The importance of shaving things into your head

Last week, I got to do something that is every geek’s dream: attend the red carpet premier of a Star Trek movie.  With the bonus of cracking jokes with Leonard Nimoy (who was very gracious about my geekiness) and producing some slides that went up before the movie and too many other small things to count.

The opportunity came about because of Bing.  When I first arrived six months ago, my boss’ boss’ boss had a meeting with me in which he asked me to “swing for the fences”.  He wanted the weirdest ideas I could come up with, and so I suggested adding Klingon to our translator.  Geeks would love it, it is actually a worthwhile technical challenge (more on that later), and it would be a big moment for Microsoft employees, who are mostly all Star Trek fans.

Nothing happened for a few months, then Into Darkness started getting closer and people started thinking about what we could do to celebrate.  Klingon came back around and suddenly all the pieces fell into place.  I reached out to the creator of the language for help, the Translate team went slightly crazy and jammed on it 24/7, and some folks in PR got behind it to push out to the world.  And then it was decided that we would partner with Paramount and go to the premier and that I should probably run that.

Gush gush gush.  But there are some actual lessons in here I want to make sure don’t get lost.  One is clearly that outlandish ideas, with a healthy dose of passion, actually work out.  Most people give up on the idea of doing really crazy things because they think nobody will support them in it, but if you have the courage to voice it, you’ll generally get a lot of love from unusual places.

Along those lines: take big risks.  I’ve never dyed my hair or even really done anything even mildly extreme to it – and now I have Klingon shaved into it.  I did it partially as a press tactic: I knew it would be hard to break through the PR noise at the premier and that something outlandish might actually earn us some coverage (turns out we didn’t need it, because translating Klingon is so geekily cool that people will talk about it regardless).  But I also wanted to celebrate the engineers, who really worked hard on this feature.  So I shaved some Klingon into my hair (which for me is a huge personal risk, as I’m rather conservative in my appearance) and while some people think its a bit weird, most people think its awesome.  Take risks; you never know who might love it.

Part of it is also the unexpected benefits of weird initiatives.  Yes, in some ways adding Klingon to bing.com/translate is a gimmick and fanservice, but it also turns out to be a fascinating technical challenge.  Because the language was created by a linguist who was actually fairly deliberate about it, he consciously broke common linguistic rules that our translation engine normally relies on.  Which meant that to do a good job, we had to change the way we thought about language.  And that’s a good thing; it forces our tech to grow and adapt.  If aliens ever land, we’ll be more ready than we used to be.

I also think there is a lesson in here about being cognizant that everything is created.  At the movie premier, people clapped and cheered at different points in the movie.  Now normally, I think clapping at a movie is sort of weird – the creators aren’t there to honor.  But here, they were right there, and I was so incredibly cognizant, truly for the first time, that this movie was something created.  A whole bunch of people spent a whole bunch of hours making something.  We take that for granted often.  WordPress?  Bunch of people worked really hard on it.  Every plugin, every theme, the technical infrastructure that underlies its delivering to your computer, your computer itself, the operating system, everything…it is all created by people who have passion for what they are making.  There is a lot of value locked up in what we do and I suspect we all could be just a little more appreciative.  Clap more, damnit.

There is one lesson that shines above all others, though, and that is the power of opportunity.  When building Klingon into our translator, we found out that one of the world’s most fluent Klingon speakers actually works at Microsoft.  And so we enlisted his help and consequently got to take him with us to the premier.  Yes, it was fun for me to be involved in Star Trek, but honestly, it was more meaningful to me to bring this engineer to the red carpet.  Here is someone who spent 16 years learning Klingon just because he was passionate about it, and now I got the chance to bring him with me.  That’s true power, true responsibility, true awesomeness: making other people’s dreams reality.  Whatever you’re creating isn’t about your dreams, it is about other people’s.  Because that’s where true happiness is: building something that gets used.  That is useable.  That matters.  bing.com/translate: now with more awesome.

Want to be happy? Get a job and learn to cross stitch

When I talk to college students, I always give them two pieces of advice: go to class and get a job even if you don’t need the money. The reason for the first advice is hopefully obvious (although it is surprising how many college students pay a fortune for an education they believe they can get simply by reading the books and writing the papers). It is the second piece of advice is somewhat more subtle.

