Jeff Bezos

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pages: 569 words: 156,139

Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire by Brad Stone

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business climate, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer vision, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gigafactory, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, NSO Group, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, Potemkin village, private spaceflight, quantitative hedge fund, remote working, rent stabilization, RFID, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, tech bro, techlash, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, two-pizza team, Uber for X, union organizing, warehouse robotics, WeWork

boasted that the newspaper had better engineers than many Silicon Valley startups: Jeff Bezos interviewed by Marty Baron, “Jeff Bezos Explains Why He Bought the Washington Post,” Washington Post video, 4:00, May 18, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/postlive/jeff-bezos-explains-why-he-bought-the-washington-post/2016/05/18/e4bafdae-1d45-11e6-82c2-a7dcb313287d_video.html (January 20, 2021). “riveting”: Benjamin Wofford, “Inside Jeff Bezos’s DC Life,” Washingtonian, April 22, 2018, https://www.washingtonian.com/2018/04/22/inside-jeff-bezos-dc-life/ (January 20, 2021). on a path to generating $100 million in annual revenue: Gerry Smith, “Bezos’s Washington Post Licenses Its Publishing Technology to BP,” Bloomberg, September 25, 2019, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-25/bezos-s-washington-post-licenses-its-publishing-technology-to-bp (January 20, 2021).

CHAPTER 10: THE GOLD MINE IN THE BACKYARD That May, he was trailed by paparazzi: Chris Spargo, “No Delivery Drones Needed: Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos Flashes His $81bn Smile While Canoodling with His Wife During Some Real-World Shopping at Historic Italian Market,” Daily Mail, May 11, 2017, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4497398/Amazon-founder-Jeff-Bezos-vacations-Italy.html (January 24, 2021). tweeting “a request for ideas”: Nick Wingfield, “Jeff Bezos Wants Ideas for Philanthropy, So He Asked Twitter,” New York Times, June 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/15/technology/jeff-bezos-amazon-twitter-charity.html (January 24, 2021). In July, he was photographed: Ian Servantes, “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Is Now Buff; Internet Freaks Out,” Men’s Health, July 17, 2017, https://www.menshealth.com/trending-news/a19525957/amazon-jeff-bezos-buff-memes/ (January 24, 2021).

“a club more than a company”: Steven Levy, “Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good,” Wired, October 15, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-bezos-blue-origin/ (January 24, 2021). Residents of the town of Van Horn: Clare O’Connor, “Jeff Bezos’ Spacecraft Blows Up in Secret Test Flight; Locals Describe ‘Challenger-Like’ Explosion,” Forbes, September 2, 2011, https://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2011/09/02/jeff-bezos-spacecraft-blows-up-in-secret-test-flight-locals-describe-challenger-like-explosion/?sh=6cde347836c2 (January 24, 2021). “Not the outcome any of us wanted”: Jeff Bezos, “Successful Short Hop, Setback, and Next Vehicle,” Blue Origin, September 2, 2011, https://www.blueorigin.com/news/successful-short-hop-setback-and-next-vehicle (January 24, 2021).


pages: 380 words: 118,675

The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone

airport security, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 11, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, big-box store, Black Swan, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, buy and hold, call centre, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, deal flow, Douglas Hofstadter, drop ship, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, fulfillment center, game design, housing crisis, invention of movable type, inventory management, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Larry Ellison, late fees, loose coupling, low skilled workers, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, quantitative hedge fund, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Rodney Brooks, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Skype, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, zero-sum game

Shaw ‘as essentially a research lab that happened to invest, and not as a financial firm that happened to have a few people playing with equations.’ ” 6 Leibovich, The New Imperialists, 85. 7 Peter de Jonge, “Riding the Perilous Waters of Amazon.com,” New York Times Magazine, March 14, 1999. 8 John Quarterman, Matrix News. 9 Jeff Bezos interview, Academy of Achievement, May 4, 2001. 10 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998. 11 Jeff Bezos, speech to Commonwealth Club of California, July 27, 1998. 12 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999. Chapter 2: The Book of Bezos 1 Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: HarperCollins, 2000). Spector’s book offers a comprehensive account of Amazon’s early years. 2 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999. 3 David Sheff, “The Playboy Interview: Jeff Bezos,” Playboy, February 1, 2000. 4 Ibid. 5 Adi Ignatius, “Jeff Bezos on Leading for the Long-Term at Amazon,” HBR IdeaCast (blog), Harvard Business Review, January 3, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/01/jeff-bezos-on-leading-for-the.html. 6 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999. 7 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998. 8 Ibid. 9 Amazon.com Inc.

Spector’s book offers a comprehensive account of Amazon’s early years. 2 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999. 3 David Sheff, “The Playboy Interview: Jeff Bezos,” Playboy, February 1, 2000. 4 Ibid. 5 Adi Ignatius, “Jeff Bezos on Leading for the Long-Term at Amazon,” HBR IdeaCast (blog), Harvard Business Review, January 3, 2013, http://blogs.hbr.org/ideacast/2013/01/jeff-bezos-on-leading-for-the.html. 6 Jeff Bezos, speech to the American Association of Publishers, March 18, 1999. 7 Jeff Bezos, speech at Lake Forest College, February 26, 1998. 8 Ibid. 9 Amazon.com Inc. S-1, filed March 24, 1997. 10 Mukul Pandya and Robbie Shell, eds., “Lasting Leadership: Lessons from the 25 Most Influential Business People of Our Times,” Knowledge@Wharton, October 20, 2004, http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?

. (© Brian Smale) Bezos stands on a Segway in 2002 as the ill-fated electric-powered transporter goes on sale exclusively at Amazon for $5,000. (Mario Tama/Getty Images) Jeff Bezos rings the bell to open the NASDAQ trading session on Friday, September 7, 2001. (Bloomberg) Jeff Bezos demonstrates an educational toy called Gus Gutz to talk-show host Jay Leno during his appearance on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at the NBC studios in Burbank on December 29, 1999. (Reuters) Bezos and tennis pro Anna Kournikova after an exhibition round of tennis at New York’s Grand Central Terminal to promote Amazon’s new apparel store, August 22, 2003. (Evan Agostini/Getty Images) Jeff Bezos laughs with Google cofounder Sergey Brin at the Allen and Co. conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, in 2007.


pages: 222 words: 54,506

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Amazon Web Services, automated trading system, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, deal flow, drop ship, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Free Software Foundation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, Pershing Square Capital Management, science of happiness, search inside the book, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, software patent, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tony Hsieh, two-pizza team, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K

Jeff’s family’s Texas roots: Joshua Quittner, “Jeff Bezos: An Eye on the Future,” Time, December 27, 1999. 20. “what I considered: “Interview with Jeff Bezos,” Time, May 4, 2001. 20. “One of the things: Rob Walker, “America’s 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs,” Inc., April 1, 2004. 20. “You become really self-sufficient: Helen Jung, “Amazon’s Bezos: Internet’s Ultimate Cult Figure,” Seattle Times, September 19, 1999. 21. “I’ve never been curious: Quittner, “Jeff Bezos: An Eye on the Future.” 23. “I think single-handedly: Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast, HarperCollins, 2000. 23. A kid who valued: “Jeff Bezos,” CEOBios.com, Kirby Directory, June 12, 2010, http://ceobios.com/2010/06/jeff-bezos-amazon-com/. 23.

“Sometimes, that meant spending: Ibid. 174. “One of the biggest problems: Tim O’Reilly, “Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design Conference,” O’Reilly Radar (blog), June 15, 2009, http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/06/jeff-bezos-at-wired-disruptive.html. Chapter 16: Head in the Clouds 178. Robert Frederick, then: Wade Roush, “Amazon: Giving Away the Store,” Technology Review, January 2005. 184. Hsieh turned him down: Tony Hsieh, “Why I Sold Zappos,” Inc., June 1, 2010. 185. But Bezos was so excited: Video from Jeff Bezos about Amazon and Zappos, July 27, 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA. Chapter 17: Step by Step, Courageously 187.

