UPDATE 1/9/19: The program is reauthorized for 2019, with a total of $10 million in credits set aside by the state.
We’ve written in a past edition of our goodnews newsletter about an Illinois program to encourage investment in innovative early-stage companies, the Illinois Angel Tax Credit Program. Illinois has recently made an important change, which could affect the way that companies would want to structure an early investment round.
This morning I stopped in at a local market to pick up a little breakfast snack. As seems to be the case everywhere these days, I found myself face-to-face with a large screen TV at the checkout counter. (Heaven forbid we should not have a screen at us in every restaurant, elevator, and public space.)
The TV was tuned to one of the local morning news shows. A segment came on, the title of which was something like “video captures moose fight.” Right then and there, just as Bruce Banner inevitably transforms into the Hulk when confronted with a threat, I knew that the moose story was going to trigger one of my periodic diatribes about local TV news. So here goes.
For early-stage startups looking to raise a pre-seed financing round (usually from either friends and family, angel investors or Micro VCs), the Simple Agreement for Future Equity, or SAFE, has become a mainstream, company-friendly mechanism to complete the financing. (See goodcounsel’s original post about SAFEs,here.)
As a corporate attorney, I don’t often find references to the kind of work I do in popular culture. I was pretty surprised, therefore, when I was listening to Boardinghouse Reach, the newly released album by Jack White, one of my favorite artists (who is rightly viewed as one of the great musical talents in rock). The album features a catchy track called “Corporation” (Spotify, Apple Music), in which White sings:
SXSW lived up to my expectations. Sure, it took time to figure out the best strategies for getting around the convention venues, for getting in to the most interesting sessions, and most of all, for avoiding lines (it felt like the former Soviet Union at times). But I learned a great deal about trends in technology and beyond, met some cool people, and was even able to pick up and share some relevant industry developments with clients.
How can you go to SXSW and not attend some films (or what people outside of film festivals call “movies”)?
Chef Flynn
After visiting WeWork Austin to catch up on client work, I headed over to the Stateside Theatre on Austin’s main strip, Congress Avenue, to view Chef Flynn. It’s a wonderful documentary about a boy who develops a passion for cooking and some incredible kitchen skills, and thereafter enlists his elementary school classmates to be his line cooks and servers at an in-home “restaurant.”
Based on the sheer number of vendors showcasing VR/AR products on the trade show floor of the conference, I would say that the arrival of VR/AR into the mainstream was one of the big themes of SXSW 2018.
In “Enlightenment Now,” a presentation packed with graphs showing data from the Middle Ages to the present day, Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker persuasively argued that the world is doing better than ever before by every important measure: decreases in disease, poverty, pollution, inequality, infant mortality, war and wartime fatalities, authoritarianism; and increases in health, happiness, life expectancy, and democracy.
In a session entitled “Hacking our Democracy,” Mark Warner, the Senior U.S. Senator from Virginia and Vice Chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, summarized what is currently known about the extent of Russian attempts to influence the 2016 election.
If you don’t know what SXSW stands for, don’t worry. (I wouldn’t have known a few years ago either.)
SXSW – South by Southwest – started in Austin, Texas in the late 1980s as a small get-together that, to the surprise of its organizers, attracted 700 people in its first year.
