In Bannon’s view, China is harming the U.S. by engaging in unfair trade practices, such as the forced transfer of U.S. technology to Chinese companies. While many experts agree, Bannon has a more dire view of the consequences. “There have been 4,000 years of Chinese diplomatic history, all centered on ‘barbarian management,’ minus the last 150 years,” he says. China’s historical disposition toward trading partners, he contends, is exploitative and potentially ruinous. “It’s always about making the barbarians a tributary state,” he says. “Our tribute to China is our technology—that’s what it takes to enter their market, and [they’ve taken] $3.5 trillion worth over the last 10 years. We have to give them the basic essence of American capitalism: our innovation.”
Bannon’s analysis of Chinese history may be glib, but his points about technology transfer are not. China — more than any other country — has built an economic apparatus designed to outright steal American intellectual property, and American politicians have been asleep at the wheel for decades in confronting this problem.
This “learning model” of state economic development is hardly novel. Korea and Taiwan are perhaps the greatest users of this strategy in the twentieth century, having constructed an industrial policy focused on science and technology learning that allowed those two countries to become electronics powerhouses. Their rise was not inevitable, but rather the deliberate work of government and business leaders.
China has in many ways copied this playbook, updating it for the internet age. Where before you had import substitution of goods, now China effectively uses the Great Firewall to
For those who have been paying attention to the press this past week, there have been two interesting independence movements, both involving breakaway provinces from strong U.S. allies. In Spain, Catalonia staged a vote this weekend, and in the northern reaches of Iraq, the Kurds held a vote earlier this week. In both cases, the central governments worked feverishly to annihilate the vote, and are now working overdrive to undermine their legitimacy post-ballot.
I get why central governments want their nations to remain whole, so it hardly surprises me that Spain and Iraq are using such aggressive tactics to squelch these movements. What is more surprising to me (or depressing depending on how you look at it) is how strongly the U.S. is also opposed to these movements, particularly given our own history of separating from a central authority.
I get that there are very challenging politics, particularly in regards to Iraq. We need their support in the war against ISIS, to stop Iran, to provide some stability in the region among many, many more reasons. That’s completely legitimate reasoning. But to my mind, there has been far too little action on our part to actually promote self-determination to more people around the world, at a time when democracy has been in retreat around the globe.
Some more political fragmentation is actually a good thing, particularly when a group of people with a shared culture, history, and language are starting to demand accountability to themselves for building their own prosperous future. If people are willing and able to take on the risks of being their own political power, I don’t see a reason why we should be reflexively opposed to that.
Much like my thinking around Brexit, I think it is also worth asking why these
I just finished Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem, the winner of the Hugo Prize in 2015. Liu is one of the most popular and prolific authors of science fiction in China, and this book is one of the first of his works to be translated into English.
I will try to avoid spoilers, since mystery is really one of the driving plot points of the novel.
Liu addresses a variety of themes, although thankfully never meditates too long on any one of them. Perhaps the structural theme of the novel is the juxtaposition of the micro versus the macro. The novel begins with vignettes from the Cultural Revolution involving one of the main characters, Ye Wenjie. We witness Ye’s struggle with the chaos of that conflict in just the first few pages, seeing clearly how small yet brutal our politics can become.
Ye is also an astrophysicist though, and so even though she has faced these horrific challenges very early in her life, she also works with the stars and the wider question of what humanity’s place is in the cosmos. This theme plays out across the novel, and Liu carefully expands our field of vision so that the politics of the Cultural Revolution seem distant, albeit still echo in our minds. That transition is really quite brilliantly done, and represents the craft of science fiction at its absolute best.
Liu is known as a more “hard” science fiction writer, and there is definitely detailed discussions of mathematical theories and fundamental physics that certainly has the feel of a Neal Stephenson novel (albeit with better editing). Those theories play a pivotal role in the plot, and so it is nice to see this sort of deep science research that isn’t just for flavor but actually provides
Update: I published a copy of this base on the Airtable Universe, check it out.
People are annoying (I will add at this point that this is a recurring theme on this blog). They are constantly changing jobs (thanks Gen X!), changing locations (thanks millennials!), and changing messenger apps (thanks Gen Z!). Like many of my friends, I have struggled to just keep up-to-date with people while maintaining my sanity as a knowledge economy worker.
Over the last decade, I have tried many solutions to this problem, from paper and spreadsheets to software such as Rapportive, Contactually, Trello, among many, many others.
None of these solutions has worked out. The reasons often overlap, from being a jumbled mess to being just too hard to update (especially on mobile). But frankly, I have not made any progress in tracking people better today than I was doing several years ago.
Recently, I moved my entire CRM database over to Airtable. It’s been a long learning process, but my current setup is the best I have ever had, and so I thought I would share what has worked for me, and how I set up my database.
Before we begin, an Important Disclosure: I am an investor in Airtable through my former VC role at CRV. I am writing this because I think it is helpful for others, but feel free to discount everything I say (minus my complaints about millennials — that’s completely legitimate no matter how much I am paid by Baby Boomers to say it).
