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| Charging Bull, a bronze statue by Arturo Di Modica at Bowling Green, Manhattan, New York City (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
The impending Age Of Abundance was prophecied in the scriptures thousands of years ago.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
Early State Tech Startups
Tuesday, May 12, 2015
A Touch Of Asperger's
“Rather than reasoning by analogy, you boil things down to the most fundamental truths you can imagine and you reason up from there,” Musk has said. “This is a good way to figure out if something really makes sense or if it’s just what everybody else is doing.” ....... To be great, you can’t think like everybody else, and you probably won’t fit in to the herd. As a child Musk was bullied and beaten so badly that as an adult he struggled to breathe through his nose and needed corrective surgery........ John Doerr, a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, who was an early investor in Google, Amazon and Netscape, has said that great entrepreneurs tend to have “absolutely no social life.” Great innovators, like those with Asperger’s, just don’t fit in...... Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been described as “a robot,” and having “a touch of the Asperger’s,” according to a former colleague. There are stories of a young Zuckerberg having awkward meetings, such as with Twitter’s co-founders. ...... One of Facebook’s first investors, Reid Hoffman, has said his first impression of Zuckerberg was how quiet he was. Zuckerberg said maybe 15 or 20 sentences in an hour-long meeting. ...... “What I most remember was scratching my head going, ‘Huh why is he being quiet?’ It turns out he was being quiet because he’s thinking a lot,” Hoffman said ... “He’s perfectly fine with, ‘Hey if there ends up being five seconds of silence, it’s five seconds of silence, I’m thinking.” ...... Zuckerberg’s willingness to defy social norms has paid off with an uncanny ability to position Facebook to thrive. It’s now worth $228 billion. ... He dared to spend over $25 billion acquiring companies without little or revenue — WhatsApp, Instagram and Oculus. ...... When Zuckerberg spent $1 billion on Instagram, which had never made a cent, many saw it as a crazy move. Now by one estimate Instagram is now worth $35 billion. ......... He wears a gray T-shirt every day, saying he wants to focus his decision-making energy on Facebook not fashion. .... Four of the six PayPal co-founders built bombs in high school. ..... While lots of “normal” people played with Legos, Google co-founder Larry Page built a functioning inkjet printer out of them in college. ...... “Think different,” happened to be Apple’s slogan, which its co-founder Steve Jobs embodied in his youth as he wandered India and experimented with LSD. ...... “If you have autism or if you have a mild form of it you might be kind of less interested in following the crowd and conforming to social norms. And you can think more independently,” Baron-Cohen said. “They want to know are we doing these things because it’s the most efficient way, it’s the best way of doing it or the cheapest way. They want some kind of logic.” ........ Obsessiveness, another trait of those with Asperger’s, also pays off when building a tech company...... Microsoft’s co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen were comfortable coding software for hours on end as young programmers...... “Some of the more prudish people would say ‘Go home and take a shower.’ We were just hard-core, writing code,” as Gates told ........ Asperger’s Syndrome is much more prevalent in boys than girls.
1% of 1% of 1%
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| English: Elon Musk at the panel Tribeca Talks: Revenge of the Electric Car, for the 2011 Tribeca Film Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
And there is the Piketty book that drew a lot of attention. He says, if wealth will get an annual 10% return, but labor will see less than 3% annual growth, then the gap will never close, it will keep widening.
And then there is this: global companies are sitting on $7 trillion in cash. Just sitting. Not doing anything with it. This is not money on that 10% train. How about $18 trillion?
One, I think there is an economic case to be made that if the gulf between the top 1% and the bottom 10% is too wide, that society is not likely to be growing at its optimum. I am talking economic theory. As to how to go about remedying? That is a debate. I am for ordinary people owning equity stakes in many more companies, and not just post-IPO companies. Heck, I am not opposed to a slightly higher tax rate. And then there is choice, the Warren Buffett choice. He decided most of his wealth should not go to his children. It is bad for them. 90% of his wealth will not go to his children.
Two, a stagnant minimum wage is a bad policy choice. The minimum wage in America should be $10 right away, and in the big cities it should be $15. Urbanization is good for the environment. Go green.
Three, trillions sitting around is stupidity. $10 trillion will take care of a-l-l infrastructure needs across the Global South, and that investment will bring a guaranteed 10% annual return. Win-win. Heck, somebody put half a trillion in Elon Musk's internet access company.
But all that is wealth talk. I meant to talk entrepreneurship, especially high tech entrepreneurship. I once put out a blog post where I said, statistically speaking, being an entrepreneur is like being gay. It is about one out of 100. But then that is everyone. That is pizza store owners.
