From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Many people say that if you're the brightest person in the room, you're in the wrong room – that's totally right. You need to bring in people with much more expertise than you to take the business forward. I started out making shoes by hand – I'm a shoemaker, not an intellectual.
One of the most precious aspects of Glastonbury is specifically that we can't put our finger on it. It's evolved slowly over 50 years to become what it is today – we've tried things that have worked, some have not, and allowed it to evolve.
What Silicon Valley needs right now is some realism. It needs people who are watching-out and identifying what's real and what's myth. There's a lot of genius and brilliance here, but also a lot of salesmanship.
From a global point of view, we are currently in the middle of a technical revolution similar to what our grandparents experienced when everybody switched their horse carts for cars. The same is happening now and it is a phase of transition for many businesses.
We're platform agnostic. People tend to see the market in terms of discrete sectors such as film, TV, music, video games, live and so on. We like to invest in content you can view many different ways- and that gives us depth and diversity within our portfolio.
Having a fiduciary duty implies an undivided loyalty to corporate interests, arguing that it's impossible to hold a fiduciary duty towards stakeholders since they are considered natural adversaries. Thus, according to the law, stakeholders are viewed as opponents.
One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.
As an economy is declining, we see an increase in sell-side interest across all asset classes, as holders are looking to get liquidity and shore up their own balance sheets. As far as an up-economy, that's where we see buy-side interest as buyers get greater risk-tolerance.
It doesn't matter how successful you are, how much market share you have, if you're in your comfort zone you will leave yourself exposed. Courage also links to decisiveness, which is one of the key attributes of great leaders. Cowardice pushes the day of reckoning out, decisiveness brings it closer.
Growth is like an elixir. It's exciting, it creates more and more growth, and it's a helluva lot of fun. Business is fun, it's a game. You're playing against others, and you want to win!
What we're seeing is a broad constellation of nominally independent subsets, even entire industries, that have now come under the umbrella of the foreign lobbying industry. All of these entities have been transformed into go-to vehicles and mouthpieces for foreign regimes.
To my mind, the essence of capitalism is that decentralised economic decisions can be taken in firms that compete against each other in structured markets, and do so under strong incentives for growth and the increase of productivity. It's the only system we've ever hit-on that appears to be capable of driving mass prosperity.