Paul Graham famously said:
The cutoff in investors’ heads is 32 … after 32 they tend to be a little skeptical.
That apparently is the consensus view on what age you want the founders to be in order to generate successful returns.
[This post appeared on HBR Online on 14th July 2017]
In the New York Times, Luigi Zingales and Guy Rolnik are proposing to pre-emptively deal with market power issues arising from the likes of Google and Facebook by advocating for social graph portability. Rather than use price regulation or antitrust, the propose a reallocation of property rights. As they note, this has happened before:
Here is an article I wrote forecasting what Canada might be like in 150 years.
Canada +150: Energy fuels Star Trek economy
William Shatner as Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk is depicted on a commemorative stamp issued by Canada Post in 2016.
Handout/Canada Post
Did the rise of free information technology improve GDP? It is commonly assumed that it did.
After all, the Internet has changed the way we work, play, and shop. Smartphones and free apps are ubiquitous. Many forms of advertising moved online quite a while ago and support gazillions of “free” services. Free apps changed leisure long ago—just ask any teenager or any parent of a teenager. Shouldn’t that add up to a lot?
Luigi Butera and John List have examined how cooperation is impacted on by uncertainty — and not just any uncertainty but Knightian uncertainty where outcomes cannot easily be described by a probability distribution.
Technology policy has been a low priority for most voters in presidential elections in the post-war era. The most recent contest was no exception. Arguments about technology policy never made it into campaign commercials, to say the least, nor even a minute of the televised presidential debates.
So it goes.
Co-authored with Ajay Agrawal and Avi Goldfarb
[This post appeared in HBR Online on March 28, 2017]
That is a question raised by the experience of a “rogue” neuroscientist profiled in Wired today: