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As part of a new project which we will be launching at Anthemis I have been helping a groundbreaking startup called Eris which launches today.

Eris is a software suite including the world’s first application server based on the technology behind bitcoin – the blockchain. It is designed to enable any kind of transaction between parties by enabling trust in a neutral framework.

The importance of creating trust via neutrality is something Eris’ CEO Casey Kuhlman has specific experience of. As this piece in the New Yorker relates, as a U.S. Marine in Iraq he was the person that had the presence of mind to replace the US flag with an Iraqi one, when the famous statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down. After leaving the Marines Casey became a lawyer involved in human rights and worked in Somaliland to create a legal framework. This is the maverick background which lead to Eris industries, a story that sounds almost too far fetched to be true but creates the unusual context that is often the basis of the most innovative companies.

What does Eris consist of?

Eris is a full stack of software to enable you to build applications using blockchain technologies not just currency transactions ones but any kind of self-executing contract, financial or legal. These are known as Smart Contracts.

There are 4 components in the Eris stack: 1. the deCerver, the world’s first blockchain based application server that can use any chain design including 2. Eris’ custom, smart contract enabled (i.e. any transaction, not just money) blockchain design, Thelonius, that can be used to create chains for groups of people or corporations or specific applications, 3. a package manager to manage multiple contracts within a single application and 4. a contract markup language that can be used to bind real world legal contracts to smart contracts (which, as software scripts are necessarily logical and unambiguous unlike most real-world legal ones).

So what is it?

Its a fancy new type of database.
The blockchain is a fancy database, except that there is no need for a master and slave, just peers. Unlike the first generation of peer to peer systems 15 years ago which resulted in services such as Skype and Napster, blockchain based systems are truly decentralised (no master/slave at the database level) rather than merely being distributed. The Eris stack is a kind of ‘mesh’ database.

With an self-governing audit trail.
But this goes one step further than being a mesh, because the verification of each block means that a blockchain database maintains state and a transaction history. A normal database has a state in time and an ancillary log file, in a blockchain one, the data is within the log file itself and the log file is completely secure from tampering by achieving consensus via cryptographic means. It is a mesh database with a self-governing audit trail.

Capable of triggering scripts based upon rules between parties – contracts.
But it gets better. Just like databases can have triggers, pieces of code that can execute within the database, and just as an object-oriented program can instantiate code with data together, this is a blockchain where the blocks contain not just monetary transactions but any kind of transaction. This is achieved by allowing scripting in the blocks of the secure blockchain, in the manner that blockchain designs like Etherium allow.

What kinds of use cases could Eris applications serve?

In some ways the main focus of Eris is to create beautiful tools that enable developers to create applications for new and interesting use cases, however in developing the system, 3 stand out:

1. Fintech
2. Legal tech
3. Internet of Things

1. Financial contracts are about quantitative elements (money) and so lend themselves naturally to smart contracts which have to be unambiguous. The promise of the blockchain approach is to play a key part in the ongoing replacement of the processes and plumbing of the financial services industry with Internet based ones. This has far reaching consequences and is why fintech has become a very active sector recently (and the area I now devote all my time to).

2. Legal innovation based on Internet technology is not as advanced as financial services and the number of people who are both lawyers and coders is vanishingly small. But the opportunities are potentially just as exciting and the Eris team consists of some of the world’s leading experts in this area. A blockchain approach allows for consensus to be achieved without a leader or intermediary and for that consensus to be protected from hijack by parties interested in corrupting it. This allows for all sorts of things to work better from voting in an election to complex contractual relationships between multiple parties, such as on a construction project. Unlike financial contracts which are inevitably dependent on numbers,legal contracts consist largely of words, so their obligations often have some degree of ambiguity which makes them difficult to bake into an auto-executing smart contract script. Eris’ approach is particularly pragmatic here as it allows for a mix between smart contracts and real-world legal ones, without which there would be no opportunity to create useful applications.

3. Perhaps the most exciting opportunity for Eris is the least obvious. The next phase of the Internet, the Internet of Things will be where ordinary physical objects are connected to the Internet and often communicate with each other independently of humans (from components in a smart factory, to sensors in homes). The result of this will be a complex network of devices communicating with each other automatically, via software APIs and the role of smart contracts to mediate this communication could be pivotal.

