From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The only value that government paper provides you at this point is, basically, the fact that if everything goes to 'hell in a handbasket' that you have some assets of value.
highly motivated teams, who are motivated by the 'end' (the cause) rather than the 'method' (the task)
So not only has average pay gone down, but the job has got riskier.
Big firms can get credit and are not using it while small firms cannot get credit at all.
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.
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.
If very damaging, asymmetries can destroy markets- causing them to unwind from the top- this is the adverse selection problem. People with high quality products remove them from the market due to the price being an average… the quality drops, then the price drops again.. and you end up with a cycle.
Something as small as a affordable ticket can make a huge difference to how someone in the community perceives a club… and ultimately, this perception, this brand is what generates more value and revenue for the club.
What was broken in journalism was not a lack of demand for good stories nor a lack of journalists or the format of stories and distribution – the thing that was broken was the business model.
It feels to us that the festival is owned by the people, and me and my Dad are kind-of custodians of it. In that sense, it's a bit like a sailing ship… me and my Dad drive it, but the ship is made of a few hundred people.
The DME was a bit of a unique experiment, we created an exchange before all parts of the ecosystem were in place.
I have not been an urban investor in re-gentrification, which tries to change the character of a community and, candidly, is very speculative. Instead I look at revitalisation, which constitutes investing in existing densely populated and ethnically diverse communities and delivering the goods and services that are sought after but not provided.