Eric's Newsletter -- April 2022

"Corporate social responsibility more broadly focuses on a company’s social impact on the world...However, these programs have one gap: they don’t directly address a company’s civic point of view. Today, the concept of “civics” is mostly thought of in the context of the individual, the citizen. This idea of understanding a company’s civic duty and responsibility is extremely nascent."

That's a quote from an interview with Clarice Chan, a former White House Presidential Innovation Fellow, about her new report: In Corporate Civic Responsibility: A New Paradigm for Companies to Advance Public Interest Technology. Chan has also worked in private sector tech, and her work addresses the way tech companies can responsibly work with the government to help fill the enormous gap in tech talent. Both the interview and the report are well worth reading. Below are some opportunities for anyone looking for a new role, a few interviews and pieces about my work, and a small collection of what I've been reading lately. I hope you'll find something of interest.[Hiring]

Mentava is building educational software to support gifted learners moving ahead at their own pace. They believe that "Ultimately, to accelerate education is to accelerate human achievement." They're looking for a Founding Engineer and a Founding Art Director.LTSE has several open roles, including a Staff Software Engineer and a Market Operations Senior AnalystTuring Labs, a platform that uses AI to guide and speed CPG product development is looking for an Enterprise Product Manager, an Enterprise Customer Success Manager, and a Senior Machine Learning Engineer.Puzzle, with a mission to rebuild the core financial data infrastructure for modern businesses, is hiring for these roles: Backend Mid/Senior staff,  Backend / API Engineer, and a Content Marketing position

 [Conversations and Coverage]This is how big companies can bust out of bureaucratic thinking3 Ways to Generate A Winning Business IdeaHow to make a new stock exchangeWhat I've Learnt: Mike Davies, Co-Founder & COO, Haystack[Readings]I Wouldn't Bet on the Kind of Democracy Big Business Is Selling Us"Today, some of the wealthiest Americans may be growing uncomfortable with the political destabilization that can accompany extreme inequality, and some may be anxious about the impact of climate change on their ability to generate profits. But this does not mean that they are eager to do the kinds of things that might actually address inequality or provide a meaningful way forward to a world less in danger of destroying itself."The Uselessness of Phenylephrine"Here in the US, if you go to the drugstore and purchase an over-the-counter nasal decongestant (as a single agent or a combination of drugs that includes a decongestant), you will in every single case be buying phenylephrine. Which does not work. It is found (according to the paper linked above) in 261 different OTC products, and it is a useless bait-and-switch on the consumer in every one of them."Why Is It So Hard to Buy Things That Work Well?"When it comes to buying products and services, at a personal level, most people I know who've checked the work of people they've hired for things like home renovation or accounting have found grievous errors in the work. Although it's possible to find people who don't do shoddy work, it's generally difficult for someone who isn't an expert in the field to determine if someone is going to do shoddy work in the field. You can try to get better quality by paying more, but once you get out of the very bottom end of the market, it's frequently unclear how to trade money for quality."What happened to Starbucks? How a progressive company lost its way"Since August, partners at more than 150 Starbucks stores in 27 states have filed petitions for union votes, mobilizing one of the fastest-moving union drives in U.S. history. But this isn’t a coal mine in Alabama, or a Nabisco plant, or an Amazon warehouse. This is Starbucks, the longtime bastion of progressive capitalism, the progenitor of groundbreaking people-first policies, the first company to offer stock to even part-time employees. (That’s why Starbucks calls its baristas “partners.”) Employees aren’t supposed to rise up against a company like this. Then again, coffee shops aren’t supposed to ask for your biometric data. How did Starbucks get to this point, and how much further can it go while retaining any shred of its original brand DNA?"A Very Wide-Ranging Chat with Jamelle Bouie"Lately I've been spending less time with Reconstruction proper, and more with the period of 1880 to 1900, which is this interregnum in the South where there exists a lot of possibilities of different configurations of politics and political contestation that could've taken this society any number of ways. And the thing that I'm trying to impress upon readers over time is that you should not think of these things as having been fixed [in place]. The fact that Jim Crow emerges at the turn of the century wasn't foreordained. Part of my writing here is coming to impress upon people that for as much as there is path dependence, for as much as there are structural constraints, it's also true that individual and collective action and choice matters, and that the things we do have an impact on where we end up."Sympathy for the Wordcel"There is a class of people – myself included – who are deeply, professionally invested in the technologies of writing, deliberation and representative democracy as the means for communication and control in society. The bedrock belief of this class of people, so fundamental that it need never be articulated, is that if people write/say the right words, and if enough other people read those words, and if democracy works unimpeded, the world will become better. Two years into the pandemic and seven years into Modern (Trump-inflected) Twitter, a malaise is creeping into The Discourse."