Author, Investor, Speaker, Mentor
The answer, as always, is money. Former Pac-12 commissioner Larry Scott bet on creating the Pac-12 cable network. That failed, which left the Pac-12 in a bad position when it came to TV rights. In addition, with the existing TV rights expiring after this season, there was no penalty to leaving the conference. Seeing the … Continue reading What The Hell Is Happening With The Pac-12?
Over the past few years, crypto games like Cryptokitties and Axie Infinity have launched, climbed a steep hype cycle, then collapsed. It’s not that the founders and executives behind these companies are dumb (though that’s certainly possible); rather, they set themselves to an impossible task. First, cryptocurrency needs to be the way a game monetizes; … Continue reading Why Crypto Videogames Won’t Work
Anyone who has ever run a company knows that it is critical to control wage costs. How often have you been discussing a job candidate’s salary request and said, “I think we should pay more than they’re asking”? In our mind, there is an unwritten rule that says, “Pay people as little as you can … Continue reading Higher Wages = Higher Profits
I read with some interest this longform piece on how the desire of the wealthy to live in cities is effectively exiling the bohemians who made those communities attractive to gentrifiers: The essence of the argument is this: “American bohemians are in a state of slow-motion flight, perpetually facing the threat of exile at the … Continue reading A Modest Proposal for Saving San Francisco’s Bohemian Neighborhoods
Provocative assertion of the day: People don’t really believe in equality of opportunity. In order for there to be true equality of opportunity, every child has to have the same opportunities to succeed. Yet what parent among us has ever resisted the urge to give our child an advantage? Move to a better neighborhood for … Continue reading People Don’t Really Believe in Equality of Opportunity
An intriguing thought, trigger by this Atlantic article, “A Cost-Benefit Analysis of Being Jewish“: What is religion is now a luxury good? Consider the following: Marx called religion the opiate of the masses. During an era in which life was brutish, nasty, and short, focusing one’s attention on a glorious afterlife made a lot of … Continue reading Economic Growth and the Rise of Religion
My friend Peter Sims recently wrote about how he disagrees with Peter Thiel’s “Competition is for Losers” editorial. Thiel argues that monopolies are good for society, and Peter respectfully disagrees. My own take is fairly nuanced–monopolies are a sign of a healthy market, because they tend to result from innovation in “winner-take-most” markets, but they … Continue reading Monopolies Are A Consequence, Not A Benefit
The popular belief is that entrepreneurs are “hungry” because they come from modest backgrounds. Here in America, we love a great “rags to riches” story. Of course, it should be noted that America’s two richest men, Bill Gates (son of a wealthy attorney) and Warren Buffett (son of a stockbroker/Congressman) don’t exactly provide validation for … Continue reading Wealth and Entrepreneurship (why the rich get richer and why we should help the poor)
As the saga of Silk Road plays out, a lot of attention has been focused on the mistakes that Dread Pirate Roberts made that helped the Feds catch up with him. The Verge has a good longform piece on this topic: http://bit.ly/1aQExxL It appears that the current Dread Pirate Roberts (for we all know that … Continue reading Why The Fall of Silk Road and Bitcoin Is Inevitable
I spend a lot of time thinking about the future–both mine, and that of the world as a whole–and one of the things that has been on my mind is the need for us to do things differently. A recent longform piece in New York focused on the theory that the seeming inexorable economic progress … Continue reading “The Blip”, False Patterns, And How Startups Are The Future of Work