march
in which experiments are run and newsletter structure is fiddled with
Wow! This newsletter is way too long. It has a lot of background context, so I plan to cut it down by 75% next time. In this post, I’ll give an update on The Next 50, Interact, my research paper, and a new project I’m exploring around water trading and agricultural regulations. I’ll end with some other personal musings and an asks & offers section. Happy International Women’s Day!
The Next 50
Last year, I cofounded The Next 50, an organization making politics more accessible to young people, with a friend from college, Zak Malamed.
Before last year, I had never hosted a political fundraiser, let alone donated to a political campaign. On February 25, 2019, Zak and I hosted a little-known Mayor Pete Buttigieg in San Francisco for the first public fundraiser of his presidential campaign. Since then, we have hosted 18 presidential candidates and 15 Congressional and Senate candidates for 50+ events over 5 cities. So far, as an organization, we’ve raised close to $1m for candidates and organizations on the left from 2,500+ grassroots donors. On average, about ⅓ of our event attendees are a first-time political donor. What’s more, through events we’ve hosted, we’ve found and built a national volunteer team who were similarly disengaged in politics before getting involved in The Next 50, and have since gone on to raise $50K+ individually for political candidates for the 2020 election cycle. Our Facebook group, The Next 50’s Meet the Candidate, is a little less than a year old and now has ~700 people who care about being better informed about candidates up and down the ballot, both locally and nationally.
In the past month, we started piloting digital tools to make it easier to advise and reach donors on a national scale. One such example is our “donor advising for the masses” tool, built by our Tech Director, Dan Schlosser. Through it, we’ve raised $15K+ from 150+ donors from a few hundred dollars in Facebook ad spend. With our Digital Fundraising Lead, Ani Mohan, we also just ran our first Online Town Hall, where we raised $500 for a 27-year-old progressive Congressional candidate, Robert Emmons Jr., for a 45-min Zoom call with 15 young people from across the country. This Online Town Hall series is an attempt to increase the ROI of political fundraiser events (which typically include expensive travel and venue costs), while making them even more intimate and accessible for people in their homes. We had a lot of positive feedback from participants, including this quote:
“That core idea of a digital event (not needing to travel and lose money on it) is a super powerful one. I also think that in the end Robert hit on a key point that might be interesting to lean into: the comfort of having the event from your own home (both as a candidate and as a participant). It’s hard to say because I wasn’t there for the whole event and I don’t know him outside of this session, but “not wearing shoes” seemed to open him up to a degree of candor that I don’t think is possible when you’re in a formal town hall setting. For example: where he complimented his opponent! Overall, it was great. It should happen a lot more in politics.”
From all of this work, Zak and I have started to develop a few key takeaways: first, our accessibility to the political world – including meeting candidates and writing some of their policy platforms – came from our fundraising work; and second, we were able to teach our team members how to become effective political fundraisers based on our learnings.
More broadly, we believe it will take a grassroots movement of strategic political donors to help us win in 2020 and for the next 50 years. The two challenges we see are (1) inexperienced donors don’t give as much or as effectively as they could because they don’t have the support or community to help them do so, and (2) we are expected to march, knock on doors, and vote, but no one is organizing a grassroots movement of people ready to give money to consistently win elections. Our approach toward solving this is to create the largest network of grassroots political donors and communities in the United States through community building, donor organizing, and donor advising.
Toward this end, Zak and I are working to pilot a small program where we train well-connected young people on how to become effective grassroots donor organizers in their local communities in time for the 2020 election. My immediate next step is to draft this program proposal, share it with the team, and then put out the word to funders and potential applicants for the program.
Interact
Since 2016, I’ve served on the Board of Directors for Interact, a 501(c)3 nonprofit and community of mission-driven technologists. Maran Nelson, Interact’s founder, and Rosalie Nathans are also on the Board with me. As Board Members, it is our responsibility to help set and maintain the strategic direction for the organization. I’m also volunteering on the admissions committee for our annual Interact Fellowship.