The physical constraints on the design of civilizations and how this relates to the Fermi Paradox.

One of the features of any civilization is information transfer. In fact, this is the principal feature that can be abstracted to create a mathematical foundation for the basis of most of the activities we associate with civilization: groups of people communicating with each other; trading; accumulation of knowledge and the end results of these things, namely culture and technology.

How might the physical limits on the ability to transfer information, (speed of light and quantum effects) affect the maximum and minimum possible sizes for civilizations and therefore the search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence — SETI?

Current SETI is often based on two ideas:

1. that really advanced civilizations will grow bigger and capture larger and larger energy sources, from the home planet to the entire output of a star, via a Dyson sphere, say, to eventually colonize an entire galaxy. These are referred to as Kardashev Type I,II and III civilizations respectively. This idea implies we may be able to detect the big ones.

2. that the shift from a Type II to a Type III civilization can happen quite rapidly, because self replicating machines could spread though a galaxy. So if big ones are likely, there should be some, given the age of the universe and the fact the we are here.

Neither of these take into account the fact that individual members of civilizations need to be able to communicate with each other or they aren’t a single or evolving civilization, by definition.

Freeman Dyson has estimated it would take us 200 years to reach type I status at current growth levels, and with a modest growth rate of 1% per annum, Nikolai Kardashev estimated that it would take 3,200 years to reach a Type II status, and 5,800 years to reach Type III.

Given this growth rate and the following other parameters:

(a) the (in my opinion quite reasonable) belief that living things are a naturally occurring and inevitable form of low entropy order that efficiently channels the energy of an open system, towards waste, like the structure of eddies in turbulent flow.

(b) the estimated number of planets. Current estimates are around 100 Earth like planets alone, for every grain of sand on every beach and in every desert in the world.

(c) the age of the universe. 14 billion years.

…the original formation of the Fermi Paradox, ‘Where Are They?’, becomes ‘WTF are they?’.

Challenging the first assumption: that an advanced civilization will get bigger.

We are a long way off being a Kardachev Type I civilization in energy terms. We use around a millionth of the tiny proportion of the Sun’s energy that ends up on Earth, partly in the form of stored solar energy from fossil fuels. Yet we are already in danger of making our planet uninhabitable for us.

Our current issue is primarily CO2 emissions, but it could be that increased use of what are currently perceived to be sustainable energy sources turn out not to be, because we will have an ever increasing dominance on the rest of the living eco-system, if we continue to grow.

So what if we shrank, instead?

Our attempts to create a sustainable eco-system are largely based on efficiency and the logical extension of how to grow, say our population, with greater efficiency is for us to get smaller. If, at some point we replace ourselves with evolving, self-replicating machines, why not make them expand by making themselves smaller at each iteration, to colonize by contraction within the earth rather than expansion through the galaxy and through greater intelligence density rather than extent – more bits per atom.

Atoms are small, using the staple grain-of-sand measure, a single grain of sand contains more atoms than there are stars in ten million galaxies, so thinking machines could certainly get much smaller. But you need a lot of bits to store and process the information that we and our civilization requires, so going small may not be as good a solution as Kardashev style expansion is, long term, unless we can go a lot smaller than atoms.

As it happens, this potential growth via contraction to the smaller scale is gigantic, bits are theoretically limited to the planck scale and this is truly tiny. We sit almost exactly half way between the Planck scale and the size of the universe. There is theoretically as much room to colonize via contraction as there is via expansion.

But there is a limit to how viable a small machine could be in terms of physics. Even at the atomic level, quantum effects, and in particular, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principal, become significant. This says that you can’t know the position and momentum of something absolutely, because at the minimum you have to use light to measure it and at small scales, photons affect things as large as atoms. The Uncertainty Principal limits the scale at which effective measurement is possible and effective measurement is the key to information exchange, which at the beginning of this article, I suggested was the key abstraction for a mathematical analog of civilization. Civilization requires information exchange, and if you can’t exchange information reliably between one place and another, they cannot remain part of the same civilization.

