Most of our generation lacks historical perspective on justice and persecution, so we’ve put together a brief paper on how these ideas have evolved in the context of Western Civilization.

“The law requires a double testimony to convict…the principal reason undoubtedly is to secure the subject from being sacrificed to fictitious conspiracies…”[1]
– William Blackstone, 1769

The cornerstone of Western criminal law is that the accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The presumption of innocence (PoI) is justly regarded as “axiomatic and elementary,” a triumph of rationalism over arbitrary persecution.[2] Like all due process protections, the PoI took shape against the specter of tyrannical violence. In particular, history suggests that the PoI emerged as an antidote to the tyranny of mob violence against marginalized figures including “heretics, witches, and Jews” — and sometimes even kings themselves.[3]

Few have analyzed persecution as deeply as René Girard. Girard argues that communities routinely commit acts of insensate violence against innocent individuals. These victims of collective aggression are “scapegoats” — symbolically equivalent to the he-goats that the ancient Hebrews would slaughter to atone for their sins.[4] For Girard, social groups are driven by an intrinsic logic of “mimesis” — mimicry of other people’s desires. Because human beings absorb our values from others, we are prone to bandwagoning, herd instincts, the madness of crowds, and sometimes a “blind instinct for reprisals.” [5] This trait occasionally drives us to demonize others as monstrous scapegoats that must be ritually slain to restore peace to the community.[6]

Girard argues that Christ’s crucifixion permanently exposed the scapegoat’s “guilt” as a lie, inaugurating progress towards more rational criminal justice. Christ is perfectly innocent. Pilate can find no case against the “Lamb of God”, who cries out from the cross “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do” (John 1:29, Luke 23:24). This most famous miscarriage of justice reveals the entire practice of scapegoating to be morally bankrupt and forces humanity to reason about guilt prior to punishment. In this way, the synoptic gospels give birth to the rational criminal trial, due process, and, by extension, the presumption of innocence. In Girard’s phrase, “the invention of science is not the reason that there are no longer witch-hunts, but the fact that there are no longer witch-hunts is the reason that science has been invented.”[7]

As a matter of historical fact, variants on the PoI surfaced in the West well before the death of Christ. The principle that the burden of proof is on the plaintiff dates back to the Twelve Tables, and in Roman law the defendant’s guilt had to be as “clear as daylight” in order for the judge to convict.[8],[9] Well before Judeo-Christian thinking penetrated Rome, Emperor Trajan said “it is preferable that the crime of a guilty man should go unpunished than that an innocent man be condemned”. Furthermore, Judaism itself endorsed the principle that “at the mouth of two witnesses, or three witnesses, shall he that is worthy of death be put to death; but at the mouth of one witness he shall not be put to death” (Deuteronomy 17:6).[10]

It is nearer the truth to say that both church and state helped cement principles of due process in the West. After all, the Roman world had the most robust legal system of any classical civilization. But Girard may be right that Christianity helped to “rationalize” the Abrahamic tradition. It was the fusion of the two traditions — Roman law and Canon law — that ultimately produced modern due process protections. 1215 was a watershed year for criminal justice: in a span of months, the Magna Carta codified the rights of a free man to the “lawful judgment of his equals or by the law of the land,” and the Fourth Lateran Council overturned pre-rational modes of trial (combat, ordeal). In trial by ordeal, for instance, defendants burned themselves with molten iron, boiling water, or glowing coals, and then clerics assessed their guilt based on the pace at which their wounds healed.[11]. Under growing pressure from Scholastic thinkers, Pope Innocent III decreed that appeal to heavenly signs (combat, ordeal) was not adequate to determine guilt. Instead, guilt had to be assessed by using human reason to grapple with the facts of a case to the best of our ability.

Unfortunately, legal progress marches to the unsteady canto of two steps forward, one step back. While Pope Innocent’s reforms were a dramatic advance in Western criminal justice, atavisms persisted into the modern world. Inquisitorial trials were “generally permeated by a presumption of guilt in the guise of mala fama, a doctrine which allowed a person to be brought to trial if they were collectively presumed to be guilty.[12] In addition, torture was used as a mode of fact-finding and an unimpeachable form of proof as late as the 18th century. As a result, the medieval criminal trial was often little more than a formalized scapegoating ritual.