Last weekend, we held our first annual Interact Team Retreat, flying in 20 remote team members from around the world to meet in person together in San Francisco. As Interact is entirely member-led, our team members are remote, part-time volunteers from the community itself. It was an incredible weekend; I love these people. This Retreat was the first time we’ve ever brought the full team together, and based on post-Retreat survey responses, everyone walked out with a much better sense of team cohesiveness, historical context and forward direction.
Application reading for the Interact Fellowship is also in full swing; this weekend, I am working with our Admissions Director, Matthew Jordan, to determine the set of applicants who will make it to the final interview round for the 2020 Interact Fellowship. This year, we received ~1,000 applications from 40+ countries from technologists ages 18-24, for what has historically been ~50 spots. I’ve been reading these applications since 2016, and this is by far both the largest and highest quality batch of applications we’ve ever received.
We also doubled the size of our application committee this year, going from 6 to 12 application readers. We decided to primarily pull committee members from the previous cohort, in order to better facilitate a peer-created Fellowship experience. This posed some unique scaling challenges – namely, how do you well-calibrate a dozen people to score applicants consistently while onboarding them to a new organization at the same time? Some key learnings include: (1) while putting together a team in advance is good, one should avoid spinning folk up too early before there’s real work to be done, as momentum has to be regained, (2) it’s important to not only write down historic processes, but also explain the reasoning behind those processes, as discussing the why is often a better starting place than blindly iterating on the what, and (3) while iteration is good and welcome, feeling iterated upon can be anxiety-inducing – this can be effectively mitigated by being explicit about historic processes and any variables that are being experimented with (such as size of team, number of applications, scoring processes, etc).
Climate risk in the U.S. military
I’m nearing completion of a two-year research project that I started at Stanford (advised by Katharine Mach) on how security risk from climate change is understood and actioned within the U.S. military. For this project, I interviewed 43 people (23 military, 20 climate security researchers) for ~1 hr each and read 50 national security guidance documents spanning 1988-2018. I’ve completed all data analysis and a third draft of my manuscript that I now need to cut by 3,000 words by Tuesday. This paper has been a big source of background anxiety for the past year, but I also genuinely feel like I’ve become an expert on this topic. I’ll do a more specific post on my research (and meta) learnings once I get closer to publishing.
Water trading & agricultural reporting
TLDR; I think there’s an interesting opportunity to build a “TurboTax for agricultural regulation” – both as a valuable, mission-aligned business in itself and as a trojan horse into the water rights market. This comes after a few months of focused research (and a few years of latent interest) in the California water market.
I’ve been thinking about building an online trading platform for water rights since the spring of 2018, when I took a class on the business of water with the renowned water attorney, Buzz Thompson. That summer, I interned for a low-profile asset management firm, Renewable Resources Group (RRG), in Los Angeles. I loved working at RRG; I spent the summer traveling around the Central Valley, speaking to farmers about their water, and watching how the partners aligned sustainability and financial incentives in their work. (RRG was later the subject of an investigative article, “A Little-Known Company is Quietly Making Massive Water Deals.”) This year, I finally decided to more seriously investigate the viability of a trading platform for the California water market.
Water markets can help societies cope with rising water scarcity and variability, as well as better integrate environmental considerations into the long-term use and pricing of water. This is particularly important for California, a state that will increasingly face water shortages due to climate change and population growth. I also think the California water market in particular is wacky and generally overlooked by Silicon Valley and a source of a lot of economic power and therefore very, very interesting, as this analysis on the potential benefits of a more robust California water market further shows:
“There are two key reasons why California is a useful setting in which to study the potential benefits of water markets. First, there are potentially large economic gains available from water reallocation. California has a large and diverse economy, but most of it depends on water supplies that are imported over great distances and prone to droughts. This water is not allocated by a price mechanism but rather according to historical rules and formulas. A secondary market exists, but it is highly regulated, transaction volume is low, and price dispersion is high. Perhaps as a result, retail prices can vary over more than two orders of magnitude: in 2017, according to their websites, commercial and industrial customers in the city of San Diego paid $2,491 per acre-foot, while agricultural customers less than two hours away in the Imperial Valley paid just $20 per acre-foot. [Note: 1 acre-foot of water is equal to 325,851 gallons.] Second, substantial reallocation may be possible through policy reforms alone. California has already built most of the physical infrastructure necessary to support a robust water market, and it has spare capacity. Canals, pipelines, and rivers together form a nearly complete hydrological network connecting the vast majority of water users in the state, such that it is technologically feasible to transfer water between nearly any two consumers.”