In college, I worked about 40 hours a week and the payroll office used to joke that I seemed to have every job on campus.  But the one that got me through school, and I don’t mean just financially, was working at the IT Helpdesk.

Anyone who has ever worked at a Helpdesk will tell you that it is a frustrating job much of the time: users don’t know why things are broken, are frustrated that they aren’t working, and expect that you will magically make them work immediately.  But it is also an incredibly rewarding job because of four simple factors.

  1. You know what you have to do.  When you start your shift, there are a pile of help requests and a stack of broken computers.  You may have to problem solve for each individual one, but the overall task is clear: solve the requests, fix the computers.  Many jobs are frustrating because what needs doing isn’t particularly clear, and so you spend more time trying to figure out what progress means than actually making any.
  2. You know how much is left.  At the Helpdesk, it is abundantly and viscerally clear the distance between you and the goal.  You can see the computers, count the open tickets.  Too often, jobs set some vague finish line that you can never really understand and instead of running a race, you’re on some sort of perpetual death march.
  3. You know how fast you’re moving.  Because the work to be done is clear, at any given point during your shift, you can look at the stack and get an update, which allows you to see how fast you’re accomplishing the task.  Jobs in which progress is only available in retrospect are almost always less satisfying.
  4. You know how far you’ve come.  At the end of each shift, you can look back and things have changed.  Broken computers are fixed, open requests are closed.  There is a special sense of satisfaction that comes with looking back on progress, and a special sense of hopelessness with feeling that at the end of the day, you’re in the same place as where you started.

The reason these are so important in college is because most schooling fails all four of these tests.  You can spend hours working on a paper and while you’ve made actual mental progress towards your eventual goal, it is impossible to tell how far you’ve come and how far you have left to go.  Which is why a job is so important: while you’re bashing your head against the academic wall, you’re going to want something that lets you feel satisfied every day.  Get your hands dirty – you’ll feel better.

For startup folks, this may come down to motion versus progress.  You can do a lot (motion) without actually getting anything done (progress) simply by shuffling back and forth from side-to-side.  And if you’re in any kind of management position, a huge portion of your job should be insuring that real progress gets made.
So look back to those four guidelines.  Does every single member of your startup know the explicit macro-goal of the startup, as well as the sprint-level goals?  Do they know what their part is in achieving them?  Can they visually, viscerally see at some reasonable interval (at least daily) how far they’ve come, individually and collectively, and how far they have to go?  If the answer to any of these is no, get on it.

And of course, this applies to the rest of your life as well.  On a diet?  Want to exercise more or perfect a skill?  Make sure that you understand your progress.  That is what is great about cross stitching: you’re working from a pattern you established in advance so you know what to do, there is an exact number of stitches that needs to happen, and if you sit down for an hour, you can see exactly how many you get done.  Not all of life can be so neatly quantified, but the premise is still there.

Advisors: facilitators, not cheerleaders

When people ask me what I think the role of startup advisor is, I often liken it to the on played by some of the great professors I had in college and grad school.  While I count many of them among my friends now, at the time they did two important things for me: removed barriers and created opportunities.

The reason I specify the difference between the advisorship of then and the friendship of now, and a great deal of why I’m writing this post, is to argue against a model of advisorship that I see increasingly in startups today.  Perhaps because part of their personal reputation is now tied to the startup, advisors get so invested in the success of the people they advise that they start pushing from behind instead of clearing the way ahead.  And I know it is a problem because I am one of the people who does it.

Advising shouldn’t be about motivation.  In academia, the big difference between college and high school is that in college, you are expected to come with the desire to learn.  That has actually eroded a bit in recent years, as at least some colleges become more like an extended high school, but certainly in grad school, the idea is still that you provide the motivation and the school (and your advisors) clear the runway.

My father is fond of saying “Luck is opportunity acted upon”.  And that’s the primary purpose of advisors: to create opportunities that motivated startups can act on.  That means introductions, bizdev, recruiting, expertise, and the whole host of things that advisors are used to providing.