Eventually the Western world clawed its way to a moral high-ground, immortalizing the presumption of innocence as a central pillar of due process. Blackstone famously expanded Trajan’s principle to “it is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” The “beyond reasonable doubt” standard found first expression in the trials of redcoats after the Boston Massacre, and the phrase “presumption of innocence” first appeared in an American court opinion in 1850. Of course, it took many years for our country to extend the principle fairly and evenly to all men and women, black and white. In the middle of the 19th century, Frederick Douglass caustically noted that slave owners espoused a hideous variant of Blackstone’s principle.

“Mr. Gore acted fully up to the maxim laid down by slaveholders, — “It is better that a dozen slaves should suffer under the lash, than that the overseer should be convicted, in the presence of the slaves, of having been at fault.” No matter how innocent a slave might be — it availed him nothing, when accused by Mr. Gore of any misdemeanor. To be accused was to be convicted, and to be convicted was to be punished; the one always following the other with immutable certainty.”

But over the course of the 20th century, due process protections were gradually extended to all Americans. In 1970 the Supreme court elevated the “beyond a reasonable doubt principle” to the status of constitutional law.[13],[14] As the concept of the plaintiff’s evidentiary burden evolved from “clear as daylight” to “moral certainty” to “beyond a reasonable doubt”, courts continued to refine the ideas of “rationality” and “reasonability” which guide the criminal trial. Borrowing an idea from Hegel, one might say that the spirit of Western rationalism animating criminal law has become increasingly self-conscious.

Whether Girard is right about the causal link between the synoptic gospels and Western rationalism, he is certainly right that we are always in danger of relapse. Our highest court once ruled that unless the right to bail before trial was preserved, “the presumption of innocence secured only after centuries of struggle would lose its meaning.”[15] The Rehnquist court destroyed this protection in Bell v. Wolfish (1979), ruling that pre-trial detention of presumptively innocent parties is permissible. The extension of this precedent has eroded the rights of those accused of sexual crimes and justified “civil asset forfeiture,” or the blatant seizure of an innocent person’s property.[16]

James Thayer once argued that the PoI has the “peculiarly important function…of warning our untrained tribunal, the jury, against being misled by suspicion, conjecture, and mere appearances.”[17] Today, social media and search algorithms corral us into the kinds of ideological pens that make suspicion and knee-jerk reactions to “mere appearances” more probable. In 2017 we made real progress in resisting the predations of the powerful — inspiring people to stand up for themselves, and making it clear that certain behavior is unacceptable in our society. As we move into the new year, we would do well to remember our civilization’s foundational wisdom and find new ways to support the downtrodden. As we continue important conversations about justice and our identity as a people, we should ensure that we do not cast stones in new cycles of public scapegoating. As Girard reminds us, a core element of our Judeo-Christian heritage — and the crucifixion story itself — is the belief that no one should face persecution at the hands of a mob, and that the presumption of innocence is the soul of rational criminal justice.

[1] Blackstone, William. “Blackstone’s Commentaries” Abridged version, ed. William Sprague, 9th edition, 1915. p. 523

[2] Coffin v. U.S. Justice White’s majority opinion. 156 U.S. 432, 1895.

[3] Pennington, Kenneth. “Innocent Until Proven Guilty: The Origins of a Legal Maxim.” The Jurist, 2003.

[4] Leviticus 16:30

[5] Girard, 86.

[6] Girard’s theory of mimesis is that individuals competitively imitate each other until they become so similar that they are driven into a cycle of escalating violence which terminates in the cathartic, sacred murder of a “scapegoat.”

[7] Girard, ibid. p.96

[8] Mousourakis, George. “The Historical and Institutional Context of Roman Law.” Routledge, 2003.

[9] Cicero. “Against Verres” in Selected Works, Trans. Michael Grant. Penguin Classics, 1971.