I said, ‘Oh, my God, it’s you!’ I didn’t know Jeff Bezos had been in the class.” With an introductory course in bookselling, some experience buying a few items online, one computer, two engineers, his wife, and a garage, Bezos was ready to start building an online bookstore. Chapter 6 How to Build a Better Bookstore We used to joke that the ideal Amazon site would not show a search box, navigation links, or lists of things you could buy. Instead, it would just display a giant picture of one book, the next book you want to buy. —Greg Linden, former Amazon programmer It took Jeff Bezos and his tiny team just one year to go from settling into Seattle to launching a company.


pages: 411 words: 98,128

Bezonomics: How Amazon Is Changing Our Lives and What the World's Best Companies Are Learning From It by Brian Dumaine

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AI winter, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, money market fund, natural language processing, no-fly zone, Ocado, pets.com, plutocrats, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

Yet, in 2019, he divorced: Aine Cain and Paige Leskin, “A Look Inside the Marriage of the Richest Couple in History, Jeff and MacKenzie Bezos—Who Met Before Amazon Started, Were Married for 25 Years, and Are Now Getting Divorced,” Business Insider, July 6, 2019. “Jeff Bezos” wasn’t always: “Jeff Bezos Talks Amazon, Blue Origin, Family, and Wealth,” video interview by Mathias Döpfner, the CEO of Axel Springer, with Jeff Bezos (4:51), posted on YouTube, May 5, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCpgKvZB_VQ. His father, Ted: Stone, The Everything Store, 140–42. Ted’s unicycling job: Ibid., 142. Bezos never saw his biological father again: Ibid., 321–24. After Stone unearthed Jorgensen: Laura Collins, “Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos’s Ailing Biological Father Pleads to See Him,” Daily Mail, November 17, 2018.

In a 2018 experiment using Amazon’s Rekognition: Brian Barrett, “Lawmakers Can’t Ignore Facial Recognition’s Bias Anymore,” Wired, July 26, 2018. In 1974, when he was ten years old: Jeff Bezos, “We Are What We Choose,” Princeton commencement speech, May 30, 2010. On the ranch, Pop Gise: Interview with Jeff and Mark Bezos, Summit LA17, November 14, 2017. Bezos even helped his grandfather: David M. Rubenstein, conversation with Jeff Bezos, the Economic Club, Washington, D.C., September 13, 2018, https://www.economicclub.org/events/jeff-bezos. Part of being a resourceful person: Summit LA17 interview, November 14, 2017. When Bezos was in Montessori school: Rubenstein, conversation with Jeff Bezos, September 13, 2018. When he was in sixth grade: Julie Ray, Turning On Bright Minds: A Parent Looks at Gifted Education in Texas (Houston: Prologues, 1977).

As painful as that litany: Amazon 2015 Letter to Shareholders. “I’ve made billions of dollars”: Blodget, “I Asked Jeff Bezos the Tough Questions.” He has given money to candidates: Sean Sullivan, “The Politics of Jeff Bezos,” Washington Post, August 7, 2013. In 2018, he donated $10 million: Rachel Siegel, Michelle Ye Hee Lee, and John Wagner, “Jeff Bezos Donates $10 Million to Veteran-Focused Super PAC in First Major Political Venture,” Washington Post, September 5, 2018. As he told Charlie Rose: Charlie Rose, “A Conversation with Amazon’s Founder and Chief Executive Officer, Jeff Bezos,” video, CharlieRose.com, October 27, 2016. When his friend and former: Rubenstein, conversation with Jeff Bezos, September 13, 2018.


pages: 390 words: 108,171

The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos by Christian Davenport

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, obamacare, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, private spaceflight, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, tech billionaire, TED Talk, traumatic brain injury, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, zero-sum game

“We’ll talk about Blue Origin”: Davenport, “Why Jeff Bezos Is Finally Ready to Talk About Taking People to Space,” Washington Post, March 8, 2016. Without mentioning Musk: Ibid. “Think about it,” he said: Christian Davenport, “Jeff Bezos on Nuclear Reactors in Space, the Lack of Bacon on Mars, and Humanity’s Destiny in the Solar System,” Washington Post, September 15, 2016. While he had been inspired: Calla Cofield, “Spaceflight Is Entering a New Golden Age, Says Blue Origin Founder Jeff Bezos,” Space.com, November 25, 2015, https://www.space.com/31214-spaceflight-golden-age-jeff-bezos.html. “If I’m 80 years old”: Ibid.

He paid his son-in-law’s tuition: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Boston: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown, 2013), 142. Jackie got a job: Ibid. “I’ve never been curious”: Joshua Quittner, “An Eye on the Future: Jeff Bezos Merely Wants Amazon.com to Be the Earth’s Biggest Seller of Everything,” Time, December 27, 1999. “It really was a seminal moment”: Bezos Expeditions, http://www.bezosexpeditions.com/updates.html. On the ranch: Joshua Quittner and Chip Bayers, “The Inner Bezos,” Wired Magazine, March 1, 1999. “We’d hitch up the Airstream”: Jeff Bezos, “We Are What We Choose,” baccalaureate address, Princeton University, May 30, 2010, https://www.princeton.edu/news/2010/05/30/2010-baccalaureate-remarks.

It was a relatively low-cost: Douglas Martin, “Space Artifacts of Soviets Soar at $7 Million Auction,” New York Times, December 12, 1993. Once that was in place: Alan Boyle, “Where Does Jeff Bezos Foresee Putting Space Colonists? Inside O’Neill Cylinders,” Geekwire, October 29, 2016, https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-space-colonies-oneill/. He replied that he’d just: Jeffrey Ressner, “10 Questions for Jeff Bezos,” Time, July 24, 2005. On March 5, 2005: http://www.museumofflight.org/aircraft/charon-test-vehicle. 5. “SPACESHIPONE, GOVERNMENTZERO” But unlike other air-launched: Ed Bradley, “The New Space Race,” 60 Minutes, November 7, 2004.


pages: 302 words: 100,493

Working Backwards: Insights, Stories, and Secrets From Inside Amazon by Colin Bryar, Bill Carr

Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, business logic, business process, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, microservices, Minecraft, performance metric, search inside the book, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, web application, why are manhole covers round?

Notes Introduction 1 “Surf’s Up,” Forbes, July 26, 1998, https://www.forbes.com/forbes/1998/0727/6202106a.html#71126bc93e25 (accessed June 2, 2020). 2 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” 2010, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312511110797/dex991.htm. 3 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” 2015, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm. 4 Ibid. Chapter 1: Building Blocks 1 Kif Leswing and Isobel Asher Hamilton, “‘Feels Like Yesterday’: Jeff Bezos Reposted Amazon’s First Job Listing in a Throwback to 25 Years Ago,” Business Insider, August 23, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-first-job-listing-posted-by-jeff-bezos-24-years-ago-2018-8. 2 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” April 2013, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312513151836/d511111dex991.htm. 3 876,800 in Q2 2020 per the quarterly earnings announcement at https://ir.aboutamazon.com/news-release/news-release-details/2020/Amazon.com-Announces-Second-Quarter-Results/default.aspx. 4 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” 2015, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm. 5 “Leadership Principles,” Amazon Jobs, https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles (accessed May 19, 2019). 6 About Amazon Staff, “Our Leadership Principles,” Working at Amazon, https://www.aboutamazon.com/working-at-amazon/our-leadership-principles (accessed June 2, 2020).

See more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control_chart. Introduction to Part Two 1 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” 2015, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm. 2 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” 2008, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312509081096/dex991.htm. 3 “Introducing Fire, the First Smartphone Designed by Amazon,” press release, Amazon press center, June 18, 2014, https://press.aboutamazon.com/news-releases/news-release-details/introducing-fire-first-smartphone-designed-amazon. 4 Washington Post Live, “Jeff Bezos Wants to See an Entrepreneurial Explosion in Space,” Washington Post, May 20, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-live/wp/2016/04/07/meet-amazon-president-jeff-bezos/. 5 Jeff Bezos, “Letter to Shareholders,” 1999, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312519103013/d727605dex991.htm.

