PandoDaily » David Holmes

The bible belt’s “porn problem”: Religious cities watch as much porn as non-religious cities

David Holmes — Thu, 23 May 2013 21:27:40 +0000

Apple’s got a porn problem. Xbox? Huge porn problem. Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest? Just three giant porn problems, basically. And with a name like Wii, you know it’s got a porn problem. And the biggest porn problem of all? Tumblr, of course. But now that’s somebody else’s problem.

Jared Keller collected these panicky links in a January 2013 Business Week story about Vine’s “porn problem.” In summary, Keller writes, “Life finds a way, and porn finds the Internet.” And indeed porn is truly “platform-agnostic,” having penetrated (sorry) all corners of the Web, though some sites do more to fight it than others. High estimates put the percentage of Web activity devoted to porn as high as 30 percent. Of course that figure comes from the erotic giant YouPorn, which has an incentive to pump up the numbers. A more conservative estimate comes from neuroscientist and porn statistician Ogi Ogas who told Forbes that 4 percent of the million most trafficked sites on the Web were sex-related, while 13 percent of searches were for erotic content. Either way, that’s a lot of ass.

But what about different US cities? Do religious strongholds like Birmingham, Alabama watch less porn than, say, the godforsaken vistas of San Francisco and Boston? The answer, according to user data provided by the obviously NSFW Pornhub is, not really.

Pornhub, the third largest porn site in the world, took five of the 10 least religious metro areas and five of the 10 most religious metro areas (as calculated by the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index) and found that how religious your community is has little impact on how much porn you watch. For example, the average number of videos watched per year by the residents of the most religious cities ranged from 5.7 for Provo, UT to 23.8 for Huntsville, AL. Meanwhile, the least religious cities ranged from 4.5 videos in Boston, MA to 40.1 for Burlington, VT.

Sure, atheist Burlington has a far more voracious appetite for porn than the teetotaling hardliners in Provo. But the correlation is inconsistent throughout the rest of the cities. For example, Boston and San Francisco residents both watch far less porn than Huntsville and Montgomery. Or think of it this way: While a map of the most religious cities would show strong clusters of religious observance in the Southeastern US, a porn map would look more like a Jackson Pollock painting.

Pornhub also measured a number of other porn-watching metrics, like time-on-site and videos-watched-per-sitting, finding a few subtle differences. Residents of more churchgoing cities’ spent about 47 seconds longer per visit than their non-religious counterparts. Not a huge difference, but one PornHub’s Vice President of Pornhub Corey Price calls “surprising.” That said, the habits of a pious porn enthusiast aren’t so different from the habits of a god-denying one.

The biggest differences between the two grew directly out of religious observances or beliefs. For example, the very religious folks were far less likely to indulge on Christmas, which makes sense (or maybe it’s just harder to sneak away from loved ones on holidays). Preferred genres of porn also came out in the study, with “Gay” being the most common category among non-religious cities and “Teen” being the most common category for the very religious cities. And while “Gay” did not crack the top 5 among the “holy” cities (perhaps not surprising considering fundamentalist attitudes toward homosexuality), “Lesbian” ranked number 5. (Apologies in advance for publishing the word “Squirt” on PandoDaily).

By making its data public, Pornhub is doing what OkCupid used to do with its blog, OK Trends, sifting through its turgid user base to make broader assumptions about human behavior. For example, earlier this year, Pornhub released data on the most porn-loving states, placing DC residents as the biggest porn-hounds in the country. “We are a data oriented company,” Price says. “We are constantly finding interesting trends in our viewership to better our products.”

So what does Price think of the Internet’s “porn problem?”

Porn has always been a huge part of the Internet. We wouldn’t say there hasn’t been a drastic shift in attitudes, but there is some movement towards wider acceptance. The growing number of people using social media to share and discuss adult content seems to show that, to some degree, porn is becoming something that can be talked about.

Sounds like your favorite tentacle erotica Tumblr is here to stay.

[Image courtesy Uncyclopedia Commons]

David Holmes

David Holmes is the head of social media and experimental journalism for PandoDaily. He is also the co-founder of Explainer Music, a production company specializing in journalistic music videos. His work has appeared at FastCompany.com, ProPublica, the Guardian, the Daily Dot, NewYorker.com, and Grist.