[10] However Judaism is conflicted on the issue of PoI. When Abraham asks “wilt thou destroy the just with the wicked?” God replies that the entire population of Sodom and Gomorrah is presumptively guilty unless Abraham can find 50 innocent people therein (Genesis 18:20–26) — an inversion of the principle that “it is better that n-guilty people go free than 1 innocent person be punished.” …By contrast, one may interpret Adam’s demand that God punish Eve for tricking him into eating the apple as a demand for a fair adjudication of guilt.

[11] McAuley, Finbarr. “Canon Law and the End of the Ordeal.” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, Vol. 26.3, 2006.

[12] Van Damme, ibid.

[13] Commonwealth vs. John W. Webster. 59 Mass. 295, 1850.

[14] In re Winship, 397 U.S. 358 (1970)

[15] Stack v. Boyle, 342 U.S. 1 (1951)

[16] Pernell, LeRoy. “The Reign of the Queen of Hearts.” Cleveland State L.R., 1989.

[17] Thayer, ibid.

When an employee of a privately held technology company leaves the company and exercises her stock options, she typically has 3 months to qualify for favorable tax treatment. However, if there has been a run up in the value of the company since the options were originally granted, the employee may face enormous tax obligations. Since secondary markets for shares in privately held companies are often difficult to access, company common stock may only be valuable “on paper,” but the departing employee must pay the taxes on her options in real cash. As a result, many Silicon Valley engineers face “golden handcuffs” scenarios, where they literally cannot afford to leave their companies without surrendering their stock options and sacrificing large fractions of their net worth.

Suppose that as an employee of a large privately held tech company you were granted stock options for 200,000 shares of stock at a strike price of 10¢ per share, and suppose that your stock has appreciated to $3 per share. You’re ready to leave your company and want to exercise your options. You want to pay the $20,000 necessary to purchase your shares at their original strike price and realize a paper gain of $580,000, but at the typical marginal tax rate in California, you must also pay $200,000 or more in taxes. Since you don’t have $200,000 in cash lying around, you reluctantly accept that you won’t be able to leave your company without forfeiting a lot of your compensation – and thus your prospects for taking a sabbatical, buying a house, starting a family, etc.

Today it is common for Silicon Valley companies to remain privately held even with valuations well above $1B. “Unicorns” such as Uber, AirBnB, SpaceX, and Palantir may remain privately held for indefinitely long periods of time. The current tax environment not only makes it difficult for tech employees to realize the fair value of their labor, it also makes it prohibitively difficult to bootstrap new ventures or move to companies where they can follow their passions and deliver superior performance. Current tax laws are stunting innovation and hurting American technologists.

Fortunately, lawmakers are aware of the problem. Congressman Kevin Brady (R-TX) recently proposed an amendment to the GOP tax bill released in the House last week which would indefinitely defer taxes due on the exercise of the most common kinds of stock options – “incentive stock options” (ISOs) and “restricted stock units” (RSUs) – until their owner ultimately decides to sell their stock. The amendment would allow employees who exercise a rarer form of stock option – “non-qualified stock options” (NSOs) – to defer their taxes for 5 years, or, if earlier, until their company IPOs or changes hands. This reform is a welcome improvement over current law.

An even better option is for Congress to amend the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act to allow employees to indefinitely defer taxes on any kind of stock option they have exercised until they sell their shares to another party. On Congressman Brady’s proposal, employees who exercise their NSOs would still be liable for large tax burdens after the 5-year deferral period elapses. Many employees will correctly realize that if they can’t afford to pay the taxes now, they may not be able to pay them later. For a software engineer with a family, risking a $260,000 tax burden is often financially irresponsible, which means that the engineer must accept a somewhat ameliorated version of the classic golden handcuffs scenario. Taxing the sale of stock rather than the exercise of stock options would solve this problem for ISOs, RSUs, and NSOs alike.

Our proposed reform allows employees to exercise their options without risking massive taxes on phantom money that they never actually possess, and boosts innovation by freeing top talent to move freely between companies and allocate time as they see fit. It is a natural extension of the spirit of Congressman Brady’s plan.

