Anil Dash

There's been a recent re-emergence of the perennial tech industry conversation about how the venture capital industry can stop excluding women from both joining VC firms and from having their businesses funded by VCs. Fred Wilson covered some specifics about what it would take to make an incubator for women-run startups, and ReadWriteWeb's Audrey Watters offered a broader overview of the declining participation of women in the tech industry.

But of course, this conversation comes up every year, and the people who haven't been excluded always say "The tech industry's a meritocracy! Anybody who wants to participate isn't barred from doing so!" So I thought it'd be useful to illustrate exactly how exclusion happens — not through a malicious, deliberate act, but through men not realizing they're doing it.

Here's a Quora question thread asking how one could get to meet ubiquitous tech investor Ron Conway. Quora's heavily populated with tech industry insiders, including many with extensive experience in venture capital. The answer I've linked to there is the consensus favorite, with an answer that begins:

The best way to get a meeting with Ron and the SV Angel team is through referral. In fact, we haven't invested in any company without a referral from someone we know, ie, a fellow investor, an entrepreneur that we know, someone at a big co, etc.

I acknowledge that this is an imperfect filter and may not be the most equitable way, but like many investment firms, we receive a high volume of opportunities and it would be virtually impossible to speak to all the founders without some initial filter. Another filter is sector focus - for example, if someone referred an opportunity in consumer internet, that would be 'higher in the queue' than if the same person referred something in the biotech area.

(One analogy is the NFL draft. It would be virtually impossible to evaluate ALL players who want to play in the NFL - scouts usually look at the same players since the top prospects are known quantities and "diamonds in the rough" are found through word of mouth, ie, referrals. For example, Bill Belichick, head coach of the Patriots, is known to draft only college players that are referenced highly by college coaches that he knows. Sorry, I analogize everything to sports.)

Now, I'm privileged enough to have a lot of access, but just a few years ago, I certainly didn't have a social network that connected to Silicon Valley venture capitalists, despite having a relatively large network. And I still don't know the first thing about sports, so a sports analogy only emphasizes that I'm not part of the cultural assumptions baked into interactions with some parts of the VC world. So even somebody like me who's male, connected and willing to cross cultural barriers can't get in. And that reality isn't just accepted, it's known. Known well enough to be documented by others, in an industry where perception is as important as reality.

How It Works

The best answer for how to get access to the man who's arguably the most powerful angel investor in the tech industry is an example of an explicitly closed network that's illustrated with an implicitly closed analogy to a sport that women are prohibited from playing. "Hey, I'll fund anybody. I meet entrepreneurs in the ladies' restroom outside of screenings of Eat, Pray, Love. All are welcome."

I'm not maligning the person who wrote the answer on Quora — he's accurately describing reality. I'm not maligning Ron Conway — I don't think he intends to exclude. What I am maligning, explicitly is closed networks that, while arguably reducing the number of unqualified solicitations for funding, also serve as de facto mechanisms of exclusion. It's a broken, inefficient, short-sighted system.

Let's look at it like a usability problem, like a website with a front door that has more than 50% of visitors failing to complete the simple task of being able to join the site. Maybe one of the new wave of "super angels" is going to get enormously higher returns by simply ending the process of eliminating half of the potential successes out of the gate. Maybe not.

Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act, and among many observances was an event at the White House that was co-sponsored by the FCC and the Department of Commerce. There's a pretty good overview on the FCC blog and a great detailed review from the folks at Purple.

I was fortunate enough to participate, not merely representing Expert Labs but also as someone trying to articulate how innovations from the world of startups and web technology could really make an impact in making more areas of society truly accessible to all.

The analogy that I kept coming back to during the whole day of conversations at the White House and at the Department of Commerce's brainstorming session later in the day was that the ADA is famous for being the inspiration behind curb cuts, the accessible ramps we see on every sidewalk at every street corner. But curb cuts didn't just enable those who were in wheelchairs to get around more easily. They're also a major reason why a market exists today for Bugaboo or McLaren strollers. They're the reason that Samsonite suitcases 20 years ago didn't have wheels on them, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a piece of luggage today that doesn't have wheels. I'm not saying the highest purpose of the ADA was to enable people to buy thousand-dollar baby buggies, but making things accessible for all has the side benefit of yielding tremendous benefits (and, not incidentally, opening huge new markets for business) for everyone regardless of ability.

Ability Maps

Which leads to the specific request I have for my friends and associates who've got some time and tech talent on their hands: Ability Maps. One recurring theme from the advocates I talked with at the ADA anniversary event was that it's hard to know which physical places are truly accessible to people with various disabilities. Some municipalities have information about individual facilities like transit systems, but it can be hard to find or out of date, and even in the best cases often doesn't cover private businesses or shopping and recreational areas.

But we're in the middle of a huge revolution in location-based services like Foursquare, right? Isn't everyone from Facebook to Twitter to Gowalla clamoring for a way to distinguish themselves in the race for places?

Well, here's an idea: Let users of a service like Foursquare log in to a site and identify themselves by any accessibility concerns that they have. A user could log in with his social network identity, check a box that says he's visually impaired or has difficulty climbing stairs, and then give the site permission to log his check-ins to various venues. The terms of service could specify that no individual information would ever be shared, only aggregated data.

