Hunter Boyle :: Published Articles :: Business and Technology Writing

Yoo-Mi Lee — Rethinking how to Give
By Hunter Boyle (Charity Focus, 05/07/2001)

Frustrated by twentysomething millionaires, stock market worship, and rampant materialism, Yoo-Mi Lee decided she'd had enough. "People were starting to lose their humanity. Because they were making six figures as a 24-year-old, they thought they were better than people who weren't," she says.

Her response? Move to San Francisco.

That was 1987 - the year that Yoo-Mi, a successful securities trader, exchanged the life of a Wall Street broker for the modesty of the Mission District. Many of her friends and associates derided the idea. "People were very angry with me. One guy yelled at me. He said, 'Yoo-Mi, are you crazy? Do you know that you're going to make $20,000 for the rest of your life?" she says. "I couldn't get through to him that it didn't matter to me. That was one of the reasons I left, because all they thought about was making money."

At a California agricultural cooperative, Yoo-Mi's passion for travel and appreciation of diverse cultures eventually led to her work with developing countries. Born in South Korea and raised in Uganda, East Africa, her teen years began in a Bronx public housing project and ended in Ithaca, New York, at Cornell University. Although her father, a surgeon, moved the family to affluent Scarsdale after completing his residency, Yoo-Mi mostly avoided the placid suburb, favoring the rich tapestry and energy of city life, making the most of her time. By the time illness canceled her parents' plans for a post-retirement reunion visit to Uganda, Yoo-Mi had long recognized that exploring the world couldn't be put off. To date, she has not only traveled to nearly 40 countries, but also helped many of them to develop infrastructure projects and improve the quality of life.

After a few years with the Washington, D.C. nonprofit that fostered much of her international travel, Yoo-Mi returned to the Bay Area in late 1997 - to ground zero in the new economy. "When I came back, it was a different world," she says. Quick to adapt, she studied e-commerce, the Internet, and social enterprise, established her own consulting business, and was considering full-time dot-com jobs when a friend suggested a way to help nonprofits with web technologies - and pointed Yoo-Mi to the CharityFocus site.

In June 1999, Yoo-Mi attended her first CharityFocus meeting and was "totally impressed" with the group's organization and mission. Eager to get involved and see hard results, Yoo-Mi approached her volunteer efforts with the same tenacity she devotes to her work. But something felt out of place to her. Gradually, she recognized what makes the group unique - and reconsidered her definition of service altogether. "CharityFocus has given me a way of rethinking how I want to give," she says.

"When I first came to CharityFocus, I thought: 'Okay, how can we grow this thing? How can we get money for it? How can we make sure that we get the most volunteers and build the most web sites?' But that's not it at all. The real focus is: 'How do you best open up opportunities for people to give of themselves?' That's been the nature of the change."

"It's a very different thing to give time than to give money," she continues. "I know money is really important to a lot of organizations, and a lot of organizations would rather have money than your time. But when you give your time, I think it changes you in some way - in a way that giving money doesn't. And that's what's really important, that's the kind of change we like to see in people, because they can go on and do other things."

Although she serves on the CharityFocus Tiger Team and has been a member since its early days, Yoo-Mi has never worked directly on a specific project. Instead, she devotes her time and considerable talents to coordinating outreach and public relations, assisting with organizational development and proposals, advising the Mentors Team, establishing alliances with partner organizations, and responding to email inquiries about CharityFocus and its services. In a quiet month, she spends about 30 hours on Charity Focus activities, but with the growing amount of press coverage, volunteers and projects, things are hardly quiet anymore. Fortunately, Yoo-Mi seems happy to find the time.

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Mr. Smith Goes to the Valley
By Hunter Boyle (Industry Standard's Internet Architect Spotlight, 01/09/2001)

If there's one thing Rick White has going for him, it's timing. With an incoming Republican administration and Washington growing ever-more aware of the tech sector, the former Republican congressman and new CEO of TechNet is in the driver's seat of tech policy.

TechNet, a network of more than 300 technology industry all-stars, takes positions both influential and high-profile. It supported trade relations with China and fought federal accounting regulations that would have altered stock-option reporting for outside directors of companies. The group counts some of the most well-known names in Silicon Valley.

White's first week on the job is likely to be a busy one, as he must lead TechNet's annual meeting and help set the agenda for the coming year. This year's top priorities are likely to include education and training, trade and workforce issues.

