Breakfast with Wiley Cirilli

Breakfast with Wiley Cirilli

Good morning, All,

Our next Breakfast with an Investor is March 18th and our guest investor is Wiley Cirilli from First Round Capital. And notice that it’s called First Round Capital. Early stage.

Wiley Cerilli is a Venture Partner at First Round, and was founder of Single Platform, which was acquired two years after its founding by Constant Contact for $100M (What It Feels Like To Wake Up At 32 With Everything You’ve Ever Wanted). SinglePlatform was initially funded by First Round, and quickly went on to be named one of the Top 10 and 25 “Companies to Watch” by Business Insider, The Next Web and Website Magazine. Wiley has been named as a “Top 25 CEO” in New York, and “Top 10 People to Watch” by Crain’s. He also dropped in and out of school five times, and met his wife on Match.com. More about him below.

We are a former gum chewer who was working on a piece about vapes/ehookahs recently – or ecigs, as some call them, and for the record,  researched and tested them, and use flavored vegetable glycerin as the liquid. Also for the record, chewing gum contains more unpronounceable chemicals than do the custom vapes and their liquids (if you’re vaping vegetable gylerin). These devices have been categorized as a tobacco product, despite the fact that they contain no tobacco, and are electronic – no smoke; that’s vapor. No fire necessary to ignite them, as with tobacco products and what’s the expression? Where there’s smoke, there’s fire?  Might as well rule chewing gum a tobacco product.

Government ‘protections’ and interventions are rarely a good thing.

Why the tech industry celebrated when the FCC ruled that the Internet is a utility and should be regulated as one is a mystery to us. If the new regulations are so wonderful, why are they shrouded in such secrecy? More importantly, every time the Obama Administration has moved towards regulating the internet, the proposal have been potentially and incrementally more detrimental to the tech sector and to innovation.

Yet in the tech media, by and large, Title II is being hailed as ‘landmark legislation.’ Note: there was no legislation. Nor were our elected officials nor the public permitted to see the document. And that’s 332 pages of regulations, for those of us playing the home version. It’s premature to applaud a document when we don’t know what is in the bold type, much less the fine print.

What we’re essentially looking at is the largest regulatory power grab in recent history.  The Administration usurped the powers of the Congress – our elected representatives. Wrote one commentator, “The FCC’s newly adopted rule takes the most dynamic means of communication and imposes the regulatory structure designed for public utilities. Federal regulation could also open the door to de facto censorship of ideas perceived as threatening to the political class.”

Not that an administration who would seize power constitutionally granted to the Congress, basically doing an end run around our elected officials, would dream of censoring the electorate.

Time to pay closer attention.

We live in an age of double speak or as George Orwell called it, New Speak. This is not net neutrality. Far from it and lest we forget, this is an administration that has invaded every part of our personal lives with backdoor spying on citizens, in case you missed the recent SIM heist (The NSA’s SIM heist could have given it the power to plant spyware on any phone).

So much for #Transparency.

This is a fight for the future, innovation, and at the core, our freedom of speech and expression. Time to stop listening to what you’re being told and to start paying attention to what’s not being said. In the words of Baudelaire and popularized by Kevin Spacey in The Usual Suspects, although we will quote Baudelaire: the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn’t exist. And like that (poof) he was gone.

Put that in your e-hookah and vape it. Onward and forward.

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