Since leaving Amazon, we have both introduced many of its elements to our new organizations, to great effect. But we find that when we talk to colleagues about introducing Amazon’s principles to their workplace, they often respond with some version of, “But you had a lot more resources and money, not to mention Jeff Bezos. We don’t.” We’re here to tell you that you do not need Amazon’s capital (in fact Amazon was capital constrained for most of our years there), nor do you need Jeff Bezos (though if he is available to work on your project, we’d highly recommend him!). Amazon’s concrete, replicable principles and practices can be learned by anyone and refined and scaled throughout a company. After reading this book, we hope you’ll see that being Amazonian is not a mystical leadership cult but a flexible mindset.


pages: 281 words: 71,242

World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech by Franklin Foer

artificial general intelligence, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, Colonization of Mars, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, income inequality, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, PageRank, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ray Kurzweil, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, strong AI, supply-chain management, TED Talk, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, yellow journalism

Some news wires use algorithms to write stories: Joanna Plucinska, “How an Algorithm Helped the LAT Scoop Monday’s Quake,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 18, 2014. CHAPTER FOUR: JEFF BEZOS DISRUPTS KNOWLEDGE “I’m grumpy when I’m forced to read a physical book”: “Jeff Bezos in Conversation with Steven Levy,” Wired Business Conference, June 15, 2009. creating an “everything store”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store (Little, Brown and Company, 2013), 24. Adam Smith, it’s fair to say, didn’t anticipate Jeff Bezos: My discussion of the economics of knowledge relies on David Warsh’s excellent Knowledge and the Wealth of Nations (W.W. Norton, 2006).

“hated for the Post or its writers to look as though they were”: David Halberstam, The Powers That Be (Knopf, 1975), 188. “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation”: Jeff Bezos, Letter to Amazon shareholders, 2011. “I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere”: Thomas L. Friedman, “Do You Want the Good News First?,” New York Times, May 19, 2012. “The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower”: Bezos, Letter, 2011. “Take a look at the Kindle bestseller list, and compare it”: Bezos, Letter to shareholders, 2011. “Our touchstone will be readers”: Jeff Bezos, “Jeff Bezos on Post Purchase,” Washington Post, August 5, 2013. Amazon, on the other hand, considers the profession to be filled with “antediluvian losers”: George Packer, “Cheap Words,” New Yorker, February 17, 2014.

• • • ADAM SMITH, it’s fair to say, didn’t anticipate Jeff Bezos. When the Scotsman first sketched the workings of capitalism, he had plenty to say about land, labor, and capital. Those were the fundamental elements of markets, and they became the bedrock concepts of mainstream economics. Knowledge never entered deeply into Smith’s thinking about trade. And for nearly two hundred years, the discipline of economics barely entertained the possibility that knowledge might really be the necessary ingredient for growth. But Jeff Bezos was born into a world obsessed with knowledge. After World War II, the American elite began to define itself on the basis of its brains, not the happenstance of its daddies.


pages: 404 words: 95,163

Amazon: How the World’s Most Relentless Retailer Will Continue to Revolutionize Commerce by Natalie Berg, Miya Knights

3D printing, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, asset light, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business intelligence, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, computer vision, connected car, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, driverless car, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), Elon Musk, fulfillment center, gig economy, independent contractor, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, market fragmentation, new economy, Ocado, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, QR code, race to the bottom, random stow, recommendation engine, remote working, Salesforce, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, trade route, underbanked, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, white picket fence, work culture

Available from: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles [Last accessed 19/6/2018]. 2 https://www.jimcollins.com/concepts/the-flywheel.html 3 Stone, B (2013) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon, Bantam Press, London. 4 Thompson, Scott (2018) We’ll all be banking with Amazon in 10 years: agree? Tech HQ, 22 May. Available from: http://techhq.com/2018/05/well-all-be-banking-with-amazon-in-10-years-agree-or-disagree/ [Last accessed 19/6/2018]. 5 Amazon’s website (2018). Available from: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles [Last accessed 19/6/2018]. 6 Stone, B (2013) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon, Bantam Press, London. 7 Tonner, Andrew (2016) 7 Sam Walton quotes you should read right now, The Motley Fool, 8 September.

Available from: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-widens-war-with-walmart-for-low-income-shoppers-1520431203 [Last accessed 28/6/2018]. 9 Amazon UK Analyst Briefing, London, 2017. 10 McAlone, Nathan (2016) Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said something about Prime Video that should scare Netflix, Business Insider, 2 June. Available from: http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-said-something-about-prime-video-that-should-scare-netflix-2016-6 [Last accessed 2.7.2018] 11 Amazon press release (2018) Amazon.com announces first quarter sales up 43% to $51.0 billion, Amazon, 26 April. Available from: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?

c=97664&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=2345075 [Last accessed 28/6/2018]. 12 Kim, Eugene (2016) Bezos to shareholders: It’s ‘irresponsible’ not to be part of Amazon Prime, Business Insider, 17 May. Available from:http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-says-its-irresponsible-not-to-be-part-of-prime-2016-5 [Last accessed 28/6/2018]. 13 Stone, Brad (2013) The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the age of Amazon, Bantam Press, London. 14 ibid. 15 Vizard, Sarah (2016) Loyalty cards aren’t convincing British consumers to shop, Marketing Week, 7 December. Available from: https://www.marketingweek.com/2016/12/07/loyalty-cards-nielsen/ [Last accessed 28/6/18]. 16 Columbus, Louis (2018) 10 charts that will change your perspective of Amazon Prime’s growth, Forbes, 4 March.


pages: 260 words: 67,823

Always Day One: How the Tech Titans Plan to Stay on Top Forever by Alex Kantrowitz

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, anti-bias training, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer vision, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, fulfillment center, gigafactory, Google Chrome, growth hacking, hive mind, income inequality, Infrastructure as a Service, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Jony Ive, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, tech worker, Tim Cook: Apple, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, wealth creators, work culture , zero-sum game

New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2019. CHAPTER 1: INSIDE JEFF BEZOS’S CULTURE OF INVENTION Bezos drives Amazon’s inventive culture through fourteen leadership principles: “Leadership Principles.” Amazon.jobs. Accessed October 3, 2019. https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles. “No powerpoint presentations from now on,” he wrote: Stone, Madeline. “A 2004 Email from Jeff Bezos Explains Why PowerPoint Presentations Aren’t Allowed at Amazon.” Business Insider. Business Insider, July 28, 2015. https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-email-against-powerpoint-presentations-2015-7. The memo was exhaustive: These memos even have their own set of micro-leadership principles for each group, called tenets.

Sun, April 15, 2018. https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6055021/rushed-amazon-warehouse-staff-time-wasting. The company’s corporate staff: Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013. “Because of the challenges”: Recode. “Amazon Employee Work-Life Balance | Jeff Bezos, CEO Amazon | Code Conference 2016.” YouTube, June 2, 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTYFEgXaRbU. “Customers are always unsatisfied,” Bezos said: TheBushCenter. “Forum on Leadership: A Conversation with Jeff Bezos.” YouTube, April 20, 2018. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xu6vFIKAUxk. a brutal five-thousand-word New York Times article: Kantor, Jodi, and David Streitfeld.

Jacket design: Christopher Sergio pid_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0 CONTENTS TITLE PAGE COPYRIGHT DEDICATION PREFACE: The Zuckerberg Encounter INTRODUCTION: Always Day One Ideas vs. Execution Miracles in Miami The Engineer’s Mindset When Things Speed Up 1. Inside Jeff Bezos’s Culture of Invention Meet Amazon’s Science Fiction Writers Jeff Bezos’s Robot Employees Hands off the Wheel Life After Yoda Insist on the Highest Standards “That Article” Outputs 2. Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s Culture of Feedback Facebook the Vulnerable Building a Feedback Culture Pathways Facebook’s Day One From Broadcast to Private “The Most Chinese Company in Silicon Valley” Enter the Machines Robot Compensation New Inputs Facebook’s Next Reinvention 3.


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Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge From Small Discoveries by Peter Sims

Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Black Swan, Clayton Christensen, complexity theory, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, discovery of penicillin, endowment effect, fail fast, fear of failure, Frank Gehry, Guggenheim Bilbao, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, PageRank, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, systems thinking, TED Talk, theory of mind, Toyota Production System, urban planning, Wall-E

Amazon: Fifteen discussions with current or former Amazon employees and industry analysts. Secondary sources included: “Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos,” by Julia Kirby and Thomas Stewart, Harvard Business Review, October 2007; “Jeff Bezos: ‘Blind-Alley’ Explorer,” by Robert Hof, Business Week, August 19, 2004; “What’s Dangerous Is Not to Evolve,” by Michael Schick, Fast Company, February 17, 2009; “The Customer Is Always Right: Jeff Bezos,” by Daniel Lyons, Newsweek, December 21, 2009; “Amid the Gloom, an E-Commerce War,” by Brad Stone, New York Times, October 11, 2008; “Amazon Auctions Losing Momentum to eBay,” by Troy Wolverton, ZD Net News, August 2001; “Amazon, Sotheby’s Closing Jointly Operated Auction Site,” by Troy Wolverton, CNET News, October 10, 2000; “Amazon.com Whiz Jeff Bezos Keeps Kindling Hot Concepts,” by Patrick Seitz, Business Week, December 31, 2009; and Amazon.com, Inc.

Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Review, December 2009. “How Do Innovators Think?” by Bronwyn Fryer, Harvard Business Review blog, September 28, 2009, which can be found at: http://blogs.hbr.org/hbr/hbreditors/2009/09/how_do_innovators_think.html. Jeff Bezos quote from: “Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos,” by Julia Kirby and Thomas Stewart, Harvard Business Review, October 2007. Apple and Steve Jobs: Inside Steve’s Brain, by Leander Kahney, Portfolio (2008), 190–197. “Steve Jobs: The Next Insanely Great Thing,” by Gary Wolf, Wired, March 2002. Steve Jobs calligraphy example taken from his 2005 Stanford Commencement speech.

Within three weeks after Google made this change, the system had produced twice as much revenue as fixed-priced ads produced within that same period, to the great surprise of many, including CEO Eric Schmidt. Once AdWords became the company’s flagship product, Google’s revenue growth exploded. Page and Brin did not begin with an ingenious idea, but they certainly discovered one. The pioneering bookseller Amazon also embraces an experimental discovery mentality. Led by founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s culture breathes experimentation. Employees there are encouraged to constantly try things and develop new ideas. It’s such an important goal of the company to provoke this that whether or not employees are doing so is a part of their performance reviews. Bezos often compares Amazon’s strategy of developing ideas in new markets to “planting seeds” or “going down blind alleys.”


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The Four: How Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google Divided and Conquered the World by Scott Galloway

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Brewster Kahle, business intelligence, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of journalism, future of work, global supply chain, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, passive income, Peter Thiel, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, Tesla Model S, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, working poor, you are the product, young professional

You felt cool shopping at The Gap, while buying a Pottery Barn couch gave a generation of Americans the sense that they had “arrived.” Specialty retailers recognized that even shopping bags offered a self-expressive benefit—if you carried Williams-Sonoma, you were cool, enjoyed the finer things in life, and had a passion for cooking. The E-Commerce Opportunity Jeff Bezos happened more to retail than retail happened to Jeff Bezos. In each of the preceding eras of retail, there were brilliant people who tapped into a shift in demographics or taste and created billions of dollars in value. But Bezos saw a technological shift, then used it to reconstruct root and branch the entire world of retailing.

In 2005, Lore started diapers.com and launched several other categories for parents under the corporate umbrella Quidsi.78 When Bezos toured the firm, he must have felt at home, recognizing the warehouses close to urban centers staffed by Kiva Robots standing behind a site run by algorithms. Bezos fell hard and in 2011 paid $545 million for Quidsi.79 For half a billion dollars Amazon bought momentum in key categories, got some great human capital, and took a competitor off the market. But Lore didn’t want to work for Jeff Bezos. He wanted to be Jeff Bezos. Twenty-four months later he bolted and, with his new wealth, started Jet.com. This must have felt like a half-a-billion-dollar divorce settlement to your husband, who then moves into the house next door and starts fucking your friends. The ex is still pissed off. In April 2017 Bezos closed Quidsi and laid off many of its employees.

Amazon, armed with infinite capital provided by eager investors, is leading a war on brands to starch the margin from brands and deliver it back to the consumer. Death, for brands, has a name . . . Alexa. Amazon the Destroyer I spoke the following morning, after Jeff Bezos, at a recent conference. Similar to the kid who sees dead people in The Sixth Sense, Jeff Bezos sees the future of business better than most CEOs. When asked about job destruction and what it would mean for our society, he suggested one more time that we should consider adopting a universal minimum income. Or, he added, a negative income tax where every citizen is granted a cash payment that will be sufficient to stay above the poverty line.


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Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, call centre, carried interest, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, edge city, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jessica Bruder, jitney, Kiva Systems, lockdown, Lyft, mass incarceration, McMansion, megaproject, microapartment, military-industrial complex, new economy, Nomadland, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, Ralph Nader, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, strikebreaker, tech worker, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

industry had leaned liberal: Margaret O’Mara, “How Silicon Valley Went from Conservative, to Anti-Establishment, to Liberal,” Big Think, August 14, 2019, https://bigthink.com/videos/how-silicon-valley-went-from-conservative-to-anti-establishment-to-liberal. “It was a blast”: Benjamin Wofford, “Inside Jeff Bezos’s DC Life,” Washingtonian, April 22, 2018. largest lobbying office of any tech firm: Luke Mullins, “The Real Story of How Virginia Won Amazon’s HQ2,” Washingtonian, June 6, 2019. The company lobbied more federal agencies: Charles Duhigg, “Is Amazon Unstoppable?,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2019. “undertaking of pharaonic proportions”: Wofford, “Inside Jeff Bezos’s DC Life.” “It’s a very big house”: Nick Wingfield and Nellie Bowles, “Jeff Bezos, Mr. Amazon, Steps Out,” The New York Times, January 12, 2018. “I have a question, Tom”: Alex Leary, “How Florida Lobbyist Brian Ballard Is Turning Close Ties to Trump into Big Business,” Tampa Bay Times, June 9, 2017.

Things were serious now. The visitors wanted to know the SAT scores of local high school graduates, an echo of Jeff Bezos’s famous obsession with knowing the scores of those interviewing for jobs at Amazon. They wanted to ride the buses and the trams. With the process so hidden, bidders grasped at any clues they could find. Alaska Airlines had added a direct flight from Seattle to Columbus! The dean of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science was resigning—perhaps to run a Pittsburgh HQ2? And Jeff Bezos was spotted in Miami with a club promoter known as Purple. “It’s not everyday you get to hang with the richest guy in the world,” Purple gushed on Instagram.

We’re going to sing: Patrinell: The Total Experience, directed by Tia Young and Andrew Elizaga (Seattle: Baby Seal Films, 2019), documentary film. “Most successful entrepreneurs start a company”: Richard L. Brandt, One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com (New York: Portfolio, 2012), 46. He came to Santa Cruz: Brandt, 55. merchants needed to collect sales tax: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), 28. He said half-jokingly years later: Jim Brunner, “States Fight Back Against Amazon.com’s Tax Deals,” The Seattle Times, April 9, 2012. Hanauer … made a strong case for it: Brandt, One Click, 57; and Stone, The Everything Store, 31.


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The End of Astronauts: Why Robots Are the Future of Exploration by Donald Goldsmith, Martin Rees

Apollo 11, Biosphere 2, blockchain, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crewed spaceflight, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Menlo Park, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, operation paperclip, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, place-making, Planet Labs, planetary scale, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, self-driving car, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, UNCLOS, V2 rocket, Virgin Galactic, Yogi Berra

Michael Sainato, “Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Think the Earth Is Doomed,” Observer, June 30, 2017, https://­observer​.­com​ /­2017​/­06​/c­ olonizing​-­mars​-­elon​-­musk​-­stephen​-­hawking​-­jeff​-­bezos​/­. 4. Corey S. Powell, “Jeff Bezos Foresees a Trillion ­People Living in ­ illions of Space Colonies. ­Here’s What He’s ­Doing to Get the Ball M Rolling,” NBC News, May 15, 2019, https://­www​.­nbcnews​.­com​/­mach​ /­s cience​/­jeff​-­bezos​-­foresees​-­trillion​-­people​-­living​-­millions​-­space​ -­colonies​-­here​-­ncna1006036; Shawn Langlois, “Elon Musk Says Jeff Bezos’s Plan to Colonize Space ‘Makes No Sense,’ ” MarketWatch, May 23, 2019, https://­www​.­marketwatch​.­com​/­story​/­elon​-­musk​-­jeff​ -­bezos​-­space​-­colony​-­plan​-­makes​-­no​-­sense​-2 ­ 019​-­05​-2 ­ 3; Sainato, “Stephen Hawking.” 5.