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

A new iOS game looks to kickstart neuroscience education

David Holmes — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:02:17 +0000

No one’s even surprised anymore when you mention that US students are behind other countries in math and science. Is this the new normal? Sure, there are promising signs: President Obama’s 2014 budget does increase STEM education funding by 6.4% to $3.1 billion. And last month, the National Research Council and the National Science Teachers Association teamed up to draft a new set of science standards in hopes of bringing American students back to the top. But is more money and more standards really the answer, when three decades of standardized tests and billions of dollars have yielded such lackluster results?

That’s why companies like Minneapolis’ Adventium Labs, a consulting and research firm, are looking to fill in the gaps. Although the prototype for their educational iOS game iNeuron was developed with a grant from the National Institute of Health, the company is now using Kickstarter to raise funds to commercialize the product for teachers across the country. It’s looking to raise $25,000 to revamp a rough but endearing prototype it started building before the iPad even existed. Developed in partnership with neuroscience researchers from the University of Minnesota, iNeuron teaches the basics of neuroscience by having students connect different kinds of synapses to complete various brain functions. It looks like one part educational portal, one part puzzle game; Encarta meets Candy Crush.

Because the game is only in prototype, I wasn’t able to play it myself. However it drew rave reviews from the 311 pubilc high school students and 5 teachers who tested it, says the project’s technology lead Martin Michalowski. Michalowski. who has a PhD in computer science, says he knew he was onto something when ”Kids would keep playing even after the class was over.” To ensure that students were learning the material, the team employed educational evaluators who found that in some cases, students learned more with iNeuron than they did when taught by individuals specifically trained to teach neuroscience.

Which brings up to a good point: Why neuroscience? Why not chemistry or history or some other mainstay of American education? “Neuroscience is at the center of a lot of topics high school students need to learn,” Michalowski says, including math, biology, and psychology. He isn’t alone in thinking this: Neuroscience is included in the Next Generation Science Standards that 26 states are looking to implement by 2015. And that’s one of the keys to marketing this to teachers. Sure, there are a lot of challenges of reforming education from the bottom-up. But in this case, Adventium Labs has created a tool that addresses a brand new need for teachers where few solutions already exist.

So if Adventium already has this awesome game, what do they need $25,000 in Kickstarter cash for? Right now, iNeuron is not a standalone project, and its deployment requires Michalowski to put in a lot of time to meet with teachers beforehand and hang out nearby while the kids play in case something breaks. Furthermore, Michalowski doesn’t have much experience building commercial-grade software. “It’s pretty close but it’s not something I’m comfortable putting on the App Store.” Dammit, Jim, he’s a doctor, not an app developer. And finally, the Kickstarter will help his team acquire customers for his product, a practice that’s very much in vogue lately.

Michalowski says iNeuron is only the beginning, and that Adventium Labs is spinning out the team that worked on it into a separate organization called Andamio Games. But the funding model used here is hardly ideal. Thanks to sequestration, NIH funding is expected to fall by $1.71 billion, making grants even harder to come by. And of course Kickstarter funds are hardly guaranteed. When Andamio builds its next educational app, Michalowski may look to raise venture funding then make money by selling and licensing its games.

If Michalowski is successful in commercializing iNeuron, he will have done so by combining government-funding, private innovation, and crowdfunding. And while that might not sound like an easy or repeatable model for others to follow, it reflects the whatever-it-takes approach many are using to reinvent education.

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

PandoHouse Rock: A history of 3D printing, from prototypes to pistols

David Holmes — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:00:28 +0000

3D printing has garnered a lot of press lately, thanks in large part to the Liberator, Cody Smith’s (almost) fully 3-D printed gun. But as Chris Dixon noted at last night’s PandoMonthly, popular discourse tends to gravitate toward the most outrageous and divisive uses of a technology, whether it’s drones, bitcoin, or 3D printing.

That’s why it’s important to look back on how technologies like 3D printing have evolved, both to remember the milestones that brought us to where we are today and to predict how these technologies might evolve in the future. From food to prosthetics to automobiles, the 3D printing revolution is about so much more than the whims of one 2nd Amendment-brandishing gunmaker. We’re not quite to the point where people can order a pair of pants online then print them out at home. But with 3D printing, it’s easy to imagine physical goods undergoing the same kind of digital, democratic revolution that media’s undergone over the past 10 years.

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

The best photos from last week’s PandoMonthly with Brian Lee

David Holmes — Tue, 14 May 2013 22:00:57 +0000

There are still tickets left to Thursday’s PandoMonthly event in New York with Andresseen Horowitz investor Chris Dixon, presented by Gravity! But unless you’ve been to one of our events before, you might be thinking: What’s so special about PandoMonthly?