Since January, I’ve spoken to about a dozen researchers, water traders, and government agency staff, including this guy at the Department of Water Resources (DWR), who I tracked down after watching his recorded talk on water data interoperability challenges from an obscure July 2019 meeting on the Open and Transparent Data Act (AB-1755). I’ve also read a number of articles (ex: brief primer on water markets), reports (ex: in-depth primer on water markets), and case studies (ex: first groundwater market under the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act of 2014).
The Californian water market represents ~2 million acre-feet in trades every year, out of ~90 million acre-feet in total usage across the state every year. Given extreme price disparity and relatively easy transport across the state, why is trading volume so low in California?
It seems as though the California water market faces both high transaction costs (long and variable time to close deals, significant agency staff time spent manually vetting transactions for eligibility and third-party harm, and low deal discovery) and high transaction risks (significant uncertainly in deal close and fulfillment, and non-standardized water commodity and data collection). A recent study showed how increased standardization (factors that contribute to water pricing, and data on water usage) and decreased ability for third-parties to file harm claims (right now, in California, any potential transaction can be challenged by any third-party individual at virtually any stage of the deal – this obviously introduces significant transaction cost and risk) can foster increased water trading in the American West.
In order to better organize a competitive analysis of this space, a friend and I developed a ‘trifecta’ framework of opportunities around data, reporting, and trading.
Data: Use publicly available datasets and personal information collected during onboarding to help people make market-informed decisions about trading and growing.
Reporting: Automate regulatory paperwork that traders and growers already have to complete, or new forms that currently are hurdles to participating in water trading.
Trading: Enable efficient buying and selling of water rights and temporary leases within a region to other growers or non-agricultural users, such as municipal and industrial entities.
From the subsequent competitive landscape analysis, I saw that there were a lot of fairly well-funded tech plays in the data category, as well as a lot of long-standing relationships and consultants in the trading category. I even found some examples of agency-specific online trading platforms built in 2018 and 2019 (Fox Canyon, Rosedale Rio-Bravo Water Storage District). However, I couldn’t find any examples of platforms that have actually seen trading usage, and the macro environment seems really slow – widespread, robust trading might not be feasible for another 5-10 years in California due to political and regulatory constraints. This isn’t something that an online trading platform can solve immediately, and is likely a precondition to building such a system.
In contrast, there is little to no apparent effort made in the reporting category. According to Courtney Wagner, a postdoc at Stanford’s Water in the West, regulatory burden on farmers has increased substantially over the past decade and is relatively understudied as a phenomenon. A recent study of Vermont farmers corroborated this statement, and also identified primary farm owners as the individuals usually dealing with government reporting and paperwork. Government reporting for farmers includes filing paperwork to execute water transactions, but also encompasses every other aspect of farmers’ lives. I’m excited about the possibility of solving this problem for a bunch of reasons:
Concreteness: Automating paperwork filling and filing is a concrete problem that can be easily solved with software.
Closeness to raw data source: It’s the equivalent of wire tapping the data pipeline that informs both water trading and a host of other related opportunities. Water data across California is messy, lossy, and takes a really long time to get out into the public. Building something in this space could enable standardization of data structures on the front end and give us proprietary access to data before even the government sees it.
Ability to add value to all stakeholders: Agricultural regulatory burden affects all parties involved – farmers (who have to spend time educating themselves and complying, as well as pay filing fees), agency staff (who have to spend time educating farmers and reviewing paperwork), and governments (who have to collect data and enforce regulations). Automating and organizing a lot of this stuff in a smart way could likely lead to win-win scenarios among all stakeholders.
