YouSaid · the spoken record

Justin Singer

lines on the record
59
first
2020-10-08
most recent
2020-10-08
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

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  1. “As a lawyer, I've just been taught there's no such thing as a free market. You want a free market? Go to Russia. Whoever has the biggest gun wins. That's a free market. If you want the rule of law, if you want the bundle of rights for property rights, that is infringing on the true free market, but it is also creating a shared platform of understanding from which people can transact. These were the same insights that underlied the original stock exchanges. Somebody was there to put down and build trust on their common laws, how you create contracts that could be exchanged. The example that you mentioned about football, the thing that I always like to say is 22 guys beating the shit out of each other in a field doesn't at least suddenly become the Super Bowl. It requires rules. It requires regulations. It requires contracts. All these things have to be commonly agreed to. The early days of football, college football in the late 1800s, people were dying quite constantly. And there was no rulebook. It just became a free-for-all.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Surviving clause of all this because all of the decency parts of the CDA were all struck down as unconstitutional First Amendment reasons, then you would have a very different internet. I would argue a better one, but I know many people would argue differently.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “But what ultimately happened is then, I think it was Yahoo stocks, Jordan Belfort, so Wolf of Wall Streets, people from his firm were pumping up penny stocks on the Yahoo Forums, doing pump and dump with them. And Yahoo got sued as part of it that they were the publishers and therefore had liability for this. And the ruling that ultimately came down was no publishers can't be held responsible. At least they aren't strictly liable for the content on their platform. There's a lot more nuance around it than just that. At a broad level, that is it. And that sort of became the basis for things like UGC, for user-generated content, for Facebook, for Twitter, that there was the belief that there was this broad exception where they couldn't be held liable for the content posted on their platform. And that unlocked a lot of activity around UGC. I think without that term, without that clause surviving and remaining.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “With the caveats that I have not refreshed my memory on this stuff in a long time, so I might get some of these details wrong. And I encourage everybody to go look it up and vet me on this. But there were basically three different parts of the communications decency act this passed during the Clinton era, and the idea was the internet is coming up. We need to preserve decency. We need to watch out for porn, all of the bad stuff. And that was really the thrust of the Communications Decency Act. more of like a moralistic view of how do we prevent things that might be dangerous to children from getting online.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Important part of the communications decency act. The rest of it was all struck down due to a lawsuit with Jordan Belford. It's actually a really fun little history there.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Know if you can do it with an analyst, I think it behooves VCs to actually pay attention to the whole picture. I'm a bear on things like autonomous cars, and it's not because I don't believe the technology is possible. It's because I don't think the insurance question is answerable. And I don't think the legal questions are answerable around it. That's not because I have some special understanding of the laws around this. It's just I have seen laws matter, not at the margins. They matter at the core. Technology alone never creates a market. There has to be some enshrinement of the competition of that technology, of the ways that you want it to go in the law. And that's the platform on which companies can stand and fight each other and develop economic activities. Do you need a dedicated person? No, because it's also sometimes hard to predict a priori which technological changes or which legal changes are going to lead to massive shifts. I mean, Section 230 has like a very strange history. The section that has remained is the least important.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Same thing can be said more closer to my industry, supplements, which for better or for worse exploded after the passage of the dietary supplement health education act to Shea back in 93. Basically every massive market that you look at, you can trace to some sort of regulatory and locking event unless we like ignore what's going on today. I think we just saw in the last couple months lots of people saying you wouldn't have the modern internet without Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. Well, I don't know that that's quite the argument in favor that people make it out to be. It is an argument and an admission that the regulations matter.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “And the synthesis of all that is my belief, the best venture opportunities are where you have the overlap of massive extent demand, known demand, and some sort of regulatory unlocking event. Some of my favorite examples, I mentioned things with telecom, the broadband spectrum auctions back in the 80s through the 90s, those really opened up a whole marketplace where lots of fortunes were made, lots of economic activity. You look at the inversion of the capital gains tax rate versus ordinary income. And you saw the explosion of the funds industry that comes after that. Another one that I really like is the reorganization and turnaround industry, where with the passage of the bankruptcy laws suddenly you're able to build all sorts of industry, whether it was high yield debt or junk bonds or whatever it might be, but it was built on top of this platform of certainty where everybody knew how things were going to function in different scenarios.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I am a little odd in that I've got the classical business and legal education, sort of the antithesis of what the last 15 years have driven people towards, but it's actually given me, I think, a much more holistic view of where markets come from that's not inside out from a technology perspective. It's much more outside in. Like what else is involved in creating this market? That started, the initial interest was in the mid-2000s, late 2000s. When I was in law school and I was looking at telecom markets. So there was all the spectrum auctions going on. There was where did the property rights in the advertising time reside? Are they owned by the content owner? Are they owned by the cable provider? Are they owned by somebody else? These were all big questions and they all determined both the quality of what was going to be able to produce what the axes of competition. The market was. So you put that all together, add in a little mix of time spent in early stage stage venture at IA ventures.”

    2020-10-08 · Invest Like the Best · Justin Singer - How Regulation Unlocks Opportunity - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.2] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source