Mark Pincus Blog

essembly.com - a political social network

i've been playing with essembly for the past day. it's the coolest political web site i've seen (because it's about interacting over informing) but it stops short of enabling the kind of grass roots organizing i've been hoping and searching for.  [if you want to try it, email me and i'll invite you on.]

it seems like the founders are trying to keep it stealth for now as they have not responded to several emails from me (or they just dont want to talk to me.)

what's cool about it is the simple way it lets users create their own 'resolves' - kind of your own little survey or policy proposal that goes out to everyone to vote on. it's fun to watch the action in votes and comments.

also cool but not used yet are the groups functions which enable candidates, coalitions and issue campaigns to organize, set their platforms and recruit.

where it falls short for me...first, it appears to be for profit which is fine, but may drive the wrong incentives. which leads to my second issue, we lack any leadership on any front. everyone is so neutral that nothing changes. we need a web movement to reform the system (i've blogged about my hopes to create an eparty). a neutral site will devolve into a message board where people are forever fragmented.

what we need is a site that can help facilitate organization and collective voice. it should gently point out our similarities on many issues rather than essembly's simplistic (but fun) approach of showing your % correlation with another person on issues. while that's cute, i'm looking for a site that can promote my overlaps with seemingly disparate people and groups so we can form NEW coalitions that can replace the current power base.

overall, i'm psyched that these kids created essembly and see it as a big step in the right direction of 'radical democracy' and hope that they/we can take it further towards enabling real action and not just real interaction.

Corporate Corruption Getting Some Great Play! - how about calling them corruptions!

sometimes the world does seem to get it right and then we have to give big kudos to MSM. today's nytimes has a slew of stories raising everyone's conciousness around different forms of corporate corruption.

one big question for me is why we dont hear more corporate and political leaders denouncing the level of ceo and upper management stealing (i mean compensation). this is one of the great injustices of our time.

today's paper highlights the amazing story of the team running UAL. why should they get 8% of the new company for showing up to work? this isnt a startup where people are forgoing cash comp in the hopes of equity upside. the team originally demanded 15% with the ceo asking for $80m in comp. the bankruptcy court says he'll have to make do with $40m.

what's ironic is that in another story they talk positively about terry semel at yahoo having now made some $630m in options and stock. it may sound hypocritical at first that they would laud semel while denegrating the guys at UAL, until we realize that semel put up $20m of his own money and then proceeded to lead a company in massive growth.

on the enron front, it appears that there is now a big chance that mssrs lay and skilling will escape prison since their defense team believes the accounting chicanery (cool word:) they oversaw will be too complicated to explain to a jury of dumb americans. if those two walk free while poor dumb bernie ebbers serves life in prison we'll know just how unjust our country is.

on the one side, we lock up a former football coach for life for crimes he still doesnt even understand (not that he shouldnt have gotten some time). on the other, we take two of the most sophisticated white collar crooks of our time and let them go free because their crimes are too complicated to explain? you gotta be kidding.

and what of the rest of the enron crew who sold options worth hundreds of millions just before it went to zero? the paper talks about some lady who was famous for running around in mini skirts and stilletos, even lauded as one of the most powerful women in america. she walked with $80m in stock and now splits her time with her bolivian boyfriend between ranches in several states. that's fucking ridiculous. if the SEC (or anyone) ever listened to me, we could right these wrongs faster than bush can say 'wiretap'.

for those who dont memorize every post, i'll remind you of my simple proposal to stop the corporate gravy train. it's so simple it pains me. the SEC adds a rule saying that any insider who sold stock or options during a period of fraud has to disgorge the profits. helloooo!! how fucking simple is that? can anyone guess how much money would have been returned to innocent investors by now? 414 companies restated earnings in 2004 alone.

i'd like to start a running tab of great corporate insider windfalls that could have been reversed without ever proving a thing. (and if someone showed me how to do a wiki spreadsheet we could all add to it.)

first and worst...

gary winnick, global crossing - $600m

john moores and family, peregine systems - $600m

clearly, the SEC works for its bosses at goldman, morgan and csfb who have rich clients to protect. otherwise, we'd hear someone besides me point out obvious rules like this that would really protect investors as opposed to ridiculous window dressing like sarbanes oxley which just punishes all companies and makes it prohibitively expensive for small companies to maintain public status favoring big corruptions, oh i mean corporations, even more.

i do want to point out that if we just shortened corporate corruption to corruptions, we'd say a lot of unnecessary verbage:)

Best Documentary at Sundance - 'Trials of Daryl Hunt'

I had the amazing experience today of seeing 'trials of daryl hunt' and then meeting daryl and his lawyer. These two men represent all that is great and redeeming about our country.