What it doesn’t mean is chasing startups around to act on those opportunities.  While a good advisor removes barriers to make it as easy as possible (good intro emails that setup the connect, being clear about why you think an opportunity is worthwhile, etc.), it is ultimately up to the startup to act and take control of their own destiny.  Advisors shouldn’t be cheerleaders or engines or any kind of motivational force – they have a specific, practical role and the should take that responsibility seriously.

Let me blunt the edge a little bit.  Being an advisor doesn’t excuse you from being a human being, and if someone is having a bad day, you still have a responsibility to care and to help.  What I’m trying to argue is that there is a big difference between getting someone over the hump and becoming the reason they do things.  Just like bad parenting means pushing your kids into things that more about your wants than theirs, bad advising means acting as a proxy CEO.

Adopting this approach means that some startups will fail that you could have forced to succeed.  But that is only true in the short term: ultimately, if you’re acting as proxy CEO, they’re going to fail when you’re not around anymore.  Some startups should fail, no matter how much you like them, no matter how much you like their idea.  Be a courageous advisor and respect them enough to let them be in charge of that failure, while giving them every chance to make it.

Netflix, an HTC 8X, an AM Radio, and a bathtub

I tweaked my back moving boxes yesterday, so I decided to take a hot bath to see if I could loosen it up.  And since I’ve been watching Star Trek: Enterprise on Netflix on my new HTC 8X all weekend, naturally I’m deeply engrossed and there is no way that wasn’t going to continue into the bath (and for those who gasp, naturally it is in a Otterbox Defender already).

So I’m sitting in the bathtub, with the speaker pressed up to my ear to hear what is going on over the sound of the water, and I was struck in rapid order by two things.  First, how utterly ridiculous I was, to be sitting in the bathtub with this miracle of technology with a high resolution screen pressed backwards to my head, so deeply engrossed in a story that I didn’t even want to pause it.  And second, how it had likely happened a hundred times before, in the age of radio.

I wished, in that moment, that I had an amusing anecdote about some aged relative who used to listen to the baseball game that way, with the portable radio pressed up against his ear while doing some noisy task, desperate to hear every at-bat.  But even though I don’t actually know of a relative doing it, I take some solace in this: I can be my grandkids’ anecdote.  Because just as the idea of some old guy with his ear glued to an AM radio is nostalgic to us, it is almost certain that our grandchildren will find not just our technology, but also our dedication to it, hysterical.  Even the idea of pressing something up to your ear is likely to be completely foreign within another 40 years.

And so on down the line.  This technological and social point has been made a thousand times by a hundred different science fiction writers, but I find something comforting in the psychological sense of it: that humans, even as our technologies advance, are still able to be totally ridiculous.

I want a broken phone hackathon

Clearly, I have no time to actually be running a hackathon these days.  But I do have a dream for the topic I want to see: broken/old smartphones.
There are three major types of hackathon-eligible phones:

  1. Screen is completing broken, cannot be used for input or display.
  2. Screen is cracked, can be used for input and basic display.
  3. Works fine, just outdated.

Geeks everywhere get terribly excited by the Rasberry Pi as a $30 development platform and they are reportedly about to sell their millionth kit.  But there were more than 5,000 smartphones available on eBay in December 2012 that sold for less than $30 and fell into one of the three categories above.  All were: faster than a Pi, had wifi, could operate without a power supply for at least some period of time, had GPS, and most importantly, were not a bare circuit board and thus had some resistance to the elements.

I’m not trying to take a swipe at the Pi; I’m glad it exists.  My point is that rather than producing something new, we could reuse old hardware that is actually more fully featured, if we write code that takes advantage of it.  And in a hackathon format, I think people would produce a shocking number of applications, many of which could be deployed for the public good.

Ideas abound.  Off the top of my head, I can easily think of several: wifi mesh network for disaster relief, food safety logger that send a wifi alert when a fridge becomes too warm to adequately protect food or a shipping container version that logs it for download, a room monitor that logs noise/light/temp and broadcasts to a central server for activity comparisons, motion/sound detection for anti-looting monitoring during disasters…the list goes on.

