Billions With Zero Knowledge - Austin Hill, Entrepreneur & Angel Investor

Sometimes the light’s all shining on me
Other times I can barely see
Lately it occurs to me
What a long strange trip it’s been.
Truckin, Grateful Dead

I wrote this post in October 2006 but delayed in posting it until I had time to get comfortable with blogging. Although I’ve edited it a bit in the last couple of weeks before posting, most of the content remains the same. I attempted to write a shorter version of it recently, but decided that I would retain the original format of the post I wrote almost six months ago. It is fitting that I’m posting this from the TED conference since it was the TED conference that inspired the idea for my new project, leading me to leave the company I founded with my brother & father.

It was almost a decade ago in the spring of 1997 when Hamnett and Hammie (my brother & father) and I had just sold our Internet provider Total.Net and had begun to work on a new venture. Our new company was based on the idea that we could build a number of services to protect individuals privacy and security online by making military grade encryption and privacy technologies easy for consumers to use.

There was a very large discussion going on about the fears of Internet users regarding privacy and we felt we could make a positive impact on millions of peoples lives with our solution.

While trying to come up with a name for our new venture, I developed a list of all the encryption & privacy related concepts and keywords that I sent to Hamnett & Hammie. It was my father, Hammie who in a meeting at my apartment keyed onto the words Zero Knowledge from a description of Zero Knowledge Proofs that I had sent around. Shortly thereafter Zero-Knowledge Systems was born. At the time, tongue in cheek names were all the rage and everyone was trying to stand out in the crowded early days of what would become the dot.com boom.

We knew going in that we would catch a lot of grief at times with a name like Zero-Knowledge - but we wanted to stand out. We stood for something different, and the name just seemed to fit.

Our Incredible Journey

The name of course, was only the beginnging of what would become an incredible journey that has lasted almost a decade for me personally.

Our staff would go on to plaster downtown Montreal and our office neighborhood with stickers proclaiming “Changing the World with Zero-Knowledge”. I’m still having to turn down requests from people who want to get some of our old T-Shirts or posters. We wanted the world to know what we stood for - power to the people - privacy for all - we were passionate about changing the way the future would look. We were social entrepreneurs believing that we could both make a profitable company and a contribution to the betterment of society at the same time.

I began capturing notes, journal entries, photo’s and video of the companies ascent early on. I had the idea of writing a book about the companies experience one day. This may have been youthful hubris & arrogance but at the time I was confident we would be a billion dollar company eventually and people would want to know how we did it. Given the time this was not a crazy idea, but you could say I was literally Chasing Billions with Zero Knowledge.

Did we ever have stories though, lot’s of good stories.

Over the course of the next nine years I would rub shoulders with incredible industry and world leaders, extremely well armed cypherpunks, brilliant scientists and luminaries of the technology and venture capital industries. (Too many links to post, but Google has a decent memory of my past activities you can peruse if you are curious.)

I began to spend time with incredible people actively involved in changing the world. I gave speeches at the World Economic Forum, traveled the world meeting and working with global leaders on issues ranging from Ethical Technology Design, Privacy, Security, International Cybercrime law, Canada’s technology innovation strategy, net neutrality, technologies role in social responsibility and many meetings on technology & human rights work.

Amidst the world travels we would also become media darlings, appearing on 60 minutes, CNN, WSJ, NY Times and in hundreds of publications as we became one of Canada’s highest profile Internet startups and acted as a regular expert on the issues of Internet privacy and security.

We brought innovative Silicon Valley style recruiting & retention ideas to Montreal as we exploded onto the Canadian technology scene.

We conducted intelligence agency briefings with most of the alphabet soup agencies, battled killer typhoons in asia, and were taxied to silicon valley in private jets as investors wooed us. We set Canadian records for our financing’s and for awhile were members of that generation of dot.com media darlings.

The Tough Times

There were also a lot of very tough stories and painful lessons we had to learn.