Golden handcuffs distort incentives and prevent technologists from freely deploying their talents on projects they are passionate about. Universally deferring taxes until an employee sells their stock will loosen golden handcuffs, tax individuals at rates which reflect their true (not notional) income, and stimulate increased mobility and innovation in the technology sector. We hope that the Ways and Means Committee will seriously consider the proposal.

The only way to create prosperity is to do more with less. In economic terms, an increase in productivity is an increase in the amount or quality of output generated for each unit of input. Jobs do not make society wealthier – productivity does. The original example of an industry that has learned to do more with less is agriculture. On a medieval farm, an entire family would have to work to eke out a subsistence living for themselves. But today, a small number of farmers produce enough food to feed the entire planet.

From the green revolution to the present, technological innovations and centralization of farming operations enabled the agricultural sector to do much more with far less. Between 1930 and 2000, U.S. agricultural output quadrupled, even though material inputs such as land, labor, and capital remained constant. This enormous productivity boost freed up Americans to specialize in other sectors: building, manufacturing, and creating new goods and services.

As the example of agriculture illustrates, there are multiple ways to increase economic productivity. One is to build and finance companies with entirely new innovations, typically the domain of the entrepreneur and the venture capitalist. Another is to improve the way existing companies work, often by merging many smaller companies to form one large one, or restructuring management goals and employee incentives within a company. This is typically the domain of the “private equity” firm or a large acquisitive corporation. The two methods sometimes complement each other: when a VC-backed entrepreneur develops a new technology, corporations or PE-like firms often scale the product and quickly spread it throughout the economy.

How Private Equity Works
Today, a private equity or “PE” firm is a company that raises funds from institutions and wealthy individuals and then invests that money in buying and selling businesses. PE firms are usually “activist” investors, which means that rather than pursuing a passive buy-and-hold strategy, they are involved in managing (fixing…or screwing up) the internal operations of the businesses they acquire.

Imagine you’re an investor who wants to make the economy run more productively by improving as many businesses as you’re able to, starting with those with the most potential for improvement. You pore over a map of the economy that shows how different sectors have evolved, which business models have proven effective, where consumer demand is trending, and rafts of other economic data. You want to do more with less – but how? The leaders of private equity firms find themselves in exactly this position, and employ some of the following strategies:

1) Combining back offices of multiple firms to cut redundant costs. Sometimes PE firms will bundle several companies within an industry vertical to reduce supply chain costs. They may also combine an ailing company with a healthy company so that the former can develop better processes and become more productive.

2) Aligning incentives by increasing CEOs’ and operational officers’ stakes in their business. This technique rewards management for increasing company growth and performing a successful company exit.

3) Rescuing and restructuring businesses that are squandering their resources. PE firms commonly target older companies that lack financial discipline, particularly those with inefficient middle management, or where executives spend money on private jets and extravagant parties. These kinds of organizations benefit immensely from the tutelage of private equity firms experienced at leading and running capital-efficient businesses. By aligning rewards with performance (rather than nepotism or habit), PE firms can make portfolio companies much more productive.

4) Locating great sectors and geographies to invest in. PE firms may be able to spot undervalued industrial sectors or localities that others have missed. When these areas are capitalized to their potential, they can fully develop and thrive.

5) Using equity capital more efficiently. The capital markets are highly competitive, and securing loans (“leverage”) for deals requires finesse. Though the popular press often disparages “financial engineering”, reorganizing a company’s capital structure can free up money to deploy to other parts of the business or the economy. Of course, irresponsible leverage makes a firm more likely to fail. But the market accounts for this possibility – investors in private equity firms carefully monitor their investments. A PE fund with failed portfolio companies will have trouble raising as much money and freely determining how to allocate it next time around.

A good example of how PE can positively impact an industry is Carlyle’s buyout of Hertz Corporation in 2005. After the buyout, Hertz improved operational efficiency in a variety of ways – for instance locating car cleaning and refueling services in the same parking lots. Not only did these improvements raise Hertz’s value by $3B, they forced the entire car rental industry to respond with innovations of their own. During the same period, Avis-Budget and Dollar-Thrifty profit margins and labor productivity increased substantially. Another example of private equity techniques at work is the brewing industry. The average worker at a North American brewing company is 7x as productive as his counterpart in 1950. Private equity groups such as 3G Capital, which merges and restructures brewing operations (recently, Anheuser-Busch), have made the industry much more efficient.