These efforts pose direct questions about the proper role of nongovernmental actors in space, which in turn raises the unresolved issue of how civilization may eventually determine what roles are assigned to (or seized by) dif­fer­ent countries, corporations, well-­f unded groups, or par­tic­u­lar individuals. Three individuals stand out most prominently for their attempts to create private space exploration spacecraft: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. Each of them gained fame during the 1990s through their close association with at least one visionary enterprise: Bezos, born in 1964, began Amazon as an online bookstore before expanding to, well, every­thing; Musk, born in 1971, became PayPal’s largest shareholder when that com­pany merged with his financial ser­v ices com­pany, shortly before eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in stock; and Branson, born in 1950, founded the Virgin empire, most known for its airline and its package holidays.

Musk took the helm of the Tesla Motor Com­pany in 2004 and plunged into making electrically powered vehicles, pursuing this effort so vigorously that Tesla teetered on the verge of bankruptcy u ­ ntil the rising public demand for electric cars made Musk one of the wealthiest US citizens, along with Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. SpaceX, established by Musk in 2002 to manufacture launch vehicles, has produced the Dragon and Falcon spacecraft, work­horses for NASA’s missions to send supplies, and to send and return astronauts, to the International Space Station. Musk’s new, super-­heavy Starship launch system aims for Mars, where, he has said, he would like to die, “just not on impact.”


pages: 352 words: 87,930

Space 2.0 by Rod Pyle

additive manufacturing, air freight, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, crewed spaceflight, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, experimental subject, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, mouse model, Neil Armstrong, overview effect, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, risk-adjusted returns, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, systems thinking, telerobotics, trade route, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize, Y Combinator

There are a number of would-be competitors ready to take up the challenges of a new space race, but only two are anywhere close to SpaceX in terms of financial investment or technical ability: Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and United Launch Alliance, or ULA. Falcon 9 carrying CASSIOPE preparing for liftoff at Vandenberg Air Force Base, December 2015. Image credit: SpaceX CHAPTER 9 A NEW SPACE RACE Image credit: James Vaughan Precious few competitors exist in the human spaceflight launch industry—the resources required to shuttle people into space are staggering. There’s SpaceX, as we have already seen, and also United Launch Alliance, which we will detail shortly. But one of the other major players, Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin, truly stands alone.

Air & Space Magazine, January 2012. www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/. CHAPTER 9: A NEW SPACE RACE 65“S. Dade’s Best and Brightest.” Miami Herald, July 4, 1982. 66Foust, Jeff. “Bezos Investment in Blue Origin Exceeds $500 Million.” Space News, July 18, 2014. 67Klotz, Irene. “Bezos is selling $1 billion of Amazon stock a year to fund rocket venture.” Reuters Business News, April 5, 2017. 68Fernholtz, Tim, and Christopher Groskopf. “If Jeff Bezos is spending a billion a year on his space venture, he just started.” Quartz, April 12, 2017. 69Foust, Jeff. “Blue Origin’s New Shepard Vehicle Makes First Test Flight.”

Space 2.0 is a beginner’s must-read for anyone contemplating an investment in the space industry or a career in spaceflight or space policy.” —Stephen P. Maran, author of Astronomy for Dummies and recipient of the NASA Medal for Exceptional Achievements “As Elon Musk celebrates more than 50 successful launches and a plethora of successful landings of his Falcon rockets and as Jeff Bezos achieves the ninth successful launch and landing of his New Shepard rocket, the space game is about to change. Rapidly. Your indispensable guide to the new space race is Rod Pyle’s Space 2.0.” —Howard Bloom, author of The Lucifer Principle, Global Brain, God Problem, The Muhammad Code, and How I Accidentally Started the Sixties Copyright © 2019 by Rod Pyle All rights reserved.


pages: 361 words: 81,068

The Internet Is Not the Answer by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Colonization of Mars, computer age, connected car, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, data science, David Brooks, decentralized internet, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Frederick Winslow Taylor, frictionless, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Hacker Ethic, happiness index / gross national happiness, holacracy, income inequality, index card, informal economy, information trail, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, libertarian paternalism, lifelogging, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, nonsequential writing, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, packet switching, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer rental, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Potemkin village, power law, precariat, pre–internet, printed gun, Project Xanadu, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, the medium is the message, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Travis Kalanick, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, work culture , working poor, Y Combinator

Monetization In The Everything Store, his definitive 2013 biography of Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, Brad Stone recounts a conversation he had with Bezos about the writing of his book. “How do you plan to handle the narrative fallacy?” the Internet entrepreneur asked, leaning forward on his elbows and staring in his bug-eyed way at Stone.9 There was a nervous silence as Stone looked at Bezos blankly. The “narrative fallacy,” Bezos explained to Stone, is the tendency, particularly of authors, “to turn complex realities” into “easily understandable narratives.” As a fan of Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan, a book that introduced the concept, Jeff Bezos believes that the world—like that map on the wall of Ericsson’s Stockholm office—is so random and chaotic that it can’t be easily summarized (except, of course, as being randomly chaotic).

As Wall Street moved west, the Internet lost a sense of common purpose, a general decency, perhaps even its soul. Money replaced all these things. It gushed from the spigots of venture capitalist firms like KPCB, which—with successful Internet companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google—came to replace the government as the main source for investment in innovation. Jeff Bezos, if he happened to be reading this, would probably accuse me of inventing a narrative fallacy, of reducing the Internet’s complex reality to an easy-to-understand morality tale. But Bezos and his Everything Store are exhibits A and B in my argument. He was a Wall Street analyst who moved out west and amassed a $30 billion personal fortune through his Internet ventures.

In spite of the Webvan disaster, the winner-take-all model had a particular resonance in the e-commerce sector, where the so-called Queen of the Net, the influential Morgan Stanley research analyst Mary Meeker (who is now a partner at KPCB), saw first-mover advantage as critical in dominating online marketplaces. And it was this winner-take-all thinking that led Jeff Bezos, in 1996, to accept an $8 million investment from John Doerr in exchange for 13% of Amazon, a deal that valued the year-old e-commerce startup at $60 million.34 “The cash from Kleiner Perkins hit the place like a dose of entrepreneurial steroids, making Jeff more determined than ever,” noted one early Amazon employee about the impact of the 1996 KPCB investment.35 “Get Big Fast” immediately became Bezos’s mantra.


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Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

The Toyota Production System evolved by trial and error on the part of a handful of the firm’s leaders, but it is known by the name of the company that pioneered it. In turn, Jeff Bezos deserves credit for and should be identified with Bezosism. At this very moment, Bezosism is diffusing through the world of work, rewriting the source code of the global industrial machine. If it proves as popular and durable as the systems of organization on which it builds, it will be, after the company he built, Jeff Bezos’s most important legacy. Depending on how the company practicing Bezosism wields its power, it can be benevolent or sinister or both.

But who was Joy Covey, other than a recently retired technology executive who had apparently been looking forward to living off the proceeds of her years of hard work and raising her young son? In a tragic irony of Shakespearean proportions, Covey was the former chief financial officer of Amazon. She had been recruited by Jeff Bezos himself. During one of the most critical periods of the company’s early growth, she had been his right-hand woman. The van that cut her off was owned by a subcontractor of Amazon. The driver had been delivering packages. Covey died at the scene. Jeff Bezos spoke at her funeral, according to the book The Everything Store by Brad Stone. Choking up, he said: “Joy and I talked often about a day in the future when we would sit down together with our grandkids and tell the Amazon story.”

There will be a run on beans and eggs and milk. Hand sanitizer and disinfectant wipes will become so valuable that black markets for them arise overnight, penetrating the national consciousness as pandemic profiteers gouge the quavering masses on Amazon, only to be shut down by a strongly worded edict from its jacked and newly divorced CEO, Jeff Bezos. Later, there will be runs on other items, like desks and web cameras and laptops, as members of the professional-managerial class are forced to work from home while their children, whose heretofore overstuffed lives mean they cannot possibly be left to their own devices, learn from teachers on the other side of Google Classroom conferences and Zoom calls.