Reducing our head count by the hundreds because of undisciplined growth while reacting to the meltdown of the private and public equity markets. Managing teams while teetering on the edge of bankruptcy as we restructured debt, getting out of potentially crippling lease obligations & negotiating a recap with the investors to keep the company going. We faced the challenges of discontinuing the companies flagship product and having to completely reposition the companies products, target market, technology and structure while trying to keep the doors open.

We would experience some of the downsides of being media darlings as the companies shift in direction and layoffs became popular targets for reporters writing about the dot.com bust. Articles with sentences like “Blood runs in the halls at Zero-Knowledge as the firing carnage continues” to report our reductions in staff made each step that much harder as the articles made their way to partners and customers.

In early 2003, as the company started to generate positive cash flow - I started joking with my brother that if we ever told the inside story of our rise, fall and survival through the bubble that we should call it Chasing Billions with Zero Knowledge.

The phrase struck me as a fitting moniker for our own journey as a company, some of the investment trends that contributed to the dot.com bubble, and many of the ideas & entrepreneurs I encountered.

To be clear, I believe that most every company begins with zero knowledge. Assumptions and theories abound but actual knowledge of what the future may hold for the company is a pipe dream. There are so many questions from team, to product, to competitive landscape that the only real bet you can make is that shit will happen and things will need to change. Every enterprise begins with zero knowledge.

The process of building innovative enterprises requires experimentation and failure. How much experimentation is a function of risk appepitite and cost of money. The cost of money was incredible low and the risk appetite for technology stocks were so much in abundances that we were fielding random calls from retail investors looking to buy stock or get on a waiting list for the IPO for almost 2 years before we even had revenue.

I don’t believe even now in hindsight that we were ever chasing billions while clueless. We proved ourselves able to play by the rules of the that time and raised money and built real products & teams in a way that the market was rewarding (Getting big fast, become the market leader by the size of your brain trust and the broad range of your opportunities).

When the rules of the market changed, we changed with them and made sure we could continue to work with customers finding a business model and customer profile that would grow with us. We made a lot of mistakes that in hindsight now seem obvious. But we rushed into our mistakes recognizing them as valuable lessons and we were eager students.

A New Story - Radialpoint Emerges

I often get questions about the fate of Zero-Knowledge Systems. For those interested in our early experiences as a company, I’m posting a case study done by Professor David Phillips that was written over the course of many interviews and on site visits with our staff throughout the early days of the company. David recently sent me this copy to distribute.

Zero-Knowledge Systems - An Early Case Study in Systems of Surveillance. David J. Phillips, Professor University of Toronto

It highlights some of our successes, mistakes, and our early adventures as a company.

It is an account of the early Zero-Knowledge history (it ends about 2001/2 as we made the transition into the Radialpoint business and turned the company around). Like with all accounts, it can never capture even 5% of what was occurring behind the scenes, but it captures much of what was occurring around the company and provides a good account of our early rise and fall from grace.

When we started Zero-Knowledge my internal email signature carried the phrase “Make new mistakes more often”. Our team culture helped us to react and evolve as we saw new opportunities, identified failing products and responded to the dramatic shifts that occurred in the capital markets.

Zero-Knowledge Systems not only survived but changed its name and is now a thriving company called Radialpoint.

The company has emerged as one of Canada’s fastest growing technology companies, Quebec’s 2nd fastest growing technology firm and a market leader in managed consumer Internet services for broadband providers. The company has been profitable for years, is growing quickly and is now providing Internet value-added services for a community of more then 20 million broadband subscribers through its broadband provider customers. This is one of the largest aggregate broadband subscriber bases in the world.

Writing about the last bubble bursting and the dot.com graveyard that ensued was popular sport for many members of the media. Now we have reporters writing about the impeding Web 2.0 bubble and asking when it will burst. I think enterprising reporters could do well to explore companies such as Radialpoint that have survived the dot.com fallout and emerged stronger, smarter and battle hardened. There are great stories out there for those reporters not just looking to write about what Apple announced.