Private Equity and Its Discontents
The classic critique of private equity is that its success derives from financial engineering tricks, such as increasing leverage and minimizing tax liabilities, rather than real operational improvements. Michael Moritz recently claimed, for instance, that PE is akin to
“making a small down payment on your neighbors' house; paying for the balance by taking out a mortgage secured by their savings, jewelry, silverware and car; selling off the contents of their property; and then siphoning off some of the loan for yourself.” Similar invectives were leveled during the 2012 presidential campaign of Mitt Romney, who helped create Bain Capital. Like any industry, PE is occasionally corrupt – as when it partners with crony state and local governments to charge exorbitant rates on water utility bills, ambulances, and inmate phone calls. But the image of private equity purely as a parasitic form of business completely misses the point.

The primary way to make money in private equity is to make portfolio companies more efficient and healthier in the long-run. If a PE firm saddles a portfolio company with such a heavy debt burden that the company is unable to return a profit, the PE firm ultimately suffers. Private equity firms are fundamentally incentivized to improve and strengthen the operations of the companies they control, not to cripple them. Furthermore, enabling companies to do more with less allows workers to specialize at other tasks, and frees up wealth with which investors and management can capitalize internal improvements or ventures in other regions of the economy. PE firms succeed to the extent that their portfolio companies succeed, and to the extent that their portfolio companies succeed, America prospers.

Another conventional critique made by Moritz is that PE destroys millions of jobs when cutting costs at portfolio companies. This is empirically false – the private equity industry as a whole is responsible for large job creation as well as destruction, with only modest net job losses. But the deeper fallacy with this argument is that full, constant employment is a kind of summum bonum in America’s economy. If we wanted to create full employment it would be easy: we could simply ban 20th century agricultural technology, immiserating millions of Americans and forcing them back into farm labor. It’s easy to intuit that this would be a bad idea, but it’s harder to imagine the economic progress that layoffs and labor migration imply. The truth is that creative destruction of antiquated jobs and invention of new forms of labor is what drives productivity growth, and PE firms are integral to this process.

Finally, some argue that PE only enriches a select few at the expense of ordinary Americans. In fact, the largest investors in PE are American pension funds, which have committed hundreds of billions of dollars to the American private equity industry. PE assets make up 9% of CALPERS portfolio, for instance, and have generated an annualized net return of 12.3% over the last ten years. When private equity firms succeed, every state government pension plan, university endowment, and large philanthropic endowment shares in their profits. It’s no stretch to say that the primary beneficiary of the private equity industry is the American public.

Private Equity and Venture Capital
Private equity and venture capital have much in common, and The Economist is partly correct to characterize VC as “private equity for fledglings”. Like their counterparts in PE, VC funds have long lifespans, allowing partners to cultivate long-term growth in portfolio companies rather than focusing on quarterly showings. Also, like private equity firms, the modern VC is actively involved in coaching and advising its portfolio companies (though ironically, PE is often more hands-on and entrepreneurial than VC because the latter has the more limited discretion of a minority shareholder).

Jim Coulter of TPG noted that whereas VC is in the business of mutation, PE is in the business of evolution. Where VCs fund “mutant” start-ups that offer completely novel technological innovations, private equity firms facilitate the process of ensuring that only the “fittest” companies survive. This is an important distinction between the two industries, and there are other technical differences. But broadly speaking, you can’t believe in the fundamental value proposition of the venture capital industry unless you believe in the basic paradigm of investment, assistance, and economic repair pioneered by PE.

