He was guilty of it too — treating tech news like a reality show. It always seemed somewhat surreal, almost like a fantasy, even though he knew many of the people he read about. It was probably because everyone put on airs trying to reinforce what the bloggers wrote about them that made it seem okay to comment on everything as if it was all just a big spectator sport. But now that he had taken the leap, he realized it wasn’t just harmless gossip and entertainment. This was his life.

His company was still a startup, just a few people. But it was different now. He used to think of entrepreneurs and engineers as characters in a story, but these were actual people who counted on him to make good on their paychecks. One of the guys had a wife and kid at home and another baby on the way. He had never known the pressure of being a breadwinner for anyone but himself but now he had several families who had put their faith in him. The disquiet knotted in his chest, pulsing like a dull pain that was breathing out of sync from the rest of his body. He was never too concerned about himself if things didn’t work out, but he worried about sending people home on a Tuesday afternoon with a paycheck cut short and some office knick knacks packed in a cardboard box. He logged into the company bank account for reassurance. Most of the seed round was still there.

When did it become so real, he wondered. For a while, it all seemed like a big game. Every day TechCrunch announced another two dozen fundings and a handful of exits. Mononymous people like Jack, Ev, and Zuck joined the ranks of Prince and Madonna as people who only needed one name. Even Ashton Kutcher and the Justins, Timberlake and Bieber, joined the Internet party. For a year he basked in the reflected glow, following the news of who went where and sold what, and adding Internet entrepreneurs as Facebook friends. Then he jumped in with two feet and was hit by reality. Behind all the parties and flashy announcements was real work and real pressure that the critics and trolls never see.

Even though he had embraced it, he came to resent the public nature of it all. He wondered how many people stopped to think about the lives behind the stories and the ramifications of putting it all on display. Internet culture had turned everyone into both a public figure and a critic. Worse than armchair quarterbacks, the ferocity of people’s attacks made them more like armchair assassins. And the targets weren’t limited to tech celebrities, everyone was fair game.

Now he just wanted to build his company without the constant cycle of judgment and public commentary. He knew it was his own fault for buying into the hype but he couldn’t help himself. Another day brought another list of top 10 hottest startups, and he felt pressure when his company made the list, bitter when they were left off. Either way it distracted him from the work at hand.

He knew the tech press painted a perverse picture of Silicon Valley, focusing on the highlights and the cool kid cliques that roamed through SOMA, somehow always finding their way onto every VIP list in or out of the industry. Long before Bravo showed up, the tech community had created its own reality show with its cults of personality and constant drumbeat of VC rounds and exits.

But as much as he hated it now, he admitted he probably wouldn’t have taken the chance on becoming an entrepreneur himself if he hadn’t been reading about it every day. That was the rub. If he had grasped the reality of a founder’s life from the beginning, he wouldn’t have tried at all. He needed the stories, and now he was a product of the very thing he had come to loathe.

If only there was a way to tell the critics watching from afar, “We are more than what you read about. We are real people trying to do real things.”

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

About a year ago, a 20-something rising star product guy at a hot startup turned to me and asked, “So are you a startup guy too?” As someone who has started several businesses but not in the Internet space, I answered, “I’m not really sure what that means to be a startup guy. I’ve been a brick and mortar entrepreneur for years but not really on the internet.” Without any hint of irony, he replied, “Yeah, the internet is just a different skill set than brick and mortar.” And with that dismissal, he lost interest in having any further conversation with me.

When I tell this story to my friends who have been around the block a few times, including the ones who have started successful Internet companies, they always shake their heads in disbelief. Of course there are different technology requirements and some of the techniques used for things such as user acquisition are different, but at the end of the day, regardless of what business you’re in, everything comes down to the same math problem. Revenue minus expenses must equal a positive number. Anyone who tells you business works in some other way or the rules are different on the Internet or any other claim of exceptionalism is an idiot.

Yet so much of the venture-fueled startup environment is based on questionable or even nonexistent math. The problem extends far beyond simply calling out individual startups for not having viable business models. With so many VCs and angels writing checks to startups without the slightest clue as to how they’ll ever make the math work, it is literally the entire ecosystem that has lost sight of the basic math equation.