While I know this story well, and I believe in it with all my heart, the Radialpoint story is no longer my story to tell. The story of how Radialpoint emerged from the dot.com bubble and became one of Canada’s largest software-as-a-service companies that quietly cornered the ISP market for desktop delivered services will be told someday.

That story will be told by my brother, father and the team that continues to work with them there. It is their story to tell.

The team working there deserves to take a bow and get full credit for the incredible work they have done. I’m no longer part of the day to day operations at Radialpoint- so I will not be posting about it’s business on this blog.

I left Radialpoint, in June of 2006 to work on my new projects. This was a very difficult thing to do, but I was no longer the right person to help lead that company.

After the sabbatical I took to help my brother fight and ultimately die with dignity from his battle with cancer, things changed for me. It took me awhile after his death to find my footing again, but I needed to do that outside of the company in an area that I felt I could make a difference in the world. My mind and heart had drifted into a new domain and I couldn’t both follow my heart and try to do the work that Radialpoint needed at the same time.

I remain an investor, friend, family member and supporter in every way of Radialpoint and the team there.

In many ways, the team from Radialpoint plays a heavy influence on the work I am doing now since I learned an incredible amount from my brother, father, our managers, our teams and the staff we had. In the school of hard knocks and practical entrepreneurship I was incredibly lucky to have the mentors, partners and teams that I did.

I want to thank all the teams that worked with me throughout the years. I can say without a doubt, I learned more from you then the other way around.

Large amounts of thanks goes to the my brother and father, our management team (especially Marty, Veronique, Carlos that I worked with so closely) and all the direct reports and teams throughout the years. I also need to thank my assistant for almost a decade, Elizabeth. She has had the pleasure of seeing me at my best, and worst - and was always there working hard to make sure that others only saw me at my best, which I’ll be forever grateful for.

I had the incredible opportunity to work with family, an incredible management team and hundreds of bright staff as they navigated the changes required to keep our company thriving. Their support of my eccentric ideas, my crazy personality and most of all their support of me leaving to do a new project was crucial to me having the confidence to tackle what I’m now working on.

Billions with Zero Knowledge - The Blog

Since I won’t be blogging about Radialpoint that much, and my new project will most likely be operating under the radar for awhile this blog is very much a personal sandbox for me to play in. I’m not marketing or selling anything (at this point) - just having fun and looking to be part of the conversation.

I’ll be writing about topics that I feel I can add some unique point of view too. I won’t be covering or reposting other stories, tracking the latest moves of other bloggers or any specific industry.

I’ll be writing about the topics I care most about which are,

• The state of the Canadian startup scene from an entrepreneurs & angel investors perspective
• Promoting Canadian entrepreneurs
• Social Entrepreneurship
• Grass root authentic conversational marketing, Social media and Angel Investing
• Online communities, open innovation and collaborative open source models for community production
• World Hacking (finding easy hacks to make the world a better place), World Changing

One of my major complaints on all the government committees I participated on for innovation was the lack of a strong culture of mentorship in Canada. This combined with a little bit of angel investing from experienced entrepreneurs could help us nurture the next generation of startups and provide a farm system for the venture capital industry. I’ve seen this model work throughout the world in creating a culture of sharing of experiences resulting in the bundling of great advisory experience coming with risk capital.

I have been very fortunate to have had the experiences I’ve had and I hope by sharing my experiences that I can help a new generation of Canadian entrepreneurs begin to shape their own dreams.

My tagline for this blog is “Changing the World with Little Bits of Knowledge”. I believe that there exists within the technology community the power to change the world both for the good and bad, and I hope my projects and this blog help play a small but meanginful role in the postive aspects of this change.

On Thu 8 Mar 2007. [13] Comments

I’ll be on the road for the next two weeks.  I’m in Toronto at the Canadian Venture Forum right now.

I then leave for Monterey for the annual TED conference, which is my favorite conference of the year.  Look for a lot of postings come out of TED (some of which I hope to be mine, but I tend to get so busy at conferences that posting is difficult).

