 Money in politics, so. Okay, let's start with a little quiz here. Who here makes tech for money, in exchange for money? I do, I am a professional programmer, that's what I do for my job. Who here makes tech at a tech company, a company that primarily sells tech? Okay, that's some two, not everyone does that. Who here uses products programmed at a tech company, say Twitter, Facebook, yeah, most of us do, almost everybody does. Who pays for products programmed at a tech company, maybe you run, give money to Amazon Web Services, maybe you donate through Patreon, something like that. Okay, so I wanted to say money a lot, and I wanted to say tech company a lot, because that's the theme of this talk. What I, the reason why I started like that is because we are all part, all of us who raised our hands, and I would venture that everyone in this room is part of an economy that involves these tech companies in exchanging money and wealth being created. Most of the wealth being created by tech companies these days, some of it is from the direct sale of products or services that people make. A lot of the very large amounts of wealth that are generated though are through what they call exit events. And what that means is that's a public offering on a stock market or a sale for a very large sum of money of a company. And the profits from that event are split between shareholders. And sometimes that's employees, often that involves some amount of early employees in a company, people who did make the products whose labor created whatever is being sold. But often it's mostly investors. And these are people who've given the people who make the products money in exchange for a fraction of the ownership. And we call very early investors in tech companies and other companies as well, venture capitalists because they're like cowboys in a Victorian novel. I don't know why it has something to do with the risk, that's why they call them venture capitalists. But most of the wealth generated in these exit events goes to venture capitalists. And I wanted to give that definition because I'm gonna be talking a lot about venture capital today. And I'm gonna use the abbreviation VC for that. And so those of us who work for tech companies who either before or after these events, our labor is going to grow those investments of VCs. And all those of us who give money to buy tech products that money is going to grow that investment. And that wealth that's generated is spent on a lot of things of all different types. Some of the things increasingly are political. They're political campaigns and races. And so what exactly are they being spent on? Well, nationally, a lot of it is going to Obama. That's a big story, tech money supporting Obama and other national candidates. Also lobbyists, like other industries, the tech industry has lobbyists. Nationally, the priorities of the tech industry are immigration, tax policy, cybersecurity, and net neutrality. I am not gonna talk about any of those things. Why am I not gonna talk about any of those things? Well, nobody talks about immigration in the tech industry. I would love to hear a talk or read about that by the way, if you do talk about that or write about that, please let me know. It's not something I'm gonna speak about today. Tax policy, tech companies want the same thing everyone else does, they want to not pay their taxes. Cyber security and net neutrality, there are other people who talk about this and talk about it far better than I do. Instead, what I'm gonna talk about is there's a trend of this money being spent at a lower level, below sort of national investment and at a state and even a smaller local level. And I wanna talk about that. I think these local actions have more impact on our day-to-day life and I believe we're gonna see more and more of them for reasons I'm gonna lay out. I will admit a bias towards California in the big area as Ash mentioned, I originally was gonna give this talk in LA, I am from California. I'm gonna justify it a couple ways. One is the services goes my hometown, so it's what I know. Another one is that a lot of the money made here does end up there is a lot of these big corporations that are funding this and a lot of the capitalists that venture capitalists that are funding the companies you work for here are based in California and the Bay Area. Tech hubs around the country are being built on these models, it's something you're seeing and we're all being priced out and moving up there up here so we're bringing it with us. So let's talk about what tech money cares about on a state and regional level. Does anyone, has anyone heard of this? Make it up here, yeah. Six Californians, so Six Californians is a plan to split California into six states, small government or whatever, totally unworkable, completely impractical. It's a ballot initiative in California, if you get enough signatures, you can put something on the ballot to be voted on. To get enough ballots saved in 2014, they collected a million, only 750K or so are valid, they're not trying for 2016. This is Tim Draper. Tim Draper is a billionaire venture capitalist. He is the son of another billionaire venture capitalist and he is the grandson of another billionaire venture capitalist and his son is also a venture capitalist. He is the founder of Draper Fisher Drivenson Associates. Some of his investments with that firm include Skype, Hotmail, Tesla, Baidu, which is the search engine in China, Twitch, and an unaccredited university named Dr. Amon San Mateo offering degrees in entrepreneurship. He is the sole founder of Six Californians, he's the only person who's paid any money for Six Californians and he's poured five million dollars in his own money into collecting those and just get on the ballot. At least in 2014, we don't know what the numbers are for the next round of trying to get on the ballot. So this is sort of