I saw a great example of this “no math” startup thinking at a dinner a few months ago. The group got into a discussion about what defines a startup, when a founder whose startup had failed explained, “A startup stops being a startup when they figure out how they’re going to make money.” My friend Ben Nelson exclaimed, “That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! By that definition Snapfish was never a startup, because we always knew how we were going to make money, and yet clearly we were a startup at some point!”

I thought the entire scene was hysterical and it’s probably worth noting that the guy who understood the importance of math sold Snapfish to HP for $300 million.

As bad as it is that both VCs and founders are willing to ignore the realities of math, I wonder how many entrepreneurs even know how to do basic math. The most egregious example of an entrepreneur who didn’t understand math can be found in the tragic story of Ecomom.

As the details of its failure came to light, its former controller Philip Prentiss described a conversation he had with its CEO, Jody Sherman, as the company was collapsing. Prentiss explained, “At the end of December when things were getting truly desperate, he said to me, ‘Phil, just bring me a forecast that shows how much we need to sell to break even.’ He did not understand, after three years of negative margin, that increased sales resulted in increased losses.”

Contrary to popular belief, raising venture capital is not a business model and the rules of math aren’t different on the Internet. You may have a little more running room because of VC funding, and you might get lucky with an exit before the reality of math comes calling, but if you’re trying to build an actual business and not a house of cards, I can assure you the math is always the same.

As Brian Lee, co-founder of ShoeDazzle, The Honest Company, and LegalZoom explained at last week’s PandoMonthly event, “Business is business.” While this statement seems blatantly obvious, it’s a concept that is often lost in the world of venture-funded Internet startups.

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

So few of us, male or female, seem to know how to do things anymore. I thought back to when I was a teenager, and how I used to change the oil in my car. These days it goes straight to the shop without a second thought, and the idea of doing an actual repair is a nonstarter.

Our economy has become so service-oriented that we now have a service for just about everything. And no industry is more hellbent on rolling out more and more ways for us to sit at home and do nothing than the consumer Internet. Need to schedule a maid without getting off the couch? Check! Too lazy to cook dinner? You have your choice between restaurant delivery or a custom prepared “meal kit” that you can just pop in the oven. How about a handyman to come over and assemble that IKEA desk? Two clicks away!

Internet entrepreneurs have even stepped in to save us from the horrible burden of buying underwear by offering to deliver it on a monthly basis. Never mind that only the incontinent needs that much underwear.

Not only can we farm out all manner of chores and work, but we’re now outsourcing our decision making on the most basic and personal items. We have websites that pick out our clothes for us because we’re too lazy to decide what we should wear, and food services that tell us where and what to eat. If for some reason the algorithms and personal shoppers of the Internet fail us, we can Tweet and post to the social Web for instantaneous advice on any choice. The services for offloading work were just the first step. Now we can also offload anything that requires even a modicum of mental effort.

Where does this lead us? At best, it strips us of our individual taste. With our personal style handed over to a monthly box curated by someone else and every choice subject to the approval of our social network, we risk becoming generic and devoid of originality.

Even worse, I fear we are fast evolving into a people incapable, or at least unwilling, to do anything ourselves. With the Internet providing everything we could ever want at the touch of a mouse click, we’re becoming a kind of distorted version of the idle rich.

Many people, especially economists, would argue that specialization is the best way to maximize productivity. While this may be true in the strict sense of economic output, offloading every chore and decision outside of our narrow area of expertise threatens to leave us so limited that we may end up handicapping ourselves in the real world, incapable of functioning without a vast array of people and services to deliver our most basic needs. Taken to an extreme, an extreme many now appear to be approaching, this total reliance on others serves to limit our knowledge and skills.