We’re glad you asked. You can start of course by browsing through our collection of PandoMonthly videos. Or, if audio’s your thing, download MP3s of the chats on iTunes or Google Play.

But if that’s still too much work, well, just look at the pretty pictures below, taken by photographer Kelly Garthwaite at last week’s fireside chat with Brian Lee, cofounder of Shoedazzle, LegalZoom, and the Honest Company.

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

We mapped out Dave McClure’s latest batch of 500 Startups companies

David Holmes — Tue, 14 May 2013 16:01:11 +0000

From the companies it funds to the partners it hires, Dave McClure’s 500 Startups is one of the most internationally-focused accelerators in the country. And its sixth and latest batch of 28 companies, announced this morning, keeps the trend going, with 2/3 of the companies hailing from outside the US. That’s up from 57% for its last accelerator group. This investment also marks the first time 500 Startups has included an African startup (Ghana’s Dropifi, a customer analysis widget) and Middle Eastern startups (The translation tool Dakwak and the mobile game developer Tamatem, both hailing from Jordan).

To give you a better idea of the international makeup of its latest group:

But wait, there’s more.

Warning: if you’re not the kind of person who wants to watch a bunch of startup people rap in a Thrift Shop parody video, please close this tab.

Still here? Okay. Now for all you masochists left, here’s the video 500 Startups sent over to go with its announcement. “Enjoy.”

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

Video games, role-playing, and Rube Goldberg machines: Is this the future of education?

David Holmes — Mon, 13 May 2013 16:00:27 +0000

If anyone tells you they’re satisfied with the education situation in the United States, they’re either lying or part of the problem. Despite federal initiatives to promote STEM education, US students still lag behind many countries in math and science. Meanwhile, the US spends as much per student as any country in the world, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. And yet the past three decades of education reform, which have laid the burden of success on standardized test scores, have yielded negligible results.

With government-led reforms bringing about little progress, does the task of reinventing the classroom fall on startups? Nine months ago, the LA-based non-profit Gamedesk launched the Playmaker school, a progressive middle-school curriculum based on various types of digital and live-action play. Over the past schoolyear, Playmaker has taken over the sixth grade class at New Roads, a private K-12 school that serves children from both at-risk and affluent communities. And last Saturday, Gamedesk officially unveiled its classrooms at a ribbon-cutting party in Santa Monica, replete with a DJ, Jenga, and a giant interactive skee-ball game built by Two Bit Circus:

Not that what’s been going on at Gamedesk over the past nine months has been a mystery, exactly. The company has shot a ton of video of its teachers and students at work (including exclusive footage given to PandoDaily for our feature story last month). But this is the first time the public has been allowed to walk through the venue and watch the students learn and play in person.

The big takeaway? Games are great, but equally important are low-tech and no-tech approaches, as you’ll see in the architecture of the learning spaces.

During the ceremony, participants were guided through three rooms:

The ideation space, a giant egg-shaped room where kids can write or draw anything they like on the walls:

The interactive space, where the creative video games Gamedesk is known for take center stage:

And the maker space, where the students are trying to build an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine, like a miniature version of the exhilarating apparatus from that OK Go video.

“Some of the parents were really concerned about the video games mindset toward learning,” said the program’s Associate Director Joe Wise. And indeed Gamedesk has a reputation as being the “video-games-as-education” startup, thanks to the technological “wow” factor of some of the games its developed, like the motion-sensing teaching tool AERO.

But as Gamedesk’s CEO Lucien Vattel emphasized when I spoke with him last month, some of the most rewarding and enriching lessons involve no tech whatsoever. In the maker space, for example, the students are surrounded by hammers, saws, and PVC piping, which might come as a shock to curmudgeony types who knock younger generations for relying too much on technology. It puts your average high-school shop class to shame.

But the year wasn’t always without friction. During one of the roleplaying lessons where the students acted out the conflicts of early civilizations, they were faced with a scarcity of resources, causing some of the kids to consider going to war over territory. Parents were not impressed. Here they thought their kids were attending a progressive school, and now the poor innocent babes were turning into little imperialists. “The phones were off-the-hook,” Wise said. But in the end, the roleplaying activity made the children realize that trade was a far more mutually beneficial solution than war. ”I told the parents, ‘Your kids chose not to go to war. They chose commerce instead.’ You don’t get that from a book.”

