Economics – Econtrepreneur.com

Diversity Wins

Every VC fund needs a token, white, male, general partner.

Sputnik ATX does mark-to-market portfolio updates quarterly and the results thus far have been fantastic (89%IRR, not that I’m bragging). Our goal is to help people reach their full potential, and we believe that IRR is a key outcome to measure if we’re doing our jobs well. Diversity is another measure of that success. How are we doing?

Two metrics we’re just as proud to cite: over 40% of our portfolio companies have a female founder, and over 20% have a black founder. How do we do it? We joke among our team that our secret to success is maintaining a token, white, male, general partner.

Yes, I’m the only white dude.

The fact that we have only one white male on our team gives us an unfair advantage. I highly suggest more VCs try this approach. If you’re a general partner (GP) reading this article, please consider ways to get your own token, white, male GP and do so NOW.

What we’ve learned at Sputnik ATX is that when diverse people (education, culture, work experience, ethnicity, gender, etc) all have a say in decisions, we make FAR better decisions. There is copious research to support me on this (check out this HBR article.).

We’re well past the time to continue to allocate capital to homogeneous white dudes and yet, the flow of capital to these funds is shockingly disproportionate and persists. It’s time for lip service to end, and action to begin.

At the risk of alienating allocators looking at our next raise, I just have to say to every fund of fund manager and pension fund manager, please stop giving money to funds where the GPs all look like me. It’s hurting your returns, its skewing investment away from quality founders, its exacerbating US economic apartheid, and preventing everyone from reaching their full potential.

Note: I highly suggest reading the links in this article, and the book on US economic apartheid is especially interesting. Also, after writing this article, Sputnik ATX shockingly found another white guy who joined our team as a temp this summer. Congrats Matt, you beat the odds at our fund. Let’s not get too comfortable. Our investor returns depend on it.

De-Risk Your Startup

Let’s take a side eye to the five general categories of risk that can doom your start-up and how you can best avoid them…

There are literally a million things that can kill your startup. Worrying about all of them will likely drive you nuts, and distract you from the “holes” right in front of you. So with an eye on the hole right in front of you, let’s take a side eye to the five general categories of risk that can doom your start-up and how you can best avoid them: product risk, market risk, financial risk, team risk, and execution risk.

Product risk is what most early stage founders and investors most commonly fail to measure. It is best framed in the economic measure of consumer surplus (the gospel of which I am an avid disciple). Are you producing something people want because the cost of acquiring it is far less than the value it provides to the user? To answer this question, you’ll need to listen (yes, stop talking) to a LOT of customers. Ask them how they do things, observe how they solve their needs. Question the root cause of those needs. Seek first to understand them before you begin showing off your so-called solution. When you can make something they actually want really badly for a cost far below what they are willing to pay, you have product fit.

Market risks that can doom your startup are most often found in distribution problems, market size, and competition/substitutes. Even if you have a product with massive consumer surplus for a party of one, you’ll never have a massive business if the total size of the market is minuscule, you can’t find a channel to get it to market, or if there is a competing solution that is half your cost. Most companies die because they fail to solve market risk by building effective sales channels. Too often VCs cite a company with a lack of product-market fit when in reality, the company has a great product and zero marketing. To solve this, focus on how you can make purchase decisions easy: convenient location of sale, ease of technology, elegant UI, one-click buy, marketing channel exploration, CAC/LTV ratios, etc. This is why we advocate for maker-founders to seek out help from proven marketing and sales guru investors who put in money and time into your company rather than advisors who both those things out of your startup.

Financial risk becomes a problem when the fundamental costs of doing business generate insufficient returns to sustain your business. Some are short term, like making payroll next week if your runway is going away. Some are longer term, like high upfront capital costs from inventory or equipment required to make or distribute your product/service. The key here is to keep a tight lid on costs and try to get profitable as fast as you can. Avoid splurging on that fancy office when a shabby one will do just fine (and use the savings to add the additional sales person who will help resolve this problem). If your company has significant upfront costs, you’ll need to carefully manage inventory levels and development expenses so that you don’t run out of runway before you’re ready to take off. Too often I hear founders complain that their company failed because they couldn’t get funding, when really, they couldn’t find a way to develop the product and market fit with the resources they had, when it was entirely possible to do so. They just failed to have a financial plan to match their access to resources. Yes, it does take longer to build a company without funding from VCs, and yes, we often don’t understand what we’re doing. So if you’re the smart founder who does “get it”, live within your means to do so.