The Uncertainty Principal creates an absolute Minimum Viable size for a civilization and it is larger than the atomic scale, i.e. ‘Reverse Karadashev’ expansion is limited to a size much, much bigger than the smallest things in the universe. It is analogous to Kardashev types not being possible beyond the size of the solar system.

Not many people would argue with this, that vastly smaller than sub-atomic machines are physically impossible, let alone sub-atomic civilizations. But nobody has challenged the physical constrains for the Maximum Viable Civilization and how that might affect both the number of potential civilizations and the ability to detect them — SETI.

The physical constraint at the large scale is also key to information exchange. At large scales, instead of message fidelity, the problem is speed of transfer. Information transfer is limited by the speed of light, and at the galactic scale it is incredibly slow. Our galaxy is an average sized one and it is 100,000 light years across. The average Kardashev type III civilization would take up to 200,000 years to get an answer to the question ‘are you there’ from one of its own members. Not knowing whether your other members exist or not, means that the speed of light suggests that a Kardashev type III civilization is impossible, on average, for members of a civilization who live for less than 200,000 years.

Several people have suggested that interstellar colonization would require ultra slow ‘metabolisms’ so that communication over large distances would appear realtime (remotely driving a rover on Mars is impossible in realtime, for humans) and organisms or any object which decays through use would be able to extend their lifetime. But this would mean that they would have to create ultra-stable artificial environments, where rivers didn’t change course or even meteorites strike to avoid having to react to things which changed much faster than their metabolism (or more accurately their brain cycle, or whatever) dictated. There is possibly a limit to this stability, and this implies a Minimum Metabolic Rate: MMR

Civilizations continue to build knowledge and culture over time, through the exchange of millions of bits of information, as humans do, every day. A Maximum Viable Size for a civilization may mean that a minimum number of bits of information exchange between members required to constitute a civilization which evolves as a whole is a relatively large number of messages, certainly much more than an endless series of pings of ‘Are you there? Yes. Oops, I’m dead.’ Call this the Minimum Messages per Lifetime: MML

Putting these parameters together (speed of light, age of the universe, MMR and MML) allows for a Drake-like equation where numbers can be plugged in to estimate the Maximum Viable size for a Civilization.

Say MML is 70,000 messages, this means that 70,000 messages would need to be sent back and forth (140,000 trips) across 100,000 light years for an average Kardashev Type III civilization to be possible. i.e. the lifespan of a single individual would have to be 14 billion years, which is larger than the age of the universe.

Given the age of the universe and the average size of a galaxy, for Kardashev Type III civilizations to be possible, MML must be less than 70,000.

For the messages to appear realtime, the rate of messages would need to be roughly correlated to the metabolic rate. Say the minimum MMR is one message per 714 years, this would mean that if MML was 70,000 the maximum sized civilization would be 100,000,000 light years across. i.e. a Kardashev III civilization would just be possible for the average galaxy, any faster then it wouldn’t.

Given the maximum value for MML, a Kardachev type III civilization is only possible if MMR is less than around 1 per 700 years.

If we start to estimate the viability of these parameters we can estimate the Maximum Viable size of a civilization and the possibility of Kardachev Type III civilizations.

Above is my talk at CERN for the 2013 Open days. It covers the cultural impact of the web.

Here’s a video version on the CERN site: Beyond WWW, the cultural impact of the Web – European Organization for Nuclear Research [CERN], Switzerland

In 1994 I started the first Internet company, Realtime Anywhere, in Shoreditch, what is now, 20 years later the center of London’s ‘Tech City’. What was London’s Internet center like then and how has it changed?

The reason I know Realtime Anywhere was the first is that there were almost no Internet companies in Britain and almost no technology businesses of any sort in Shoreditch, where all of the people involved in creative industries there knew each other. After the property crash of the 80s, when Interest rates hit 18%, light industrial units around Hoxton and Shoreditch, were often derelict, rents were cheap and the area boasted the largest proportion of artists of anywhere in Europe.