I’m then in Silicon Valley for a couple of days, and then I spent most of that week (March 12th to 16th) in Calgary.

I have a number of overdue posts (my inaugural one would be a good start that I hope to get finished while travelling.

My posting schedule may be erratic but I’ll be keeping my status updated with my new Twitter widget which you can see on my blog.  After only a couple days of use I’m a Twitter fan. 

Mitch has a great post up on the basics of Twitter.

It now has some critical mass with my friends in San Francisco, Montreal, Toronto and a few in other pockets of the US and for me it feels much more personal then blogging.  I’m connected to my friends stream of activities and it somehow feels closer.

I’ll post something about my own experience in a couple weeks when I’ve had a chance to experiment with it a bit more, but for now I can say that I really like it.

On Mon 5 Mar 2007. 1 Comment

The time of year has come when everyone makes resolutions, ponders lessons learned and slip into Nostradamus mode making bold or obvious predictions for the coming year. (Unfortunately no longer in the form of quatrains. I strongly believe all predictions should be made in the form of quatrains for the amusement of those who have to listen to them.)

I apologize but after taking some time off the blog, this is going to be a long post since it is my major goal for the entire year - and I feel it’s cathartic to post this in detail.

I took some great downtime over the holidays to think about some of what I accomplished in 2006 and my plans and projects for 2007.

As I mentioned in a previous post, I tend to like living with a very full plate. I am active in many business & personal projects, volunteer organizations, advisory relationships and still try to have tons of fun while doing it all. I’m also spending more time in various Internet communities building experience and relationships that all take time, adding more items to my inboxes.

I also have a hyperactive mind (those who know me can attest to this) that is always in overdrive with ideas, projects, conversations, things to research and skills to develop. I have lot’s of hobbies and unlimited interests, and try to lead a rich life by exploring it’s diversity.

My past business & personal success can be attributed to many things ranging from luck, some personal quirks & skills and mostly to the teams of people I’ve been around. If I had to point to a single quality that has served me best in life, it has been my passion & energy (I’m also a fairly quick learner). I just don’t know how to do things without going at them full blast like a kid racing after an ice cream truck, no matter what I tackle.

That being said, I know that my success is in no way related to my organization skills. I have never been that type of person. So when it comes to my inboxes I know the problem is me. I’ve tried various tools and systems before, but I’ve always petered out in applying them after a couple of weeks of not being able to dig myself out the existing hole I was in. I also don’t believe I have ever found a suitable mix of tools and methods to support the habits I need to develop. I know the problems is not the tools, it comes down to me not being a tool.

So instead of listing the hundreds of goals or resolutions I have, I’ve decided to scrap them all and make just one goal this year and that is to fundamentally renegotiate my relationship with my inboxes.

I get about 200-300 emails a day, regularly live with 5000+ items (around 1200 unread at anytime) in my email inbox, maintain busy task lists in various places, manage project plans, make around 15-20 phone calls a day, maintain a busy calendar, read 400+ news feeds somewhat regularly, read 5-10 books a week, am listening to 20 odd podcasts almost weekly, and read about 30 magazines a month.

My office desk, my home desk, my mail, books & magazine piles, computer desktops are all generally messy and chaotic. Add voice mail, Skype calls, IM, notices from an increasing number of online community services, my personal and home responsibilities (bills, errands & life stuff), the number of companies I’m involved in, my exercise & health regimens, friendships, my dog and my relationship with my girlfriend and my life tends to always be active.

I’ve had an executive assistant and team of financial and bookkeeping staff taking care of organizing my life since I was 21 years old. They were instrumental in keeping me organized and productive. Despite this I never felt particularly in control of the many things I juggle on a daily basis. For the first time in almost fifteen years I am flying solo, with no executive assistant. This is a major change for me, that I’m dedicated to maintaining until I get organized myself. If and when I need some help after getting organized, I want my next executive assistant to help me amplify the volume of productivity I can accomplish by executing tasks on my behalf, not spend all their time chasing after me to organize my messy life.

