’ve gotten used to it. I’m not sure who said it first, but the Doobie Brothers said it again in the title of their 1974 album: What Were Once Vices Are Now Habits.

There’s a lot of blame to go around, but no one did more to pioneer the politics of disgust than Donald Trump, who took the outrageous moments of his two presidential campaigns and turned them into virtues. Trump ran, and still runs, as something of a dare, a challenge to see if we’re just a bunch of delicate scolds who get the vapors over things like veterans or foreign influence or nepotism. Are you really going to let the commies and immigrants from the “shithole countries” take over? he seems to ask at every turn, just because of little nothing-burgers like whether I’m keeping highly classified documents in the magazine rack next to my gold toilet?

As usual, however, the real problem lies with the voters. The Republicans are getting the candidates they want. This is not about partisanship—it’s about an unhinged faux-egalitarianism that demands that candidates for office be no better than the rest of us, and perhaps even demonstrably worse. How dare anyone run on virtue or character; who do they think they are?

This is a tragedy of insecurity, because what it really means is that GOP voters don’t think very much of themselves. At some point, some of them may realize what they have done, but by then it’s too late. The only thing worse than making a mistake is admitting it was a mistake, and facing the humiliation of being a sucker.

Other voters can help raise the bar by inflicting serial defeats on such candidates in the general elections and giving oxygen to arguments on the right that it’s time to stop nominating—in the words of New Hampshire’s Republican governor, Chris Sununu—“crazy, unelectable candidates.” Perhaps from there, the GOP can start fusing electability back to character, but that process will take a while. In the meantime, we should all refuse to normalize terrible and often scummy candidates. If Walker is elected, it will be a tragic day in the history of the Senate. But the fact that he ran at all—and garnered millions of votes from perfectly normal American citizens—is the larger tragedy, and the damage will last a lot longer than Walker’s bizarre political career.

NEW INC. MAGAZINE COLUMN FROM HOWARD TULLMAN

 

Elon Musk Promotes Power Sharing for Everyone but Elon Musk

The boss of Tesla, SpaceX, and Twitter is now playing a game of three-dimensional management chess with Apple, Google, automakers, governments, and whoever else displeases him. Even for someone like Musk, the distractions can be harmful for business.

BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS@TULLMAN

In his latest pronouncement, Twitter owner Elon Musk offhandedly observed that, if the Twitter app is removed and barred by Apple and Google from their app stores, he'd simply make his own smartphone and compete with both of them.

As if. Has he totally forgotten that Microsoft, Nokia, and Facebook, among others, all failed to successfully produce and market their own phones? But Musk, who also runs SpaceX and Tesla in his spare time, seems to believe, in this case, that if a thing has enough style and buzz, the substance and even the underlying tech -- at least initially -- doesn't really matter that much. He's dead wrong. Ideas and talk are cheap. Execution and substance are everything.

This "I can do anything" approach is not uncommon among the sharpest entrepreneurs out there, some of whom come, over time, to believe that their skills are readily and easily transferable. And some, such as Richard Branson, have a pretty good track record. The difference is that Branson is great at branding. Building actual technology, as Musk discovered, is much more difficult.

For instance, one of Tesla's earliest design failures was the poor location of key components and other assembly and access choices, which made repairing and servicing the cars much more costly and difficult. Apparently, Elon thought the vehicles would never need maintenance or other adjustments. Had he consulted anyone in Detroit with actual auto expertise, these issues might have been avoided. 

There's an important lesson for startups here:  you have to design and build your entire strategy into your product from Day One. Quality assurance and support choices in a service business happen before production, not after.

But, in fairness, Musk is certainly one of the prime examples of someone who has demonstrated range across businesses. Still, anyone who thought of himself as a mere mortal, rather than a deity, might also think twice about taking on another overwhelming challenge in light of what's presently on his plate. My guess is that Elon's fantasy phone - if it ever comes to be - will text and tweet but only make one-minute calls because he hates to waste time in conversations and thinks the rest of the world does too.

One of the risks of being a one-man show who prides himself on micromanaging everything and who believes that he's always the smartest guy in any room is that there's still no substitute for being present and for paying attention. As the entire world sees, there's more than plenty on his plate, new players and models are entering the auto market (half of the 30 EVs available now in the United States weren't on the market a year ago), and even Elon can't be in three places at one time. I suspect that Tesla will suffer the most as a result from his neglect and lack of focused attention.

Putting aside the traumas of the Twitter debacle, Tesla itself is under some substantial competitive pressure apart from Elon's own antics, which are damaging all his brands. As the glitter and glow of Tesla's last decade starts to fade, its future is unclear at best. Tesla's domestic market share continues to drop every quarter. Part of that is to be expected, as more consumers get more and more choices in EVs from other makers. So, it's entirely likely that, within the next three to five years, Tesla could be an also-ran, outcompeted by other EV manufacturers, as Elon takes his eyes off the ball and the competition continues to heat up. The tortoises have dropped it into gear.

As I wrote in 2020, Tesla's lead in driving experience data accumulation will be almost impossible for other players to overcome for at least the next decade. But anyone who knows the science also knows that we're not going to see completely autonomous consumer vehicles before 2030 at best. We may see truck lanes established on the major interstates filled with automated convoys of semis, but the programming challenges of day-to-day urban driving remain enormous. Tesla may be the "smartest" manufacturer from a data standpoint, but the data edge isn't going to be enough to make a difference yet. Having the best answers to the wrong questions isn't much of an advantage.

Similarly, there are huge issues around both ends of the battery enhancement battle --the onboard battery and the charging unit. The Chinese in particular are definitely accelerating their push to have bigger capacity and quicker-charging batteries while also addressing the heat issues that seem to continue to spontaneously combust a few Teslas every month. Tesla's hard at work at scaling its newest 4680 battery and also continues to work on plans to build its own lithium mine, but I'm betting that just about all the battery players will advance the capacity and speed issues at about the same rate, or ultimately license the tech from the few winners. As a result, neither of these concerns will likely be a differentiating factor in selecting any of the high-end EVs available in the U.S.

Interestingly enough, even though all technologies eventually become commoditized, and data is the oil of the digital age, the biggest risk to Tesla isn't what you'd expect. Once you zero out price and performance (all the high-end models will eventually be comparably priced with Tesla ending up at the lower end) and assuming that somehow the "safety" concerns are finessed, all you have left to compete on is your brand, certain qualitative attributes, and the reputation of your after-sale service. Elon's own Twitter tweets and actions are already seriously tarnishing the Tesla badge. That means for all intents and purposes, that Tesla's got to sell "style" and in truth it's sorely lacking in that department.

As the technology evens out, softer elements will prevail with consumers, such as the craft of a vehicle's interior appointments, handling, road noise and even the infotainment systems. Even the most eager Tesla advocate will admit that its insides look and feel cheap and have always seemed to have been afterthoughts.

Another note for startups making hard goods. Early bad quality choices and cheap initial solutions get baked in. They stick around like cigarette smoke. Waiting too long to upgrade your finishes and other tactile attributes is a bad bet. The Detroit and European big guys may have started out slow, but they're already blowing Tesla away in terms of style and especially high-touch feel. This is something they learned to do well long ago; car quality is something that has to be planned, designed, and caused, not controlled after the fact.

Sitting in a Porsche or a Benz EV is something you quickly savor - sitting in a Tesla is something they ask you to settle for. There may be tons of Teslas on the road today, but not for much longer. Scale without substance means squat.

PRESIDENT CLINTON

 

REPUBLICAN HYPOCRITES