like wacky rich guy, right? Like he's so entrenched. The only kind of issue this is in his university, like all this big and drapery university is being backed. And this would be significantly more like wacky if it was his first entrance into politics, which he just bought. So in 2005, the year 2000, turns out there was like another time I recently were, there was all this money floating around and people needed to know what to do. I think I might be from tech, but we don't talk about that. But in 2000, he put on the ballot a proposition for voters called Proposition 38. Prop 38 imposed from every student in the state $4,000 to attend private school with no regulation whatsoever. Privatizing both education. He spent a record breaking $20-40 billion of his own money on it, which is huge. It's far to the right of even the most ardent school choices when they call that sort of policy advocates. And it failed, it failed overwhelmingly, but not before its opponents spent another $30 million on it. This is still probably firmly in beanbag territory in terms of like viable political campaigns, except that at that point he was actually fresh office sit on the state board of education. So he had been appointed there by Governor Pete Wilson and his main qualifications of the state board of education was that he had fundraised for Governor Pete Wilson. And the board of education has a ton of power and they accept education policy. They adopt textbooks, they measure the outcomes, they decide what to measure and they decide whether to continue the policy. When Pete Wilson was replaced as governor in 1999, Tim Draper was not re-appointed. However, Reed Hastings was and you probably know him as the CEO of Netflix. He's also on the board of Facebook. He was on the board of Microsoft. And Hastings was already rich when he founded Netflix. He had a 750 million dollar acquisition early in the first film. He's a huge major, major, major democratic donor. And he was a special supporter of the newly elected Governor Greg Davis. He stayed on the board of education much longer than Draper. He was actually the president of the board of education in California. He actually had his own big bunny school bill on the ballot in 2000. Prop 39 was designed to reduce the threshold to pass local school bond measures from 66% to 55%. Passed super easily. Probably at least thanks in part two outspending its opponents six to one. They raised 31.5 million dollars to pass Prop 39. That was one million of that was Reed's own personal money. But it was in thanks in big part two weeks buddy in this camping co-chair, John Doar. John Doar is a billionaire partner at Kleiner Perkins Cowfield & Byers, who you've probably heard of in conjunction with the recent Ellen Powell sex discrimination case. Kleiner Perkins and Doar made their huge amount of wealth by investing in basically any tech product to ever use. Google, Amazon, AOL, Intuit, Sun, EA, Genentech, Zynga, Poppin, see I threw in some local play cards. So for Prop 39, Kleiner Perkins plus Doar ended up investing more than eight million dollars between the partners and Doar himself and the company. Made from investments in those companies, they invested in, they paid more than eight million to pass Prop 39. So like you have to start thinking about 31 million dollars, eight million from Kleiner Perkins, all that just to like lower the voting threshold for school bonds is kind of esoteric. It turns out that there's a proposition of Prop 39 that has nothing to do with bond funding. Charter schools are private organizations that can be non-profit or for-profit that run public schools and they're funded by taxpayer dollars per student. It's been a growing movement over the last 20 years to sort of grow and encourage these charter schools. That Prop 39 requires that public districts provide charter schools with space reasonably equivalent to those used by non-charter students in the district and they have to be authentically furnished and have to be in the area the charter school wants. The LA Unified School District has fulfilled this request via the controversial practice of co-location, which is literally putting the charter schools in the same building as non-charter schools that hasn't gone very well. And this culminated recently in a drawn out series of lawsuits against the LA Unified School District by the California Charter Schools Association. Where are we going with this? Well, guess who's on the board of the California Charter Schools Association? Reeve Hastings is on the board. He's also an investor in a spotter, which is California's largest charter provider. There's another couple of tech pieces on that board. He's on the board of KIP, which is a massive nationwide charter network. The CEO of Viacom and the former director of Bain Capital, which has a very big tech investment arm and is funded optimistically run for the way LinkedIn are on the board of KIP as well. Hastings is also on the board and a major investor in Rocket, the Rocket Ship K-5 charter group. They're known for their aggressive growth. They actually have their own real estate company to buy land to build new schools on. And this is a really tech heavy charter network. They're former CEO, John Tanner's, which from the first boom, they've got a ton of tech investors, including the CFO of Skype, Sheryl Sandwork from Facebook, Arthur Rock, who's a legendary venture VC, who invested in Fairchild Semi, Apple and Intel. Metlo Ventures, who invested in Uber and Warby Parker. Excel Partners, who's funded Etsy and Dropbox. Benchmark Capital, who have funded among many others Snapchat, Instagram and Heel. And then the aforementioned Clenor Perkins and John Doar are all in on Rocket Ship for more than a billion dollars. And that's a lot of tech people, right? It's a lot of tech money that's going from those companies. And in fact, there's a ton of tech money in