I hope I’m wrong. I hope all of you reading this are still out there with energy & enthusiasm for the work of doing the right things. I hope this class brings back my faith in humanity (although reading about failed utopias will really challenge you on that, pro tip).

I hope that if you are reading this and you’re feeling the same way, you’ll reach out so we both know we’re not alone. This shit is hard, and I have so much respect and love for everyone trying to do the right thing anyway, and I also just think we should all acknowledge that it’s hard and help each other out.

Goodtech started as a volunteer project to support founders in social impact spaces who weren’t finding what they needed from traditional incubator programs. We shared rants, laughter, occasional tears, and the ridiculous contortions we’d come up with to circumnavigate the fact that public & private spaces aren’t yet built to work together.

Above all, we shared a common belief that until we can find ways to use the innovation and technology so prevalent in the private sector, we’ll never harness human capacity for good in the public sector.

After Uvalde, for me at least, the idea that there’s any pathway forward in a country that will kill women to protect fertilized eggs yet recommend bulletproof blankets to children doing nothing more than learning their ABCs died a permanent and painful death.

I simply can’t reconcile the idea that any policy change or innovative idea can change something so dominant as the idea that children don’t matter unless they’re not born yet.

Also featuring internet vending machines, rational do-gooding, a lot of stuff about the metaverse, and the future of goodtech 💡 Big Ideas TL;DR: Talking about VCs is like asking questions in church, and the future of goodtech My last newsletter became the basis for a short series on ‘what I learned in startupland.’ It turned […]

And not only that – but all regional economies will falter whether they are building in tech or not. Every business in the 21st century relies on the internet and technology in multiple ways.

Yet we often avoid looking at the third and fourth order impacts of our solutions – and in doing so, we open the door for even more predatory solutions that come behind us to solve the problems we’ve inadvertently created.

And thank you for a wonderful year. Hi friends of goodtech, I’d hoped to get you one last, great read before the holidays. Unfortunately, American healthcare is only a system insofar as it fails when you need it most, and bad luck becomes proportional in its impact the further down you fall. We’ve had a […]

Let’s stop asking how to treat people’s money and start asking how we can best help people help people.

How do we empower people, companies, and technologies that serve the public good without making them subject to private control or forcing them to operate on shoestrings?

Institutions are failing because they aren’t built for the people they serve. They’re built by people who have no idea what it’s like to be in need, and all the good intentions in the world can’t fix what you’ll miss from simply not knowing what it’s like to live there.

Those tests reduce crash damage for men – including whiplash by 71%, since the design of headrests and airbags is built around the way men’s necks are structured. As a result, women are injured more often and more severely than they would if safety equipment were designed for them.

Also, we’ve known this since at least 1980. NHTSA was supposed to implement a family of drivers and passengers of all sexes against which they could test safety equipment that year. The project was cut due to budget restrictions under the Reagan administration.

To this day, there’s no intention of testing safety ratings for female drivers, much less passengers.