We believe that in the coming decade, segments of the private equity and venture capital industries will converge and adopt similar strategies. Returns will disproportionately accrue to firms that combine the best of each. In the 1980s – the heyday of the private equity industry – firms such as KKR, Blackstone, Carlyle and Apollo tapped the under-deployed resources of banks to purchase, restructure, and resell corporations. But leveraged buyout (LBO) techniques are now “commoditized,” and the industry is extremely saturated: PE backs 23% of America’s midsized companies, and 11% of its large companies. The private equity industry remains valuable, but in order to generate unusual returns it must “evolve” itself.
PE firms have always tried to harness new innovations, but a surge of new information technologies has made it increasingly valuable for some private equity firms to partner with leading entrepreneurs and technologists – many of whom are located in Silicon Valley. Commercial data is exploding in volume and variety, and metrics are becoming much more precise. Private investors of the future will use technology platforms to evaluate formerly uninteresting assets as hidden stores of data, which will make their businesses and industries more efficient. New information will allow top investors to better assess consumer demand, supply chain logistics, and industry-level shifts, as well as determine where to open channels of communication and dedicate resources. Data-driven PE firms will limit waste, increase their margins, and become more valuable to their partners.

Venture capitalists able to draw on the top networks of talented leaders and builders in Silicon Valley were among the first to develop an armamentarium of data-driven procedural improvements for their portfolio companies. Hybrid groups such as Vista pioneered these techniques in the buyout space. Private equity firms working closely with venture capitalists and technologists may be able to unlock assets that others have not leveraged and build technology cultures to iterate on solutions that make those assets more productive. Some may even reclaim 1980s or 1990s-level returns. At the same time, the best VCs will begin to imitate and adopt PE strategies. Scaling major technological breakthroughs in certain industries requires armies of people and significant resources – private equity’s bread and butter. VCs may also begin to increase their return on equity capital of late-stage portfolio companies with debt financing, drawing on the private credit divisions of investment banks, PE firms and more.

There is still a large cultural rift between the two worlds; the culture of Silicon Valley is very different from the “Wall Street” mentality of the American financial establishment. Fortunately, open-minded individuals in each field are establishing rapport and exchanging insights. We have been lucky to add luminaries including Henry Kravis and Geoff Rehnert as investors and advisors to 8VC, and Sir Deryck Maughan as a board partner. Communication and cooperation between our industries will only continue to improve as the distinction between elite private equity and venture capital investors becomes less meaningful.

Conclusion
Critiques of PE reflect a naïve understanding of what creates economic prosperity. No industry is perfect, but private equity is an integral part of the economy, and should be celebrated for making our country wealthier overall. The confluence of the venture capital and private equity industries will only make each more productive, strengthening and fine-tuning the economy. Savvy, competitive investors able to build, buy and fix companies will continue to stimulate growth by allowing us to do more with less – the only way to create prosperity.

Joe Lonsdale
General Partner, 8VC
8VC is a San Francisco based venture capital firm which invests in industry-transforming companies. For more information or to sign up for our newsletter, visit www.8vc.com

Hello, World!
Announcing Terminal, by Joe Lonsdale and Jack Abraham

Talent is the technology ecosystem’s most precious resource. Innovation occurs when gifted and hard-working entrepreneurs bend their wills to solve the world’s most challenging problems. A primary indicium of a healthy startup is the talent of the engineers involved. At Palantir, Addepar, Zenreach, Milo and the other companies we have started, we focused on building the kinds of organizations that attract the best minds. There is no formula for innovation, but the best proxy is a group of brilliant, highly motivated people clustered together, working towards a shared goal.

A decade ago, popular opinion suggested that this talent had to physically cluster together — in Silicon Valley. That’s no longer true. First, attracting and retaining talent in Silicon Valley is more difficult than ever; startup founders are spending most of their time and money chasing around engineers to join (or stay with) their companies. Second, proximity is now as much virtual as physical; today everything is in the cloud and deskmates often chat first via tools like Slack before talking across the table. Empirically, the majority of entrepreneurial engineering talent is no longer concentrated in a 15 mile radius but rather all across the globe, in localized emerging talent hubs.

Until recently, mathematical and systems thinking talent remained an untapped resource in many parts of the world. The spread of the Internet and everyday visibility of major technology companies such as Apple and Google has drawn attention to the importance of these talents. Technological literacy rates are rising, and increasing numbers of universities are adapting their curricula to emphasize STEM skills. In fact, the 10 best countries for computer programming do not include the US.