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Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

3D printing, additive manufacturing, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Boston Dynamics, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, company town, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deal flow, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, gravity well, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Jono Bacon, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, microbiome, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, rolodex, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart grid, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, superconnector, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Turing test, urban renewal, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, web application, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Which is to say, Branson’s appetite for bold is so big and his track record at scale so stellar that, for a great many, it’s difficult to not believe Branson is going to Mars. Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos is a busy man. About five years ago, when I emailed him to set up a breakfast meeting, his response came back: “Peter, I’m so busy I’m trying to optimize my toothbrushing time.” And there’s a reason he’s so harried—the same reason Eric Schmidt listed Amazon (alongside Google, Apple, and Facebook) as one of the four horsemen of technology. Bezos isn’t interested in small shifts or polite progress. He wants to effect change on a massive scale, with customer-centric thinking and long-term thinking being the primary drivers behind this revolution. Jeff Bezos was born on January 12, 1964, in Albuquerque, New Mexico.22 Like Musk, he too showed an early interest in how things work.

Bezos, “1997 Letter to Shareholders,” Amazon.com, Ben’s Blog, 1997, http://benhorowitz.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/amzn_shareholder-letter-20072.pdf 27 “2012 re: Invent Day 2: Fireside Chat with Jeff Bezos and Werner Vogels.” 28 Julie Bort, “Amazon Is Crushing IBM, Microsoft, And Google in Cloud Computing, Says Report,” Business Insider, November 26, 2013, http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-cloud-beats-ibm-microsoft-google-2013-11#ixzz37zMH8gUr. 29 James Stewart, “Amazon Says Long Term and Means It,” New York Times, December 16, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/business/at-amazon-jeff-bezos-talks-long-term-and-means-it.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 30 “Utah Technology Council Hall of Fame—Jeff Bezos Keynote,” Utah Technology Council, published online April 30, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=G-0KJF3uLP8. 31 “About Blue Origin,” Blue Origin, July 2014, http://www.blueorigin.com/about/. 32 Alistair Barr, “Amazon testing delivery by drone, CEO Bezos Says,” USA Today, December 2, 2013, referencing a 60 Minutes interview with Jeff Bezos, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/12/01/amazon-bezos-drone-delivery/3799021/. 33 Jay Yarow, “Jeff Bezos’ Shareholder Letter Is Out,” Business Insider, April 10, 2014, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-shareholder-letter-2014-4. 34 “Larry Page Biography,” Academy of Achievement, January 21, 2011, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/pag0bio-1. 35 Marcus Wohlsen, “Google Without Larry Page Would Not Be Like Apple Without Steve Jobs,” Wired, October 18, 2013, http://www.wired.com/2013/10/google-without-page/. 36 Google Inc., 2012, Form 10-K 2012, retrieved from SEC Edgar website: http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1288776/000119312513028362/d452134d10k.htm. 37 Larry Page, “Beyond Today—Larry Page—Zeitgeist 2012,” Google Zeitgeist, Zeitgeist Minds, May 22, 2012, https://www.youtube.com/watch?


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Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies by Reid Hoffman, Chris Yeh

"Susan Fowler" uber, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, database schema, DeepMind, Didi Chuxing, discounted cash flows, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, Ford Model T, forensic accounting, fulfillment center, Future Shock, George Gilder, global pandemic, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, high-speed rail, hockey-stick growth, hydraulic fracturing, Hyperloop, initial coin offering, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, late fees, Lean Startup, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, oil shale / tar sands, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, Quicken Loans, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, thinkpad, three-martini lunch, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, web application, winner-take-all economy, work culture , Y Combinator, yellow journalism

During the first half of 2017 alone, Uber lost eight VPs or department heads. In contrast, companies like Facebook and Amazon, and leaders like Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos, found ways to successfully recruit leadership from the outside, blending them with existing team members to change and strengthen the organization. Facebook promoted insiders like Chief Product Officer Chris Cox (who joined Facebook as a software engineer in 2005 after dropping out of Stanford), but also brought in compatible outsiders like Sheryl Sandberg and Mike Schroepfer. Jeff Bezos’s top lieutenants like Jeff Blackburn and Andy Jassy are Amazon lifers, but he also brought in key outsiders like Jeff Wilke from AlliedSignal and former Chief Information Officer Rick Dalzell from Walmart.

Whether you are a founder, a manager, a potential employee, or an investor, we believe that understanding blitzscaling will allow you to make better decisions in a world where speed is the critical competitive advantage. With the power of blitzscaling, the adopted son of a Syrian immigrant (Steve Jobs), the adopted son of a Cuban immigrant (Jeff Bezos), and a former English teacher and volunteer tour guide (Jack Ma) were all able to build businesses that changed—and are still changing—the world. The strategy and techniques we describe in this book are based on my experiences as a member of the founding team at PayPal; as the cofounder, CEO, and now executive chairman at LinkedIn; as a leading investor in Facebook and Airbnb; and as an investor at Greylock Partners, where I worked with many other billion-dollar companies, such as Workday, Pandora, Cloudera, and Pure Storage.

To mitigate the downside of the risks you take, you should try to focus them—line them up with a small number of hypotheses about how your business will develop so that you can more easily understand and monitor what drives your success or failure. You also have to be prepared to execute with more than 100 percent effort to compensate for the bets that don’t go your way. For example, anyone who knows Jeff Bezos knows that he didn’t simply mash his foot down on the gas pedal; Amazon has intentionally invested aggressively in the future, and, despite its accounting losses, generates a ton of cash. Amazon’s operating cash flow was over $16 billion in 2016, but it spent $10 billion in investments and $4 billion paying down debt.


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Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race by Tim Fernholz

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 13, autonomous vehicles, business climate, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deep learning, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fulfillment center, Gene Kranz, high net worth, high-speed rail, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, multiplanetary species, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, new economy, no-fly zone, nuclear paranoia, paypal mafia, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planetary scale, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Scaled Composites, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, trade route, undersea cable, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize, Y2K

“Russian kitchen appliances”: Elon Musk, remarks at Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, October 8, 2003. “shuts the thing down”: Vance, Elon Musk, 109 year after SpaceX’s inception: Musk, remarks at Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders. “enormous nature preserve”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), 153. “lottery winning for me”: Jeff Bezos, remarks at Satellite 2017 conference, March 8, 2017. 6. The Tyranny of the Rocket 200,000 feet above the earth: Columbia Accident Investigation Board report (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), 38. “dumbest thing I’d ever seen”: Rebecca Wright, “Interview with Michael Griffin,” NASA Oral History Project, September 10, 2007. 94 percent propellant by mass: Don Pettit, “The Tyranny of the Rocket Equation,” NASA, May 1, 2012, accessed August 22, 2017, https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/expeditions/expedition30/tryanny.html.

As the tide receded for the dot-coms, major investors sold out of their riskiest plays, and that meant no more easy money for people using explosives to launch five-ton orbital computers. If any of these satellite firms had hoped to raise new money, the markets made it clear that it wasn’t the time. The year 2000 was an appropriately futuristic time for a different tech entrepreneur to lay the groundwork for a bet on space: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The king of internet retail had taken his fledgling online bookstore public in 1996. In 1999, he had been Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Amazon survived the downturn and thrived, thanks to Bezos’s demanding style and focus on measurable results. He could take some time to pursue a personal project.

The economics of his rockets, which were simply more expensive than those made by SpaceX, meant that he needed a new rocket that was just as effective but cheaper. That meant designing a new rocket engine. And he had a solution in mind. “I would like to say a couple of words about our path to an American rocket engine,” Bruno began. “We entered into a strategic partnership with Blue Origin late last year, a company founded by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.” Blue Origin had gone back underground after its big land purchase a decade before, though it was hiring engineers and working on closely held projects. “Good people would disappear, for years, and you’d have no idea what they were working on,” one Virgin Galactic executive told me of the Blue Origin operation.


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The Connected Company by Dave Gray, Thomas Vander Wal

A Pattern Language, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, business cycle, business process, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, complexity theory, creative destruction, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disruptive innovation, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, folksonomy, Googley, index card, industrial cluster, interchangeable parts, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, loose coupling, low cost airline, market design, minimum viable product, more computing power than Apollo, power law, profit maximization, Richard Florida, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Vanguard fund, web application, WikiLeaks, work culture , Zipcar

Modular components are a critical element of a connected company. But to take advantage of pods, you also need a business that is designed to support them. Notes for Chapter Fourteen A/B TESTING “Institutional Yes: The HBR Interview with Jeff Bezos, by Jeff Bezos, Julia Kirby, and Thomas A. Stewart,” Harvard Business Review, October 2007. “WE HAVE THIS WEIRDNESS IN OUR BUSINESS” Alan Deutschman, “Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos,” Fast Company, August 1, 2004. THE STATISTICALLY-IMPROBABLE PHRASES SERVICE Jim Gray, “A Conversation with Werner Vogels: Learning from the Amazon Technology Platform,” Association for Computing Machinery, May 1, 2006.

