Michael Keating

This idea was originally inspired by a number of conversations had with female friends who are, like me, highly educated from good schools.

When many of them make the decision to stay home with their kids, they are left in a tough situation. On the one hand, they get to spend time with their kids and dedicate themselves to the most important and challenging job in the world – being a mother. But on the other hand, they are forced to let their professional aspirations go.

Too many times, this seems to result in a scenario where they end up spending their “free” time on websites like Facebook, which although perhaps amusing, does not satisfy their desire to do something more intellectually engaging and rewarding.

This seems to be a travesty both for these highly educated women, but also for our society as we lose these valuable contributors. I don’t think this has to be the case.

The idea:

Distributed Research. This organization uses a new “distributed” business model. This business would be targeted at either a) consulting or b) investment research. Employees can work entirely from home and collaborate using all the cool technology we have today. Hours would be asynchronous and flexible. And the best thing is, the pool of talent out there is enormous, so it would be staffed with really high quality employees who would likely be willing to work for a reasonable wage.

There are clearly issues of management, recruitment, details of collaboration, sales and other stuff to figure out, but it seems like this would tap into a huge resource and provide for a platform to reconnect a lot of talent with our economy.

I’m sure some people are doing similar things already. Please let me know if you have any thoughts. 

Photo by Jim Ellwanger

[I am going to continue Dave's topic of better investment options for the masses, but I am not an investor, so perhaps Dave can jump in and improve this idea.]

I see three problems:

1. Investment advice for most people is simplistic, generic, and essentially attempts to peg their portfolios to some sort of public market average on the assumption that over the long term if they try to do better than the average they will lose their shirts.
2. "The Market" is a poor proxy for the myriad forms of value creation that occur in the world in that it is made up of a collection of instruments (largely equity and debt from huge companies and government entities, some commodity and real estate-related assets, and various derivations thereof) that are representative of only a very narrow slice of value creating activity.
3. By virtue of the above two problems, the broader economy of small businesses and other private entities are denied low cost capital for expansion and innovation while large, mature entities and assets are flooded with capital, over-valued, and in their every minor success and failure violently wag the dog that employs and serves most of America and the world. 

Of course there are practical reasons for this, most important of which is that it is hard to value small businesses and hard to invest in them efficiently given their inability to absorb large amounts of capital individually, so the cost of placing capital in them is very high relative to the potential value created. What I hope is that this is changing. For better, and in many cases for worse, the mortgage securitization industry was successful at channeling massive amounts of capital into individual home purchases by, in part, identifying their common elements and packaging them at a scale that could generate efficient profits for investors. This is being done for other forms of commercial debt, but as a small business founder, I don't yet see the breadth of options and affordable capital I would like to see that could help me build my business, innovate, hire people, and make the economy stronger. So here is my idea:

A software platform to create, manage, price, and market small business investment funds. The funds would make loans to particular types of small businesses (perhaps grouped by geography and/or sub-industry), leveraging new reputation systems, such as Facebook and LinkedIn for security, and spreading bets widely across many businesses for diversity. Companies with less than 5 employees make up the majority of businesses in the US, so it shouldn't be hard to find deals, so to speak. Models exist for part of this, such as Prosper, which offers very competitive rates (around 10%) to individuals willing to lend to other individuals, and correspondingly low rates to individuals looking to borrow from other individuals. 

If investors could move a fraction of their portfolios that today are tied up in some anachronistic mix of stocks, bonds, cash, real estate, and commodities, into small business funds, I believe they could make more money than they would in the public markets without taking on more risk, and the resulting influx of billions of dollars would be an adrenaline boost to the US, and world, economies. 

This is an idea I might actually start someday, but I haven’t yet, so I figured why not air it here to see what people think.

The fundamental assumption behind this idea is simple: "normal" (i.e. not rich) people have bad access to investment advice.

I would like to create a company that solves this problem.

There are three basic approaches I have considered:

1:  Provide access to sophisticated asset managers in a way that allows “normal” people to benefit from the services wealthy people and institutions benefit from today. The simple description of this would be something like: hedge funds for the masses.

2:  Provide automated investment advice to people through a website using sophisticated algorithms and other fancy stuff that gives people tailored advice in a way that scales. This one seems easier (less regulations perhaps) but also harder because investing is actually really hard and few people do it well – which is why option 1 (which is more human-centric) might beat this version.