Young people thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley increasingly have the chance to become engineers, scientists, and programmers in top technology companies without immigrating to the US. China is already home to a huge amount of top talent, and is even eclipsing the West in certain specializations. Leading talent from India has thrived in Silicon Valley for decades, and is now building an impressive technological ecosystem on the subcontinent. Despite restrictive government regulation, Western Europe has been unable to suppress the entrepreneurial tech talent emerging in London, Paris, and Berlin. Talent from South America, Australia, and Africa has become part of the global technology community in the last decade.

World-class tech hubs are emerging in distant, sometimes unexpected locations. Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam is now a major technology hub in Southeast Asia. Business and engineering are the most popular majors for Vietnamese studying abroad, and LG, Panasonic, and Toshiba are establishing R&D operations in Vietnam. Eastern Europe, with its strong tradition of mathematics and computer science, is also emerging as a powerhouse. Eastern European programmers consistently take first place in international competitions, and AVG Technologies, Codewise, and Prezi are all exports from Eastern Europe’s capital cities. Israel remains a technological powerhouse, punching far above its weight in fintech and cybersecurity. “Start-up Nation” features the most SMEs per capita in the world, and Israeli startups raised a record $4.8 billion in 2016.

Some forward-thinking governments have helped shepherd this surge of talent by creating R&D programs and other initiatives. One great example is Canada. The late Finance Minister Jim Flaherty was not only one of the most respected G8 finance ministers, but a visionary with respect to technological progress. Canada’s 2012 budget pledged CAD $1.6b to support R&D and innovation through grants and credit programs, and this number has grown substantially in the past 5 years. Canada also pioneered a startup visa geared specifically towards technologists.

Canada’s efforts have helped bridge its strengths in scientific research, applied science, and experimental development to the business world, particularly technology markets. The public/private MaRS Discovery District in Toronto and the Montreal Institute for Learning Algorithms (MILA) are at the forefront of AI and machine learning research, and the latter has attracted partnerships with Google and IBM. Many of Canada’s top universities — Waterloo, Toronto, Montreal, and McGill — are producing highly talented computer science graduates. Canada is a desirable place of residence for engineers (as well as professionals in other industries) and recently, Toronto startups have experienced a reverse brain drain with double-digit increases in job applications from the US. These political and cultural developments have made it possible for a group of Silicon Valley veterans to create a talent program aimed at nurturing the Canadian tech industry to maturity.

For that reason, we are pleased to announce the launch of Terminal — a company which builds and scales elite engineering teams for the very best technology firms. We funnel talent to top technology firms that maintain the highest standard of conduct and consistently pursue impressive missions. Terminal provides full stack recruiting, comprehensive infrastructure and back-office support for talent. Members of our organization cluster and develop their skills in supportive, stimulating environments, which simplifies the hiring and employment process for potential employers. We already have “terminals” in Kitchener-Waterloo, Montreal, Vancouver and plan to open more soon.
Terminal helps talented individuals across the country find berths in the best technology companies, and helps technology companies locate the employees they need to thrive and grow. One of our central pillars is to ensure that our partner companies will commit to treating their new employees as a first-class citizens rather than replaceable parts. By cultivating mutually respectful relationships between tech companies and prospective employees we are strengthening tech cultures in productive, valuable ways. Our co-founders are Dylan Serota, who built and scaled the successful Eventbrite platform team largely in Mendoza, Argentina, and Luke Finney, who has led teams of Navy SEALs around the world. Together we will expand Terminal to the global scale, and ultimately plan to open “terminals” in all emerging tech hubs.

We strongly believe that the hardest problems in the world will be solved by technology companies. Talented technologists are tackling some of the most difficult problems in healthcare, government, financial systems, and other broken industries. Concentrating and structuring teams of great minds to work on these problems is what the startup ecosystem is all about. We hope our efforts at Terminal will enable great companies to partner with tens of thousands of leading technologists in the coming years.