Of course nobody is fully self sufficient, and that’s not what I’m arguing for. The efficient division of labor is why we live in cities, and before that, in villages and tribes. But a full life requires the experience of living. Having others provide all of our needs, including our food, our clothes, even our potential mates without any effort of our own, makes us narrow. It strips us of our taste and of the experiences of a full life. What we think are timesavers end up being missed opportunities to learn or do something new.

Unlike Joe’s fiance, who knows how to do things on her own, we won’t have to learn how to do much of anything. Two clicks of the mouse and everything will be decided for us and delivered to us. We can just sit back, relax, and enjoy being a do nothing nation.

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

The sharing economy is almost universally portrayed as a good thing. A move toward a less materialistic culture and a way of living a “smaller,” more sustainable lifestyle. Who could argue with maximizing something’s utility value, whether that be a car, a house, a lawn mower, or anything else? For true believers, the concept of “ownership” is a thing of the past, a concept almost bordering on being shameful.

While I love the altruistic belief system that underlies the sharing economy, I think it’s based on a misperception that all of the participants are part of some kind of global kibbutz where ownership is communal. But this simply isn’t true. Ultimately, somebody still owns the items being shared. Sometimes it’s a private person, as is the case with most of AirBnB, but other times it’s a corporation such as Avis (ZipCar). When a company owns the resources being “shared,” it isn’t really a sharing situation at all so much as just a new way for you to rent something. And lumping it all together under the guise of the sharing economy is just marketing spin to make you think you’re not being a typical consumer.

Even in the situations with private owners, there is still a dichotomy between the owners of the resources and the renters. I’ve heard of several cases of people using AirBnB to rent out multiple properties on a repeated short term basis, using the platform to fill so many properties that they’re essentially running virtual hotels. While there isn’t anything shady or wrong about this, is it really in the spirit of what most people consider the sharing economy?

From what I gather, the roots of the sharing economy can be traced to a combination of difficult finances faced by much of the millennial generation, combined with an awareness of our environmental impact. Once people figured out they could use the Internet to facilitate the exchanges, the sharing economy was born.

As I mentioned above, this spirit of sharing is the altruism that underlies the movement, but somewhere during its maturation, the sharing economy took on a different role. It became less about borrowing something you needed and more about giving people access to things they couldn’t afford. The sharing economy lets you rent anything for a day, sometimes even an hour. Everyone can taste luxury or style for a reasonable price.

When the sharing economy evolved into the access economy, it took on a similar role as credit plays in fooling poor people into thinking they’re still living it up. As long as people can rent something and still experience it for however short a period of time, they feel they’re not missing out. And just as easy credit distracted the declining middle class from their dwindling net worth by allowing them to continue buying toys, it seems at least part of the sharing economy inadvertently serves to distract the non-owners, the people who lack possessions, from their lack of resources by giving them access to things they couldn’t otherwise afford.

As a whole, I still think the sharing economy is a positive development. But the question of who ultimately owns the goods and the dichotomy between the “landlords” and the “renters” in the global sharing community is kind of a dirty secret that nobody wants to acknowledge. It’s important to remember that despite all the talk about ownership being a thing of the past, at the end of the day somebody still owns all of this stuff, and often, that somebody is just another company.

I’m not suggesting that everyone needs to give up on sharing, but keep in mind that if you don’t own anything in this ecosystem, wrapping it up in the pretty package of the sharing economy doesn’t change the fact that you are just a short term borrower of someone else’s property.

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

I recently attended an economics lecture that touched on the direct correlation between economic development and the access to, and effective deployment of energy (coal and oil). In a nutshell, the energy of coal and oil replaced human and animal labor which increased productivity on a massive scale. Fossil fuels also made large scale metal production possible which enabled better engines and construction which then drove the industrial revolution and all manufacturing since.

Obviously, this is not a comprehensive explanation of all the macro-economic drivers of growth, but in the simplest terms, energy provided the power that made industry possible. More than anything, this is what has produced our higher standards of living.

As I thought about the role of the Internet and information technology in relation to productivity growth, it occurred to me that I.T. and the Internet mostly serve to make industry more efficient but doesn’t really create anything on its own. Here’s a very simple example. In order to make a car you need steel. In order to make steel, you need energy. You don’t actually need the Internet or an enterprise resource management system to make a car. An ERM makes your automobile factory more efficient but it’s not imperative to the actual production of a car in the same way steel and power are needed.