I spend my days fighting my inboxes like a fire fighter addicted to the thrill of battling fires. Tackling the issues of the day, with constantly changing projects, tasks and priorities I’ve always felt that I was able to deal with it through a high tolerance for chaos. I think I’m a great multitasker but it requires a lot of effort and lot’s of good help to keep those tasks even partially managed. I’m getting to phase in my life where I’m trying to simplify those things that are burdens, and spend more time doing things that are fun and meaningful. My inbox is a burden.

I feel I’m always barely keeping on top of the most important items that I can handle at that time. Many items that aren’t critical sit around for long period of times gathering dust. Too many require some simple actions that take me too long to get around too and lead to stress, that just isn’t helpful or productive even though I’ve become quite accustomed to dealing with it.

This video reflects how I have come to view my current relationship with my inboxes.

Lately I’ve been investing my time and energy in those things that will give the best results for all areas of my life. I mention the idea of leverage points in my previous post. For the last two years my major goals were related to my physical & mental health and my choice of career path. This is the best I’ve ever felt in my life with how those things are progressing.

So my goal for this year is simply to get control of my inboxes, becoming naturally organized so that it’s effortless and second nature to organize my inboxes, tasks and commitments.

This includes the following specific goals;

1. An empty inbox by late-January.
   • I started 2007 with almost 8000 items in my inbox with 1000 unread items. I’m down to about 3000 items left (about 300 unread), having deferred, assigned, deleted, filed or created tasks for each item that I removed.
2. Empty my inboxes completely at least once a week.
   • By emptying I mean deleting, filing, assigning, scheduling or creating tracked tasks for each item that crosses my various inboxes. I may not respond to each item in that week, but it will be scheduled and tracked. At least once a week I will have no items in my inboxes.
   • Completely clearing my desk of any paperwork or post it notes. This is a big one for me, since my desk has always been as busy as I am.
   • Empty my voice mail every day, and update my incoming message at least once a week with my upcoming geographic location and availability.
3. Add all my various ideas, notes, tasks and calendar items to the same tracking system and review the lists once a week.
   • I’ve recently begun to schedule exercise time, time with friends, reading time, blogging time and I want all my commitments that have times associated with it to be added to this calendar or time based task list.
   • I normally maintain task lists or reminders in various places from post it notes on my fridge @ home, to slips of papers, my moleskin notebooks, my PDA, my Google Desktop Tasks Widget & Outlook Tasks w/ OneNote integration (all of which suck at task management), project tracking tickets, Voicemail, Delicious Bookmark tags, draft blog posts, idea scratch pads, and journal entries. I am going to empty all my notebooks and journals of any outstanding items or ideas and put them into a single system each week.
4. Completely relax by using a rigid tracking system of organizing my inboxes to allow myself complete freedom to negotiate my commitments.
   • I want the freedom to be able to renegotiate my commitments based on what I think is most productive at that moment, or needed including my personal time.
   • I don’t want to be rigid in my schedule, but rather rigid in my scheduling allowing me mental freedom to know that all my items are scheduled, deferred, or some action is on a single task or calendar list. If I want or need to change the schedule to adjust to new priorities or just because I need some down time, it should be easy to do.
   • I want to be able to be more comfortable saying no, or not right now to many things with the confidence that I can tackle them at future dates that are easily scheduled and tracked.
5. Do the minimal amount of planning needed to accomplish the most amount of doing.
   • In today’s rapidly changing and fast paced world doing too much planning becomes daunting because of the layers of assumptions, interdependencies and rapidly changing learning. I believe that most heavy planning quickly suffers from the law of diminishing returns.
   • Although it’s new for me, I’m am now using more execution biased light weight iterative planning tools. We are using a mix of development methodologies, good sense and financial planning models in all my projects that adopt monthly iterative light weight planning that heavily favor execution, flexible plans, small teams and tracking of the changes in plans to improve the culture of light weight planning and execution.
   • Although I’m still learning these behaviors with a small team again and many of the tools we are using are new to me, I’m happy with how the project and financial/operational management functions at my various company projects are developing. I don’t feel my own personal planning is up to snuff though. This is what I’m going to change this year, by adopting a personal system (including financial, project, tasks and commitments) that mimics the systems we use in my company projects.

