I thought this was going to be more comforting than it turned out to be. Although, I have to say that it’s a lot more comforting now that I’ve added today’s market close. GDP and Total Stock Market Capitalization in Real Billions of Dollars This is a lot less comforting. Total Stock Market Capitalization as […]
Output is Welfare
“The US average growth rate of real per capita incomes over the last 190 years has been 1.8% a year, and the same rate over the last 10 years has been…. 1.8% a year.“ (Hat tip to Chris Blattman.)
The Fundamental Impossibility of Banking
I was just reading Nassim Taleb’s claim that with … the costs of the 2007-2008 subprime crisis, the banking system seems to have lost more on risk taking (from the failures of quantitative risk management) than every penny banks ever earned taking risks. And it occurred to me that due to the no arbitrage condition […]
Start a Company. Now.
My fundamental strength as a venture investor is having a clear view of what the future will look like (at least as regards my little niche of the industry.) My fundamental weakness has always been not being entirely sure how we get from where we are today to that future. I suppose there’s a name […]
Spectrum Wants to be Free
You need to read today’s NYTimes Op-Ed by Tim Wu. AMERICANS today spend almost as much on bandwidth — the capacity to move information — as we do on energy. A family of four likely spends several hundred dollars a month on cellphones, cable television and Internet connections, which is about what we spend on […]
Thoughts on Corporate Venture Capital
Was it almost a year ago that I wrote about Google getting into corporate VC? Well, here they come. Reaction among the blogs I follow has been negative. Fred Wilson has the most cogent take, as usual. I worked in corporate venture capital for years. I was skeptical when I was interviewing for the job […]
On Eating Your Own Cooking
Valleywag has an post implying ad agencies don’t practice what they preach: that they don’t spend on search ads for themselves like they do for their clients. I have no doubt this is true. I just searched for “advertising agency” on Google. The paid results are almost all very small agencies. Ad agencies spend very […]
"I Would Give It Eleventy-Million Stars If I Could, And So Would You"
Okay, I’m sure everyone has already seen this, but it made me laugh out loud sitting here alone in the kitchen. The scathingly funny Amazon reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Link Cable, a $500 ethernet cable “made of high-purity copper wire” to “get the purest signal from multi-channel DVD and CD playback.” Yes, a $500 […]
Expressly. You Keep Using That Word. I Don’t Think It Means What You Think It Means.
I’ve been way too busy to post lately. Sorry. But yesterday an email from Forbes landed in my inbox and I had to share. It starts: Forbes is committed to protecting the privacy of its readers… However, Forbes does make available its list of readers who have expressly provided us with their permission to receive […]
Dumb Money
The juxtaposition in my RSS reader of Kedrosky’s Venture Capital is an Attractive Nuisance, II and Organizations and Markets’ Against Government Subsidized VC seems like a sign for me to comment on something I was striving to ignore. Bloomberg announces a taxpayer subsidized venture capital fund just after the NBER publishes a paper on what […]