A well-known venture capitalist and early investor in Google, John Doerr, has a famous saying: “Ideas are easy. Execution is everything.” I didn’t create this Substack about tech policy to be an “ideas guy”; I created it to be the engineer who executes.
I have previously worked as a software engineer at Google and Microsoft, and I also served for a year as a tech fellow in Congress—an experience that is more valuable than a fancy credential such as a Masters in Public Policy (MPP).
In Silicon Valley, “ideas guy” is often used as a pejorative term for someone who claims to have great ideas for a startup—and not much else to offer, be it technical skills or even business skills. Paul Graham, a cofounder of the famous Silicon Valley startup accelerator Y Combinator, once said that ideas are worthless:
Actually, startup ideas are not million dollar ideas, and here's an experiment you can try to prove it: just try to sell one. Nothing evolves faster than markets. The fact that there's no market for startup ideas suggests there's no demand. Which means, in the narrow sense of the word, that startup ideas are worthless.
Startups need to build a product that customers actually want because it makes their lives better. Legislators need to build legislation that voters actually want because it makes their lives better. For both, execution is everything.
As an engineer, I prefer to show rather than tell, so let’s use age verification for social media as a representative example. The point here is not whether this is a “good” idea or not; the point here is to demonstrate a failure of execution.
Many states passed social media laws for age verification, but once NetChoice (a trade association for Big Tech) started suing to block these laws, these laws started dropping like flies. After the first two laws were blocked, I published a piece in City Journal about this failure of execution. When three more laws were blocked later—making that piece look prescient—I used this Substack to propose a solution.
To regulate social media, you first must define social media. In all these lawsuits, courts were essentially rejecting the law’s definition of social media. What if you wanted to pivot from age verification to a different idea to protect kids on social media? (It’s not uncommon for startups to pivot, too.) Even then, you would run into the same problem: to regulate social media, you first must define social media.
The legal definition of social media is not a flashy or exciting topic, but when we get down to the brass tacks of execution, it’s a critical issue. Over one billion websites exist, and the definition has to correctly classify each site as “social media” or “not social media.” That problem is challenging enough by itself—much less when we add in the constitutional constraints that you must obey when writing this definition.
In more ways than one, to execute here, you’ll need some technical assistance.
