YouSaid · the spoken record

Keller

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26
first
2017-08-25
most recent
2017-08-25
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1
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podcast

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  1. “The truth of the matter is that we are still a society under construction and we still have fissures in our society. We still have needs as people to congregate, to socialize, to be with each other. It's really important not to lose sight of that because, again, when we talk about equity issues, that's one variation of what I'm talking about where we could completely create this whole new thing and build a moat between the people who can afford and the people who can't. You know, I don't think it's an issue of people's intentions at this stage. I think it's more of blind spots that we have to be careful to fill in.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “We were able to understand each other and communicate with one another at a pace that was simply unimaginable even 30 years ago, right? That now we have a global brain and we can transmit ideas and share ideas and get feedback and iterate towards something very quickly at the global scale. And I have really high hope that power will be defined at the local level. As autonomous really takes off on the street, you start to see autonomous and drones as combined the next big paradigm shift in our settlement patterns. The 20th century was defined as the sort of hollowing out at the hands of the automobile of cities and becoming distributed and the rise of suburbs and this new paradigm shift allows us to get together in new ways like the quilt work, the polycentric model, right?”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “When you're talking about infrastructure, some of the most exciting opportunities and the places that have the highest needs are not the US, but these are global problems. There are global infrastructure problems that are looking for new solutions, and you can build viable, sustainable businesses serving them. And in fact, this is probably where a lot of the innovation in infrastructure is going to happen because the need is so high. And a lot of times you may not have as complicated of a regulatory framework.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Most important things that we think about is we need to make sure that we're investing in the infrastructure, not just in the infrastructure of the 19th century, but that we're also investing in the infrastructure of the 21st century. I think it's kind of easy to look at this and say, hey, rebuild the railroads, rebuild the bridges. And it's like, yeah, we have to do that. But at the same time, there are so many ways that new technology, autonomous vehicles, ride sharing drones are going to make it possible to actually achieve the same goals for less cost. Look, everybody knows there's not like a trillion dollars just lying around. So how can we find ways of solving the same problems in an order of magnitude more efficient ways?”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “Trillion dollar program. Now, you asked me, you know, how does this differ from 1956? The short answer is I'm not sure. Because from 1956 to now, we've basically had a view of transportation that was very much focused on the automobile. And I argued strenuously for a national program that would take a more multimodal focus from surface transportation perspective look at the roadways and cars, but also transit and walking and biking and give people more choices.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “The American Society of Civil Engineers has done a series of studies that show that the country has an infrastructure deficit in transportation of a trillion dollars. President Trump tried to more or less craft a package that would achieve that amount of investment. One, using project streamlining as a way to accelerate projects. Secondly, he's talking about putting forth some credits to the private markets to invest in infrastructure and credits to local and state communities for taking assets that were once publicly owned and putting them in the marketplace for some level of privatization. And then the third piece is some type of investment at the federal level. I think this is where they will struggle the most is finding the revenue sources to build a system to actually build”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Aggregation that, you know, it's clean energy upgrades for the school in the low income district combined with the sewers citywide. And suddenly that bank can't say this is a community reinvestment act investment. So it doesn't count towards that. Now we can do very specific targeted types of things where we have banks that say we're going to invest in this energy upgrade that will save this low income school district $100,000 a year. This is a new type of investor that has direct access to those types of opportunities. We mentioned Robert Moses earlier and that's the antithesis of what we do. It really is more about Christopher Alexander, right? If you read Moses, you have to read Alexander. It's for projects that get beat up in today's billion dollar a day public finance market like bike lanes.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Get tight, what goes? And it would be there's 50 of the budget for the park. The school is cutting this many hundreds of teachers next year. The art program's gone. Community is looking at things like privatizing playgrounds, literally creating pay-to-play. You used to be a nation of communities that would get together and say, we want a ballpark, we're going to crowdfund the ballpark with municipal bonds, and we're going to all get together and invest and do this thing. And it's going to be for the benefit of all citizens. But then there's a global capital network of thousands of investors of various types, from someone down the street from the project all the way up to a global bank that because of the community reinvestment act needs to put $300 million a year into load of moderate income communities as designated by the Fed. They haven't been able to really invest in those communities through municipal bonds because of the”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “I grew up really poor in really crazy turbulent circumstances in a rural community in the Midwest, right? And I had an awesome mom and a park down the street and some public school teachers that were willing to enable to look past the nonsense of a troubled little dude, right? And those things, the awesome mom is kind of unique to me. I would go to that park, right? think about a world that was like better than the world that I currently knew. And I go to the public school and have these teachers who would mentor me and I would come to understand things that existed outside of my immediate circumstances and grew up assuming that's like constant. That's just a given that everybody has those things, right? Everybody's got a park. Everybody's got a good school. Then I ended up studying cities, right? And seeing up close and personal, that's not the case. That, you know, those things are highly unevenly distributed.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “I think it's so interesting because we've talked about how individuals at a local level can both create and fund a lot of these infrastructure projects that other people might not think about. We've talked about how technology might make it possible to get some of the same benefits from infrastructure for one-tenth of the cost, but also that when you look at some of these new solutions, there are complicated regulatory environments. We have to find ways of at a local level trying new things and experimenting and then taking advantage of the things that we see working and taking advantage of the things that benefit people equally rather than lead to more inequality. Yes.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “Status, we started to see the development of solutions around this. One solution was neighborhood kiosks, where people who didn't have a mobile phone could have access to the same application that you and I have access to through hours. And solutions that worked around the unbanked that gave people the ability to use cash where they didn't have another way of paying for a certain service. If we're not careful and intentional, we could be unintentionally repeating some of the history that we have inherited.