the charter movement. It's kind of everywhere you look. Lauren Powell Jobs, who's Steve Jobs Widow, too much of her philanthropy that's been sort of lauded since his death, has been to charter schools via her Emerson's Lend of Education Fund. Jeff Bezos' family and Paul Allen have given a lot of money in Washington to establish charter schools. Mark Zuckerberg's million dollar donation to Newark schools was focused entirely on charter schools. And here in Oregon, Stanford Children, which is a long-standing advocacy group, in the past few years, has taken on a bunch of VCs and write and finish the founder of Survey Monkey and pivoted to focus on school reform. So what are they spending all that money on these charter schools? Well, as sort of state initiatives that allow charter sovereignty in the past, they started to turn it from state to local governments and therefore in just an unprecedented amount of dollars into school board elections, local school board elections. In 2012, $185,000 went from the Tech Fund of the Washington Committees to school board elections. $150,000 in 2014. West Country Crafts to County, which is a county in the East Bay of the Bay area, saw $350,000 in 2014 in their school board election. And this is even going farther afield. We saw $285,000 in the Minneapolis School Board Race last year from our African friends. It's happening in New Jersey, it's happening in New Orleans, it's happening all over the country. And this is really an order of magnitude over the normal amount of money you're seeing in a school board race. So this is a new thing and it's a lot of money going into relatively small elections. So like, why? Well, sort of every day, he says a couple quotes here that explains why they spend this money. And if you ask what's wrong with school districts, this is sort of an answer again. He says the fundamental problem with school districts is that they don't get to control their boards. The importance of the tourist movement is to evolve America from a system where governance is constantly changing. So if you allow me to paraphrase, what's wrong with school districts? It's definitely their democratically elected school boards, right? And one stated outward goal of the charter school movement is to shrink school board power. And this is where the opposition to church generally happens at the school board level, right? So like, what? That isn't really, I'm being a bit of a toddler here to answer a lie question for another why, but why, right? So they're doing this to further the charter school movement, but why is the tech money so invested in the charter school movement? And so this second quote, I think, is pretty instructive to that. Hastings says the school district still exists in New Orleans, which famously has not all chartered, I believe, since 2012, bringing to town more and more charter school networks. Sort of like a chamber of commerce would to develop business, I hope will become a long-term model for great education. So the thing about charter schools is that they're really heavy advocates of something called blended learning. And that's classroom time backed up like a peer-based instruction. And in fact, there are charter school networks, including starting in Xamarin, that are entirely online, entirely online schooling. It's a ton of online work. That requires a lot of software. And there's a new sector called EdTech that's been growing hugely, especially K-12 in the last four years, that's focused around providing the software. So this is stuff like online classes, apps to drill for tests, classroom management, things like that. This is big money stuff. Dreambox, which is an online rough education app, was recently bought for eight figures by Reed Hastings and John Doar, and now used in all rocket ship schools. The former CEO of Rocket Ship Left to develop an app that's now used in schools. The founder of Camp Left to head an EdTech company. There are now VC firms that focus only on EdTech, and there are multiple EdTech accelerators. There are stuff that are focused only on K-12 EdTech that are building companies to build software to sell to these schools. The size of the K-12 market is projected to be over a hundred billion dollars for the peak for EdTech. So that's huge. It's a pretty huge market opportunity, right? And there are definitely challenges of investing in EdTech. So this quote is from Mark Andreessen, who's famous for building Netscape, and then for investing in many, many companies, and for contemplating on Twitter. He says, I wouldn't want to back a business that's selling to public schools or characterized by public financing. Unions are about to run institutions. Those institutions are incredibly hostile to change. Now, what I think is important to point out what this quote is, that Mark Andreessen does invest in EdTech. He's not saying he wouldn't invest in EdTech. He's saying that certain things need to change to make that market more favorable to companies that he invests in. And that's happening. Some of that's happening via changing public schools the way they can sort of the way as we can see them exist so we can change how they procure things. Another interesting trend is bypassing schools entirely. You go to parents and students directly. And these products are almost always offered for free, right? And something we know is that if you have a free product, it's not the app itself isn't the product. It's the user's data, right? And so having some measure of sway over regulations about student data could be really valuable if you are building and investing in companies that do that. And there's a really good piece. I feel like there's like a minimum one model view culture shout out per talk, but there's a really good piece in model view culture by Jesse Irwin talking about surveillance in EdTech and that being a new and lucrative model. Okay, so what? So I