Team risk is why most seed stage companies with $50k-$100k MRR fail to raise their series A. No one is going to drop $3-5mm on a company that, if the founder is hit by a bus tomorrow, blows into dust with them. Nor will a VC put real money into a team that has only product skills. If you want money to scale, you need to show that you can build a team that is better than the founder and has complete skills (product, marketing, sales, customer support, and finance). This means you not only need a team, but a team that says, “we’ve got this”. Hire folks who’ve done it before or have such impeccable academic qualifications that their abilities are not in doubt. Hire away a key person from a HOT growth company who has experience with the growth challenges you face right in front of you (note: Google is not a hot growth company, it is a stale corporate machine).

Execution risk will be the subject of a post later this month, but to summarize it best, it is when you get to $3mm in annual revenue and think you’ve “made it” when really, you haven’t even started the real race yet. The ability of a company to grow quickly under pressure, hire the right people, put in place proper culture, incentives, and relationships so that the company can prosper and run full speed is far, far harder than anyone thinks. Execution risk is the killer of would-be unicorns and turns them into someone’e distressed asset purchase or family business. Your ability to create a culture of performance aligned with your customers needs and economic value model will be the key to getting things done as you scale. If this is your start-up, DM me, and we’ll talk further. A paragraph here just doesn’t do that sentence justice.

So, overall, start thinking about how you can de-risk your startup by looking at these risks and how your daily activities, weekly and monthly goals help eliminate them as best possible. You’ll never get rid of them, but you can sure sleep better at night if you do.

Blitzfailing – How to NOT Grow a Company

If your marginal profit per unit sold is negative, no amount of volume will help you be profitable.

Some time around 2016, a company that was raising at a lofty valuation pitched to me requesting capital from one of Sputnik ATX’s antecedent funds. The company pitching was WeWork.

The heart of their presentation was a claim that WeWork represented a new model for coworking space that was going to revolutionize coworking from stodgy folks like Regus, a profitable competitor. At the time, WeWork charged less than Regus to use office space and WeWork had significantly higher unit operating costs, customer acquisition costs, higher churn, and a significantly riskier customer base.

I pointed out to their pitchman that they had lower unit revenue and far higher unit cost than their competitors. How could they make money?

They responded with more of the same balderdash. WeWork’s plan to overcome negative unit economics was to make it up on volume, as they grew faster and faster with additional investment.

Poppycock.

This reminds me of Paul McElroy in the old SNL skit, First Citywide Bank, who claims the bank makes it up on volume. Thus the old joke, “I lose money on every one I sell, but I make it up on volume.”

If your marginal profit per unit sold is negative, no amount of volume will help you be profitable. Taking investment to accelerate losses makes the situation worse.

Blitzscaling is taking in large amounts of venture capital for massive customer acquisition growth in a short period of time. Growing so fast, you can’t be ignored, and then basking in the glow of a sustainable, massively profitable business.

A Blitzscalable business must have positive unit economics so that scaling increases profits, over and above overhead expenses and marketing costs. In short, the net profit selling each unit accrues faster than your expenses. When this happens, your company becomes profitable and sustainable.

Over the past few years large amounts of venture capital have poured into negative unit economic businesses that tout “volume” as the solution to their woes. Unless those businesses have some monopolistic plan to dominate the industry and then jack up prices to alter the unit economics, they will fail.

Of course, they could be hiding a novel new technology that will disrupt industry cost structure to make the unit economics positive, but if they did, why aren’t they using that technology now?

For example, Uber analysts tout that the company may be profitable when driverless technology becomes broadly available. This begs the question why they’re just figuring that out now, after massive investment on a different thesis, but I digress.

Bottom line: when your unit economics are negative, the business is unsustainable and you are blitzfailing if you raise capital to dig your grave at an accelerated pace.

Instead, resourceful entrepreneurs should create disruptive innovation that dramatically lowers the cost to solve a customer’s problem or provide a new, novel service that generates massive consumer surplus that cannot be ignored.

If you choose the path of the resourceful entrepreneur, unit economics and the market will reward you handsomely.

Author’s Note: yes, I love old words like poppycock. So precise!