I realize I’m using very broad strokes, but in short, energy builds while information only streamlines.

Based on the role of the Internet as something that makes other industries more efficient but doesn’t really create much on its own, it occurred to me that the economic benefits of the internet would be very limited in a pre-industrial developing nation.

Essentially, a country has to go through a stage of energy driven growth, AKA industrialization, for the Internet to have a significant economic impact on productivity. If there’s no factory to make more efficient, what do you need the Internet for?

Take Uber for example. If a country has no cars then there’s no reason to make calling for taxis one more efficient. Or even Amazon, if there’s no reliable mail service and people aren’t buying much outside of food, Amazon doesn’t really work.

This isn’t to suggest that the Internet provides zero benefit to early developing nations. Clearly, it opens up a world of knowledge to people who otherwise wouldn’t have it and this allows them to learn new skills that can improve their craft or local business. My point is only that the massive, economy transforming benefits we’ve come to expect from the internet are only possible after a nation has begun industrializing. It is the industrial core that magnifies the efficiency benefits of the internet.

None of this is relevant to the developed world which benefits greatly from information driven efficiency advancements, but I thought it was a point worth considering because Silicon Valley often champions the internet as a great equalizer and the ultimate driver of economic advancement. It seems to me this is wrong and it’s actually energy, and the industrialization that follows it, that is the seminal driver of economic development. Think of it this way. If you’re a farmer in Uruguay and you need to plow a field, it’s an oil driven tractor that makes that possible — energy and steel. The Internet might help you get a better price for your crops at the market but without that tractor, you wouldn’t have any crops to sell.

As I said at the beginning, this is not meant to be a comprehensive explanation of economics and it is obviously very simplified. But if I’m even half right about the role of energy and industrialization, it raises the additional question of whether or not an information economy based on streamlining and not building is a sustainable source of long term economic growth. After all, someone needs to build those cars, plow those fields, and deliver those packages, and the actual work of doing these things is not done on the Internet. It’s done by physical energy, which today still means oil and coal.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

I woke up this morning feeling a little grumpy, completely lacking in motivation, and with not much to do besides send out a few emails and go to the gym. In other words, it was a fairly ordinary day. I dallied around the house for a few hours reading meaningless tech news and leaving comments on Facebook until I came across an article in the Washington Post that made me realize how much I, how much all of us have failed to appreciate the everyday joy in our lives.

The article was about women and careers. But what struck me, what made me think about how unappreciative we are of everyday wonder, was a story the author told about her then six-year old daughter:

My daughter came home from school one day and announced that she’d had the best day of her life. When I asked what had happened, she said it was just an ordinary day. I pressed — certainly something different must have occurred? She shook her head. Intrigued, I called her first-grade teachers and asked if anything special had happened in class. No, they repeated, it was just an ordinary day.

“Just an ordinary day.”

I let that thought roll around in my head for a moment and realized this child had a far better understanding of life than the rest of us. She appreciated the joy, even the perfection, of a simple day without the need for something special to happen.

What did she see that we could not about, “just an ordinary day.”

I imagine very few of us appreciate ordinary days. Entrepreneurship is essentially driven by people who are unhappy with the status quo. We see things that need fixing and dedicate ourselves to making them better. Most of us plan our happiness on some imagined future after the big exit or when everyone is using our product. Today is for the grind.

When someone asks us, “How is your day?” the question seems almost contrived. We usually don’t even think about it as we mumble back an obligatory one word answer such as, “good,” “fine,” “shitty.” We think there isn’t anything to describe because it’s just an ordinary day.

Instead, we build our lives around chasing highlights, a night here, a weekend there, at best a moment of victory that we tell ourselves is the fulfillment of some lifelong dream. We label these fleeting moments the best days of our lives and assume the rest is empty time to be filled until the next flash of excitement or glory.