In the spirit of martin luther king jr these men have spent 20 yrs fighting to right one of the greatest injustices of our time.

In what has become a recurring story, Daryl hunt was wrongly convicted of murder in 1984 by a corrupt winston salem DA and judicial system that featured all white juries. It was eventually proven in court that these evil people had evidence including DNA and witnesses that proved daryl was innocent, yet persisted in convicting him in two separate trials.

Daryl was offered the chance to plead guilty to second degree murder and be a free man in 1990 but refused to admit to a crime he didn't do. Now what guilty man would ever pass on that?

He spent another 14 yrs in jail and was only released when an astute reporter managed to find the real murderer who then admitted guilt.

What was truly amazing was that even after the DNA evidence and the admission by the guilty man, the DA still fought to keep daryl behind bars.

Why don't we have stronger laws to send corrupt DA's to jail? Why does the DA always have to protect his ass rather than fight for justice?

You can learn more about the film and daryl's foundation at

www.trialsofdarylhunt.com

.

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The Illusionist must see movie from sundance

Ed norton, paul giamotti and a super hot chick named jessica biel. Great movie on all fronts. Reminds me a bit of peter pan movie. Just see it! Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

MSN search bites

Has anyone had the misfortune of trying msn's lame search product? I found it so bad I had to check the url. All I had above the fold were sponsored results. What happened to chasing google? Ill have to retry yahoo to see if they're any better. Goog still owns my searches hands down. Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Give the spin doctors another spin

My friend actually hired them for his 40th bday this weekend and they were awesome. I was a bit nervous at first that they might not get on stage for our measely group of 40 but they were total pros and put on a killer show. Fun to resing their old classics - pocket full of kryptonite, 2 princes.

I'm getting a fun 70's funk band for my 40th called grooveline. Feels like the bar mitzvah circuit. Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

10,000 words on ethics typed on one blackberry with two thumbs!

Its been amusing and frightening watching leaders of both parties compete on ethics 'reforms' the past few weeks.

Don't you just love the way our leaders wait till they're all caught to bring up the issue? I love how shamelessly they all pander.

Now they're all competing to 'out' each other on every dirty trick. Who ever heard of 'pocketing' before and that it costs us $27 billion annually? And what a great idea to force the member proposing a special interest pocket to publicly attach their name as author?

We can only hope that these guys keep competing to discredit each other. Why they almost seem to be replacing the media as their own watch dog which is lucky since the media stopped ever reporting any of this stuff just after watergate.

This reminds me of the scandal that ocurred while I was attending harvard business school. that venerable institution was full of its own ethically challenged - namely investment bankers.

The school had this bullshit 3 week class called 'ethics' which we all took together at the outset of the program - guess it was to make sure we all had at least heard the term a few times and might feel more comfortable even using it.

I knew I was in for an interesting two yrs with my 800 new 'best friend for life' when we dove into our very first ethics case study.

This one dealt with the 'tough' decision faced by a morgan stanley banker when he was trekking in the himalayas and came upon a sick indian sardu. His 'dilemma' was whether to leave this man to die (there was another group that could have helped too) or give up his lifelong goal of climbing some mountain to save the sardu. Of course he chose to leave the man but then write a case study to help the next gen of bankers. The case was never clear whether he later regretted his actions or simply found it an interesting dilemma. See at harvard we were supposed to answer these tough questions for ourselves. After all, they were training the next gen of america's ceo's and we've all seen how ethical they are (can anyone say enron?).

Having been to the himalayas and spent a decent amount of time back country I was confused where the dilemma was. Isn't it illegal to knowingly leave someone to die? Either way, you take it 100 times more seriously in the wilderness and very few humans would even consider such a decision.

I sat for 90 minutes listening to my classmates actually 'debate' this. It was touching to see the i-bankers show loyalty for one of their own and defend his actions with points like 'its harder to think clearly at high altitudes', 'it was his lifelong goal' and 'maybe the korean group saved him'.

In the end I couldn't stop myself from accusing them all of being as morally bankrupt as the banker which cemented my position for the next two years as a wacky outsider.

Anyway back to the bigger scandal story. It wasn't many more months before we had a real life ethics question to deal with in our newly formed community.

See this kid murry gunty was actually caught 'stuffing the ballot box' for head of the finance club. At HBS this was a highly coveted position as you were guaranteed a job at goldman sachs, meaning you'd one day be really fucking rich.

I first met murry when he interviewed for a job at lazard freres (yes I was a self-hating i-banker. What's that saying about having to do evil to know evil).