The approach of letting children figure things out on their own appealed greatly to Jenn and Glenn Gers, whose son Harry attended the school. “For Harry it’s not about being told and taught stuff, but having it brought out of him and being taught to use his own mind,” said Jenn. But don’t all schools teach kids to use their own mind, at least in theory? Here’s a good example of what she means: Instead of having students memorize the names and frequencies of different waves, the teacher will draw each wave on the board and ask students to identify and categorize the differences between them.

Along with encouraging students to break down concepts at a more fundamental level, this technique minimizes the kind of rote or recitation that can instantly cause a child to tune out. It’s even a little sneaky at times. Glenn Gers told me, “Harry came home one day and said, ‘We were playing this game and at the end we realized we were learning algebra.’”

Not everyone is convinced that what Gamedesk is doing could or even should become a model for schools across the country. Last month, when I talked to Steven Hodas, Executive Director of the New York City Department of Education’s Innovate NYC Schools program, he said part of why the Gamedesk model works is that it was built from the ground up on a foundation that encouraged creativity and experimentation. It also benefits from being a part of the New Roads School which is fairly progressive to be begin with, plus it’s impossible to ignore the millions of dollars given to Gamedesk by the Bill Gates Foundation and AT&T.

In many public schools, however, bureaucratic pressures can easily stamp out innovation. And with so many children on the razor’s edge, it’s not always responsible to bring bold, untested experiments into the classroom. In tech, they say fail fast and often. Tell that to a kid who is one failing grade away from dropping out of school.

Regardless of whether it scales to the rest of the nation, for parents like Jenn Gers, Playmaker has been a dream come true.

“We feel incredibly lucky,” she said.

[Photos and Videos by David Holmes]

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

Should startups always offer health-care? Our readers weigh in

David Holmes — Sat, 11 May 2013 00:57:13 +0000

Paul Carr’s recent post about startups and health-care sparked a huge debate in our comments section and on social media. So we wanted to continue the conversation by asking our readers to weigh in with their health-care experiences at startups, both from an entrepreneur’s perspective and from an employee’s perspective.

Here are some of the responses, and thank you to everyone who participated:

Entrepreneurs: do you offer your employees health insurance?

For most entrepreneurs, there wasn’t a simple “yes” or “no” answer.

Erik Klein, CTO at Endorse.com, says employers can avoid some of the complications and paperwork of offering health insurance by simply reimbursing an employee’s individually-purchased health-care:

One of the easier things a very small startup ( < 10 people) can do for health care is to offer to reimburse the employee’s individually purchased health care. You get a decent spread of cost there between 200 and 1k per month for that health care, but it’s worth it when hiring top talent to ease their mind, and it lets them know that eventually when the cost of company supplied health care drops down with employee count that you’ll be legit.

Patrick Ambron, CEO at BrandYourself, says there are ways to take care of your employees while also saving costs:

When BrandYourself raised it’s $1.2 M round, much of it went to hiring a larger development team. After a lot of thought and research I ultimately decided to offer our employees health insurance, for two main reasons

1) It’s the right thing to do: Many of my employees have families. Others are young and don’t have much saved. I expect my employees to make my company a big part of their lives. I don’t think it would be fair or reasonable to expect them to do that if we aren’t willing to invest in their basic well being.

2) It helps with recruiting: Startups compete with bigger tech companies for the best talent. Since you can’t offer them the same salary, it’s a big gesture to show you’re serious about their work. Put it this way, it’s a lot harder for a 32 yr old designer with a kid on the way to justify a riskier, lower-salary job with a startup, if he also has to put more towards health insurance.

All that said, you still need to be smart about your costs and it may not be as expensive as you think.

1) Don’t pay for the entire package. Put a certain amount (75%) towards the plans, but have the employee pay the rest. This way you can avoid people taking plans just because they’re free, when they may not need them (maybe a spouse has a slightly better plan from a bigger employer).

2) Offer different packages. For example we offer a high deductible (catastrophic) plan and lower one. We realize most of our younger employees don’t need/want to spend as much on insurance as older employees with families. By offering packages based on people’s needs you end up saving money

That said, if you don’t have funding, it’s going to be hard to pay the health bills, says Alex Griffiths, CTO at CareSquared:

Nope. We have limited funding and few employees. If we are funded we will offer health care.

Have you ever worked for a company that didn’t offer health insurance? And if so, did that cause any hardship for you?