But it is the whitespace of ordinary days that forms the fabric of who we are. And it is in this whitespace, in the commonplaces, and in the familiar routines of our ordinary days where lasting happiness is found.

Most of you reading this are incredibly fortunate. But I also suspect most of you never think about what you have, only about what you don’t have. Like most people, you probably spend your ordinary days dreaming about some extraordinary time when you’ve reached various milestones that you think will make your life perfect. You tell yourself that your best days are yet to come. Perhaps you’ll reach your goals. Perhaps you won’t. But as you make your way, you would do well to remember the wisdom of a six-year old. The best days need not be distinguished by anything remarkable. If we could only learn to appreciate them, there is happiness and even joy to be found in the simplicity of just an ordinary day.

[Image courtesy Patrick Q]

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

If you listen to the advocates of online learning, MOOCs and Internet-based courses will cure all of our education problems. Just hand out some Android tablets, stream some courses in Python, and sit back and watch as everyone magically becomes a highly productive knowledge worker propelling the United States to new heights of economic prosperity. But this vision of online learning is so ridiculous I’m waiting for Ricardo Montalban to show up in a white suit and welcome these people to Fantasy Island.

The online education utopians ignore the fact that free learning has existed for decades in the form of the public library and despite that availability, every kid within bicycling distance to his local branch didn’t turn into a self taught entrepreneur. Suggesting that online courses are the cure-all for our educational needs is like saying all you have to do to teach kids in the ghetto is give away textbooks on the corner.

Recent studies have shown there is a significant gap between the completion rates of online students compared to classroom based students. When you consider that online learning is often promoted as a cost effective solution for at-risk learners who don’t have the financial resources for face-to-face instruction, it becomes clear that the online movement is offering a product that makes it easier to drop out to students who are already more prone to quitting in the first place.

Education is primarily driven by motivation, and online learning doesn’t do anything to address people’s motivational needs. In fact, the nature of online education strips away many of the components that keep students engaged and committed. Many of the factors that online education advocates claim are a benefit, such as time flexibility and the lack of classrooms, are actually a hindrance to learning. Studies have shown that a fixed structure and the sense of belonging that comes from a student body improve completion rates. Allowing students to study on their own removes these components of the support system resulting in lower rates of course completion.

In the end, MOOCs and online programs primarily help those who are self motivated to learn, and the vast majority of these people would have figured out how to educate themselves, whether in college or on their own, regardless of whether or not online courses are available.

Of all the online based learning programs that I’m aware of, only the Minerva Project addresses the inherent weaknesses of online education by incorporating physical campuses with dorms and classrooms where students interact. While the instruction is delivered over the internet, in many ways the Minerva Project resembles a brick and mortar university much more than an online program, certainly when it comes to real world student interaction.

I’m not arguing that online courses have no value. They have tremendous value for those who are self-motivated and prone to seeking out knowledge on their own. But in this regard, online courses play the role of a public library. And just as libraries are utilized by a fairly small percentage of the population and have not solved our educational needs, so too will online courses fail to be the solution to educating the masses.

There’s a scene in the movie “Good Will Hunting” where Will shames an arrogant Harvard student by pointing out that he wasted his money because he “dropped 150 grand on a fucking education you could’ve got for $1.50 in late charges at the public library.” Today that line would be written as “dropped 150 grand on a fucking education you could’ve got for free on the Internet.”

But just as few people in 1997 replaced their formal education with visits to the library despite the massive price differential, so too will most people continue to require structure and a supportive learning environment in the modern age of online education.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

If anything teachable came out of the tragic and frightening events in Boston last week, it’s that the powers of the Internet failed in every way. The FBI, the police, the national guard, the fire department, and every other first responder who worked to keep the people of Boston safe and ultimately kill and capture the marathon bombers were part of the government that the tech industry loves to vilify. How did the Internet respond last week? Let’s take a look:

1. The Internet decided they were going to do the job of the FBI and find the Boston bombers by creating a Reddit forum.
2. That same forum quickly degenerated into racial accusations and the misidentification of several innocent people including missing student Sunil Tripathi.
3. The rest of social media jumped into action in its usual role as a high speed rumor mill that will spread anything without the slightest attempt at verification.
4. In our desperate attempt to inject ourselves into the action, the police had to ask people not to share photos of current police activity, because it might put them in danger. Not only was the Internet not helping, it was putting the people on the front lines at more risk.
5. At least the Internet provided plenty of useless sideline commentary and filled my Facebook newsfeed with a whole bunch of new platitudes about not messing with Boston.

