From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
We are facing the mother of all debt crises. When you look at the data on private and public debt, the debt to GDP ratio was near 200% of global GDP in 1999, today it's more like 350% and rising. In advanced economies, it's over 420% and in China, 330% and rising.
Africa is an enormous continent, larger than the US, China and Europe combined. It represents 20% of the global land mass, and only 10% of the world's population. It offers an un-crowded space of opportunities including minerals, natural resources, water and agriculture.
I never started off with money, I started off with love. The love of being an entrepreneur. The love of being a lawyer. The love of being an athlete. When you start off with love, people will love and respect you and you will always be monetarily rewarded.
Systems change is slow because it requires consensus that there is a system failure to start with, as well as the presence of a viable alternative. This requires a combination of culture shift, behavioral change, and structural change to ultimately change the rules of the game.
The social sector offers this middle-ground where you've got organisations that have a social purpose. They care about the level of service in a real way, but also have the financial disciplines of a for-profit company as they must be sustainable.
People think that life inside Silicon Valley firms is like life under an orange tree, where you suck on the oranges and everyone treats each other perfectly – but that's not quite right… people are ruthless, competitive… human.
Just get in the goddam car and get driving. Things will go wrong… plans may go half-cocked… you're not an idiot, you're not going to burn money… just be smart and get driving.
I realised that athletes were my customers- they were the people I wanted to sell too. We wrote to them with a 15% discount offer, and the chance to become an agent to help fund their club. I must have got 200 agents signed-up and the business started to grow.
Our mission is to help people create a life, not just a living. Our product provides the space, community and services that creators need so they can focus on their work.
They took a relative view of risk... They had an understanding of the risks of something going wrong, but balanced that against missing an opportunity. When that opportunity exceeded the risk of going wrong? That's when they jumped.
The principal problem with Groupon, in my opinion, is that they have a bad business model. It basically eats by selling their customers crack cocaine- telling them to cut their prices 50% for a selected number of people. If you do that enough? You wont have a business.
One of the things which is a really distinguishing factor about our markets in contrast to the OTC derivative market is that we're completely open, competitive and transparent with a very high degree of participation, a very high turnover, and a high degree of pre and post trade price transparency.