DOMINO’S Stephanie Clifford, “Video Prank at Domino’s Taints Brands,” The New York Times , April 15, 2009. BANK OF AMERICA Bank withdrawal numbers from the Credit Union National Association newsletter, November 4, 2011. CUSTOMER RECOMMENDATIONS 2009 Nielsen Global Online Consumer Survey. AMAZON “Jeff Bezos recalls a publisher calling him and saying ‘I don’t think you understand your business. You make money when you sell books.’” From “A Conversation with Jeff Bezos” by François Bourboulon, Les Echos (blog), June 23, 2011. Chapter 2. The service economy In today’s world, where ideas are increasingly displacing the physical in the production of economic value, competition for reputation becomes a significant driving force, propelling our economy forward.

The more things you try, the better your chances of discovering something valuable. Not surprisingly, GE’s Jack Welch, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have all made very similar statements regarding ongoing experimentation. Jack Welch, GE: “Size either liberates or paralyzes. We tried every day to remember that the benefit of size was that it allowed us to take more swings.” Eric Schmidt, Google: “Our goal is to have more at-bats per unit of time and effort than anyone else in the world.” Jeff Bezos, Amazon: “You need to set up and organize so that you can do as many experiments per unit of time as possible.” Be Connectable to Everything We live in a networked world.


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WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

CHAPTER 4: THERE ISN’T JUST ONE FUTURE 71 an appeal from Richard Stallman: Richard published his email to me as an open letter. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/amazon-rms-tim.en.html. 71 an email to Jeff Bezos: Tim O’Reilly, “Ask Tim,” oreilly.com, February 28, 2000, http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/amazon_patent.html. 74 an open letter: Tim O’Reilly, “An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos,” oreilly.com, February 28, 2000, http://www.oreilly.com/amazon_patent/amazon_patent.comments.html. 74 I had 10,000 signatures: Tim O’Reilly, “An Open Letter to Jeff Bezos: Your Responses,” oreilly.com, February 28, 2000, http://www.oreilly.com/amazon_patent/amazon_patent_0228.html. 74 wasn’t introduced till six years later: Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired, June 1, 2006, https://www.wired.com/2006/06/crowds/. 74 We did award the bounty: Tim O’Reilly, “O’Reilly Awards $10,000 1-Click Bounty to Three ‘Runners Up,’” oreilly.com, March 14, 2001, http://archive. oreilly.com/pub/a/policy/2001/03/14/bounty.html. 75 after I published my open letter: Tim O’Reilly, “My Conversation with Jeff Bezos,” oreilly.com, March 2, 2000, http://archive.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.html. 76 Determining an Efficient Transportation Route: Sunil Paul, System and Method for Determining an Efficient Transportation Route, US Patent 6,356,838, filed July 25, 2000, and issued March 12, 2002. 78 “with a single touch”: This was the Apple Pay page as of September 30, 2014, when I wrote “What Amazon, iTunes, and Uber Teach Us About Apple Pay,” oreilly.com, September 30, 2014.

He was concerned about Amazon’s 1-Click e-commerce patent, and the fact that Amazon had just sued rival Barnes & Noble for adding a similar feature to its site, barnesandnoble.com. Richard urged me, as one of Amazon’s top publishers, to boycott its service. “Have you tried to talk with Jeff?” I asked. He hadn’t. So I wrote an email to Jeff Bezos (whom at that time I’d never met), asking him to reconsider: SUBJECT: Amazon 1-Click patent DATE: Wed, 05 Jan 2000 10:03:59–0800 FROM: Tim O’Reilly TO: Jeff Bezos I wanted to give you guys the heads up that I’m getting a lot of pressure from my customers (via my Ask Tim column on our website and direct customer e-mail) to comment publically [sic] on the Amazon 1-Click patent.

Jimmy Guterman (Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly, 2007), 1, available online at http://www.oreilly.com/data/free/files/release2-issue2.pdf. 102 Today it is still No. 49: Or #116, depending on whose panel you follow, Alexa or SimilarWeb. “List of Most Popular Websites,” Wikipedia, retrieved March 30, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_popular_websites. 103 now enrolled in Amazon Prime: Alison Griswold, “Jeff Bezos’ Master Plan to Make Everyone an Amazon Prime Subscriber Is Working,” Quartz, July 11, 2016, https://qz.com/728683/jeff-bezos-master-plan-to-make-everyone-an-amazon-prime-subscriber-is-working/. 103 200 million active credit card accounts: Horace Dediu, Twitter update, April 28, 2014, https://twitter.com/asymco/status/460724885120380929. 103 begin their search at Amazon: “State of Amazon 2016,” Bloomreach, retrieved March 30, 2017, http://go.bloomreach.com/rs/243-XLW-551/images/state-of-amazon-2016-report.pdf. 103 46% of all online shopping: Olivia LaVecchia and Stacy Mitchell, “Amazon’s Stranglehold,” Institute for Local Self Reliance, November 2016, 10, https://ilsr.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ILSR_AmazonReport_final. pdf. 103 remove the “Buy” button: Doreen Carvajal, “Small Publishers Feel Power of Amazon’s ‘Buy’ Button,” New York Times, June 16, 2008, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/16/business/media/16amazon.html.


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The Future Is Faster Than You Think: How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives by Peter H. Diamandis, Steven Kotler

Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, call centre, cashless society, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, digital twin, disruptive innovation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental economics, fake news, food miles, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, gigafactory, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hive mind, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, initial coin offering, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, loss aversion, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Lou Jepsen, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, microdosing, mobile money, multiplanetary species, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supercomputer in your pocket, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban planning, Vision Fund, VTOL, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

@JeffBezos: See: ttps://twitter.com/JeffBezos. @elonmusk: See: ttps://twitter.com/ElonMusk. We’ll start with Bezos: Jeff Bezos, author interview, 2015. See also: Catherine Clifford, “Jeff Bezos: You Can’t Pick Your Passions,” CNBC Make It, February 7, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/07/amazon-and-blue-origins-jeff-bezos-on-identifying-your-passion.html. “a simple two-step plan”: Tony Reichhardt, “Jeff Bezos’ Simple Two-Step Plan,” Air & Space, September 16, 2016. See: https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/jeff-bezos-simple-two-step-plan-180960498/. the Moon—which he still believes is the best launch spot: Korey Haynes, “O’Neill Colonies: A Decades-Long Dream for Settling Space,” Astronomy, May 17, 2019.

Bezos at a 2019 event in Washington, DC: Neel V. Patel, “Jeff Bezos Wants to Solve All Our Problems by Shipping Us to the Moon,” Popular Science, May 9, 2019. See: https://www.popsci.com/blue-origin-moon-lander/. Blue Moon Lunar Lander: Ibid. See also: Ian Allen, “Jeff Bezos Wants Us All to Leave Earth—for Good,” Wired, October 15, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/jeff-bezos-blue-origin/. “The Earth is the gem”: Loren Grush, “Jeff Bezos: ‘I Don’t Want a Plan B for Earth,’ ” Verge, June 1, 2016. See: https://www.theverge.com/2016/6/1/11830206/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-save-earth-code-conference-interview.

See also: Lisa Grace Scott, “Vertical Garden Towers Can Grow Plants Three Times Faster Than Normal: How a Business in the Bronx Is Trying to Take Urban Gardening Mainstream,” Inverse, June 1, 2018, https://www.inverse.com/article/45464-rooftop-garden-technology-vertical-garden. Bay Area–based Plenty Unlimited Inc.: Dee: https://www.plenty.ag/. With over $200 million in funding: Chelsea Ballarte, “Jeff Bezos and Other Investors Raise $200 Million for Vertical Farming Startup Plenty,” GeekWire, July 20, 2017. See: https://www.geekwire.com/2017/jeff-bezos-investors-raise-200-million-vertical-farming-startup-plenty/. seventy-thousand-square-foot factory: Olivia Solon, “Inside the World’s Largest Vertical Farm,” Wired, February 29, 2016. See: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/aerofarms-largest-vertical-farm.