The way to think about it is to move beyond the “what do we normally use computers for” paradigm and think about the unique properties of a smartphone: configurable input, low power usage, and, for the purposes of the hack, disposability.  They are broken phones that would normally go in the landfill, so as long as they provide something useful before being destroyed, we are in better shape than we were.

Someone run this thing.  And then invite me.

If you can't find it, grow it

Finding the right team for a startup is hard.  You are often facing a tradeoff between limited resources (cash and equity, which themselves can have different values to different people) while looking for people who not only meet your current needs but your future plans.  And for many key roles, once you find those people, you have to compete for them: most active startup cities are busy places, with many good ideas for the talented to pick from.

So what do you do when you can’t find what you need?  You grow it.  I think my friend Max Shron makes this point nicely in this DataGotham talk on finding a data scientist: for many startup positions that are not exact maps to other fields (like software development, design, marketing, etc.), you cannot expect to find someone who has all of the skills simply because the field itself is too new.  And even for fields that are established, in a small market or a competitive market (which essentially covers all markets at this point), you may have to accept a less experienced hire.

As any good farmer knows, some seeds are better for growing than others.  If you know that you are hiring based on growth potential, some of your search patterns need to change.  For one, make the explicit choice to privilege personality over experience.  Too often, I watch entrepreneurs acknowledge that they are going to need to grow someone into a role, and then concentrate on resume and experience-level as a way of deciding who to interview.  If you know this is a growth role, personality is the single most important variable in your hiring process.  Look for good cover letters that are personal and personable, and refer to resumes only as an indication of variety and intent.

The interview is also different for a growth role.  Instead of trying to understand their experience, you want to understand their motivation, both level and direction.  To understand skills, ask questions that focus on the future, rather than the past: what do they want to learn how to do, how do they want to grow the role, how do they see that growth contributing to the business.  Don’t bother asking about their desired reward: plenty of people have said they are not motivated by money, and then discovered their own sensitivity to it around acquisition time.  Instead, try to get at motivation by asking them why they want to work at a startup instead of a larger company.  If they’re going to have to reach every single day in order to do a job they may not really be qualified for, they better know why they are there.

Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of having people solve problems in interviews, but growth is synonymous with the need to find novel ways to solve problems when you don’t always have all the skills already.  Try to get at who they would ask when the autodidactic approach fails.  Growing someone can truly sap all of your energy if you become the gateway through which they find all information.  You want to know that they understand the organization of a startup and the skills that people throughout the community can teach them.  Especially if you’re in NYC, where people are often far more willing to help than in The Valley.

In the end, look for someone who reminds you of yourself.  While senior employees often need to be differentiated so that they can provide different viewpoints, chances are that if you’re running a startup, you yourself are the kind of person who expands to fill the needs of a role.  If the candidate feels like they could be your younger sibling, you’ll probably in good shape.  Trust your gut!

Buy a good startup lunch

This is another one of those posts about how to spend some money in an awesome way.  You’ve been warned.

I’ve written before about why I love AdventFinancial and their awesome founder, but I’ve never really told the story of what I do about it.  Because I like the Advent product, there is all the normal startup stuff I tend to do: introducing, recruiting, BD, etc.  But because I like Advent people, I do something a little different: I buy them lunch.

The nature of the tax business is that during the season, your entire life stops.  It is easy to talk to folks in August, when they’re really just thinking about the financial backend, some light selling in for next year, counting coup from last year.  But try to reach out in January, as all the tax preparers are coming online, and you might as well be on mute, unless you have an actual problem that needs solving.

Fortunately, Advent is in Kansas City, almost across the street from a noted BBQ place called Jack Stack.  So a few years ago, I started sending them lunch once in awhile during their toughest season.  For about $250 bucks, I can feed the 30ish employees a delicious buffet of three kinds of meats, bread, slaw, sauce, beans, potato salad, and all the plates and napkins and such.  All from the comfort of my NYC apartment.