Five Things to Make Your Business #Coronable

After talking to entrepreneurs over the past two weeks, it seems most businesses are imploding or exploding, depending on how well their business model can adapt to a post-corona virus world. There are five general things you can do now to make your business coronable: survive and thrive in a viral world.

If you have a physical good, start selling online, leveraging Amazon, Shopify, etc. to make it easier for people to buy what you have. Elite Sweets (https://elitedonut .com/) makes a gluten free, keto-friendly donut that is delicious and good for you. The perfect donut to survive the apocalypse, and available directly online. The small coffee shops that usually stock their product are closed, but no fear, you can still enjoy a guiltless pleasure, delivered to your doorstep. Heck, you can even get a free website from downloading the Leia app (https://heyleia.com/) and their powerful AI will build an ecommerce business for you! Consumers are shifting their buying online, move with them now.
If you are a service, start figuring out how to position your product for social distancing using online tools. ZenYala (http://zenyala .com/) is a software suite to manage meetings and make them more productive. When Corona hit, the founder, Jacob Bernstein, quickly realized that his software made virtual meetings even more productive, and because it is designed for results and accountability, was a better way to organize workflow for virtual teams than other products like Slack and Microsoft Teams. He quickly pivoted and created a new brand, ExecuMeetings (preview at http://execumeetings .tilda.ws/) and is aggressively selling to companies desperate to keep productivity high in a corona world. Kanthaka (https://mykanthaka .com/ and in your app store as Kanthaka) is a marketplace where individuals can find highly vetted and certified personal trainers and book them to come to their home. When corona hit, they had a surge in bookings as gyms closed; however, as the need to isolate became more obvious, Sylvia Kampshoff, founder and CEO, quickly added an option for trainers to do virtual sessions, and providing free group sessions called “Mommy and Me” for kids and parents to enjoy from home for free, further raising awareness of her brand.
If you are a local business owner, begin no-contact delivery (drop and go). If you’re blessed to live in the State of Texas, companies like Favor (https://favordelivery.com/), will find and deliver anything to your home. Local businesses can partner with Favor to deliver office supplies, hand sanitizer, and pretty much anything. Consumers can go to favor and ask for anything too, including toilet paper! For those of you who have to suffer living outside of Texas, you will need to hire and locate your own delivery people, or do it yourself. There are some new startups like GoShare (https://www.goshare.co/) that are last-mile delivery on demand and will do no contact delivery. Check who does delivery in your area, and bridge that last mile to the customer!
Learn to nano-target your customers with mobile ads. People will be spending a lot more time on their phones, so learn how to target your ad spend to effectively reach them. Companies like Datum (https://datumxy.com/) can specifically target individuals who are your customers or fit a very specific customer profile and make sure your ads only appear on their phones. For example, if you were a coffee shop owner, you could have Datum only target persons who visit coffee shops daily and live within a two mile radius of your shop. That highly targeted group would make a great audience to launch your new coffee by bike service, eh? The best part of nano-targeting is it’s FAR less expensive than buying bulk ads on Facebook, etc. The good news is that companies like Datum market across all app platforms, so they save you money and keep you in relevant digital locations for your customer base.
Get cash. We don’t know how long this will last, so make sure that you tap all your lines of credit, raise new equity, sell assets you don’t need, etc. and please do so now. Get your security deposit back from your landlord with Otso (https://otso.io/otso-for-tenants/). Companies that weather storms are those that have adequate reserves to keep employees and suppliers paid so that your business can keep selling through the worst of times.
So, take a deep breath, you’ve got this. Remember, the best businesses in history were started in recessions/depressions. This is the time that heroes are made.

Good luck out there, and please post any suggestions you have on becoming coranable in our comment section.

What Entrepreneurs Really Need (and It Isn’t Funding)

Avoid the trap of “I believe, therefore I am right”

I recently saw data from Y Combinator comparing what founders consider their biggest obstacle, then contrasting that with a list of the things proven to grow companies fast (what you really need). To be clear, high growth is all that matters when it comes to proving product market fit. Nothing says “people need our stuff” like hoards falling all over themselves to obtain your product/service.

What you think holds you back:
1. Funding (from investors)
2. Bug fix (make it work better)
3. Design (make it easier to use and pretty)

What actually holds you back:
1. Launch (get product to market)
2. Design (make it easy use and pretty)
3. Pricing (create consumer surplus)

Remember, high growth covers a multitude of sins.

Short on cash? Sell more.
Product buggy? Get code fixes to market now.