White is well suited to the task. He helped grow the Internet Caucus, an influential group of legislators who examine policy on Internet and tech issues, from 20 members to more than 150 today. His requirements for membership were nominal in hindsight - members had to have Web pages and make themselves available to constituents by e-mail - but effective. Even Strom Thurmond eventually signed on.

"Congress is never going to be as savvy as people in general. But it's gotten to the point where they're no worse on (Net-related issues) than anyone else - at least you're getting the same sort of debates," he says.

Noting that Congress and the incoming administration closely resemble the profile during his two terms in office, White is cautiously optimistic about getting his message across to both new and former colleagues. "With any issue that goes to Congress, the best you're going to get is rough justice," he says. "I spent four years in D.C., and it's easy to get cynical," White says. "In Congress, you form relationships in a crucible, with pressure from all sides and both parties."

Nevertheless, White sees TechNet as different than typical industry-lobbying organizations and is enthusiastic about the chance to help shape and establish national policy with regard to technology - and to see his ideal model for policy-making spread. To him, that means promoting the exchange of ideas and information between industry leaders and public officials - not simply campaign contributions - and in turn, altering the perception and practices of industry collectives.

Coming from a former congressman, that's a difficult concept to take at face value. Indeed, the process within and outside of Capitol Hill is much the same. As White puts it, "Find the people who share beliefs, and support these people, financially and otherwise."

"Public policy is an organic thing," he adds. "It requires ongoing dialogue at lots of different levels," White says. "Our most important goal is not to get government to adopt our issues, but to get the industry to figure out what our policy should be. Once we've decided that, we can probably speak with one voice and be very effective."

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Brazen New World
By Hunter Boyle (Industry Standard, 08/10/2000)

Big, important ideas beg to be carefully spun out in big, important books. Future Wealth, unfortunately, is long on big ideas but short on the vision of a big book.

Picking up where their 1998 bestseller Blur left off, Stan Davis and Christopher Meyer draw an enticing financial road map for the next two decades. The premise of Future Wealth is simple: The radical economic changes brought about by Net-enabled connectivity are driving economics away from tangible assets and toward a greater reliance on intangibles like intellectual capital. The authors' vision of the future of wealth involves three basic themes: risk as opportunity, human capital as the key force in financial markets and effective safety nets as the linchpin of social order.

But after a brief primer on economics, which asserts that current B-school economic theory already belongs in a history course, this vision begins to get, well, blurry. Maybe a better metaphor for the authors' optical flaw is tunnel vision. Davis and Meyers simplistically predict that within a few years, forward-thinking parents could be taking their daughters public as effortlessly as driving them to soccer practice. They cite such examples as the team of Web engineers that tried - unsuccessfully - to auction itself off on eBay and David Bowie's personal public offering as evidence that financial markets are now ready to trade in intellectual capital.

The implications of these not-too-distant future scenarios are hardly desirable. Picture yourself having breakfast at McDonald's. You're thrilled because you bought your coffee right before the real-time price board bumped it up by a dime. Sitting with coffee and an Egg McMuffin at your table's Bloomberg terminal, you begin tracking your investments - including your own market cap, and perhaps that of your daughter, your friends and coworkers, and the latest addition to your stable: Keanu Reeves (the action movies fund). You are at one with the market, oblivious to the guy waiting behind you in line for the terminal.

Ultimately, a lack of attention to surrounding details is what unravels the silver lining from Future Wealth. If human capital is rolled into the financial markets, and individuals and groups are bought and sold like stocks and mutual funds, serious issues like insider trading, rampant speculation and daytrading addiction take on entirely new dimensions.

Is a phone call to your parents about a job offer considered insider trading if Mom and Dad are among your shareholders? Will office gossip dampen investor enthusiasm for your IPO? Will your stock tank if you're diagnosed with cancer? Will you be expected to file your medical records and diaries with the SEC?

On the book's last page, the authors address some real-world potholes in their vision: "Will daytrading replace caring? Will profit-taking replace philanthropy? Possibly." For a book built on assured predictions, this 11th-hour ambivalence begs for a reassessment of the preceding pages.

Future Wealth raises more questions than it can answer. Fortunately, as they did with Blur, the authors have created a Web site where the exchange of ideas can continue. Some healthy skepticism seems wise.

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