I was an architect at the time and several architect friends had moved there into quirky, unusual places. A friend, Dan Philips’ place was so big you could ride a bicycle in it and one local resident lived in a signal box on a disused railway line that you had to get to by ladder. I found an empty and very cheap, 3 storey warehouse in Cotton’s Gardens, near Hoxton Square for roughly the price of a parking space today (40,000 pounds) and changed the usage to live-work. This was a new planning option which had been brought in as services like desktop publishing had replaced the partially toxic light industries such as printing that circled London’s financial center. Redevelopment of Liverpool Street station had pushed the boundaries of city workers’ lunchtime excursions northwards, bringing a cluster of seedy strip clubs, or more accurately ‘strip pubs’, most of which have disappeared apart from the infamous Brown’s where bankers and East End gangster’s would mingle to gawk at lunchtime strippers who included the woman who ran it’s daughter.

There were no Shoreditch pubs or bars open at the weekend except the Bricklayer’s Arms on Charlotte St. and the ironically parochial Charlie Wright’s International Bar. Both were served by Lil, an orange-rinced barmaid from a Carry-On film. Despite the lack of fancy bars, shops or drinking club franchsies like Soho House, the atmosphere was surprisingly similar to today. Shoreditch still looks superficially grim and somewhat Dickensian despite the gentrification and it isn’t so much more colorful on deeper inspection, as creative professionals have displaced the more avant-garde who decamped to places like Berlin. The London Apprentice gay club was there in the 90s and the Blue Note was the first piece of nightlife to sit on Hoxton Square. In the mid 90s, just under the railway bridge over the Kingsland road, the first Vietnamese restaurant opened, now part of what could justifiably be called Vietnam-town.

Myself and Markham Darbyshire started Realtime Anywhere in 94 from my living room at 5 Cottons Gardens. His dad came to give us advice and when we said that we thought there was a business in creating websites for people it wasn’t obvious there was a market for that. We also thought domain names might actually have a value but we’d need money to host them (domains were free to register, but you had to have an IP address to host them and Demon Internet in Finchley were the first place in the UK that you could do this for reasonable cost). We registered anywhere.com as our domain and our company email address was anyone@anywhere.com.

We had dial up Internet and later ISDN. My friend Simon Perry started an Internet company, POW communications, down the street and he was the first to have a leased line with a then impressive 64kb connection. Simon kept an Internet diary at the time, noting down the first time he heard people mention the web in the Bricklayers’ (Bloody hell – can you imagine people are actually talking about the Internet in Shoreditch!), the first time he saw a URL on a billboard or read out on TV.

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We started working on more involved projects, a school friend Angus Bankes who had co-founded a healthcare technology company joined and we developed an Intranet connecting hospital staffing around the UK, a genealogy service for Scotland’s government records (with my father, who had even earlier Internet cred, having written possibly the first Internet book – The Electronic Mail handbook, in 1979) and some experiment projects such as a 3-d search engine. We then teamed up with Nick Denton, who now runs Gawker Media, and I later moved to San Francisco to create the first news aggregator, Moreover.

At the time, however, Shoreditch was considered a backwater, and when in 97 we were given the opportunity of an office in Soho, above Mr Bongo records in Poland Street, in exchange for doing their website, we jumped on the chance to move somewhere that would improve our credibility as a technology company.

I registered designskunkworks.com, thinking it would be a good name for an Internet product company, not realizing that Skunkworks was a real, trademarked facility run by Lockheed Martin or that you can now threaten to sue people just for registering a domain name.

Having long been a fan of David Thorne’s hilarious email exchanges on 27b/6 and wondered if the technique could be put to use in a real word scenario. Big companies don’t do surreal. So when I received the nasty letter below from Lockheed Martin’s lawyers, I sent them a picture of a kitten.

Below is the email exchange that ensued:

Dear *****,

I’m happy to transfer this domain, since for ethical reasons I do not wish to be associated with Lockheed Martin, the manufacturer of cluster bombs and weapons of mass destruction, or any of the people such as yourselves who represent them in such a harassing manner.

The domain was bought in good faith that it was not a trademark violation, since skunkworks is a commonly used term. I do not host this domain and any monies being made from it are by the domain registrar, whom you can contact separately. Since I have no idea how to assign a domain please send detailed instructions.