I’ve researched various systems before, and now that we have adopted two important principles at my corporate projects including lot’s of alone time and a toxic aversion to meetings I feel I finally can tackle a critical part of my own ability to get more done with less effort. I think this will be the single most important thing I can do to better serve the people who I make commitments and am responsible too, while having the most fun doing what I enjoy.

I have been researching the tools and techniques of David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach. I read his stuff a couple of years ago, but could never ‘clear the decks’ and didn’t really feel like I was capable of being the type of organized person I read about. I reread his two books (Getting Things Done and Ready for Anything) and really feel I am at a point in my life when I can fundamentally tackle becoming an organized person.

I have researched various tools, am subscribed to his podcasts and have generally adopted his basic workflow for handling all my inboxes. (I’ve modified it slightly based on some research I’ve done and my own needs)

I am experimenting with a bunch of the tools, but am mostly using the Outlook plug-in that aside from a few annoying bugs has finally given me confidence in using Outlook to manage tasks and projects, alongside the messages, contacts and calendar that are so integral to working on the tasks. My productivity in just a few short days of using this tool has really improved. Outlook is no longer a place I dread, but is becoming a place where I get tons of work done.

I’ve got a bunch of other mail filtering, organization, research, contact management, personal productivity plug-ins and other personal dashboards that I’ve assembled but tasks was the one area that eluded me until now. In processing my inboxes I’ve quickly created about 400 tasks, 60 project files, 100 sub-projects and added @context and time scheduled reminders or series of actions that are planned in my calendar and organized properly. Working in my inbox is beginning to feel fun, because I’m able to easily get so much done simply by pushing items through the system and onto my new task list.

I’ve been slow to blog and get some other things done lately because I am really hard at work on finishing clearing all my open items and getting them into this system.

I am going to be adapting the system using some utilities and social media tools that I think can be combined with the basic GTD approach to cover more than just inbox items. I’ve already begun developing a macro that takes an URL from my browser or feedreader and creates an automatic task that I can assign to a project, my @context (@blog content ideas, @email for email tasks etc.), or just to my personal learning or @Someday categories. Adapting this to also incorporate De.licio.us, Sphere, Technorati and Wikipedia links for automatic link insertion associated with tasks around ideas, urls and copied text from webpages as part of the same macro is something I want to experiment with once I get the basics of the system down. I feel this will be a more effective way to manage my bookmarks and tags where I am now often tagging items as reminders or for later action items (such as reference material for a future blog post) and my Delicious bookmarks are becoming another place that’s as messy as my other inboxes.

I don’t think I’ll become a Steve Pavlina or LifeHacker type blogger, but I do plan to blog once in awhile on how I’m doing on this one goal.

I’m really happy with how it’s going so far, but need to get a couple months of habitual practice before I start dispensing any verdicts about it’s effectiveness. I’ve burned myself before going gun-ho on a new way to organize and tackle personal planning and have seen those efforts fall by the wayside as mounting priorities become excuses to revert to bad habits.

I invite my friends, team mates, partners and anyone who reads this that I happen to run into this year to ask me about how this is going. My inbox count and the date that it was last empty is available upon inquiry

On Sun 7 Jan 2007. [7] Comments

I really enjoyed some down time over the holidays which was needed. I had been running with my throttle in the red zone for a couple of weeks and needed a breather.

I had a good holiday dinner with both my family and Kelly’s family on different nights.

I sat around and watched some movies, read tons as usual and generally stayed off the computer for most of the week (well there was some periodic email and watching of Gifter.org - but mostly I left it all alone).