3:  Connect individuals around the world with the myriad of individual investment advisors that are out there through a P2P platform. Think of it like Ebay for financial advisors, or Experts Xxchange for financial advice. This one is hard because it is a two-sided platform and suffers from the “chicken-or-egg” issue, but it is maybe easiest because it is just solving a search problem, which the Internet is really good at doing.

There are a lot of details behind each of these ideas, but I figured I would at least float the gist here to see if anyone has any thoughts. Please let me know if you do.

Four or five years ago I read The Omnivore's Dilemma, and since then have been telling friends about my dream of a museum of food. I was inspired by that book's look at the ecology, economics, and nutrition of what we eat. Another book, A History of Food, a reference that explains the unusual origins and traditions of foods like honey, and the Slow Food movement, also informed  the idea. I wanted a broad audience to experience these ideas in the immersive, social, authoritative way that only a museum can offer.

Given the relevance and accessibility of the topic (we are not talking about contemporary art), as well as its breadth, this should be a serious museum, on the scale of a museum of natural history, with a whole wing for each of the key themes the museum would cover:

Ecology and Economy: Where does our food come from? How is it grown? What effect does that have on the world around us and on nature? How have those locations, practices, and effects changed over time? Who grows the food, processes it, and sells it? Imagine exhibits with huge interactive maps and time lines. Time-lapse videos showing food growing and people farming. Live or harvested samples of different crops for people to see and touch.

Cuisine and food preparation: What do we eat today and how is that different from previous generations or eras of human history? What are the many ways of preparing food, when were they adopted, and why? What kinds of food are eaten in different parts of the world and in different cultures? Exhibits could include samples of featured dishes cooked in the museum (the equivalent of an audio guide in an art museum). Images and videos of different cultures' food and eating habits. Maps that show how one ingredient migrated around the world, influencing new recipes.

Nutrition: What are vitamins? Is it healthy to be a vegetarian? What is the history of dieting? What diseases come from too much or too little of certain kinds of food? How do traditional cuisines and eating traditions support healthy eating? How are food companies changing the way we eat? Exhibits could include scales, blood pressure tests, quizzes, and other information about an individual's diet. There could also be interactive displays where kids could add different foods to a hypothetical person's diet and see how it effects their health (“What if you only ate ice cream for a year?”)

Of course there would be great restaurants at the museum, a fabulous gift shop, and perhaps a mini-TV studio where people could pay to record their own cooking shows as a way of passing down family recipes. Like most museums, this would certainly be a non-profit and I think it could attract a great deal of financial support to complement the revenue opportunities. One key, in my mind, would be to avoid the support of big corporate agribusiness and processed food money. Conflicts of interest would be guaranteed. Just look at previous iterations of the federal nutritional guidelines. A total sham.

I hadn't Googled this idea in year or so, but I did today and found out, not surprisingly, someone (David Arnold of the French Culinary Institute) is finally going to build one: The Museum of Food and Drink (http://www.mofad.org/ - site under construction, real location somewhere in Manhattan). There was a big fund raiser at the Manhattan restaurant Del Posto a few months ago. I certainly hope they will be successful, but I have to wonder if NYC is the right home for another big museum. San Francisco is across the bay from Chez Panisse, the progenitor of the California Cuisine that salvaged American cooking, is a short drive from one of the world's most productive growing regions, and has an excellent restaurant scene. I wonder if SF missed a great opportunity, or if they might create their own competing institution.

I want to create a site that helps kids see the various different possibilities that exist for their futures – so they dream big…with more content and career paths to fill out their vision.

By helping kids to develop tangible dreams, I believe they will be motivated to achieve more than society thinks they can - because all kids have the potential to be great.  And being great means more than being a professional athlete or the President.

To help kids achieve these dreams, we must overcome many barriers, but the one of the biggest impediments – not knowing about the possibilities that are out there – is one that the Internet is perfectly suited to destroy.

I believe that even though we have big imaginations, we also need tangible content to fill our imaginations as we envision our futures. Kids don’t only dream about being an astronaut or doctor because they sound like cool jobs – too many kids don’t know that being an actuary or a computer programmer is even a possibility.

In the past, people mainly learned about career paths from their families and neighbors.  Over time, television and other media helped expose more people to more ideas.

However, even though this partially opened the door, many kids still have no idea how many different paths and options are out there waiting for them.  Unless they have the right parents and the right schooling – as victors of the so-called lottery of birth – too many kids don’t even know what their options are.

This should change.