Here is a picture of an 8 week old kitten taken by Sasan Geranmehr to take your mind off things http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Persian_Cat_(kitten).jpg

Regards
David

__________________________________

Dear Mr. Galbraith:

Thank you for your cooperation. In order to transfer the domain name to Lockheed Martin, we will need you to do the following:

(1) Contact your registrar, Domain.com, and request that the domain name be unlocked;

(2) Also request that Domain.com provide you with an authorization code to transfer the domain name (this may not be available for 60 days following the registration of the domain name);

(3) Once you obtain the authorization code, please forward it to my e-mail address as well as to **************@******.com;

(4) As the administrative contact for the domain name, you will then receive an e-mail from Corporation Service Company (i.e., ****************@*******.com) asking that you approve the transfer of the domain name to Lockheed Martin Corporation. Please reply to that e-mail stating “I agree” to the domain name transfer.

We look forward to receiving the transfer authorization code.

Sincerely,

**********

__________________________________

Hi *****,

I was a bit disappointed that you didn’t thank me for the nice picture of the kitten I sent you.

I thought it was a kind gesture since, after having registered a domain that I quite reasonably believed was merely a concatenation of commonly used English words, I was wrongly, distressingly and somewhat unbelievably accused of attempting to harm the business and reputation of a colossal arms manufacturer. I was also incorrectly accused of attempting to make money from this, when simple due diligence would have shown this to be false.

I’m further distressed since having done a Google search for Lockheed Martin to see if you were in fact acting for them or this was just some kind of weird practical joke, there were some really gruesome images of people with no eyes and disfiguring wounds under the title ‘Lockheed Martin Cluster Bomb victim’. I need to see some pleasant and reassuring pictures of cute animals to remove these horrible images which have permeated my subconscious.

So here’s the deal. I’m out of pocket $9.99 for the domain you want me to give to you and doing this transfer to gift it to you is a considerable hassle vs letting the domain lapse, as is, without me ever using it (I have cancelled automatic annual renewals and will never host any website there), which I agree to do unconditionally. I also doubt I would win a fight against someone with nuclear weapons with my Swiss Army Knife.

If you send me a link to a picture of a really cute puppy, I’ll transfer the domain to you.

Best Regards

David

__________________________________

Dear Mr. Galbraith:

We appreciate your cooperation. Our client is willing to reimburse your costs for registration of the domain name if you can provide us with proof of same (e.g., receipt, invoice, etc.). We will also need you to complete the attached W9 form to process any reimbursement costs. Thank you.

Sincerely,

************

__________________________________

Hi *****,

Sorry for the delay, I was in London, which would have been nice had it not rained cats and dogs.

Speaking of which, since the costs of me providing you with what you need to process the $9.99 reimbursement you offer would exceed the amount offered, and since, without doubt, the costs for your client to process this would also exceed the amount. Further, since the costs for yourself to organize this reimbursement would also certainly exceed this, it would be both a waste of money for all parties concerned and merely a symbolic gesture.

I am sure we agree on not wasting money and I am happy that you are interested in a symbolic gesture. The picture of a puppy will be much cheaper and fill me with the joy that money simply cannot buy. It will more that recompense for the tedium of following the steps your client would like, beyond merely not doing anything with the domain DesignSkunkworks.com

I look forward to receiving a wonderful picture of a puppy (as long as it isn’t a Chihuahua, or any other dog that is smaller than a domestic cat when fully grown) after which I will gladly go through the detailed instructions your client would ideally like.

Best Regards

David

__________________________________

Hi *****,

I didn’t receive a response from my last email of July 24th, with the
suggestion of a settlement using puppy pictures rather than cash. I
thought I might, since your first letter contained all sorts of
terrifying crypto-intimidatory legalese like I imagine you get when
you haven’t returned a library book for 36 years in a Kafka novel,
demanding “steps” and “written assurances” etc. with a deadline of
“August 6th, 2012”.

It’s now September and I’ve received less than one puppy image.

I understand that puppy picture payment must be a more demanding
logistical problem, due to its unorthodox nature, for a corporation
like Lockheed Martin in comparison with Byzantine legal procedure or,
indeed, the manufacture of thermonuclear devices. I can comprehend
that, it’s no doubt a serious business and gravitas is important

Gravitas, isn’t important to me, however. I genuinely believe the
world would be a better place if eminently solvable legal disputes
were resolved by the ludicrous ritual exchange of somewhat cloyingly
saccharine pictures that nevertheless made people whose personality
has been subsumed by institutional groupthink melt like grannies
huddled round a new born.

