The 19th Century was notable for being the last century of chattel slavery, and the transatlantic slave trade sailed its final voyages over these years. Chattel slavery is a unique and important moment in history. It is unlike any other slavery, in that you were owned *forever.* You couldn’t earn your way out of it. If you escaped, you were in fact in violation of the law, and your children, and their children, and their children […]
I’ve been reading Freaks of Fortune, a wonderful book on the history of the modern insurance industry. It’s a fascinating survey of the emerging capitalist threads of the 19th Century and their implications for the world in which we live. There are too many points to summarize or opine on for one short blog post, but a few concepts jumped out at me (quoted as screenshots below). I’ll split them up into a few posts, so […]
At 9.5 million people, the country’s population is somewhere between Michigan and New Jersey. It’s slightly bigger than New York City. It’s GDP per capita is high, but not in the top 10 (depending on whether you’re using purchasing power parity or nominal GDP), and lower than the United States’. And yet, if you look at the last 10 years of technology activity coming out of that country, they have a *stunning* number of companies […]
A few months ago i was having breakfast with a mentor and investor of ours, who said something very interesting to me: “When I was young, I used to think there was a distinction between ‘things that are made’ and ‘things that are grown’. I no longer believe in that distinction, which is a profound change.” As I thought about it, I realized I was the same way, but hadn’t realized it: on my old view, some things […]
Along with 150 of my peers in the technology industry, I signed an open letter organized by Alec Ross regarding the upcoming election. Reprinted in full below, shareable link here. — We are inventors, entrepreneurs, engineers, investors, researchers, and business leaders working in the technology sector. We are proud that American innovation is the envy of the world, a source of widely-shared prosperity, and a hallmark of our global leadership. We believe in an inclusive […]
Financial economist and famed venture capitalist Bill Janeway says, of the conditions for innovation: “economic growth has been driven by successive processes of trial and error and error and error.” Failure is core to the innovation economy. It is taken as an article of faith in Silicon Valley vocabulary to “fail fast, fail often”. A successful brainstorming exercise can be described as a process of throwing many ideas against the wall and seeing what sticks; […]
Woe be to this phrase: “We need to catch up soon!” Found in a beautiful, if tragic, essay in the Atlantic from last fall. It talks about how adult friendships are hard! It struck a personal note to me, on a few levels: the first, because my wife and I are entering that phase of life where we’re trying to decide if we’re going to end up in a suburb or in a city, or something […]
Lately, the hottest topics in the technology community have been focused on municipal regulation of drones and cars, federal regulation of labor markets and health insurance, the IPO window, and the scary dominance of FANGAM. And always, it seems, there’s the topic of China and India, and their growing influence in the global technology market. In a conversation with Morgan Housel week before last, however, we ended up taking a very different tack to our […]
Oxford English says: The application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry Merriam Webster: The use of science in industry, engineering, etc., to invent useful things or to solve problems As I’ve been working on describing what it means to be a technology investor, this question has plagued me. I’ve been surprised by this, as a shallow consideration of that question lands me on “software and hardware companies”. But General Motors has 100 million […]
While in San Francisco last week, I heard a very interesting comment a few times from YCombinator founders: “our advisors set ridiculous – even unreasonable – growth targets for us, which forced us to think more creatively about how to acquire customers and solve problems.” In each of those particular cases, the founders ended up not only finding, but dramatically exceeding those growth targets, and realizing something very new about the potential of their business […]
Musings 