Notably, most of our respondents had never worked jobs that didn’t offer health insurance (unless you include the startups they’ve funded themselves that don’t offer it). Jerry Jones, co-founder of Spaceman Labs is an exception, but says not having health insurance is a young man’s game. And even then, he wouldn’t recommend it:

I have worked for companies that didn’t offer health insurance. I was young, and fortunate enough not to have any medical issues at that time. It did however cause a hell of a lot of anxiety.

Meanwhile, Tiffany at Audioair has always had insurance, but it wasn’t always worth it:

No, but my last employer offered health insurance that was too much for most people working there to afford, even for just the employee to be on the plan. It made it very difficult for the employees there when medical issues did arise, and most left to find a different job with better benefits.

When should a startup offer health insurance? Always? Only when they reach a certain size or funding milestone?

The milestones our respondents selected varied widely from seed funding to Series A funding to profitability (If startups only offered health insurance when they were profitable, we’d have a whole lot of sick, stressed people in the Valley). But the most commonly-cited milestone was pretty cut-and-dry: You need to offer health-care once you expand your team beyond the founders (who receive significant equity anyway):

Grace Mastalli, Corporate Secretary at Starfish Enterprise:

A startup should offer health benefits as soon as they hire their first w-2 employee. Affordable options with concomitant tax benefits to the employer do exist and will grow.

Patrick Ambron:

If you can’t afford to hire someone with benefits, then you can’t afford to hire someone. It’s like going to a restaurant. If you can’t afford the tip, cook yourself.

Tiffany at Audioair:

Raising significant funding, and not having a business plan that assumes health insurance seems wrong. You assume insurance, payroll taxes, vacation, holidays and other overhead factors – health insurance should be a must-do at that point.

And finally, do you think health-care reforms like the ones proposed in the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) will have a positive effect on entrepreneurship?

None of the respondents had a wholly negative reaction toward the Affordable Care Act, as the responses here ranged from neutral to enthused:

Tessa Petrich:

We can argue about the mandates to insure and the health exchanges and the blah blah blahs but, fundamentally, the ability for EVERYONE to now access good health insurance will lead to an exodus from crappy jobs, a willingness to take bigger risks, and a growth in the entrepreneurial scene that many did not expect.

Tiffany at Audioair:

It won’t matter one way or the other. Be it minimum wage, health insurance or regulation or factors like energy costs, companies and markets adjust. Any doom and gloom about the impact of implementing ACA is a lot more about views on ACA than actual facts about what will happen.

Grace Mastalli:

Yes, but major further reforms to contain health care costs are badly needed and largely lacking from the Affordable Care Act. The needs of small business and entrepeneurs were drowned out by big business and big pHarma.

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

Audi’s new “Star Trek” ad and 6 other sci-fi commercials

David Holmes — Wed, 08 May 2013 22:22:50 +0000

Audi’s newest car commercial pits old Spock vs new Spock, as actors Leonard Nimoy and Zachary Quinto race each other to the country club to see who’s paying for lunch. (See? Celebrities are just like us!) On the surface, it’s a cute ploy that plays off next week’s release of the highly-anticipated CGI-delivery-system “Star Trek: Into Darkness.” But it also has a few obscure references for the more hardcore Audi-buying geeks (like Nimoy singing “The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins” which is either the lowest or highest point of the actor’s career).

That got us thinking. What are some other memorable science fiction commercials?

Kellogg’s C-3PO’s cereal

What do you get when you fuse two Cheerios together like horribly malformed Siamese twins? A new force at breakfast!

Let GE’s boombox of the future set you free from your humanoid overlords.

Before commercials were ironically epic, they were just plain epic. While this spot isn’t tied to a specific film, it’s one part “Brazil,” one part “Blade Runner,” one part Apple’s 1984 ad. Because why reference a movie in your commercial when you can reference another commercial that references a movie instead?

Korean RoboCop will eat all your fried chicken

The horror movie “The Ring” was actually based on this commercial:

“Now all restaurants are Taco Bell”

That’s right. In the year 2032, there’s not a single restaurant that isn’t Taco Bell. That’s the vision of the future put forth by 1993′s Sylvester Stallone film, “Demolition Man.” The only thing they get wrong? The “Demo Deal” made up of a Burrito Supreme, nachos, and a drink needs about four more items to reach the gastronomic heights a modern-day Taco Bell meal deal.

The T-Bell action starts at 1:01.