Alternatively, Failory did a study that patterned start up data to identify why some fail and some succeed. The 4 reasons for failure generally fell into four categories:

Incompetence – lack of planning
Inexperience – lack of product know-how
Inexperience – lack of managerial skills
Personal problems – you’re a hot mess.

The worst thing you can do, is say to yourself, “I believe, therefore I am right.”

Note, three of these categories are, by definition, items that founders may lack and fall into the false premise, “I believe, therefore I am right.”

We see many founders who fail to identify that they are in one of these categories. Successful founders know that they are always one or more of these, and fill their gaps by building a diverse team that is united and motivated around common goals and vision. It takes humility to assume you know nothing, and build a team with the skills to succeed. And humility is what you really need.

Humility will help you get MVP to market faster because you know it will never be perfect. Humility will make the product better because you will not assume you know what the customer wants and will listen to them. Humility will help you to identify who you need to execute your vision, and inspire them to follow you, especially when times are tough.

In short, develop your company with humility, so you can grow with confidence.

Is Your Start-Up Struggling for Sales?

The more non-price barriers disappear, the more customers will say yes.

Struggling for sales? One of the things entrepreneurs often don’t consider is the price customers actually pay when purchasing. While price is obvious, there are several less obvious costs to your customer when they acquire a new, shiny thing. Economists call these non-price expenses switching costs and categorize them into three buckets:

Time cost
Effort cost
Psychological cost

Here are a few examples of these costs you need to consider:

Training costs required in order to fully use a new product or service, for both individuals and companies
Disposal costs related to their current product or service, and perhaps even the future cost of disposing of your product or service
Mental cost of a purchase, time to complete a transaction, like when you have to click ten times and fill-in redundant or unnecessary information to make an online purchase
Integration costs with current business systems or consumer lifestyle, such as legacy database usage or accessing personal libraries online in other applications
Emotional costs related to any change, such as losing a friendship with a rival sales person, or parting with another product where there exists sentimental value to the customer
Finding cost if your product is hidden in the back of a store, or on a shelf top

If you want someone to purchase new product or service, you need to help the customer reduce or eliminate as many of these costs as possible. For example, Amazon.com introduced one click purchasing precisely because it lowers the time, effort, and psychological cost of an online purchase decision. They made it easy to say yes.

You can make it easy to say yes too. Get together with your team, your family, and friends and brainstorm ways you can automate training, disposal, integration, and add features to the purchasing process to eliminate any form of stress to the person making the purchase decision.

For example, if you’re replacing a legacy product that is bulky, providing a free disposal service for the old unit can make saying yes easier. For B2B SaaS, perhaps making the integration free or one-click automated to the customer. You get the idea?

The more these non-price barriers disappear, the more customers will say yes.

Do you have any pro-tips for entrepreneurs on lowering switching costs? Feel free to share your ideas and creative tips in the comment section.

3 Economic Rules Every Crypto Start Up Must Obey

There’s a ton of people infusing cryptocurrency and blockchain into traditional businesses and asset classes claiming to have some revolutionary breakthrough when, in fact, the business value proposition is nothing more than, well, bananas.

We see a lot of crypto start-up ideas that go something like this:

“We’d like to put bananas on the block chain and trade them with utility tokens. It will revolutionize produce sales globally. Our pre-money valuation for the seed round is 2 trillion dollars.”

I’ve taken some editorial license here, but you get the idea. There’s a ton of people infusing cryptocurrency and blockchain into traditional businesses and asset classes claiming to have some revolutionary breakthrough when, in fact, the business value proposition is nothing more than, well, bananas.

I thought I’d take the time to put down some basic “cryptonomic” rules to help would-be, block chain titans evaluate if their idea is gold or goop. It all begins with Ronald Coase at the University of Chicago, Laureate for the 1991 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (yes, it does have a cool sounding official name).

In 1937 (yeah, it takes that long to win the Nobel prize), Coase wrote a paper called the Nature of the Firm that revealed the fact that transaction costs are almost always material and do shape economic transactions. For example, if it takes too many clicks of the mouse to buy something online (a non-monetary transaction cost of your time), you’ll just go buy something on another website. Transaction costs, while not always monetary, affect our willingness to buy, sell, and engage in a market.

