Continuations

I have not been blogging a lot, other than the occasional updated excerpt from World After Capital and a few posts in my Uncertainty Wednesday series. The reason is that I am struggling with the relevance of much of what I would have said, when contrasted with the current political and social developments in the US and abroad. The positive longterm vision that I am laying out in World After Capital stands in stark contrast with where we are currently headed. As I write in the book, I am optim...

I have been openly critical of Trump as a president going back to before the election. While I want radical change I do not believe the price for this ought to be going backwards on foundational issues such as the rule of law, press freedom and science. Nonetheless it has been fascinating to observe how Trump’s potential or actual irrationality has opened the door for progress on some issues that were previously deemed intractable, such as North Korea. It is well known that even in relative s...

One thing I have learned in over 2 decades of working with startups is that you can learn the most about a leader from the organization that they build. Over time, especially if not checked by a capable board, the organization will come to reflect the strengths and weaknesses of the leader(s). There is a great German saying “Der Fisch stinkt vom Kopf” – “The fish stinks from the head.” The origin of this saying is that a fish’s brain is the most fragile part of the body and when a fish has be...

At our house we were all refreshing our computers furiously starting at 8pm with ever increasing excitement as the evening progressed. We were absolutely thrilled when Doug Jones victory was certain. If Doug Jones can win in Alabama, the state where Trump had his biggest victory, after Trump endorsed his opponent, well then Trump too can be defeated. I have come to think of Trump’s candidacy and presidency as the last hurrah of a past that we need to leave behind for good. Trump, and the mone...

Having been outspoken against Trump since before the election, I am encouraged to see that we may have found a particularly effective form of protest in #TakeAKnee (or #TakeTheKnee). We have the initiative of Colin Kaepernick and those who followed his lead to thank for that. I realize that this started out as a protest against police violence as part of the Black Lives Matter movement during the Obama administration. I believe it has the potential though to morph into a broad and effective p...

The other day I was pointed to an essay about how people are overreacting to Trump. That we should all adopt a wait and see attitude instead. In thinking about how to reply it occurred to me that this is exactly how big companies lose against startups. They wait around to see what the startup will do, and by the time they have figured out that it’s important it is too late to catch up. This is why Andy Grove’s motto at Intel was “Only the paranoid survive.” So working with startups has taught...

Confidence in the US Congress is near an all time low according to a Gallup poll on “Confidence in Institutions.” People have stopped trusting government. And government has done a lot to deserve it. Politicians have taken huge sums of money from special interests and partisan divides have deadlocked government on important issues. Add to that the secret surveillance of the population by the NSA and other agencies as revealed by Edward Snowden. At the same time income inequality in the US has...

I recently read “Seveneves” by Neal Stephenson and just last night finished “The Dark Forest” which is the second book in the “Three Body Problem” trilogy by Cixin Liu. What these books have in common is that they look at a threat to humanity’s existence and probe our responses to it. This literature is timely because we face such a threat in the form of climate change. The message from the books is clear: only scientific knowledge and staying rational can get humanity past a global threat. T...

I am writing this from Web Summit in Lisbon where I have just spent the morning meeting with some terrific startups. One question that was on a lot of people’s minds was what the election of Trump as the US President will mean. I think the right answer is: nobody knows and nobody will know for quite some time. The only thing that we can know right now is that the amount of perceived uncertainty has just shot up dramatically (*). And when that happens a lot of investors put their foot on the b...

We are rapidly approaching the first half year of Trump’s Presidency. I am genuinely curious whether there is anyone attempting a cogent defense of the record so far. If you have read something you think qualifies, please link to it in the comments. I would also love to see someone go back and ask people, like Peter Thiel, who supported Trump’s candidacy about their assessment of his performance to date. I just spent a week in Germany leading up to the G20 summit. While the following is a com...