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “To a citizen that's showing up at a public input hearing on a road project or a rail project or something, the process is mysterious because they don't exactly know what input they're giving, where it's going to go, what impact it could have on the overall project. And we actually created a pamphlet that basically lays out for the average person how to influence the process of getting a project done the way that person would like to see it done. And that's just one way of trying to correct past practice, which was more autocratic, quite frankly. We also look forward a little bit. We invited mid-sized cities across the country to tell us how can cities best utilize available technology to solve their problems. We also ask them to explain to us how the deployment of that technology was going to help every citizen in that community regardless of their socioeconomic.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “We have a particular challenge in America when it comes to building infrastructure. And that challenge, and we shouldn't sugarcoat it, is that we are a pluralistic country. And if you look at the history of how infrastructure has been built, and Robert Moses is a good example of this, the autocratic style that was prevalent at a certain part of our history resulted in essentially using infrastructure as a way of creating barriers between Americans. And I worry, frankly, that we may be repeating some of the same problems when it comes to the use of technology in transportation.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “Well, I think the challenge for policymakers is knowing which tool to use in a given situation. The autonomous vehicle guide is frankly, there was a lot of concern that we could end up with a situation where 50 different states had 50 different regulations when it comes to autonomous vehicles. And what we tried to do is a layout of framework that wasn't prescriptive, that left room for the technology to grow and become more mature without killing it in the crib, so to speak, which is different than what I think drones need right now.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “There's a role where the government, even with a small amount of funding by basically being an anchor customer for that infrastructure, they can have a catalyzing influence in terms of getting something off the ground and started where a little bit of critical mass is necessary. And not only that, but by working with the government as an anchor customer, it also often makes it a lot easier to get regulatory permission. I think a lot of people look at some big companies in the world that are doing drone delivery and say, okay, you're talking about delivering someone's latte to their backyard using something that looks like a lawnmower of death. Like we're not that psyched. But when you're talking about working hand in hand with the Ministry of Health to deliver a medical product that someone's life depends on, that's an easy decision for just about anybody in government, even a relatively conservative regulator. Just a little bit of that can go so far in terms of catalyzing the creation of new infrastructure that ultimately will be fully sustainable from a”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Yeah, it's a very active market in most of the developed countries around the world. I've been to places like. At a certain time, in a certain part of whatever government building, if you work, it's limiting, if you're not plugged in, if you don't get the notice, our governments are using their municipal resources, but are actually working to go out to where people already are, go to the coffee shops, to go to the universities, to go out and get public input rather than expecting the public to come to you, so to speak.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “New units of collective action, an organization that the current mode of public finance does not support, like the neighborhood scale microgrid, building their own all availability. Playgrounds. We saw a distributed wireless mesh networks pop up in low-income communities to provide high quality broadband for the Households get together and say, We're going to borrow five million bucks and put together a bank of Tesla power packs and, you know, do distributed energy at our neighborhood.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Some of them that won't happen for another couple of years to do a single mega financing rather than borrow exactly what's needed when it's needed. You know, if a community could receive the funds and a MOU from the local council that says, yeah, you can do that project, then you can do this project and you can put your resources together and other people from other parts of the country might.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “New York Manhattan, and we say we need a canal. Imagine all the great things we could do with this canal, but how are we going to build this canal? Well, we have an idea. Let's pass the head around and write ourselves IOUs. To be fundamentally a community driven effort that would allow the community to build exactly what it needs when it needs it. Is now this hyper consolidated Aggregated $1 billion per day market. The cost structure is such that it makes more sense for. Communities to put together a bundle of 30 or 40 or 50 projects at a time. Some of them that needed to happen years ago.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “One of the drivers is innovation, obviously, but the other is certainly the citizens who are using this infrastructure on a daily basis. Oftentimes these municipal building projects are initiated by cities and counties, but is there actually a way in which citizens could start to suggest where things go?”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “That technology. So there's a reason that the US is the most complicated airspace. It's because we led in the development of that technology and the implementation of that technology. The government of Rwanda have had the vision.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It's going to happen because industry creates this thing called an autonomous vehicle that actually gets to a place where it's in the market and people are actually buying the service, if not buying the thing itself.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “I think this is going to be a part of a process that probably is government assisted, but it's going to be driven a lot by innovation. The U.S. has the most complicated airspace in the world because we've got so many different objects up there already. God knows I tried to think ahead and to do exactly what Keller just said, which is, you know, instead of looking back nostalgically at the infrastructure we had 50 years ago, this is not going to be for the US a time like the Transcontinental Railroad when Lincoln said let's build it and we built it or even the Interstate Highway system when Eisenhower said let's build it and we built it I think this is going to happen because the government gets nudged into doing it and that's what is so interesting about the phenomena of drones and drone delivery”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It seems like kind of the feature of various technologies that is most going to transform infrastructure is autonomy for physical infrastructure. In an age of flying cars, does that mean we're going to start have to build these islands that flying cars can stop on or massive drone terminals scattered around the country? Let's think about kind of 20 second century infrastructure. What does that actually look like?”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Economies that we put in our community Just the roads, the bridges, those physical things that immediately come to mind, but also those physical assets that help make modern society possible and connectivity as something that should be viewed as a utility. As infrastructure to a modern and functioning society, an even broader view of infrastructure than that is some of the assets of communities like education, so schools and libraries, we view all of that in the realm of infrastructure.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “I thought about infrastructure as the apparatus or apparati that are necessary to get people and things from one place to another. And, you know, more broadly speaking, you can think of infrastructure as what it takes to achieve a certain objective. You have energy infrastructure. You have financial services infrastructure. You have internet infrastructure. In the broadest sense of the word, I think we always think of infrastructure as kind of an instrumentality, something that helps us achieve a certain objective.”

    2017-08-25 · a16z Podcast · a16z Podcast: A Society Under Construction - Modernizing Infrastructure · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source