Why does this matter to crypto? Because what crypto and blockchain do, precisely, is reduce transaction costs for certain economic activities. For example, bitcoin makes it possible to transfer money between parties without fees, or oversight from your bank, government, etc. That transaction cost can be high (prison) if you’re a drug trafficker or engaging in some other illicit activity. That is why so much illegal activity is transacted using virtual currencies. They lower the transaction cost of the exchange sufficiently to justify the risk of volatility inherent in virtual currencies. I’m not advocating using virtual currency for illegal activity, I’m just saying that it happens for well-understood economic reason.

Overall, bitcoin is probably the lowest transaction cost method to transfer “money” securely to anyone, anywhere, for any reason, and at any time.

This leads us to crypto start up rule #1 – the use of crypto or blockchain must lower transaction costs for the economic activity it underwrites.

If you’re not actually making it easier to transact an economic activity using your business plan, then you’re not creating consumer surplus above traditional market activities and no one will adopt your platform after the initial hype wears off.

The second rule of crypto start ups is due to a government body that was created as an indirect result of Ronald Coase and his pioneering work on transaction costs: the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Some asset transactions require government oversight to even the playing field in public market transactions. This is because asymmetric information (when one party has inside information about the value of something) leads to fraudsters dumpling worthless assets on less-knowledgeable persons. If this insider trading was allowed, it would impose a major transaction cost on public markets from a fundamental lack of trust between two parties in any asset exchange.

To remedy this, the SEC regulates certain asset classes that are publicly traded to ensure that all information provided from insiders with non-public information about an asset, and have control over that asset, share that information with all market participants simultaneously and do not manipulate markets to their advantage. If you try to create an asset for public trade, and then benefit from trading it with inside information, you will go to jail.

This is rule #2: Don’t go to prison. Sounds simple, but for some crypto folks, this is a difficult idea to master. If you intend to create an exchange for your crypto tokens where they can be held, bought and sold, then you’re business should be regulated by the SEC and you need to hire a regulatory attorney who specializes in crypto assets and make sure that you’re idea is lawful with appropriate disclosures and oversight. This isn’t cheap to do, but going to prison is definitely more expensive.

Hmm, does that mean prison is a transaction cost of criminal activity? You bet it is!

Now, on to rule number three.

Blockchain is a secure way to share information, plain and simple. If you want to use it for a business purpose, then by so doing it needs to be a transaction where securely sharing information on the blockchain lowers transaction costs sufficiently to act as an incentive to increase underlying economic activity . For example, putting banana information on the blockchain doesn’t really help a person buying them at their local Target store get better information in a manner that is more convenient than the sign at the store; however, securely transmitting point of agricultural origin data may be helpful to Target if they have to certify to their shoppers that the banana is organic and their sign is accurate.

To simplify, rule number three is that blockchain should only be used when it lowers transaction costs to securely share and maintain information critical to the underlying economic exchange.

Now, if you’re a crypto entrepreneur, you still have to abide by the basic rules of good startups (link shamelessly inserted if you missed it before). So don’t think that if you do merely these three things, you’re going to be the next Winklevoss twins and the living is easy. Getting any startup off the ground is still a knife fight in an alley with Andre the Giant and he has a gun (as we often say at Sputnik ATX).

These are just economic realities that any crypto start-up will ultimately have to face, so better to know up front and assess if your idea has merit before you push your life savings into the next banana-crypto debacle.

In summary:

Rule 1: The use of crypto or blockchain must lower transaction costs for the economic activity it underwrites.

Rule 2: Don’t go to prison, hire a regulatory attorney and obey the law.

Rule 3: Blockchain should only be used when it lowers transaction costs to securely share and maintain information critical to the underlying economic exchange.

No go out and make Ronald Coase proud: start lowering those transaction costs crypto entrepreneurs!

What Every #Bitcoin Investor Should Learn From a Dictator Named “Awesome”

Bitcoin investors should learn a lesson from Awesome, a dictator who lost his life introducing the one of the world’s first fiat currencies

Bitcoin investors should learn a lesson from Awesome, a dictator who lost his life introducing the one of the world’s first fiat currencies. A fiat currency is a form of money to exchange goods and services that has no intrinsic value. For example, a gold coin is not a fiat currency, because it is made of gold, something that has value in, and of, itself. Paper currency, like the US Dollar, is a fiat currency because the note has no intrinsic value.

Bitcoin has a lot in common with early fiat currencies, so let’s take a second to review fiat currency and take a quick history lesson from one of its early adopters.