I’ve invented a new term for this, Skunk Puppying.

Accordingly, if I haven’t heard from you by September 17th 2012, I’ll
assume that you are taking this matter no further and I’ll have to get
a copyright free or Creative Commons (CC BY-SA) puppy pic, elsewhere.

All the best

David

__________________________________

Skunkpuppy competition.

I thought it would be good to to a Skunkpuppy logo for other people to use when skunkpuppying. If you want to reward people who send you nasty letters with pictures of cute animals, you would be free to use this under a Creative Commons license.

I was thinking something along the lines of a cartoon dog wearing a superhero outfit with his fist in the air.

My friend Keith had a stab at some ideas already:

Submit your entries in the comments.

The term design is associated with visual things, we design magazines, products and buildings but not music or food and this visual association has carried across when people speak about web design. But Like food, it’s as much about getting the right recipe or the right use case, flow or need – Invisible design.

Here would be my picks for 5 design principles based on invisible web design:

1. Design for beneficial feedback loops
Beneficial feedback is the opposite of virality. A virus spreads but is harmful, something which is beneficial spreads precisely because it is valuable. Don’t design things to get more users, design things where the more use the more value and therefore the more users. Focus on the product and the business will come.

2. Design for incremental value
Create something where the more people use it the more value there is for each of them. This creates community.

3. Design for the primary use case.
Do one thing and do it well. There is no scarcity of resources in Internet land so a secondary use case can be a secondary product. The scarcity is attention, design for the principal thing that will engage people.

4. Design the personal.
Small companies used to pretend to be big companies by appearing less personal .e.g. a switchboard that said “for customer service press 3”. Do the opposite. Design so that 30,000 people appear like 3.

5. Design recipes not visuals.
Achieve 1-4 with recipes not visual designs. A web design will have a specific flow and ingredients. How this looks will change based on the technology it sits on. But the recipe will be universal.

I used to love trains, in secret I think that I became an architect because I spent so much time building infrastructure for my model railway set, as a kid. Having watched trains crawl along at the speed of slow freight, in my 10 years in the US, I moved back to Europe and was excited by the prospect of regularly using a truly high speed rail network.

Then I actually used it.

A train on France’s TGV from where I live, in Geneva, to Paris takes a mere 3 hours, it is by far the best way to get there. But it costs almost double what a flight does. If I want to use the Swiss network it’s more, and if I want to combine two networks, say by taking the train to Berlin via Basel (which I have done, when flights were delayed by snow) then not only does it take a full day, but the idiosyncratic differences between providers means that the complexity is several orders of magnitude higher than a multi-point plane flight. Ticketing for the TGV is worse, positively Byzantine. There are no print-out tickets, let alone iPhone barcodes, you have to pick up or have a cardboard ticket delivered.

So what’s going on, why is state subsidized, cheap, electric powered transport more expensive than for profit air travel at a time when gas prices are high? This is not just a function of competitive efficiency, although that is part of it, (SNCF went on strike, for example, to prevent freight running on the TGV network), in the UK privatized rail has created prices that are even worse.

The problem is the infrastructure itself. When you fly a plane there is no track required, the infrastructure investment is only at the nodes, and the decentralization of these nodes by low cost airlines in Europe, has driven prices down and broken down the stranglehold of the large airport authorities. On a rail network there is a massive cost for the rails themselves that creates less competition so privatization means monopoly capitalism.

So why isn’t the same true of the road network? That requires massive infrastructure and in France the road network is possibly the most free-market driven infrastructure in the world with private toll freeways operated by companies in places like Dubai. The French road network is ironically far more capitalist than America’s. But it isn’t the nature of the ownership of the infrastructure but the nature of the network itself that determines its character. Railways can only pack a very few number of trains on at one time and there are few exits or stops. Roads have many vehicles like little packets of transport. The road network is like a packet switched one, like the Internet whereas the rail Network is like the legacy, fixed line, monopolistic telephone system.

But at least trains are green, like the nuclear generated electricity that powers the TGV.