Aligning incentives: Regulatory burden seems like a major reason why farmers might oppose environmental regulations, and rightfully so – it’s variable and costly. Reducing regulatory burden could also reduce resistance to environmental policies.
Expansion to water trading: Because we would already have most of the data needed to facilitate water trading, it’s likely easy to layer on some sort of web interface to facilitate deal discovery or other aspects of water trading.
Expansion to fishermen: From an afternoon I spent a few years ago speaking with a fisherman on his boat in Half Moon Bay Marina, I think this type of regulatory burden extends to fishermen as well. This has meaningful implications for me, as I’m also deeply interested in environmental protection of fisheries and international ocean policy, but also suggests market expansion potential.
My next step is to speak to 5-10 farm owners (and maybe fishermen) in California about their experiences with regulatory burden, government reporting, and related paperwork. With those learnings, I’m going to do some market sizing and related calculations.
Other musings
I’ve decided I want to create more space for local adventures, because they make me happy; I especially love adventures that center around a mission (i.e. “talk to fishermen about climate change”), because even if you don’t complete the exact mission, it provides a fun focus for everyone involved. In the past few weeks, I invited five friends to join me in a Lunar New Year Tea & Sweets tasting with Song Tea & Ceramics, one of my favorite shops in San Francisco, to learn more about tea sourcing and culture. Last week, as a belated Christmas present, my boyfriend took me to a 3-person pickling class in the Bayview home of a woman who is really into fermenting things. (I recently realized that I’ve always loved pickled and fermented foods and have since been trying to make pickles at home to varying degrees of success.) And yesterday, we were randomly road tripping through the Central Valley, where I spoke to a kid my age manning an egg stand in Modesto about egg sourcing (a lot of eggs get re-labeled and upsold, and often are more than a month old by the time they hit the grocery stores) and quality (Grade AA eggs just mean a more uniform shape than Grade A eggs; there is no difference in taste). I also bought a pallet of 30 fresh wonky-shaped jumbo eggs for $4.50.
New personal missions I am considering, if anyone is interested in joining:
Finding a starfish on the California coast (this is actually quite challenging, due to sea star wasting syndrome)
Going mushroom hunting in Santa Cruz and learning how to identify edible vs. poisonous mushrooms
Speaking with olive farmers and olive oil producers / sourcers in California about the impact of climate change on their trees / industry
In the background of all of this, I’ve been moving into a new apartment in San Francisco for the past week – going from a large, furnished house to a smaller, semi-furnished apartment, I’m in the odd position of simultaneously having way too much stuff from storage and way too little furniture. I spent this week navigating Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace to both get rid of things and find new things. I’m not excited about the prospect of cleaning my room for the rest of the day, but I am excited to eventually build a little garden in my back balcony.
Finally, I’ve decided to try to learn how to play the cello again, so that I might one day be able to participate in improv jazz jam sessions with a few friends. A quick search on Craigslist found me Irina Pelman, an intimidating Russian grandmother-type whose glowing student testimonials also make me think I may have found a new life coach? My first lesson is this Wednesday; I’ll report back next month on how things are going. I’ve completely forgotten how to read music, so it may be a slow process.
Asks
If you have any direct contacts with farmers or fishermen who would be willing to talk to someone doing research on regulatory burden in agriculture and aquaculture, I would love an introduction. My current strategy is just finding contact info online or going in person to farms (and marinas), and then snowballing with asks for intros from there.
I would love your feedback on this newsletter! My main goal is to provide myself with an accountability mechanism for progressing on projects. It is also very fair feedback to say you didn’t read the entire thing – who knows if you even made it down this far.
Offers
I recently graduated from a master’s program in international policy from Stanford. If anyone is considering a graduate degree in policy, I’m happy to talk to them about the pros and cons, as well as how to evaluate potential programs.
I help dozens of teams a year with interview prep for Y Combinator. I’ve streamlined the process now where I ask (1) that all cofounders be present for a 30-min video call, (2) to read the application ahead of time so I have the same context the partners would have, and (3) for the team to practice concise answers with https://ipaulgraham.herokuapp.com/. Send folk my way!
-Mackenzie