We had a great evening with about 10-15 friends, and people from around town coming over to my place and watching TED DVD’s for about 6hrs on last Friday night. Mitch blogged about it here. My buddy Julien Smith was also there and wrote this kind note about my projects and blogging here. Fred Ngo and Benjamin Yoskovitz and some of my team from Project Ojibwe were down as well . My buddy Patrick also joined us. There were a bunch of other interesting people there and I think everyone had a good time.

Kelly and I went with a bunch of friends to Toronto for a single evening and danced our proverbial asses off at a great New Year’s party thrown & DJ’d by my cousin George Chaker. Kelly and I did the official celebrate New Year’s @ 5am on stage with all the DJ’s and Junior Sanchez who was there spinning with a host of great other talent, it was incredible. I stopped going out pretty much completely when I stopped drinking last year and started to focus on getting my health in check. I haven’t danced til 6am for a couple of years and it was much needed. In fact this was the first new year in a long time where I didn’t drink anything and I really didn’t miss it. My exercise and diet has been really paying off and I just don’t miss drinking, or unhealthy food at all.

The night was a blast and we saw a bunch of old friends (Dov, Billy, Whitney, Al, Slomo, Josh, Ali, everyone) and had a great time.

Thanks George & our friends at Diesel - you are the best. We are going to come out with you when you come to Montreal to DJ again in a couple of weeks.

I enter 2007 feeling great and very optimistic about life, the future of our society and the exciting changes that I’m seeing everyday in both social and technological advancement.

There are a few great links that have been occupying some of my deeper thinking about happiness and optimism that I’d like to share. My friend Tara started this with her post about happiness and the work they are doing Citizen Agency. This got me thinking about what I’ve been reading and thinking about why I’m so optimistic and happy.
The first is the great collection of answers to the question “What are you optimistic about? Why?” by some of the great thinkers (and some people I’m lucky to call friends) that John Buckman at Edge.org has put together. I’ve spent hours browsing these answers, and could put together a months worth of blog posts discussing various responses and ideas inspired by some of the great writing here. I suspect that I will visit these in future blog posts. For now the TED blog has a great summary of some of the posts.

The next is the incredible essay “The Pursuit of Emptiness” from my friend John Perry Barlow. It was in the months after Sept. 11 when he wrote this that I first read it and I wasn’t in the frame of mind to understand it with the same sense of clarity that I have now. John’s essay on the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace was an inspiration for some of my thinking for Zero-Knowledge Systems. Funny how small the world is, my friend Pip Coburn sent me a link to the emptiness essay a couple days ago it reflected much of how I’ve been trying to live for most of the last year and I understood it much more this time around.

I think I’m doing something right if John always ends up being my career muse, even if he doesn’t really write anything with me in mind

Someday I’ll corner him and try too coax him to tackle a version of the declaration of interdependence of cyberspace that pays tribute to the power of open communities to share and engage in collective social production to enrich themselves and the world without money as the primary goal but rather community (Wikipedia, Flickr, Open Source, Librivox, Creative Commons etc.).

Until someone can convince him or another writer worthy of the task to write a Declaration of Interdependence that fits the Internet community, I’m going to link to this great resource discussing the history of various attempts to write a Declaration of Interdependence (including William Durant’s original and a few other versions).

For now I’ll copy the one version that the author of the site wrote which sums up nicely my reason for my optimism for the future.

Declaration of Interdependence

June 2003

We hold this truth to be self-evident:
We are All.
In This.
Together.

Therefore we live this truth
in our lives, communities and societies,
and thrive together into a long future
that we create together.

We are the world
that is awakening
to both the fact and the opportunity
of our interdependence –
fully, finally and beyond a shadow of doubt.

We are the world
who are making
ourselves a good world
that works for all people and all life.
Because we know the Greatest Secret
of All:

“We are All
in this
together.”

Happy New Year and Best Wishes for 2007.

On Sun 7 Jan 2007. [5] Comments