From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I never, ever, thought – even remotely – that I would make this festival my life. It was never seen as something that would run forever – and was something which was very much done 'by the seat of our pants'.
The opacity is the difference between profit and loss. If every airline seat that could be sold- were sold at the lowest possible price, the industry would lose billions. If every airline seat that could be sold- were sold at the highest possible price… It would make billions.
Before we came to market, everything in retail was about how cheaply you could pay your employees- and unfortunately, particularly women. There was an attitude in retail that said, '... well, your female employees are just going to get married, have children at 23 and leave, so why invest in them?' The reality of the world was that 60% of university graduates were women- and most women were having children later, entering professional careers.
A crucial realization for me is that the management styles of the West and East are not mutually exclusive. In fact, blending the best elements of each can be highly effective. Western management, particularly in Silicon Valley, is often seen as a triumph of capitalism, primarily focused on maximizing shareholder value. Contrastingly, my experience with NTT revealed a different approach, one that prioritizes stakeholders, sometimes even more than shareholders.
I believe businesses need to move away from having profit as their primary reason for existing, that's why we built Kickstarter as a public benefit corporation and encoded our mission into our fiduciary responsibility. Profit primacy can be replaced by mission primacy.
You know what else is immoral? 700 million people who have no electricity. We need to have actual conversations about how to solve problems – and hold the uneasy tension of who pays for it, and how.
In today's climate, and over the past 5-7 years, people have been building financial arbitrage machines not actual companies. Most people's behaviour is more predicated towards raising the next round of financing rather than building towards a profitable company. We're going to have a massive crash and 90% of the people will go back to working at Bank of America, Chase, GE and companies like that- and the people who are good enough will continue to build businesses.
Most fundamentally, the subprime bubble was created by- a surfeit of global liquidity due to large current account surpluses in China and other emerging economies and easy global monetary policies; a flawed private mortgage securitization process that funnelled the liquidity into poorly underwritten mortgage and other loans; and weak regulatory oversight that failed to catch and rectify the problems in the securitization process.
Taking that first step is your biggest competitive advantage; most people won't do it.
A brand has to be authentic and be born of a personal passion. If you, its creator, doesn't want the product, no one else will. If you want it, chances are it will be wanted around the world. Desires are universal and speak in every language.
In Silicon Valley there's a sense that there are 30 individuals who are 10x more capable than most people, it's like a power law scaling of talent. If a founder has really succeeded and thrived, people think it's because of their brilliance and because they're at this super far-end of the spectrum. As a result, founders get immense leeway, capital rushes toward them and in some ways that's good.
The actual actions of the people in the market are the things that determine what happens next within the market.