In my book World After Capital, I propose a theory of history in which technology changes the binding constraint for humanity. After hundreds of thousands of years of the Forager Age, constrained by the availability of food in the natural environment, humanity invented agriculture. With that set of technologies (planting, irrigation, domestication of animals, etc.), invented roughly 10,000 years ago, the constraint shifted from food to land in what became the Agrarian Age. Then only a couple ...

It is the season of mega tech IPOs including the recent offerings by Pinterest and the upcoming one by Uber. A key question to be answered is how well will these companies perform in the public markets over time? So far Pinterest has traded up nicely in the first few days, but I am asking about long term performance. We are in new territory here because of how much money these companies have been able to raise previously in private markets. To unpack the question and its implications further:...

In my book World After Capital, I open with a section on the duality of technology: since the days of inventing fire we can use technology for good and for bad. The technology itself simply broadens the space of what’s possible. We have to choose how we want to use it. Interfacing human brains to computers is another great example of this duality. Earlier this week Elon Musk launched Neuralink, a new company for brain interfaces to add to Kernel, which Bryan Johnson funded with $100 million l...

Today our portfolio company Clarifai has announced its $30 million Series B financing led by Menlo Ventures. It constitutes an important milestone in the history of the New York City startup ecosystem: generous early backing for an ambitious technology vision. I have been around the NY technology and startup world since the late 90s. There were a lot of justified knocks against the efforts here. It was difficult to find engineers for startups. Well, Google helped solve that by locating a majo...

When the web first emerged I remember vividly the excitement that I and many others felt about the potential for decentralized and permissionless publishing. Want to put some content out there? Register a domain, run a web server and publish. No newspaper, journal, book publishers and editors to ask for permission. A massive shift of power to the people. Fast forward to 2016 and we have an internet where much of the activity is dominated by a few super large players with centralized platforms...

I have been writing a lot about the impact of technology on the labor market, arguing that we need a Universal Basic Income. My basic premise is that technological progress is making it harder and harder for people to earn enough to cover their basic needs. Across these posts I have encountered a set of objections to the idea that technology can cause under- or even unemployment. While I have addressed these elsewhere in separate posts I thought it would be a good idea to pull them together h...

This past Saturday was Video Hackday in New York City. It had been organized by the team at Ziggeo with the help from many others, including a great roster of sponsors. I enjoyed participating and wrote a little hack that you can see here. Even though I am pretty rusty as a developer, I managed to write something that let’s anyone ask a written question (which then lives at its own URL – all handled via Firebase) and others can answer by recording a video response (recording and playback from...

I have been away for two weeks in Europe. The first skiing and the second meeting with startups in Berlin. As usual while traveling I took a break from blogging which I find helps me in a couple of ways. First, it frees up some more time for reading and I finished two interesting posts (more on those in separate posts). Second, it also gives me a bit more time to think about the bigger picture. And when I do that I unfortunately come back to the my “Is it 1880 or 1914?” post. Most of us worki...

Yesterday I wrote about how free or low priced online courses are beginning to put pressure on pricing in education. As a small addendum to that: the same day the New York Times ran a front page story about home schooling recognizing the growing importance of that movement (which in turn is enabled by much of the same content). Today I want take a look at what is happening to healthcare costs and whether there is any hope for technological deflation here also. If you haven’t seen this chart f...

I have been arguing that we live in an era of technological deflation driven by advances in computing (including robotics). In the US, the prices for consumer durables peaked in the mid 1990s as this chart from the St. Louis Fed shows. There are still ways in which monetary policy and potentially the price of energy could throw a wrench into this overall trend but what I want to write about today and tomorrow are the potential for price declines in two other areas: education and healthcare. A...