First off, how does fiat currency get its value? Fiat currency has value when:
1. It has limited supply
2. People believe it has value
3. It can be easily transferred to facilitate economic transactions

Right now, Bitcoin meets all three of these standards. There is limited supply due to its unique block-chain encryption standards, people believe it has value from the increasing rate of exchange to the dollar, and it can be transferred easily to facilitate economic transactions using online Bitcoin wallets. So how did fiat currencies get started and what can we learn from these early currencies about the future of Bitcoin?

In 1294 Gaykhatu (literally, “Awesome” in Mongolian) was the leader of one Hoard of Mongols ruling over what is now Iran, Iraq and Southwest Asia. Taking his name a little too literally, Awesome decided that he needed fiat currency like that introduced by his distant cousin Kublai in China.

Awesome was in the middle of a crippling drought in his territory, and after several years of expending all of the royal treasury building a seriously sweet palace (still unfinished, of course), he was broke. When he heard that Kublai was just printing his own money, he saw his path to riches and summoned the Ambassador from Kublai’s court, demanding to see the new paper currency.

So smitten with this idea, Awesome copied the idea and printed his own money. He liked the notes printed by Kublai so much, he even copied the Chinese characters on them. He demanded that everyone accept these new notes as currency. However; Awesome had competing currencies. He didn’t think about confiscating all the gold and silver currency in circulation and soon discovered that no one wanted his paper money (Kublai at was smart enough to make some of his Chao out of copper to help with the perception of value).

Awesome also launched his new currency during the worst cattle plague his realm had ever encountered, and printing new money at such a tumultuous economic event was just poor form. Needless to say, no one thought Awesome was awesome. Riots and violence broke out around his kingdom.

Topping it off, Awesome himself emptied out his treasury of the notes he printed for himself, buying lavish materials for his palace from merchants foolish enough to accept his worthless piles of paper. Awesome was bankrupt, his markets frozen from the lack of a credible medium of exchange.

In the end, he was pelted with all manner of foul, medieval produce without refrigeration, and openly mocked over the irony of his increasingly worthless name. His cousin was so angry, he didn’t stop there, he killed Awesome by strangulation with a bowstring and took over his kingdom. Yeah, that ended badly.

So, what does this have to do with Bitcoin? Bitcoin has value only from the drug dealers, money launderers, illegitimate governments, and black market moguls who see Bitcoin as a valuable exchange to conceal their dirty doings. Like Awesome, these neer-do-wells created a virtual currency that can’t be traced to support their palace building.

And like Awesome, this party will crash back down to earth. There are two primary structural problems to Bitcoin that will undermine its ability to satisfy all three standards for a fiat currency.

First, quantum computing stands to make any encryption 100% worthless in the next ten years. We are rapidly approaching a future where there will be no secrets stored on computers, because no computer can encrypt itself sufficiently to prevent a quantum computer from hacking any and all methods designed to protect it, end of story. This means that the encryption protecting Bitcoin itself, Bitcoin wallets, and any and all servers that are used to process and secure its ownership rights, will all be broken and worthless. This destroys the fundamental premise of value, to say the least. Goodbye limited supply!

Second, governments can block people from using Bitcoin as a measure of exchange. Why would they do this? Because Iran, North Korea, drug cartels, tax evaders, and money launderers are using Bitcoin to evade sanctions, bank laws, taxes, and pretty much violate every lawful economic law on the books. They are already starting to do so, in China and South Korea, and the impact of this on Bitcoin value is just beginning.

At the end of Bitcoin, no governments will allow an asset class that has a primary purpose to undermine the faith of their regulated, lawful financial system and allow untraceable and untaxable exchanges of value between two parties. In short, all these ICOs are a threat to the established global financial system, so the governments who created this system will not permit Bitcoin to stand. You can’t fight city hall, let alone every major world government.

When these governments begin to go to war against crypto-currencies in earnest, belief that Bitcoin has value will plummet, the ability to use it to exchange goods and services will evaporate, and its demise will be the latest chapter in fiat currency collapse. When this happens, I hope the Winklevoss twins have good security. I’d hate to see them go the way of Awesome.

