True Insights: Voice

We say “I’m speechless” colloquially when we don’t know what to say. Something is so surprising to us that we describe ourselves as unable to communicate, without words.

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen the power of Freedom of Speech catalyzed by the powerful platforms of True’s community of Founders. Our community has been incredibly engaged as a result of recent events.

Beyond the True community, I’ve noticed a resurgence of outspokenness in general that is driving humanity forward despite the screeching brakes of opposing thought. People are communicating and debating a lot more than they were six months ago.

In light of this resurgence of point of view, this month’s True Insights is all about voice and the distinct, valuable perspectives each and every one of us brings to the table.

Influence for Good

In response to the executive order restricting immigration to the U.S., littleBits’ Ayah Bdeir placed a billboard saying “We Invent the World We Want to Live In” in both English and Arabic in Times Square. The goal was to help remove the stigma around the Arabic language. The bold move garnered attention in Slate and Inc. Magazine, helping to further spread Ayah and her team’s compassionate message.

Ethan Diamond declared that Bandcamp would donate a whole day’s profits to the ACLU. Since his announcement, 400 labels and artists joined him in donating their profits to the civil liberties organization. Bandcamp fans spent more than $1 million on music that day, 550 percent more than any given Friday.

NewCo Daily editor Scott Roseberg wrote “Trump’s Border Ban Pushes Tech to Take a Stand — But Will It Lead?” — a piece about the tech community’s reaction to the President’s policies. NewCo contributor and advisor Pete Leyden wrote NewCo’s most popular story of all time: “Why Trump’s Inauguration Is Not the Beginning of an Era — but the End” which sheds a positive light on what the Trump reign may mean for our country.

Off the Trump topic: Keep.com’s Courtney Harwood published “Women Are Not the Secretaries of Life: How Our ‘Friends’ Alexa, Siri and Cortana Perpetuate Gender Biases.” While women and men work hard to break gender stereotypes, Courtney asserts that gender biases are still slipping in through the cracks.

In Other Tech News

Early-stage hiring can be difficult and time consuming. The Chameleon team wrote a piece called “How to Run Recruiting Like a Fundraising Sprint” about how they applied agile methodology to the recruitment process to make it more efficient.

Cloverpop’s Erik Larson published two new articles on Forbes: “Six Simple Decision-Making Metrics to Kill Meetings and Emails” and “When It Comes to Decision Making at Work, You’re (Mostly) No Tom Brady.” What I like most about Erik’s content is that he’s found a million and one ways to talk about decision making creatively.

Howdy’s Ben Brown wrote a piece about how he uses Slack’s new threading feature to build native-like apps within Slack. This opens up some very interesting opportunities for companies in terms of how they embed themselves into workflow. Also on the Slack front, Tray.io shared “How Real-Time Slack Notifications Are Driving the Future of Sales Teams.”

The Callstats.io team published their first WebRTC Metrics Report for companies developing or managing products that incorporate real-time audio or video calling. The plan is to produce one per quarter moving forward.

Surprise, Surprise

Puppet’s Luke Kanies argues that the common opinion that entrepreneurs learn more from failure than they do from success is a wackadoodle idea. “Does your restaurant belong on a popular street with other successful restaurants and lots of reasons for people to visit, or a desolate strip where no restaurant has succeeded?” writes Luke.

Academia.edu’s Richard Price wrote an article for Wired about how scientific papers need a better feedback system. Richard thinks the solution is building a crowd-sourced peer review system and reward system for sharing data sets and code.

Lastly, Ginger.io’s Anmol Madan recently spoke at the World Economic Forum on the gaps in access to mental health care resources, and how technology can play a role in scaling access to care at lower costs.

True Insights is a monthly round-up of articles published by True Ventures’ community of thought leaders.