Once a few users had signed in and check-ins started to be recorded, it'd be possible to ask "Which venues in this area are popular amongst people who've identified themselves as blind?" If there's a restaurant with a disproportionate number of check-ins from blind diners, then odds are, they're doing a decent job of accommodation. Found a theme park that's popular with patrons who use a wheelchair? It'll probably be suitable for other folks on wheels, too.

In short, users label themselves with self-descriptive tags. Then they check in to venues as normal. The site that's tracking them aggregates their visited venues by tags, and allows maps (or simple search queries) by tags to show patterns or popular venues. Voila: An imperfect, but perfectly usable, map of the places that welcome people of all abilities. And nobody is individually trackable to the places that they hang out.

Does it already exist?

Interestingly, this sort of thing is very nearly possible right now. Twitter users can tag themselves on sites like WeFollow already. Foursquare's venue pages already show who has checked in lately, but a separate list could tell us about the self-identified traits of those who did. Our ThinkUp app (formerly ThinkTank) from Expert Labs does a great job of aggregating social networking messages on Twitter and Facebook; It could be part of the toolkit for this sort of thing, too.

But maybe we could go even simpler. If we find places that are accessible (or maybe ones that are inaccessible) we could just use hashtags as part of a shout when checking in to a venue. "I just ousted @somebody as the mayor of Starbucks on @foursquare!" could evolve into something far more powerful simply by becoming "I just ousted @somebody as the mayor of Starbucks on @foursquare! #wheelchair".

I'm certainly not expert enough to know what the hashtags should be, or all the ways that people could identify themselves appropriately in an ability-aware check-in aggregator. But we're definitely very close to a lightweight way of identifying and rewarding the places that allow everyone in, and making clear which places don't. It doesn't require any new regulations or onerous processes, just a simple set of conventions and some good word-of-mouth amongst those who want to make the world a more accessible place. And this sort of scrappy, rough-around-the-edges imperfect solution is the kind of thing that government just can't do very easily for itself. That makes it perfect for us to do for each other.

If you build it, I promise I can help bring it to the attention of the folks who regulate these sorts of things, and will shout from the rooftops about your new site and its ability maps. Got a promising start on this? Let me know and I'll help you make sure it succeeds.

In improvisational theater and comedy, one of the first rules of participation is allowing co-creation. Basically, instead of saying "No, wait!" you respond to your collaborators with "Yes, and..." to continue the conversation and start to create something great together.

That principle of collaborative and cumulative creation is a fundamental aspect of modern culture in general. Remixing, rebooting, remaking and re-imagining culture require a "Yes, and..." aesthetic. When a moment of online inspiration blossoms into a full-fledged meme, communities from 4Chan to YouTube are demonstrating their embrace of improvisational culture.

But this doesn't just apply to goofy web memes. This could be an interesting, even important aspect of how society and policy evolve as well.

Yes, and...

Take, for example, the recent Citizens United case at the Supreme Court. The ruling states, in effect, that companies can now spend an unlimited amount of their funds on political campaign ads for various candidates. People who prefer humans to corporations are, naturally, concerned about the pending completion of the corporate takeover of elections.

So, opponents of the decision are reacting as you'd expect, by trying to pass legislation to undo this damage to our democracy. But trying to roll back the clock on this sort of thing tends to get into the usual long, expensive, unproductive cultural-battle-masquerading-as-political-battle that makes so many of us get turned off by politics.

What could it look like in a "Yes, and...." culture, though? What if, while acknowledging that spending is not speech, we decide to forgo trying to roll back the law, and instead roll it forward? Yes, corporations can buy political advertisements, but what if any employee of the corporation could submit the content of the advertisement? The last video in before a TV station's programming deadline would be the one that went on the air, privileging those who are nimble with media, instead of just corporate officers.

Or if we struggle with Arizona's new law which allows police to detain suspected undocumented immigrants, instead of merely fighting to repeal the policy, we should extend it. Any legal resident or citizen of the United States who is wrongly detained by the police should get a free gun, perhaps one of those confiscated by the police. In that way, when we abridge the Fourth Amendment rights of someone, we make it up to them by supporting their Second Amendment rights. You want to protect the rights of Americans? Yes, and... we do too.

While the particular examples might be polarizing, the key principle is that you don't change culture by trying to stuff the cat back into the bag. I'm writing this up mostly as a reminder to myself, but hopefully some of you will find it useful, too.

Relatedly: What happens when vast numbers of social networking citizens find another law that they consider irrelevant? It's a million mixer march.

Been busy running around doing a bunch of fun stuff lately; Here's some videos with highlights!

The Personal Democracy Forum invited me to talk about what we've been learning at Expert labs, which I summarized in a talk called "Startup.gov" which talks about bringing startup-style principles to government.

Ignite NYC asked me to take five minutes to show twenty slides on any topic as part of Internet Week here in New York. I decided to try to defend the indefensible:

Finally, yesterday we finally announced our first public project at Activate, the work we've been doing to help Condé Nast launch Gourmet Live. Though we've just started to explain the concept to everyone, the fundamentals of an awesome new business and some truly impressive new technology are all laid out in the introductory video:

Phew! More on all of these projects as soon as I get a little bit of time to blog about them, but thanks also to everyone who came out to the internet Week interview and all the great folks I met at Blogging While Brown last weekend. Nothing's more inspiring than the talented people I'm lucky enough to meet at all of the various events I get to attend.

(And yes, as the videos make clear, I really do have a whole closet full of dark suits and pinkish-purple shirts.)