Joe Merrill is an Austin-Texas based venture capitalist at Sputnik ATX and Linden Ventures. Follow his blog at http://www.econtrepreneur.com or on Twitter @Austin_VC

Tax Facts – What Government Doesn’t Want You to Know

Warning: this blog post is about taxes. Taxes are an inherently boring topic, but useful if you want to understand something that will seriously impact your life. So, please read on if you want to learn the economics of what takes 40%-50% of your income. Otherwise, stop here and remain blissfully unaware.

There is a lot in the press these days complaining about the tax cut package passed by congress and signed by the President. Almost universally, the comments in the mainstream media have an agenda that appears to be almost perfectly tailored for the echo chamber created on each side of the aisle for the major news outlets’ political sponsors. However, a careful scrutiny of the history of US tax law (and tax rates) paints a very different picture of how these tax cuts will impact the United States insofar as its impact on the tax base and the demand-side of the economy.

While US tax law goes back to the very founding of the Republic and the tariff system created by Congress to fund it, personal income tax is a relatively new idea. Although there was a brief period from 1861 to 1872 where a personal income tax existed to help pay for the civil war, it wasn’t until the 16th Amendment was passed in 1913 that the government actually got the right to tax our incomes for the first time.

From 1913 until 1931 at the start of the great depression, the federal tax rate hovered at around 1.1% for the poorest families and while progressive (meaning wealthier families paid more than this), it was not punitive for rich people either, with 7% as the top bracket for people earning over $12mm a year in today’s dollars (adjusted for inflation).

However, from 1932 to 1941, Hoover and FDR had tax policies that, by any survey of the most liberal-minded economists, had disastrous results on the economy. Tax revenue in 1931 was 834mm USD. In June of 1932, Hoover decided that the worsening economy required government to start collecting more taxes to balance the budget. Hoover almost tripled the top rate from 25% to 63%, and the low rate increased from 1.1% to 4%.

The amazing result was that tax revenue fell from $834mm to $427mm in 1932. Why? Well, when you take money from people’s pockets, they have less to spend. Less spending results in less profits, and lower corporate tax collections (if companies are losing money, they don’t have profits to tax). This fell further by 1933, with a mere $353mm in taxes collected as the economy continued to shrink and the government took more and more of the pie for itself (a concept economists call crowding out). FDR raised them up to 76% when he took office (he raised the top rates to 76% by 1936) and unemployment spiked to 20%. By 1937, FDR realized that his efforts to spend money to lower unemployment were only partially successful. Unemployment was down to 15% but the government was spending huge amounts of money and creating large debts in the process.

So why did this happen? This has to do with the impact of taxes on the overall economy and the velocity of money. Since the government can only tax profits on money in circulation, the speed with which money moves around between firms in an economy have a major impact on taxes. For example, if our economy only had four companies, and each company has $100 a year in profit on $200 in sales, then the economy would have $800 in sales, and $400 in profit to share. However, if the government taxes 50% of that profit, there is $200 less money for the companies to share with the economy, and the economy will shrink. Now, think about how many times a single dollar is exchanged in a year between consumers and companies, and how each time the dollar is exchanged it creates a taxable event. More exchanges equals more taxes.

So if the government raises taxes very high, they reduce the number of taxable exchanges by the amount they took in taxes multiplied by the number of times those dollars would have been spent in a transaction. In short, the government is taking money so that it can’t be spent and then taxed. While I’m not calling for the abolition of taxes so that we’ll have economic stimulus, it is a good idea to understand that when taxes go up, the economy goes down by a multiple of that tax collected.

However, at the time of these tax increases during the great depression, some Keynesian economists (those who believe that government expenditure is key to stimulating the economy) were shocked because these New Deal tax increases were increasing unemployment and New Deal spending wasn’t improving the economy to compensate.

Government spending was just helping us to limp along while incurring huge debts in the process since demand for government program spending far outstripped taxes collected. Governments are like us, if they borrow a lot of money today, they will need more income in the future to pay off the debt and maintain their standard of living. Sadly for us, when governments need to increase their income, they must raise taxes (taxes are the only way they get money legitimately). So FDR decided to raise taxes again and again. By 1940, the upper rate for wage earners was 94% for upper income earners, and 23% for anyone earning more than $500 a year. Needless to say, the economy was so bad by this point, it took World War II to force dramatic changes in production and labor and end the depression. At the end of WWII, Truman decided to start cutting government spending and lower taxes beginning in 1945. Economists complained at the time that Truman was going to guarantee another depression, after all government spending is what they believed saved them from the depression getting worse, right? Actually, Truman’s decision restored accountability in the economy and the nation grew to full employment in very short order. Needless to say, the corporate tax rate was dropped from 90% to 38%, providing companies plenty of additional cash to grow and hire new workers. In a recent survey, 2/3 of all economists agree that FDRs policies made the great depression worse and enabled it to stick around for a long time.