put this slide in here because I wanna cut off a conversation that I'm not that interested in having after this talk, which is that I'm sure I don't really wanna hear about how your niece is in this charter and it's amazing or your cousin to teach for American it changed their lives. I don't dispute that, right? Technology in the classroom is not inherently bad. And I think the charter school argument is actually really complex. And I don't wanna imply that the two million students currently in American charter schools are diluted or that and their parents are as well or that the admins and educators who work at those schools and work very, very hard and those schools are evil or scheming for profit. However, what we have here is a private infrastructure being built under our noses by people who are publicly advocating for less democratic processes in order to serve their own economic interests. And that bothers me. I think it should probably bother you too, right? Public schooling is one of the foundations of our democracy and has been as long as our democracy has been conceived. And whether you agree or disagree with school reform our ability to have that conversation at all is being usurped. And it's being usurped with our own labor with money we're generating, right? As tech workers, those of us who do work in tech. I think that's disturbing in and of itself. And there's something else that we know about tech and tech companies. That is that they imitate each other. You know, you get, you go from Uber to having Uber lift in sidecar. Sometimes they imitate and improve on each other. So you had a MySpace and now you have a Facebook. And so I wanna point out at the end of this talk a model where I see this same pattern being applied again. Does anyone know who this is? Okay, see this, I know this is an Oregon audience. This is Ron Conway. And if we were in San Francisco, people would know who he is. Ron Conway is an enormously prolific angel investor. And he's invested, he made early investments in Airbnb, in Google, in PayPal, in Twitter, in Zynga, in Facebook, in BuzzFeed, Reddit, Pinterest, Mint, Square, over 200 and 650. I'm sorry, other tech companies. You have interacted with a Ron Conway investment today. I'm almost sure of it in some way. This is his most impressive investment to date. This city and entire political apparatus of San Francisco. And I'm not exaggerating by this. He paid to have our mayor elected and paid to have seven members of our 12 board of supervisors elected. This is not a secret. This isn't me being tinfoil hat. This is all very public record and a thing that's happened out in the open. He's used his sway to enact laws that are favorable to companies he invests in the Twitter, Taxbaker, the Airbnb, short-term rental lobbying, two examples. He's also set up a lot of public-private partnerships which him and Ed Lee, who's his sort of, I think they've even said protege before, are really famous for with the school system and with notably for this talk, the SFPD. Why that? Well, he has a pet cause, Ron Conway does. And in response to Sandy Hook, he came out and he said, look, gun safety is where I'm focusing my philanthropic efforts. And that's a really interesting word to use philanthropic because what he's actually doing is investing in an entrepreneurship challenge. And he said, I am looking for the Mark Zuckerberg or Larry Page Innovator for Gun Safety. He's offering to invest money into companies that offer technological solutions for gun violence. And that can be a private owner market, but it also, one of their challenges has been community safety. So I'm doing this because that means police. When you hear the word community in terms of politics, it almost always means police. His partner in announcing this challenge, Ian Sobieski, said, there is money to be made. Gun violence is expensive to society and there is a big potential market for solutions. He would note, one of his investments that he's very proud of is SST Inc, which used to be called ShotSpotter. ShotSpotter is a audio gunshot detection tool that's been, that's installed in many companies or many cities around the country. The idea being that it has these microphones that activate when a gunshot is detected and alerts the cops. It turns out ShotSpotter is on all the time and records conversations. That may, at least in the case of Oakland, have been a feature, not a bug. Oakland being one of their big pilot cities. Oakland also is in the midst of attempting to build a domain awareness center, which is a hub for surveillance data for police. And the way that it's supposed to work is that all of this data is sucked in from various sources, including ShotSpotter microphones and surveillance cameras and things like that. And it's run through data analysis software, phase detection software, machine learning algorithm software. What I'm getting at is that there's a lot of software that's needed to make these domain awareness centers work. And it's being designed explicitly with an eye towards future integration of additional tools and software ensuring there'll be an ongoing market for this. So far, most of the bids for that one in Oakland have been military contractors, but Google actually, we found out via a Freedom of Information Act last year, put in a bid. They already have products that do this that they've marketed to other municipalities. In New York, Microsoft helped develop a domain awareness system and markets it to other municipalities now. It's called, this is so Orwellian, I hope you all are ready. It is called the automated workspace for the analysis of real-time events, Microsoft Aware. Yeah, this is a market that exists and is growing. It's called predictive policing often. Some of the big companies that are innovating, disrupting in predictive policing are Predpaul, Hunch Labs, Street Cred. There's over 150 law enforcement