Given the power of the Internet, kids should not be limited by geography or background as they learn to dream about their futures.

The solution starts with a simple idea:

Create a site where people describe their background and careers in video format.  The site would bring people as varied as an older woman who is a career-long poet, to a young guy working on Wall Street, together – to put a face with a career path and a story. By giving tangible examples, it will provide the seeds of ideas to fill the daydreams that start to become potential career paths as kids think about their futures.

Over time, if enough different stories are collected, the site could become a repository for kids to find ideas about the schools, backgrounds and training that lead to the myriad of different destinations people in America end up in today.

This idea is rough, so I would appreciate any feedback as I hope to develop it at some point.

Some of the obvious challenges include:

1. organizing the content
2. developing good interview formats that kids can relate to
3. distributing the content – getting kids attention.

Besides developing a simple website the concept also lends itself to additional add-on concepts like:

1. Direct mentorship
2. Targeting a broader audience – to help break down barriers of judgment – i.e. by showing personalized videos – putting a face with a “story” – I believe people will realize that even people with very different backgrounds and careers have a lot in common.



Welcome to Not Stealth. This blog is a home for all those ideas for businesses, services, tools, products, or projects that could be HUGE or beautiful or important, but that we are not going to realize on our own. So we are giving them to you. Maybe you will take one and make it real. Maybe you will tell us why it is actually a bad idea and we will learn something. Or we will find out it has already been done and can see how it turned out. For more about why we are doing this, see the About section, and the Notes section for how we are doing this.

Thanks in advance participating. This is going to be fun.

- Michael and Dave

Why didn't Buckminster Fuller's dome—a brilliant innovation of design—ever take off?

A few months ago, I spent a wonderful week living in a dome. For a total investment of about $250, I acquired over a 100 sturdy, shaded, weather-proof square feet of residential real estate. At Burning Man, this was four-star living.

My circular pad was not the only one in the Nevada desert that week. The dome is as characteristic of Burning Man’s Black Rock City as the Brownstown is in Brooklyn. Parts of the festival can take on the look of a moon base. This wouldn’t surprise Buckminster Fuller or any of the many boosters and designers of domes who had their heyday in the middle of the last century. What would surprise them is the sheer number of domes in one place at one time.

Domes were supposed to be the houses of tomorrow. Judging by their virtues—they are structurally strong, with the efficient ratio of surface to volume making them cheap to build and easy to heat and cool—a dome should still be on our list of building options. Shouldn’t domes have become a disruptive innovation in housing, displacing old-fashioned gables over the last 50 years? Perhaps, but they haven't.

Housing’s environmental impact is huge. The land claimed, the construction materials, the energy and water and chemicals used over the life of a home, and the activities humans undertake (such as driving) in order to access their housing add up to one of the most important drivers of environmental damage in the world, and in any one person’s lifestyle.

If conventional housing, especially single-family suburban housing, is negatively impacting climate change and biodiversity, what innovations will disrupt this and bring to market a new dominant, sustainable housing form? Understanding why domes failed in that regard might point us to the right solution.

Domes represent a whole new way of building, with an outcome that looks completely different from a conventional home. Their low cost should—despite the trade-offs of an awkward shape for furnishing, and weird acoustics—make them classic low-end alternatives to the norm. Would you be as likely to find a buyer for your dome as you would a conventional home? When making a purchase that will become your biggest expense over the coming years, taking a risk on the resale value seems imprudent. Further, in many places, neighbors or home owners associations might fight the development of a dome-next-door in order to protect the character of their neighborhood, which has something to do with their daily aesthetic experience but much more to do with their property values. Though domes have great disruptive potential, it appears that they are not disrupting the right thing, or, to use the language of disruptive-innovation theory: They are competing on the wrong terms.

According to Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen’s theory of “disruptive innovation,” we should ask what “job” does a house do for you? The answer is that housing does much more than put a roof over your head, give you nice neighbors, and locate you in a good school district or near your job. Since the creation of the Federal Housing Administration, Fannie Mae, and other means of boosting ownership, it has also been, in some cases primarily, making you money. So while Fuller thought he was shaping the future with his geodesic architecture, the government and the financial services industry were implementing a more compelling design.