We are experiencing a tech boom during a financial crisis. Not just a mere slump but what threatens to be a continuation of global financial meltdown that started with sub-prime mortgages in the US and now concerns sub-prime countries in Europe. According to people who are not prone to hyperbole, like the governor of the Bank of England, we’re in a period worse than the Great Depression of the 1930s. But in San Francisco, at least for some, everything is swell. Twenty year old college dropouts are once more raising millions armed with nothing more than a PowerPoint presentation. As people around the world are protesting banks, people in flip-flops, t-shirts and jeans that look like they would normally be protesting banks are embracing the world’s purest form of capitalism.

People are just starting to call the top of this latest wave in tech, however, in the Wall Street Journal AngelList reports valuations are nearly half what the were six months ago. As someone who was very much a participant in the last tech bubble, I feel I’ve seen this movie before, and maybe there’s something to learn from a quick recap of the prequel.

The dotcom bubble was a form of mass hysteria. By the beginning of 1999, if you were working in technology in the Bay Area, you never needed to buy a drink, the SFGirl website listed which dotcom parties to crash, on a daily basis. These parties were often lavish affairs, such as Ask Jeeves’ in April 2000, where Elvis Costello played. A variety of networking events, such as Drink Exchange were replicated around the world, First Tuesday, a European Internet cocktail party sold for $50million.

This mania wasn’t entirely unfounded it was driven by the realization that the Internet was going to fundamentally change the way that businesses work, that connecting people together via a many-to-many communications network rather than a one-to-many broadcast system, would lay the foundation for a something that would dis-intermediate many of the middle men in business, from music companies to newspapers.

Middle men act where where there is a lack of information or a network disconnect, where the buyer does not know how to find a seller a middle man jealously guards a few contacts and profits. The Internet was about the free flow of data, information liquidity, it promised to replace armies of brokers, trade secrets and hidden contacts with software which connects buyers and sellers or finders and seekers, directly. The dotcom bubble burst when people applied the increasingly over-optimistic belief in people to instantly deliver on the promises of this revolution to mundane things like pet food. They forgot about the how, rather than the what, imagining that you could point a magic wand at any market and Internetify it. Meanwhile a separate group of people that were interested in products rather than markets were figuring out how to make anyone contribute or publish to the Internet, rather than just browse, through the seemingly trivial world of online diaries, weblogs. This would turn the web into a truly two way medium, where people could communicate and be social.

After the crash, both the hipsters and the corporates who were pretending to be geeks quickly moved on, but people like the bloggers remained. People, like Evan Williams of later Twitter fame, had moved to SF during the dotcom boom but had been involved in the web since its inception. The eventual model for today’s social networks came when blogging was reduced to its absolute minimum combining the aggregated feed – a reverse chronological list of all your friend’s updates with the weblog, a reverse chronological list of your own updates publishable with the ease of using a search box. Although much of the innovation and confidence surrounding the web came back during this phase, the Web 2.0 era, what was missing was money, access to capital had somewhat dried up as people questioned the VC model and VCs looked to fashionable areas such as clean tech.

It wasn’t the appearance of Facebook as a clearly huge company that inflated the bubble (although investments would later cluster around ‘social’), Paypal or Google, were post dotcom crash companies that didn’t create a new boom. What created the new mania was the 2008 crash which made some people very rich and some rich people with nowhere to put their money. Artificially low interest rates, money printing and risk deleveraging meant that normal market forces were not at work, people with money to invest had few options of where to put it to earn a decent return and so the high risk, high return world of venture funding was a more attractive than normal for a small portion of that wealth. This money went towards ‘angel funding’.

There are far fewer Venture Capital funds than during the late 90’s, with a quarter of the money, funding twice the number of startups, largely because the fixed cost funding required to launch a startup is far less. During the dotcom era, startups would buy expensive hardware from companies such as Sun, enterprise level hosting from people like Exodus and database software from Oracle. Scalable hardware and hosting which used to cost several hundred thousand dollars upfront, have been replaced by cloud services such as Amazon’s EC2 which until you have lots of traffic, costs very little. For startups, proprietary software such as Oracle’s has been replaced by open source LAMP stacks which are as good. Newer document based systems which scale much better for social networks are actually better than what you can buy. What used to require more than a million dollars has been replaced by free.