There are lots of things you can do with $250; though the buffet is cheap in that it feeds a large team, you could make a credible argument that it should go to charity.  But in a world of double bottom line businesses and startups that are actually trying to make things better for folks, there is more than one way to give.  In the same way that supporting a parent that you are connected to, a neighbor or parent or relative, helps raise better children, spending time or money to help a prosocial startup can be a way of making the world better.  Looking out for those who look out for others, as it were.

One of the great lessons of social psychology has been that small gestures often have disproportionately large results.  In truth, I could probably just stop by each Advent employee’s desk with a cookie and a smile and not have to pay for lunch, but I’m not close and so that isn’t possible.  And $250 worth of food really can have a large effect; in every study that has looked at what motivates quality in the workplace, “feeling appreciated” tends to top it out.  Food from a non-affiliated person who thinks what you are doing is great?  Now that’s a feeling of appreciation.

Something to think about when you’re figuring out how you want to encourage and enable companies who are doing good things.  If you’re in the startup community, you’re likely connected to many people who are working on positive projects – it is worthwhile to keep them motivated to do so.

NOTE: Please do not send me lunch.  I’m still eating the jelly beans.

Why it is easy to believe Bush misvoted

First, read this.

Second, I need to point out that this story is not true.  Do you hear me, internet?  NOT TRUE.  The Daily Currant is like The Onion, a satirical newspaper that pokes fun at things.

Third, even though it isn’t true, it is entirely believable, which is why so many people passed it around as true.  Partially because we’re happy to think that Bush just isn’t terribly bright, but more because the UI for voting is terrible.  Really, really terrible.

And it isn’t like we don’t know how to make good UI.  Collectively, we’ve created Facebook and Twitter and Mint and thousands of examples of truly unique interfaces that enable people to make incredibly complicated and detailed decisions.  In voting, you’re just picking one thing from a list of things.  A series of dropdowns would be better than what we have now in most voting markets.

The real fun of this story, though, is not in thinking about what better UI might look like, but rather the forces that are driving design in the world.  Overwhelmingly, design innovation comes from the private sector, the need to drive people to a decision point in an ever-increasing way.  The race to conversion, because it is the clearest metric that predicts revenue, means that companies are constantly recruiting for a combination of designers and data scientists to run every possible variation, chasing improvements as small as 0.1%.

Non-profits and the public sector just don’t have the same use for such small differences and as a consequence, we miss out on the big differences.  Voting software is built primarily by engineers concerned with security and redundancy, and because there is no concept of conversion, it could be the world’s most frustrating experience.  After all, as long as people persevere and vote for someone (regardless of whether it is who they intended to vote for), nothing changes.

It is, in a sense, the problem we have with any captive audience: as long as people don’t have a choice other than participate or don’t participate, and incremental participation isn’t considered as a success metric, then nothing changes.  Particularly because this is not software that is built in the public sphere, so things like Code For America have an uphill battle to get involved.

So what do we do about it?  For one, we need to employ some of the data science I talked about earlier.  Unless we test whether people are actually able to vote for the candidates they intended to, we have no way of knowing whether a UI is appropriate.  Indeed, intention congruence should be the new primary metric for judging voting software, followed closely by a subjective measure of the quality of the experience.  After all, if people don’t feel like voting was a good experience, then they won’t do it again.  Year-over-year participation, for example, should be considered.

And then, quite simply, we need designers who treat this problem like a commercial one.  Given the metrics, they need to design against them and have the opportunity to A/B test and refine in waves.  In a commercial atmosphere, this is standard fare, but in the public sphere, it is far less common.

I leave you with this thought experiment: how much is a vote worth?  That is, a single voter who is able to vote for the candidates of their choice effectively – how much should we as a country pay for that?  Let’s pretend you said it was worth a $1 to get an incremental voter through the experience.  ~126 million people voted in the 2012 presidential election.  That 0.1% change I mentioned early?  Its worth $126,000 each e

The Double Bottom Line Restaurant

Double bottom line is a relatively silly name for a simple concept: businesses can be about more than just profit.  Double bottom line usually means “profit and social good” and triple bottom line usually means “profit and social good and environmental sustainability”.  God knows what a quadruple bottom line would be, since environmental sustainability seems to fall under social good.  Really, double is the sweet spot: profit and “not sucking”.