Murry was one of those annoying kids that was hated by his peers and loved by his bosses, also called suckups. We did our best to stop the firm from making him an offer but the partners just loved him. In the end, he came in to interview us and after telling the partners how ready he was to work 24x7 had the nerve to tell me we were now 'in a beauty contest' to win him. I've never tried harder to sell someone on not joining a company, telling him he would be brutalized (not far from the truth). Murry chose to go to trammel crow which soon after went bankrupt.

It was sinful how much joy I found in murry's downfall. The guy had managed to be generally disliked at HBS too, driving around in a flashy BMW convertible (chick car:). The only question on his case once he plead guilty was whether he'd be expelled for life or get off with a year absence (which HBS was known to do for its worst offenders).

What happened next was shocking and strangely parallel to what was happening to white collar criminals like milken on the outside - pretty close to nothing. Murry wrote a tearful letter in the school paper, saying his only regret was embarassing his parents. the administration decided his emabarassment was bad enough and even asked him to write a case study to guest teach to the next year's incoming students!

The only solice was seeing the WSJ pick up the story and accuse HBS of being lax on ethics.

I'd soo love to know where that kid's career went and what he's doing today. He must be a major leader as he soo gets our system.

Mo says I need to tie this all back to my original point so here goes...I guess we've never had any real commitment as a country to acting ethically in business or politics.

I am an optimist and believe that's changing. we are moving from a 'corporate culture' where the individual has never had to be responsible for his actions to a 'community culture'.

The culture around 'corporate capitalism' and 'corporate politics' was about the buck never stopping. The actions of the individual, whether manger or owner, were always protected by the 'corporate veil'. The alumni of the former Drexel Burnham especially milken went on to even greater success. Enron traders are amongst the most sought after today.

Is community capitalism coming? Well I'm encouraged that this century's newest success stories are about authentic people taking responsibility and serving all stakeholders equally often to the short term detriment of shareholders.

Google is obviously the best example with their corny but effective 'do no evil' slogan. It may seem like a toss up today as to whether google or walmart will be more valuable but not which we'd rather work for and even buy from.

Beyond google there's ebay and soon we'll see craigslist too. All of these companies are nearly synonmous with their founders who have across the board devoted their newfound wealth to helping their communities.

Pierre omidyar of ebay has a stated goal of investing 150m this year alone in community. Google has created a foundation seeded with $1 billion. Bill gates has given away 58 % of his wealth.

Meanwhile the walton family has donated less than 1 % to charity and recently it was reported that they contributed a mere $5k to a multi million dollar fund established by their employees to help fellow walmarters displaced by katrina.

Will this community beats the corporation theme ever enter politics? We saw it in the last election with the campaigns of dean and gonzalez (for sf mayor) and I'm sure it will only get bigger.

What will happen to the murry guntys, jack abramoffs and tom delays in this new world? They're all about winning so they'll play by the new rules. I'm sure they'll soon trump me in their outrage against walmart and corporate corruption everywhere and thatll be great because they're all a lot better at selling than I am:) Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Hilary/condie the new first ladies?

My girlfriend, mo (www.mosworldmblogspot.com), tells me the rumor around washington is that hilary and condie rice are both gay.

This raises interesting questions...

* why hasn't this been reported anywhere? Mo thinks reporters are afraid of losing access.

* if its not true will one or both sue me and other bloggers for defamation and how will the gay community feel about that?

* if it is true, it would mean we have two presidential candidates who are grossly misrepresenting themselves (well at least hilary). But that's been the case with male candidates, from jfk to clinton, so why not this odd twist? But still, its always bothered me that hilary and bill have pretended to be a normal married couple when they're so not. Its patronizing, like we kids can't handle the truth.

We need authenticity and that means brutal honesty from our leaders. Instead we just get more corporate BS. We need leaders that can regain the moral high ground and this isn't the way.

* course I have to ask about the possibility of a hilary/condie relationship. This might mean that either way they both become the first ladies on so many new levels.
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NY and Sundance

I'm off to ny today and then sundance film festival next week. I'm looking forward to scamming my way into finn taylors new film 'darwin awards' (on the best titles ever) and actually have tix to a bunch of exciting new films including

* the beastie boys doc in which they handed 150 vidcams to their audience, * 'flannel pajamas' some stars?? * robert downey jr film - must be about drugs and drowning which he's soo good at * several iraq docs * and several boring sounding films that will probably be great because they have no stars - see the rule with festivals is the less stars the better the picture since it had to get in on its merits.

Also going to see the beastie boys live which should be fun(ny). Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.

Spending 2x on selling fighting than voting

One interesting factoid from eugene jarecki's great doc 'why we fight' is that the US military has spent over $1 billion on recruitment advertising. Its interesting to think that we spend twice the money convincing kids to fight in iraq as vote for president. (The two campaigns spent a combined $500m.) Sent wirelessly via BlackBerry from T-Mobile.