The fixed costs of creating a startup have become low enough that they can be initially supported by individuals who inject small amounts of capital at the seed stage, business angels. The angel money has been pooled into quasi VC vehicles, from the more esoteric forms of incubators to the super angels, from 500 Startups to Floodgate to Seedcamp to Angel Pad which take a relatively large percentage (up to 5%) for a token investment (as low as ($20K). This acts more like a competition prize than a real investment, an endorsement that makes series A funding more likely (the prestige value of the trophy is worth more than the cash). The stake is in the form of a share IOU, a convertible note that can be exchanged for a percentage of the company at the point a significant amount of money is raised, demanding a proper capital structure and at a discount to the later guys. In other words, at the initial stage these aren’t really proper companies, angel funding is based on a wing and a prayer. This is a gigantic game of musical chairs – with places to sit representing Series A and the people dancing around them being the angel funded.

The benign view of this is that the angel funding has created a rich variety of new pool of species of company where the environment is evolutionary, is constrained and only the fittest will survive. But this is a matter of degree, the startup environment has always been market driven and Darwinistic, this is not the world of state funded arts or military contract cronyism. What we have now is a very large number of companies with a tiny amount of angel funding that either have to be profitable very quickly of they will die, it will be less of a winnowing out than a mass extinction event. This may not be a good thing for anyone, regardless of what will happen to the individual companies, for the ecosystem as a whole, the immediate aftermath of a mass extinction doesn’t showcase variety.

Because this is an ecosystem the startups aren’t the only type of species in the food chain, angels are one step up and there is equal change of a mass extinction there. If investors start seeing poor results from the incubators and the super angels, individuals driven by the fashion for this kind of investment will quickly be put off investing in them and they will become deeply unfashionable. This is largely what Fred Wilson points out and although it may look like he’s talking up the professional VC model out of self interest, I suspect he’s just spot on in predicting that those that come out best from all this will be those at the top of the food chain, the top tier professional VCs and the handful of companies that are never left under funded.

Whether the increased role of the angel or incubator works in the longer term relies on two things: (a) the idea that a primordial soup of experimentation will produce more companies with massive potential than would otherwise emerge and whether that potential can be spotted and (b) that many of the other ideas can turn into sustainable businesses with little extra funding.

Regarding a) I would argue that the potential for companies to be massive is rarely seen before the end of a significant series A round. Most web companies suffer from a chicken and egg problem – to have value you need users and to get users you need value. Money is needed to seed systems with value – and this is particularly true with social networks. For a company like Yelp which I worked on in the incubator it was launched from, half a decade before this bubble, the potential was only really seen after several million and a couple of years, even by its initial investors.

As for b) Its certainly true that the Portfolio of VC’s like Index’s (which I pick just because I recently looked through it) reflects a wide variety of businesses, some of which could see a lowish risk 10x return on little investment and other on a higher risk 10x return on a much larger sum. However, companies that are based on ad revenue and social models will need lots of cash and are competing in an environment where the big social galaxies are already in place. Part of this bubble is distinguished as being all about social, and that’s the part that is most vulnerable.

Today’s Internet boom is a refinement of the original promise rather than a paradigm shift. It is based on the crystallization of the many-to-many model not as portals which were a legacy of the broadcast infrastructure and dominated the dotcom boom but as social networks, platforms for self-emergent non-hierarchical networks. At the same time it’s based on the extension of the Internet from when we are sitting down to when we are moving around, via mobile devices such as smart phones and, in future, ubiquitous health and environment based sensors. All this stuff is real and exciting and providing the feeding ground for the innovation that is the only way out of the financial mess we are in. But the funding cycle is by definition cyclical and while the overall trend for Internet technology is still towards secular growth, we are in a bubble which will burst, leaving the seeds of the next great thing in its gooey mess.

The subject matter of this interactive presentation is fascinating in itself a haunting story of a town that lived a single generation and died, like a person.

But beyond that its an example of how the Powerpoint style presentation format: annotated slides, with embedded media, is evolving from being the most artless thing on the planet to something sublime, when its in the right hands.

Pinepoint

I had to rush through it and the info level was fairly dense, so here is a PDF with slide notes. PDF_4trends_Lift_11