Despite the name, the concept is fairly important.  Most folks aren’t aware that CEOs have a fiduciary duty: one of which is that they are legally obligated to maximize profit for their shareholders (and can actually be sued for not doing so).  By formally introducing a second bottom line and writing it into the company mission, they are then allowed to use that second bottom line as a justification for taking actions that aren’t explicitly profit-oriented.  Which, in turn, prevents them from being sued for not doing terrible things in the name of profit.  Pretty nifty.

So explaining this over dinner to a friend, I used the restaurant we were sitting in as an example.  It might be more profitable, I posited, to swap out our green salad for some fries and if this restaurant was publicly traded, shareholders could conceivably try to force that that move.  If it was a double bottom line restaurant, however, the manager could argue that it would make people fat and that would be a legitimate defense.

Which got me thinking: what if more restaurants, private or public, were double bottom line?  That is, what if they were concerned with reducing the calorie count of the food that they served?  Large chains already are, because in NYC and some other markets, they are required to put the calories on the menu.  But when I go to any of New York City’s wonderful restaurants, there is literally no reason for them to pay attention to my health – taste/value ratio is literally the only bottom line.

The idea behind double bottom line is not only that it protects companies who choose to pursue “not sucking” but that it sets another goal for employees to strive for and in turn differentiates that company.  It is the most authentic form of marketing: saying something and doing it.  We all want to be healthier – is it really impossible to compete as a restaurant willing to help us do it?  For those that say yes, consider that twenty years ago, there were almost no double bottom line companies.  And now Tom’s Shoes.  Chobani.  Seventh Generation.  Warby Parker.  Ben & Jerry’s.  Patagonia.  It is a very long list.

Restaurateurs – you need to step up your game.

Invited Talks versus Submitted Talks

Recently, after giving a flurry of talks and press interviews, I started talking to colleagues from a variety of fields about the process of speaking and the somewhat bizarre rituals that occur in order to create good events.  Almost everyone I talked to had some funny story about speaking, and the humor was often generated by unexpected deviations from the community norms around talks.

Which made me realize that there were community norms, but like most norms, they were encoded and passive and rarely discussed.  Which naturally made me want to discuss them.  So now, settle back and enjoy a few definitions, a brief rant, and the occasionally lame joke.

Now that you know why I’m writing this post, let’s get to the what of the matter.

Invited talks are exactly what they sound like: an inviter (usually an individual, though often acting on behalf of a group as an organizer, curator, or editor) and an invitee (presumably an expert in the field).  The inviter generally sends the invitee a personal note or gives them a call, asks if they’d like to talk at a particular event, and relays details about the event.  The implicit assumption is that the invitee is doing the inviter (or at least the inviter’s organization) a favor by appearing; travel costs are often covered and if they aren’t, the invitee is at least wined and dined.  The invitee is free to talk about whatever they want and they submit nothing in advance.

This usually works out well because the community is self-policing.  If the invitee was a bad speaker or prone to giving inappropriate talks, they wouldn’t get invited to give them again – interests are aligned because presumably the invitee wants to be heard in the world and so is motivated to present such that people will continue to listen.  And because they are invited by an individual, there is also a smaller social effect at work, such that the invitee doesn’t want to disappoint the inviter, who puts some of their reputation as an editor/curator/whatever on the line in having issued the invitation.  A bad talk is bad for all and so there is a strong aligned pressures for everyone involved.

But invited talks do have a significant downside: they favor the established over the undiscovered.  You’ll rarely see a grad student give an invited talk, for example, unless they have a particularly notable career already.  Inviters tend to work with known quantities, often those they have personal ties with, and this can lead to a cyclical series of invitations that means you hear the same ten people speak most of the time.  It also means that hot topics tend to rise to the top because of a recency effect: the inviters often heard the invitee speak recently, which makes them top-of-mind for inviting.

Submitted talks aren’t new, but they are become more common in some arenas.  Basically, they’re the opposite of an invited talk: people are asked to submit proposals or videos or some sort of evidence of what a talk is going to be about to the inviters, and then the inviters select from that pool.  Usually this submission process is open to almost everyone, although there may be explicit or implicit requirements.