1% of that 1% might be in high tech. And 1% of that 1% of that 1% might be successful tech entrepreneurs. 1 out of 100 which is 1 out of 100 which is 1 out of 100. 1 out of 1,000,000. You are quite literally one in a million. In a country of 300 million, that would give us 300 such entrepreneurs. That is about right. Does this country have 300 self made billionaires? If not, there is something missing in the social/political/economic fabric. Maybe the 1% have too much wealth, maybe the minimum wage has been too stagnant for too long, maybe there are too many trillions just sitting around, having a negative gravity effect on overall growth and well being. Probably all of the above.
1% of 1% of 1%: self made billionaires are in august company.
Saturday, May 09, 2015
Wednesday, May 06, 2015
Tuesday, May 05, 2015
Ecommerce In India
Experts see India’s e-commerce market at an inflection point. A recent Morgan Stanley report titled “The Next India” said Indian e-commerce would expand to $100 billion in revenue by 2020, from $2.9 billion in 2013, making it the world’s fastest-growing market...... Ant Financial, an Alibaba affiliate that invested $575 million in January for a 25 percent stake. .... Paytm has 20 million active wallet users (compared with 190 million for Ant Financial’s service Alipay, China’s largest) and aims to quintuple this by 2016. Some experts predict that mobile wallet users will overtake credit card users in India. ..... For investors in Indian e-commerce, China’s growth provides evidence that the scale is real and achievable ...... As in China, India’s smaller cities and towns lack retail infrastructure. In 5,000 cities and towns, tapping an app is the new equivalent of a visit to the mall, and it could unleash pent-up demand for the latest fashion or the newest device. ..... India resembles China of seven to 10 years ago in its broadband Internet growth, creation of digital-native marketplaces and rapid user adoption. Even ideas like online grocers, which have just started to gain a foothold in places like Silicon Valley could do well in India. ..... “So investors who won in China are playing in India. Those who missed in China, too, are playing in India. This is the land of opportunity”
The Next India
India’s new government has the strongest mandate in 30 years to deliver reforms ..... The government’s reform agenda must rein in corruption and streamline the regulatory and bureaucratic complexities of doing business so that foreign and domestic investors can feel more confident. If successful, growth in labor, capital and technology in tandem can power productivity and industrial output in ways that are simply not possible in Reform Club peers such as Japan, South Korea and China. For example, new capital can fund technologically advanced factories that can hire relatively inexpensive labor, assuring a market advantage in terms productivity, cost base and quality of product. ....... Over the next 10 years, India will contribute an additional 124 million people to the global labor pool, accounting for nearly 25% of the increase in the world’s working-age population. Economic growth that creates better-paying jobs can transform this youth demographic into a rising middle class, which will also be better educated, more aware of information technology and better able to take advantage of globalization trends.
Monday, May 04, 2015
Food
5/8/23 Update: Goshen (NY) puts Third World corruption to shame, thanks to greedy, corrupt, unethical lawyers like Andra Dumais. ..... I toppled a Third World dictator and German Radio called me Robin Hood On The Internet. I am not going to get intimidated by some small-town racist. Andrea Dumais is a small-town racist. ....... You are treating me worse than the people 2,000 years ago.
Friday, May 01, 2015
Musk Magic
I have never bought an Apple product in my lifetime. I do appreciate Steve Jobs' excellence. But he did not directly touch me. Elon Musk is a whole different story. I am looking at this guy's battery and I am thinking, this battery could do for energy for the dollar a day people what cellphones have done for communication. And lack of energy is easily the number one reason for poverty. The first computers also cost thousands of dollars. But now you can get a Chromebook (an idea Google stole from me -- I pitched to Google Ventures, bad idea) for 200 dollars. This battery needs to go down in price from 3500 dollars to 350 dollars. You can light up hospitals and schools across the world with this. Kudos Elon!
I actually was one of the first users of X.com --- but I did not hear about Elon Musk until at least 10 years later. Actually I heard of Peter Thiel before I heard of Musk. And I never connected with Thiel at any level.
Tuesday, April 28, 2015
European Angst On GAFA
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| English: Google Logo officially released on May 2010 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
My first reaction (years ago) was Europeans are sore losers. Instead of innovating they are hammering. They are just jealous of Google.
Now I think differently. Instead of Silicon Valley sucking money in from all over the world like the British Empire stole gold from India, these Internet behemoths should pay taxes in each jurisdiction they generate revenues in.
There should be a global regime. So there is an upper limit. Maybe you should not have to pay more than 10% in sales taxes in total at all levels of government put together.
Google is cashing on the infrastructure built by these countries. And I don't mean just broadband. Google thrives on educated populations. And Google should give back as a matter of business decision.
Such negotiations have to be global. That might also push us towards a world government (which both Bill Gates and I think would be a good thing).
The simple formula is, every Internet company should track as to where a sale got generated, and they should pay sales taxes in those jurisdictions, up to a maximum 10%.
Thursday, April 23, 2015
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