Now let’s look at what the hated, unnecessary government did last week:

1. As always, cops, firefighters, and other government employed first responders ran towards the bombs while everyone else ran away.
2. Same goes for the Texas fertilizer explosion.
3. The FBI and Boston police went into immediate action and successfully identified the bombers and provided their photos to the public (at which point Reddit used the photos to misidentify Sunil).
4. Police, FBI, and the national guard responded to the MIT shooting putting themselves in direct mortal danger and suffered casualties.
5. After killing one bombing suspect in the shootout, the authorities captured the second bombing suspect alive.

Seems like the government did a lot more to find the bombers and keep us safe than the almighty internet did last week. I guess the tech industry was too busy disrupting underwear delivery to capture the Boston bombers.

My point isn’t to paint the government as perfect, far from it. I get as frustrated by government incompetence and I hate paying taxes as much as anyone. But I’m not so self important to think that I, the Internet, social media, Reddit, the tech industry, and even Anonymous, can solve all of our problems if the government just gets out of our way.

It’s easy to hate the government, especially when things are going well as they currently are in Silicon Valley. During the good times, it often feels as if the government is just a parasite sucking what they can from the fruits of our labor. But as the events of last week showed, when times turn bad it’s the government that steps into the breach while the rest of us hide behind its efforts. The great Internet problem solving machine sat on the sidelines making wild and incorrect speculations while government employees put their lives on the line and caught the Boston bombers. Think about that the next time you bang the anti-government drum.

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

There is nothing I appreciate more than intelligent conversation and spending time with interesting people. In fact, a big reason why I started 50Kings was so I could enjoy the company of quality people I might not otherwise have met. But lately I’ve found myself increasingly hesitant to talk to people, even those with whom I’m already acquainted. It seemed like the vast majority of folks wanting to meet me or “catch up” were really just looking for an excuse to ask me for a favor or

Since I’m just some dude with a nice set of friends, I figured if this is a problem for me, it has to be a massive problem for people who are more successful than I am. Short of turning away everyone and defaulting to “no,” something many people are essentially forced to do, there had to be a way to separate the people who were actually interested in a conversation from the people who were just looking for a favor.

Here are a few things I’ve noticed that should help you sort the wheat from the chaff:

1. Beware of people who are just acquaintances who suddenly want to catch up. When someone you’ve only met once or twice or haven’t spoken to in a few years suddenly wants to meet for coffee or schedule a phone call, that’s almost always a trap. If they really just wanted to catch up and had no ulterior motives, they would have sent you an email asking, “Hey, how are you?” Or they could just check your Facebook profile. Going to an out of the blue coffee meeting is like flying into the Death Star. It’s a trap!
2. When people are slow to reply, understand what that means. Their slow replies indicate that you are not a high priority for them. If the relationship is new or casual for both parties, this is completely understandable. I have friends who I’m not really close to and I expect to be low on their priority list. By itself, this is not a problem. Just be aware of it so when they ask you for a favor you know where you stand with them.
3. Be cautious of people who show uncommon curiosity about your business. This is a sure sign that they want to pick your brain. Most businesses can be explained very simply in a few sentences over email and you probably have some links, articles, or videos that go into more depth. If someone starts asking to meet and learn about your business beyond that, be prepared to have your brain picked and don’t be surprised if they use that knowledge without paying you or even as a basis for copying you.

Here are some tips for the jackoffs who screw things up for everyone else by expecting free shit.