Fast forward to the recent housing crisis, which shows us that the guarantee of getting rich from borrowing all you can to buy a home may have reached its limit. House prices will still rise in many places, eventually, but some of the brightest minds in the country created the financial engineering techniques to keep those home “values” rising fast, and the slope got too steep for us to keep climbing. That these techniques were predicated on the construction of fairly standard homes that could be easily valued, mortgaged, securitized, tranched, and sold as something very different from a place to live shows us that the present unsustainable construction techniques that dominate in America today were as much a product of an investment strategy as they were of mainstream tastes and of trade union influence on building codes.

Now that the housing bubble has popped, will we allow ourselves to build homes that break the mold, both in terms of aesthetics and sustainability? That are more habitat than they are investment? This is not an armchair question. With the US housing market in crisis and receiving billions in subsidies, and China and India being reshaped by urbanization and rising middle classes who are building millions of new homes, this is the moment to change course. We could:

• Reform the national building code to allow for passivhaus and pre-fab’s efficiencies in factory-built components, rapid on-site construction and energy efficiency in any state in the country. 
• Allow people to deduct the mortgage interest on an RV that is their primary residence, allowing them to live where they drive, eliminating one commute and vehicle per household and reducing land use.
• Legalize AirBnB to make it possible for people to move from apartment to apartment without ever needing a rental agreement
• Improve urban schools to attract more people back to cities with their efficient and multifamily residences.
• Prohibit neighbors from blocking innovative construction in their midst, in order to spur new ideas and experimentation in how we build and live.

The money pay for these ideas could be found by eliminating billions of mortgage interest tax deductions on luxury housing and second homes that promote waste and only benefit the rich. And all of these ideas have the potential to disrupt conventional housing forms and reduce housing’s environmental impact significantly, but only if housing is seen first as a home, not as a stock pick.

Note: This is the fourth and final post in a series I have contributed to irregularly over the past year. The goal of the series was to get people to think critically, using one of the most important theories of technological change, about how important it is to know the difference between what is “greener” and what is really “green”. I will continue to blog on this and related topics at http://michaelburnskeating.net.

Is there such a thing as a sustainable alternative to beef and other meats?

Beef is not what’s for dinner if you are serving 6 billion people, much less so if you are serving 9 billion (where population is expected to level off, around 2050). Current meat production puts meat on the dinner table for far fewer than 6 billion people every night, as most people can’t afford it. Meat alone is responsible for about 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions. The land required to grow the feed and graze those animals that are allowed to graze, the water used at every stage of the process, and the complications of hormones and antibiotics make the kind of industrial meat production required to feed billions of omnivores  one of the biggest threats to the global environment. Scale that up to meet current or future demand and you have a crisis.

We really should have started eating less meat years ago, but in the 20 years until 2002 (the most recent year the data is available from the World Resources Institute) meat consumption has grown in every region of the world except in Europe and Sub-Saharan Africa, where it has essentially remained stable (and in Africa very low). The Americas, with the United States, Canada, and Argentina in the lead, are the biggest meat eaters. The Europeans aren’t far behind. As countries get richer, they eat more meat, because it tastes good, and because they can. And some very big countries are getting richer right now, so the trend is clearly upwards.

As in past pieces in this series, the question is how to find, among the many forms of meat touted as greener or more environmentally friendly, that kind of meat that really has a chance of pushing environmentally damaging, industrial meat off the table. We are looking for a “disruptive innovation,” to use the concept coined by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen to explain how innovations in technological and business systems can gain a foothold in a market of established, profitable corporations and eventually come to dominate those markets themselves. The theory of disruptive innovation successfully explains the rise of the cell phone against the landline and Japanese automakers against Detroit. Environmentalists should hope to replicate such successes in environmentally damaging industries like transportation and electricity (discussed previously) and in the meat industry.

A trip to even a mainstream grocer or butcher will likely bring the shopper in contact with one or more of the following green “innovations” in meat production:

• Organic: animals fed entirely with organic feed, excluding GMOs, herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, and synthetic fertilizers. They are not fed antibiotics or growth hormones and are not genetically modified themselves. Since a third of all grains goes to feed livestock, and almost half of all cropland is used to grow grains, organic livestock feed could better the ecology of an area about the size of Alaska and California combined. Not bad.


• Grass-fed: Grass-fed meat is fed largely or exclusively on the natural food for ruminants like cows and sheep, instead of on corn and soy and other non-grass additives that make up industrial feed. The most obvious benefits are in the health of the animals and the people who eat them, but it also amplifies some of the environmental benefits of the organic meat. All those acres of feed that stay chemical-free under organic agriculture don’t need to be planted for grass-fed, though they may be needed for pasture. And, ruminants that eat grass have better digestion and lower methane emissions.