What does that mean for us today? Well, during the Obama administration taxes went up, and so did regulation (a quiet form of taxation because it raises the cost of doing business). So despite the Federal Reserve pumping unprecidented amounts of money into the economy through quantitative easing, the velocity of money (over 10 before Obama was elected) fell to just over 5 when he left office.

So, if we are to fix this, we need to have policies that would lower taxes and lower regulation to a sensible level. Both would be good ideas, if your goal is to grow the US economy. So when I hear people opposed to both of these, regardless of their intentions, we need to recognize that they are advocating policies that hurt the financial future of America’s families.

That is why it is all the more important to have sensible people in government who can not only enact policies that help working class families, but are able to explain these policies in a way that unites the American people behind them. Alas, that last part is what both parties appear to be lacking these days: leadership.

Note: some nut job out there may construe (how, I don’t know) this article as some sort of tax advice and then think about suing me. I’m not a tax adviser, this is not tax advice, so don’t make any tax decisions from my article. And yes, this is proof positive that attorney’s can ruin our lives.

Public Goods: What a US #Startup can Learn From #China Sidewalks of Death

The greatest threat to modern China comes not from foreign invasion, but in the form of bicycles, millions of bicycles.

Chairman Xi Jinping take notice, the greatest threat to China is not from America, it is from the bazillion bicycles you’ve permitted to infest your sidewalks. Bicycles now cover pretty much every vacant piece of concrete and asphalt from Beijing to Urumqi. What am I talking about? The billion or so bike share start-ups that are now brilliantly exploiting what every entrepreneur should know about: public goods.

Look around anywhere in China lately and you’ll quickly see scads of bike-share bikes everywhere. There are ten or so leading companies, each with its own distinctive paint scheme and bike design. These bike services allow anyone to make either a large, one-time upfront payment (say $500 for life-time usage rights) or to make monthly subscription payments, like $20 a month, for unlimited use of that companies bikes. After subscribing or becoming a member, the user can take any bike from that company that they find, from any location, and ride it to wherever they want, then just leave it there. It is bikes on demand.

The bikes automatically lock themselves, and can be opened by taking a picture of the bike’s individual ID tag using the bike sharing application on their phone. To make the service convenient, the bikes are ubiquitous and deposited along almost every street, all over town. Their presence on sidewalks, now impassable, and other areas around the city have become a blight and a danger (tell me about it, I had to jog in the street sometimes to avoid both stationary and moving bikes that formed a dynamic death maze on the sidewalk).

However sketchy to pedestrians, this business model is proving to be very popular in the smog and traffic-choked cities of the middle kingdom. In cities where parking is very hard to find and the sheer number of cars causes massive disruption akin to the plagues of Egypt, bike sharing solves an important human need for cheap and reliable local transportation. And in that success lies a powerful lesson for the eagle-eyed entrepreneur: leverage public goods to get a free lunch.

Public goods are things that we commonly share, like roads, sidewalks and schools. They are typically free to use for the public. A free asset to leverage is more than just nice for start-ups that can utilize these public goods rather than invest in the same resource for themselves, often at very great expense. In the case of China’s bike menace, the public good is the sidewalks all around town where their bikes can be parked. If the bike start-ups had to build their own bike parking lots across the entire city, the whole venture would be too cost prohibitive. By leveraging a public good, they dramatically lower their cost structure and have a viable path to market.

Other start-ups can learn from this model. For example, if you’re starting a night school for adult learners, why build a school building and invest a lot in capital expenditure when you could just lease unused classrooms at night from your local school district? Using that public good is a lot cheaper for you to get started, even if you have to pay a nominal fee for it.

Another good example of this is the interstate highway system. This public good is a boon to car manufacturers and transportation companies that don’t have to bear the full cost of their complimentary asset. So if you can find a novel way to use public goods to solve a social problem, you could be on to the next big thing.

Start-ups that have innovative ways to discover and use public goods save capital that can be redeployed into more productive, value-creating work.

Just please remember, don’t block the sidewalks. Runners need space too.