startups listed on Crunchbase, if you go look it up in Angelist. So those are directed at police and sort of marketed as being police-friendly. This is a body camera, and these have been in the news a lot lately. Body cameras are less welcomed with open arms by police, but there's increasing clamor to outfit police with them for very good reasons. A thing that I haven't seen as much of is discussion of who makes body cameras, and so the biggest manufacturer of them currently in this country is Taser, who also makes non-lethal stun guns. Now, Taser's approach to profitability with body cameras is interesting. Body cameras themselves are not that expensive to make or sell. The way, really the cash cow for Taser is a cloud-based storage solution to store all this footage, right? That's central to their company's plan for profitability. Their cloud offering is called evidence.com, and it's really touted as the way they're gonna continue to make money long-term from this body camera plan. The sort of policies around how evidence.com works in terms of retention and redaction and release are generally not really known to the public. I think that there's, you know, again, this is another situation where we have an argument happening that has really good arguments on both sides, but I think there's reason to be concerned about what Taser's motivations are in a cloud offering for body cam evidence. There are two members of the board that I think are really interesting in view of this strategy, which is Hady Partovi, who's the director of code.org. He worked at Microsoft and MySpace before that. And Brett Taylor, who worked at Google Maps and was the CTO of Facebook for a long time. These are people who have really sort of strong experience with surveillance and with evidence collection and with profitable cloud strategies, right? Again, it's not that the cameras are bad, but what are the incentives there? We're not really examining that for the people that are making them. And what we're seeing with Taser specifically is that they are pursuing extremely aggressive and potentially illegal sales strategies. So the chief of police in Albuquerque recently was fired because of his handling of the Taser contract. In SF, there started to be sort of details leaked out about these no-bid contracts. I would argue that the legal barriers here are actually more easily surmountable than those that have been steamrolled by the charter school movement. And I think we're gonna start to see police reform, which is a worthy and important movement, start to get bankrolled, funded and steered by people who are making products who would stand to profit by these things being enacted. So, what's my point, Erin? This is my last slide. I think we all make trade-offs to pay the bills. I don't really mean to guilt anyone out specifically here about this, about what our tech money is funding, right? Does this happen everywhere? Sure, all sorts of industries have lobbyists, right? But we're sort of, I feel like we seem a little determined to ignore the broader context of the economy we work within. I did a lot of research for this talk, but I am a programmer. I'm not someone with a special background in this. I wasn't like filing Freedom of Information Acts. These were all news articles. Journalists are following this, and yet I'm surprised about how little we, and I include myself in that, know about what our industry is doing. The activism around this, I do, okay. I've given this talk a couple of times and people keep telling me it's a bummer. So I'm gonna try to wind it up on a positive note, and I do think it's scary and overwhelming, but if there's one positive note I can take out of this, when I was telling you about those school board elections where they're pouring just an order of magnitude of more money than's ever been poured into these school board elections, $350,000 is a lot of money per potential voter even on a school board level. They won a lot of those elections, but they didn't win all of them. And I do think that at that level, you've got a scale where those are still winnable even without that financial backing. And there's, when you look at stuff like police contracts, a lot of those businesses are done in, they're done in city, they're done in boring, not sexy spaces, right? I've been to City Hall and I've sat in those meetings and it is not the most exciting form of activism, but it actually can have real impact. SF for one, local activists without huge bankrolls have managed to keep the actual Taser stun guns out of SFPD hands for over a decade just by going to meetings and backing it up. I think we can do this. And I think not just as citizens, it's our responsibility to, as tech workers specifically, because in my mind, right, like we're doing this in, like, we're, that's maybe, okay. People in this room and out of this room are doing amazing, incredible, awe-inspiring work to fix some of the really serious problems inside of tech and to open the doors to see who's in there, right? And to fix the problems in there so we're not just funneling more people in to a shitty situation. It's amazing work. Those of you that do it, I am so proud to boost your voices and to join in with you. I do think if we are doing that hard and critical and incredibly important work to open the doors to more people, when the policies being enacted with the labor of ourselves and the people who are welcoming into tech are chewing up communities on the outside, that's not even like a toxic pipeline that's like love canal. So I think we have to look, my final thought is we have to start looking at who's funding our work, where our labor is going and how we can build systems to make tech and to make tech that's sustainable, usable, and that supports people's livelihoods without depending on venture capital. Thank you. And there's, you can check all my sources at this link.