1. Just because you’re friends on Facebook with someone does not mean you can ask them for stuff.
2. If someone agrees to do a favor for you, don’t try to weasel another favor out of them.  There is nothing more annoying than the sneak attack “two-step” favor.
3. Don’t assume people will come to your office, especially if you’re the one who wanted to meet.
4. I suggest you earn your favors before you ask for them. I know so many people who have not been helpful or supportive of my efforts in any way, but they have no problem coming on strong when they want something from me.
5. Understand how much work or what’s on the line for the person you’re asking. For example, I’ve been asked to read and edit thousands of words of horribly written crap as if it’s no big deal. Or worse, people who have shown themselves to be flaky or demanding assume they’re automatically entitled to introductions. Seriously, why the fuck would I do that?

It’s a real shame that it’s come to this. Ideally, people wouldn’t try to take advantage of others, but if nothing changes we may have to start asking people point blank, “Do you really want to meet for coffee or is this some kind of trap?”

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.

One of the biggest benefits of the Internet, and more specifically social media, is how it supposedly democratizes power. Advocates of the Web often point to its ability to spread information and how it provides a platform for people to be heard as examples of its empowering effects. But simply spreading information is not the same as actually empowering people. And since the internet gives everyone an opportunity to speak, the end result is analogous to being in a room where everybody is yelling at the same time and drowning each other out.

The problem with democratized power is that it’s transient. It moves from group to group  and even person to person. And transient power, by definition, doesn’t last. Even when this type of leaderless movement appears to accomplish something, it is almost always as an obstructionist, not as a movement that provides forward looking solutions. Consider how the internet community rallied together to defeat SOPA. Once SOPA went down, we did nothing to offer an alternative to Congress or to the entertainment industry. The movement provided no leadership beyond stopping what it didn’t like.

Revolting against the powers that be versus actually being charged with leading are two very different things. We can see a great example of this in Egypt where social media helped organize the revolution but the country now finds itself back at square one, trying to put together an effective government. Deposing Mubarak is starting to look like the easy part.

Because of the transient nature of democratized power, even at its best these movements can only rally around a cause for a short period of time. Once the problem is defeated, or sometimes even before the problem is defeated, the energy behind the movement will dissipate. Or worse, the loosely affiliated factions will turn against each other and engage in infighting.

Consider the Occupy Wall Street movement. OWS had all the characteristics that advocates of Internet social “power” talk about. It was meant as a movement for the masses, as embodied by the “we are the 99%” motto. It was spread and at least partially organized online, and it compelled people to take real world action. And yet it achieved no results. The core message of exposing a flawed and perhaps corrupt plutocratic ruling class devolved into various demands ranging from free tuition to free housing. Because of this, the energy of OWS was misdirected.

Ultimately, OWS was easily broken. The movement never offered a solution, or for that matter never even agreed on what it wanted fixed. For all of its online social democratized power, without a leadership structure to organize its pent up energy, OWS proved powerless to affect any real change. Defeating the movement required little more than clearing a few parks and waiting for it to die out on its own. So much for the leaderless social revolution.

While the power of the Internet to help organize people is indisputable, in some ways it has made it too easy for people to express themselves. We can now claim to be part of a protest movement by simply Tweeting a link or liking a Facebook page. It requires virtually zero commitment, and anything that requires low or no effort is going to attract transient followers. Notice we’re back to the problem of transience. Transient followers have no skin in the game.

This is why the promise of Internet empowerment has largely gone unfulfilled. We have failed to recognize the importance of organization. Decentralized power does not have to mean directionless power, and democratized power does not have to be disorganized power. But in our rush to reject hierarchical leadership, we threw out the baby with the bathwater and have lost sight of the benefits of formal organization. This left us with transient, disorganized, and unfocused power that, at best, serves to obstruct but never leads. And that isn’t really power at all.

[Illustration by Hallie Bateman]

Francisco Dao

Francisco Dao is the founder of 50Kings, a private community for technology and media innovators. He is a former leadership columnist for Inc.com, a lifelong entrepreneur, author, and former stand-up comic. He writes every Tuesday and Thursday for PandoDaily.