Levi’s Transformers Aliens Tarzan what?

See, the transformer represents our longing to change who we are, a change only fully realized by putting on a pair of Levi’s jeans. At least that’s what Don Draper would say.

And finally, The movie that launched a thousand ad campaigns

With Reese’s Pieces, “ET: The Extraterrestrial” turned product placement into an artform. But candy isn’t the only thing ET shilled in his brief time on our planet. He sold Ataris, Happy Meals, cereal, Speak and Spells, credit cards, and vitamins, to name a few. In this spot, ET comes back to Earth so he can drink all of his family’s Pepsi then feel ashamed by his insensitive behavior:

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

Box partners with GoodData to provide productivity and security solutions for enterprise

David Holmes — Wed, 08 May 2013 13:00:27 +0000

There’s big data, small data, and then there’s GoodData, a firm that makes it easier to digest all those numbers and statistics that are now (for better or worse) at a business’ fingertips. And starting today, the company is bundling its data analysis software with Box so businesses that already use Box’s cloud storage can also take advantage of GoodData’s business intelligence tools.

Of course, few words in the modern business lexicon are more vague than “data” so we should ask: What flavor of data does this new app (called “GoodBox Bash”) specialize in? And to what ends? Productivity and security.

“If you are a Box customer and you have lots of users,” says GoodData CEO Roman Stanek, “You want to know what file is the most shared, and who downloaded what and when.”

The service also caters toward organizations with multiple teams. It can map out the behavior of highly productive teams to help improve the productivity of less successful ones.

The Box partnership is in keeping with GoodData’s customer acquisition strategy. By partnering with firms that already serve thousands of enterprise customers like Zendesk, Netsuite, and now Box, GoodData can to some degree avoid the tough decisions many enterprise startups face in choosing whether to target end-users or employers.

“It’s much easier for startups today because, only 5 years ago, if you wanted to sell to enterprise, you’d have to sell your startup to (a big company like) HP,” Stanek says.

As for how Box benefits, it’s about more than offering customers a few new analytical tools, though Box CEO Aaron Levie did have plenty of nice things to say about GoodData in today’s press release. (Something about “actionable intelligence” amid “a deluge of data…”). Stanek says GoodBox Bash offers a new way for users to engage with Box as a product, thus creating “better customers.” But will customers who are only accustomed to using Box as a cloud-sharing service be ready to embrace GoodData’s tools?

Stanek is confident that they will, though he admits it’s not always easy to convince clients that “business intelligence” doesn’t have to be limited to Excel spreadsheets. People like what they know.

Last July, GoodData raised $25 million in Series C funding before launching three new business intelligence tools the following September. At that time, Stanek told Michael Carney he planned to take the company public within two or three years.

[Disclosure: Andreessen Horowitz has invested in GoodData and Marc Andreessen is a personal investor in PandoDaily]

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm

Do you work for a startup? Do you have health insurance? Let’s talk about health-care

David Holmes — Mon, 06 May 2013 20:06:22 +0000

Over the weekend, Paul Carr wrote that funded startups have a responsibility to offer affordable health-care to their employees. It’s no surprise that the post sparked an intense conversation in the comments section and on Twitter. Like gun control, abortion, and other political issues where the stakes are life and death, the health-care debate can often become so overwhelmed by emotions that’s there’s simply no room left for logic. And because the issue is so closely tied to our debate about taxes, it’s pretty much the Thunderdome of American politics: No room for compromise.

But we want to take a step back from the binary political dichotomies at play here and ask our readers, many of whom run startups or work for startups, questions about your personal experience with health-care. To sweeten the deal, if we feature your response in an upcoming wrap-up post, you’ll win free tickets to a PandoMonthly event of your choice. To submit your answers, either fill out the form here or leave a comment below (if you leave a comment, be sure to include the best way for us to reach you in case you win).

If our last two PandoDaily polls were any indication, then we should see lots of smart, nuanced responses from our readers. We’d expect nothing less.

Entrepreneurs: Do you offer your employees health insurance? Why or why not?

Employees: Does your company offer affordable health insurance? Have you ever worked for a company that didn’t offer health insurance? And if so, did that cause any hardship for you?

Everyone: When should a startup offer health insurance? Always? Only when they reach a certain size or funding milestone?

Everyone: And finally, do you think health-care reforms like the ones proposed in the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare) will have a positive effect on entrepreneurship?

David Holmes

You can follow David on Twitter @holmesdm