• Local: Local meat is grown near the place it is consumed, and the designation implies traditional, non-industrial farming, though this isn’t always the case. The benefits of local are as often described in terms of supporting local economies or freshness as they are described in terms of reducing the energy and pollution from transporting meat long distances.

The question is which, if any, of the above might be that disruptive innovation that will make eating meat sustainable, moving from its current niche to a paradigm shift. Asked differently, do any of these have the qualities that gave Toyota a foothold in the U.S. car market in the 1960s? Compact, unsexy Toyotas were cheap, fuel efficient for the time, and could get you from here to there, so they were good enough for some people who couldn’t afford an overpowered, gas guzzling Ford. Detroit was caught unprepared for the oil shocks of the 1970s, and that gave the little Japanese cars their chance to go from niche to mainstream as buyers’ priorities shifted. Today, Toyota is the biggest car company in the world.

Looking at the organic, grass-fed, local meats above, we won’t find any Toyotas, unless you are looking for a Prius. None of them are cheaper or just good enough, relative to their non-green equivalents. They are all premium products. Organic feed is more expensive and pasture land even more so. Not feeding the animals antibiotics, hormones, or protein-rich industrial feed results in them taking longer to fatten, further increasing the cost. The meat is likely healthier too, and some people can tell the difference. Local meat is generally more expensive, especially if it comes from a small farm. The reduced cost of transporting meat long distances is not enough to make local meat cheaper. These cost differences would be less obvious if the United States and other governments didn’t subsidize so many stages of the meat production process. These subsidies stifle innovation in a fundamental industry and ultimately hurt the meat eating public, the environment, and industry competitiveness.

So if none of these meats are Toyotas, could they be cell phones? Do they allow people who have not had access to meat in the past include it in their diets the way a cell phone lets you make calls even when you are away from home or work? A product doesn’t have to be cheaper to get a foothold if it isn’t competing against anything else.  Unfortunately, none of these kinds of meat are available where industrial meat is not, and very few people would not eat meat but for the existence of these preferred varieties.

Neither cell phones nor Toyotas, these green meats are certainly better than industrial, but they aren’t cheap or distinctive enough make a difference in the big picture or the long term, and that's disappointing.

But we left something out. If we ask ourselves what meat does in our diets, we find it is an important source of combined protein, fat, cholesterol, vitamins (especially B-vitamins), and minerals. These nutrients don’t have to come from animals. That same mainstream supermarket in which you may have found the high-priced organic meat probably also carries some of the following:

• Soy: in the form of tofu, tempeh, pups, tofurkey, and every other form imaginable.


• Seitan (high protein wheat gluten): in traditional forms as well as those that can resemble duck.


• Veggie burgers: a mix of all kinds of things in as many varieties but all standing in for the American beef staple.

Some of these “meat alternatives” (like the traditional tofu, tempeh, and seitan) are Toyotas because meat is a luxury in many parts of the world: For centuries they have been an important part of traditional diets and a cheaper, good-enough nutritional stand-in for meat, or just a regular part of the traditional cuisine. Some (the pups, veggie burgers, and soy nuggets) are like cell phones in countries where meat is very cheap and people are relatively well off, like the United States. They are not a cheaper alternative to hamburgers as they are mainly for people who don't eat meat, but they are gaining popularity as people seek healthier, safer, more humane, and greener alternatives to meat. As they get tastier, more meat-like, cheaper, and more socially acceptable, they can ride these trends to a greater share of United States “meat” consumption like cell phones took over land lines as they got better, lighter, cheaper, and less ostentatious.

However, as shown by the short happy life of Zen Burger (a tasty vegetarian fast food concept that closed a year ago in New York City), it will take more than good intentions to marginalize meat eating among those who can afford to eat it at every meal. Meat substitutes will probably only become a mainstream alternative if the price of meat rises sharply, perhaps as a result of subsidies being scaled back or in the face of an oil-shock-type crisis in water, climate, or food—like recent scares over e. coli or the food price rises attributed to the biofuels boom, but bigger. When something like that happens, the Boca Burgers and Nasoyas of the world will be ready to become the Toyotas of tomorrow.

Michael Keating is an environmentalist and entrepreneur living in Brooklyn, New York.

Illustration by Will Etling.

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"If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." -Henry Ford

Michael Keating is Business Development Manager at The Open Planning Project.