Thesis on Personal CRM
Before I dive into the how-to, I want to talk a bit about how I think about networking and why I track people. The reality is that I communicate with roughly 2000-4000 people every year — just professionally. One week last
It’s been about three months since I left CRV to become an entrepreneur. There is lots to talk about, but I want to write up a quick hit list of some thoughts since switching back to the entrepreneurship side of the table:
The market is far more saturated than it used to be. Really, I have some really long-tail ideas that I have been working on, and it never ceases to amaze me just the sheer number of founders working on projects. I feel like you could be building a startup around outer space meat processing and you would still be able to create a stereotypical 2x2 competitive landscape.
That said, it’s always hard to judge execution. I think ideas are worth more than a lot of people give them credit for, but at the same time, the same idea — executed by two different people — can return wildly different results. Even though we have reached a level of market maturity and there is a veritable gravesite of former startups, that doesn’t mean we should actually throw any of those ideas away. Hell, even Quirky is coming back to life.
Market monopoly leaders are a huge problem. Over the last three months, I have been doing the co-founder matching game (have leads – send them my way!). One of the interesting dynamics that isn’t emphasized enough in the monopoly discussion around Google and Facebook is how much these companies have essentially created a union job that saps the risk-taking of potential founders. How much of the decline in entrepreneurship in the US is driven by the increasing desire to work at these top jobs by the Founder Class?
Another obstacle to mobility is the growth of state-level job-licensing requirements, which now cover a range of professions from bartenders and florists to turtle farmers and scrap-metal recyclers. A 2015 White House report found that more than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs, with the share licensed at the state level rising fivefold since the 1950s.
Janna E. Johnson and Morris M. Kleiner of the University of Minnesota found in a nationwide study that barbers and cosmetologists—occupations that tend to require people to obtain new state licenses when they relocate—are 22% less likely to move between states than workers whose blue-collar occupations don’t require them.
The second article was about the challenge of building housing in New York in this lengthy discussion in the New York Review of Books. Exclusionary zoning is making it harder to build houses in many neighborhoods in the city, raising prices and driving more and more middle class workers out of the city. Although salaries have had a bit of growth over the decades, that minuscule growth has been dwarfed by the rapidly increasing rents we have seen in the city over the past ten years.
While housing and job protections seem to be quite politically quite different, the reality is that both occupational licensing and exclusionary zoning are really part of the same pattern: using
Basically, a citizen built stairs in a garden really cheaply (at 0.3% of the cost!), and Toronto took them down.
The story is absurd, but all of it is unfortunately “rational.” You can imagine a bureaucrat at city hall realizing that the stairs don’t meet a number of requirements for safety, reliability, inspectability, and more, so the obvious answer is to tear down the whole thing. Bad stairs are only likely to invite lawsuits, and so the city would prefer stairs not exist (increasing injuries on the hill) than to allow potentially unsafe stairs to exist.
I say potentially, because the more I study the problem of cost disease, the more that safety in a very broad sense is the root of the cause. No one wants to actually fight over the safety of a small staircase. No, a couple of steps shouldn’t be $150,000, but neither does anyone want to do the work to prove that a lower-quality model would be more than sufficient for the needs of its users.
When it comes to safety, no one ever wants to stand up for the issue of cost over the value of human lives. Even though economists have built an entire literature around the concept of the “value of a statistical life,” it actually takes someone to argue in a council meeting that no one is going to be hurt by a small and cheaply-built staircase in a garden.
So we get these absurd cases where we spend 1000x on a staircase, to reduce
I am a big believer in subscription models — both for software and for media. As such, I often bring up the topic with friends to get their take, since more publications are moving from ads to subscription, and more apps are doing so as well (for instance, through in-app purchases in the App Store for iPhone).
The consistent view I have gotten is that people absolutely hate subscriptions. That hate is particularly vituperative when it comes to content, but software is given no mercy either. And listening to some of my friends and their stories, it seems people will go to the ends of the universe to avoid paying some of these fees.
That said, nearly every person I talk to does pay for something, whether it is Netflix, or The New York Times, or something else. And many seem happy to do so.
Where’s the disconnect? While we can talk about perceptions of quality, utility and many other facets of products, I think the simple answer is that most subscriptions are just incredibly overpriced.
Take a couple of popular products as examples. 1Password is $60 annually for a family license, Pocket is $45, and while Evernote has several tiers, Premium comes out to be $69(!). I do pay for these licenses, but they seem shockingly expensive for the real value I get out of them. How many people — probably with less disposable income — saw those prices and just walked away?
It isn’t surprising that most software companies are priced this way. The traditional advice from VCs for years has been to just ignore cheaper users. “Fire your cheapest customers” and “just raise prices” are heard ad nauseam. VCs actively won’t fund startups where the average revenue per user is in the single digits, because past experience
Hi, I'm Danny. I'm Partner, Research at VC firm Lux Capital, where I publish the Riskgaming newsletter, podcast, and game scenarios. I'm also a Fellow at the Manhattan Institute in New York. I analyze science, technology, finance and the human condition.
Formerly, I was managing editor at TechCrunch and a venture capitalist at Charles River Ventures and General Catalyst.