Good things happen in eights. In 1957, Eugene Kleiner and seven other engineers quit their jobs at Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory. Kleiner, a Jewish émigré of Austrian extraction, secured a $1.5 million investment from Sherman Fairchild to found Fairchild Semiconductor, the first major computer chip manufacturer in Silicon Valley. In the subsequent decades, the “Traitorous 8” founded a host of spin-off companies so wildly successful that Fairchild and its offspring are today reputedly worth over $2 trillion.[1]

Kleiner pioneered the archetype of the Technologist-VC. Though he referred to himself as an engineer to the end of his days,[2] he occupied the various roles of Scientist, Entrepreneur, and Investor at different points in his life. In 1968, Kleiner made a major bet on Intel, a company founded by another two members of the Traitorous 8, and now the largest semiconductor manufacturer in the world. In 1972, Kleiner cofounded a venture capital firm called Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers. KPCB went on to become one of the most prolifically successful venture capital firms in history, with notable investments in Genentech, Sun Microsystems, Compaq, Amazon, Google, and over 350 other companies.

Kleiner was a calm man with a rich baritone, famous for his formulations of entrepreneurial and investing wisdom. Kleiner’s Laws — a collection of pragmatic and occasionally culinary aphorisms — have achieved the status of folklore in Silicon Valley. Though Kleiner passed away in 2003, his principles remain vital to running a successful start-up or venture capital fund. Here are a few of our favorites:[3]

1) Make sure the dog wants to eat the dog food.

The technology may be groundbreaking and the team may be world-class, but if people don’t want to buy the product the company will be a failure. Product-market fit is a fundamental element of any start-up’s success, and some venture capitalists regard it as the controlling variable.

2) Build one business at a time.

Entrepreneurial ambition often outstrips reality. Founders may devote their attention to developing a scattered array of bells and whistles rather than to the core product. The appropriate time for sideshow experiments is once a company has scaled to maturity; in the early years of a company’s life, sustained, precise focus on a singular business mission is vital.

3) The time to take the tarts is when they’re being passed.

Venture capital exhibits a cyclical, seasonal quality. The strategic founder should take advantage of funding when it is available, and not attempt to time funding according to the business’ stage of development.

4) It’s difficult to see the picture when you’re inside the frame.

Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards aren’t a formality, they are a vital source of perspective and feedback on the direction of a business. Kleiner famously quipped that “a good board will give you better advice than your mother.”

5) Even turkeys can fly in a high wind.

In a similar vein, investors should factor in macroeconomic indicators when assessing the value of a company. Tailwinds of irrational exuberance often drive company valuations into artificially high ranges. The intelligent investor understands that few companies can really survive in such thin air.

6) After learning some of the tricks of the trade, some people think they know the trade.

Though entrepreneurs commit this fallacy, venture capitalists are more likely to mistake superficial knowledge for robust understanding. Both founders and financiers should beware dilettantism and make sure they have a deep grasp of the industries they deal with.

7) Venture capitalists will stop at nothing to copy success.

Second-rate investors will often attempt to replicate the strategies of top investors with catastrophic consequences. The winner-take-all dynamics of modern technologies — especially but not exclusively software platforms — mean that it’s usually better to fund companies with first mover advantages.

8) Invest in people, not just products.

To make good dog food, you need a good team. Kleiner famously maintained very close relationships with the founders he invested in, and he was always a source of patient guidance on operational issues. A great company will combine an excellent team, product, and market.

Today, Kleiner’s Laws remain at the heart of what we do as technologists and investors. Kleiner operated from first principles as an entrepreneur and an investor, and his approach yielded enormous rewards. The best culture an investment firm can foster is to constantly invoke, reflect on, and argue from basic principles — and to help their founders do so as well. Only in this way can a firm remain methodologically sound, and make confident decisions. A founding father of Silicon Valley, Eugene Kleiner remains a perennial source of wisdom.

Thanks to Harry LeFrak for reminding me to write this piece.

[1] Morris, Rhett. “The First Trillion-Dollar Startup.” TechCrunch, Jul 26, 2014.

[2] Meyer, Peter. “Giants of Poly: Eugene Kleiner.” p. 22 http://web1.poly.edu/alumni/_docs/Giants-Kleiner.pdf

[3] http://www.kpcb.com/partner/eugene-kleiner