Originally, these were most common in very large academic conferences, where there were main invited talks, but plenty of smaller sessions that were filled in with people presenting papers, often in a panel format.  And by people, I generally mean grad students – they didn’t get travel money, they have no reputation, they’re just hoping to get noticed.  It isn’t quite vanity press, in that many more submit than get picked; it is more like trying to walk-on to a sports team – you only really show up if you think you’ve got a reasonable chance of being picked.

Recently, however, this format has expanded beyond second-tier academic slots.  With the rise of social media and the increasing ease of collecting electronic video, many venues, including TED and Ignite, have increasingly been at least partially filled with submitted talks.  The 2013 TED has promised that over half their speakers will come from a “worldwide talent search”, in which people submit applications and give a demo talk.

There is an argument to be made that the submitted talk is actually a form of egalitarianism.  Yes, not everyone always has the ability to submit, but it is certainly more broad reaching than the invited talk and it does help promote new voices.  In theory, the best of the best can rise to the top, even if they’ve never been seen before or don’t have the same stodgy track record that others may insistent upon.

But a major drawback is that because most submitted talks are still curated, the inviters actually not have significantly more control than with invited talks.  Not only are they taking a pass at initial submissions, but they continue that editorial power down the line; the presumption is that there are always more people who submitted than were selected, so if your talk doesn’t fall into the desired shape, you can be replaced.  Unlike the invited talk, where oversight is actively discouraged and inviters would have difficulty pulling back from someone once they have been invited and announced, submitted talks give inviters the ability to meddle in the content of the talk itself.

And why not?  After all, it is the inviters conference and can’t they damn well do what they please?  Depends on your goal for talks.  The trouble is that a format that appears more egalitarian (submitted talks) can actually be significantly less so because of the ability of the inviters to control content.  Just as tenure exists in academia to make sure that controversial research still gets done and controversial classes still get taught, there is a very real danger that the curation of submitted talks can actually stifle the very voices that the format originally encouraged.

Perhaps more passively (and more importantly), submitted talks also privilege a certain kind of speaker: one with time on their hands.

Preparing a submission, a video, and trying out adds to the already onerous process of doing a talk, which is particularly difficult if you’re not simply sitting on your duff and are actually trying to do things in the world.  In academia, the active researcher always has things happening in their lab and simply may not have time to go search for speaking opportunities and submit themselves to them – that is an inhibiting pressure in a world of competing pressures.  And outside of academia, people who are actively directing projects meant to help and change and create face the same pressures: they may simply be too busy to submit a talk that, if they were invited, they could find the time to give.

This is the true loss of submitted talks for me.  As someone who has never looked for the opportunity to speak, I treasure the process of spreading a particular message but would much rather be building than looking for someplace to talk about what I’m building. We can avoid the censorship issue by simply insuring that submitted speakers are allowed to speak freely on the topic of their choice, but it is difficult to get around the sheer inhibiting pressure that is the act of submission.  Any college admissions officer will tell you that inviting minority students to attend guarantees you higher admission from that pool that asking them to submit themselves, and such invitations have had a significant impact on the face of college enrollment.

Submitted talks make life easy for inviters, but I doubt highly that is the explanation for their rise.  Its us, the masses, the people who dream of one day being on the TED stage.  It fuels reality TV and game shows and the idea that we can be famous, if only just for a moment.

The problem is, fame should actually be earned – it should be a mark of respect for genuine achievements.  And in our clamor to have the chance at the TED stage, we’ve forgotten that what made TED so unique was the ability to see truly insightful talks by people who had put years into gaining the expertise that made their short talks such a mind blast of knowledge.  The reason we loved TED talks was because they were drinking straight from the geek tap.  And ultimately, submitted talks will water that down, because you will lose out on those geeks who you have to ask to come out of the lab or their non-profit or the boardroom long enough to talk to us about something they are truly expert about.

Let us do our job, as inviters and audiences, and not just pander to the need for instant fame.  Go find the speakers too busy doing awesomeness to submit an application and make them talk, for all our sakes.