When Innovating Away Staleness (Notes from Nov 18 - Nov 24, 2019)

Entrenched. The longtime incumbents. When industry becomes too single-minded, others may start to notice. Each of these individuals from the podcast episodes are in very different industries - media/news, investing/venture, monetary policy system, and regulatory updating of provider-side healthcare. All very large, important systems that beget those that have lived the longest.Each of the guests, however, saw opportunities in how stale an industry had/has become and attempted to take advantage. Whether that's building something on their own directly (Jon Steinberg with Cheddar News Network) or indirectly (Gil Penchina with Flights.vc), they have a penchant for seeing innovation through. I loved hearing a few of them mention that it's nuts to have the incumbents stagnate over some of the most advanced couple of decades we've ever seen.I hope you enjoy the notes for how they structured the framework for the innovation, what opportunities they tried or came to realize, and which crazy people do you back.

• Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg), COO of Cheddar News Network (Launch Pad, Wharton XM)

• Large appetite for live news and sports, very few people had done any in 20-30 years
• Younger, faster, better as a business network Younger, diverse anchors & audience in their 20s, 30s, 40s vs 60s and older
• First round raised was $3mln, no big iron of typical broadcaster - different look and feel, same structural format for guest formats
• Former president of Buzzfeed (2010-2014), DailyMail after - CNBC and live production as the best production
• Lightspeed Capital friend who wanted to give him a first check - being part of a startup management team that's successful to go from there
• His first success was with Buzzfeed - played a role with many others, but combined his luck and effort to get the check
• Gave up 20% for the $3mil
• Showed up at the WeWork with Peter Gornstein, first partner and Chief Content Officer - looked at each other and "What now?"
• Bought computers, then what now? Looked for vendors for equipment and build set.
• Shot a 3min sizzle reel - shot sample video packages.
• Next, go live from 9-10am one hour a day, basically - then how to ramp it up to 3 hours and more
• Facebook Live launched, then they enabled the API so they could connect professional network equipment to it
• Carriage fees - ESPN gets several dollars for every cable subscriber Cheddar does advertisers and partnerships for their money and business
• Purchasing Ratemyprofessor, MTVU - college market and network
• Competitors are part of the network and counterparties still
• Runs all news and advertising for Altice (after being bought by Viacom)
• Gil Penchina (@gilpenchina), Founder at Flight.vc (20min VC 2/7/16)

• Note that this was the first day Harry had been to SF (meeting Jason Lemkin)
• Network of AngelList syndicates that covers a wide range of sectors, SaaS, security, geographies Biggest raise for syndicates to date - PayPal, LinkedIn, AngelList, Indiegogo - nominated for Angel of Year at Crunchys
• One of early engineers at eBay (100 employees to 15000, 8 years)
• Ran a spin-off of Wikipedia called Wikia - consumer content site, went to Fastly and angel investing
• Wanted to work with entrepreneurs to fund small checks to other entrepreneurs as a community of helping Didn't want to do the full-time thing and thought he didn't want to focus on terms all the time
• At Flight, at time, they have 25 syndicate managers, 100+ volunteers to join the list - 2 groups - 1 analysis/learning companies, other sales/scouts 3000 backers and they ask them to help their companies, small tasks (AngelMob) to improve or give introductions and recruiting
• 5 years time - become a place for consumers to invest and save Expansion fund and new projects - Eric working on traditional venture fund for follow-on in angel investments
• 15 years ago, cost $10-15mln to get a website now and now it's $10 or free for URLs (Reed's blitz-scaling)
• Next sector to be disrupted - education (investment seed and B into Allschool)
• Start a syndicate - come up with thesis, going out and finding the deals (1 click to start), getting traction is hard
• Investment ethos - people that are actually crazy
• User of Nuzzel - best content for all of his friends
• Similarity of Happn to "Chance Encounters" from newspaper - hoping someone sees it and reacts
• Patrick Harker, President of Philadelphia Fed (Behind the Markets, Wharton XM)

• About 1/5 of jobs are at risk of being automated out - minorities and women in his district
• Creating and destroying jobs with automation - not necessarily ridding them, but training will be important
• Philadelphia Works - job training model for America, partnering with Comcast Typically, it's been "train and pray" - training and upskill, Comcast will reimburse out of the HR budget if successful
• Biggest surprise - outside the lens of monetary policy - breadth of what they do is stunning Largest collection of economic talent for all sorts of issues that aren't celebrated
• Pharma Drones, Veteran Health (16min on the News #14, 11/15/19)
• Venkat Mocherla - market dev on bio team, GP Julie Yoo, Joel de la Garza security operating partner a16z
• Pharmacy-patient relationship is highest volume/frequency interactions with healthcare system, owning node is good
• Lots of startups on logistics on pharm, last mile and full-stack delivery/pharm, nontraditional care centers
• Medicines/therapeutics work for patients, compliance is one of the biggest pains
• MediPlus, Whatsapp your prescription and you can get delivery within 24 hours
• Fastest regulatory arbitrage - where are opportunities - Zipline in Rwanda, for instance
• Antiquated for brick-and-mortar to innovate, but instead mobile-first and digital distribution
• Pills, small molecule drugs that are cheaper, chronic that can be easier
• Last mile delivery solution is cost - one-off deliveries to patients to homes has cost issues - more expensive All come to hub because of delivery efficiency
• Apple opened up health records service to vets with iPhones - give them access to their medical information regardless of provider
• VA is mired in healthcare challenges (came up with EHR)
• Knock on digital health industry - great for pilots but unable to scale so far, VA and NHS populations are one-go scale Not bastions of innovation but more captive population (1mil to 10-20mil)
• Last decade, provider-side heads down for data that's digitized but not interoperability Get at the data is not a given, Apple unleashing data to consumers is great but is there utility in it? (no imaging data, limited)
• Match data to patient, or doctors, scheduling appointments - technology for technology's sake isn't usually great
• Voice commands as being sent by light - specific microphone design that's vulnerable to the attack
• Area of research to use frequencies of energy to affect systems - light to mimic sound, for instance
• Advent of radio has been different research - cathode ray tubes, radio surveillance
• Enabling hardware manufacturers to guard against this - microfilms or filtering fraud and security