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Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires by Douglas Rushkoff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, buy low sell high, Californian Ideology, carbon credits, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, CRISPR, data science, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, digital capitalism, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, Fairphone, fake news, Filter Bubble, game design, gamification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, liberal capitalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megaproject, meme stock, mental accounting, Michael Milken, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mirror neurons, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), operational security, Patri Friedman, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, QAnon, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SimCity, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the medium is the message, theory of mind, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , working poor

v =uWeDnN0O _xA.   76   Extrinsic rewards … intrinsic rewards : Alfie Kohn, Punished by Rewards: The Trouble with Gold Stars, Incentive Plans, A’s, Praise, and Other Bribes (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993); Kenneth Thomas, “The Four Intrinsic Rewards That Drive Employee Engagement,” Ivey Business Journal , December 4, 2017, https:// iveybusinessjournal .com /publication /the -four -intrinsic -rewards -that -drive -employee -engagement /.   76   “vile despoilers” : Pinker, Enlightenment Now .   76   Bezos has a yacht : Allison Morrow, “Jeff Bezos’ Superyacht Is So Big It Needs Its Own Yacht,” CNN , May 10, 2021, https:// www .cnn .com /2021 /05 /10 /business /jeff -bezos -yacht /index .html.   77   “there is a growing loss” : Pope Francis, Fratelli Tutti , sec. 13, https:// www .vatican .va /content /francesco /en /encyclicals /documents /papa -francesco _20201003 _enciclica -fratelli -tutti .html.   78   Nietzsche’s sister : Sue Prideaux, “Far Right, Misogynist, Humourless?

Their various self-sovereignty escape initiatives amount to the same techno-libertarian world-building fantasy exemplified by the ultra-billionaire’s competition to colonize Mars, but designed for implementation right here on Earth. Only trillionaires will actually make it into space to terraform planets, anyway. The cohort who solicited my doomsday advice readily admitted they were “low-level billionaires” who could at best hitch a ride with Elon Musk, Richard Branson, or Jeff Bezos—who are themselves still at least a few generations away from colonizing anything. Offering a slightly more reasonable techno-utopian escape fantasy, the “seasteading” movement—publicized in a flurry of maga zine stories a few years ago—promises a sustainable solution to a world of climate catastrophe, social chaos, and economic collapse.

Things may be bad out there, they seemed to be saying, but if you buy into the digital bubble, life can be a cabaret. The digital platforms supporting this lifestyle were rewarded under Covid, too. Shares of Zoom went up more than 700 percent during the first ten months of the pandemic. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s fortune rose $86 billion in about the same period. While airlines, hotels, and brick-and-mortar businesses struggled or went under, the combined revenue of the five biggest U.S. tech companies —Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Alphabet, and Meta—grew by a fifth, to $1.1 trillion, and their combined market capitalization rose 50 percent to over $8 trillion by the end of 2020.


pages: 311 words: 90,172

Nothing But Net by Mark Mahaney

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Burning Man, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial engineering, gamification, gig economy, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), knowledge economy, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, medical malpractice, meme stock, Network effects, PageRank, pets.com, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, stocks for the long run, subscription business, super pumped, the rule of 72, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft

I have had the opportunity to track some of the most innovative companies of the last quarter century—Alibaba, Amazon, AOL, eBay, Expedia, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Netflix, Pandora, Priceline, Snap, Spotify, Twitter, Uber, Yahoo!, Zillow, and others. I have had the chance to meet and get to know (sometimes barely, sometimes well) some of the leading entrepreneurs and CEOs of the last 25 years—Jeff Bezos, Reed Hastings, Meg Whitman, Steve Case, Mark Cuban, Eric Schmidt, Jack Dorsey, Jeff Boyd, Dara Khosrowshahi, Tim Westergren, Evan Spiegel, and Doug Lebda, to name a few. And my stock calls have had their share of failures, but also many dramatic money-making wins. I’ve had a Buy on Google for most of the past 10 years as that stock has climbed 465% from $310 in early 2010 to $1,750 at the end of 2020.

I have experienced some truly memorable moments covering Internet stocks. (1) Gazing in awe, along with Mark Cuban, as Broadcast.com’s stock soared 249% on its IPO trading day—at that time the biggest one-day pop for an IPO ever. Was Cuban upset about all that money being left on the table for investors? Nope, he viewed it all as a great marketing event for his company. (2) Watching Jeff Bezos leg-wrestle Joy Covey, Amazon’s then CFO, at a dinner following a 1999 Investor Day in Seattle. I actually don’t remember who won. But it sure was entertaining. (3) Watching eBay CEO Meg Whitman celebrate (very briefly) when eBay’s market cap surpassed Yahoo!’s for the first time during a Morgan Stanley Tech Investment conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, in 2000.

Finally, there was eBay, which became the bullet-proof Internet company from 2001 to 2004, surging in market value when almost every other Internet company fizzled. While NASDAQ all-in declined 14% over that period, EBAY rocketed over 600%! Meg Whitman, eBay’s CEO, was considered one of the best managers in the business, dramatically outperforming chief competitor Jeff Bezos in revenue and profit growth, as well as market cap creation. eBay’s job fairs were so popular they shut down parts of Route 280 near San Jose. And eBay’s success under Whitman helped pave her path to an almost successful run for governor of California. Today, however, eBay’s market cap is just 2% of Amazon’s, and its marketplace is considered quaint and outdated by many Internet users.


pages: 186 words: 49,251

The Automatic Customer: Creating a Subscription Business in Any Industry by John Warrillow

Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, barriers to entry, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, David Heinemeier Hansson, discounted cash flows, Hacker Conference 1984, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, passive income, rolodex, Salesforce, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, subscription business, telemarketer, the long tail, time value of money, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The company was offering the same Huggies Little Snugglers and Pampers Swaddlers that moms could buy from Amazon. The business grew quickly and caught the attention of Amazon, which sent Jeff Blackburn to visit with Lore and Bharara. According to Bloomberg Businessweek’s Brad Stone, the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, Blackburn was a senior vice president of business development for Amazon, which means he was in charge of buying companies for Jeff Bezos. According to Stone, Blackburn told Lore and Bharara that Amazon was getting ready to invest in the diapers category and they should think hard about selling to Amazon.4 Soon after meeting with Blackburn, Lore and Bharara saw Amazon drop its prices on diapers by 30%.

Tuttle, Brad, “Amazon Prime: Bigger, More Powerful, More Profitable than Anyone Imagined,” Time, March 8, 2013. business.time.com/2013/03/18/amazon-prime-bigger-more-powerful-more-profitable-than-anyone-imagined. 3. Stone, “What’s in Amazon’s Box? Instant Gratification.” 4. Bensinger, Greg, “Amazon Expands Grocery Business,” Wall Street Journal, June 5, 2013. online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324798904578526820771744676. 5. Bishop, Jeff. “Bezos: Amazon Closer to Solving Economics of Grocery Delivery,” GeekWire, May 24, 2013. geekwire.com/2013/jeff-bezos-amazon-fresh-closer-solving-economics-grocery-delivery. 6. Perez, Sarah, “Target Launches Its First Subscription-Based E-Commerce Service, Focus for Now Is Baby-Care Items,” Techcrunch, September 25, 2013. techcrunch.com/2013/09/25/targets-launches-its-first-subscription-based-e-commerce-service-focus-for-now-is-baby-care-items. 7.

Amazon Fresh didn’t start out as a subscription business; instead, it was open to anyone willing to pay the delivery fee of $8 to $10 to have milk, veggies, and meat brought to their door in a one- to three-hour delivery window. AmazonFresh stayed stuck in beta in one city for six years as the company tried to work out a profitable business model. The business proved challenging, which Amazon founder Jeff Bezos seemed to acknowledge in response to a question about AmazonFresh at Amazon’s 2013 annual shareholders meeting: “They have made progress on the economics over the last year,” said Bezos.4 “They’ve been doing a lot of experiments and trying to get the right mixture of customer experience and economics.


pages: 380 words: 109,724

Don't Be Evil: How Big Tech Betrayed Its Founding Principles--And All of US by Rana Foroohar

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, future of work, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, life extension, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, PageRank, patent troll, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, price discrimination, profit maximization, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Sand Hill Road, search engine result page, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, warehouse robotics, WeWork, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Schmidt was also a key adviser in digital efforts for both the Obama and Hillary Clinton campaigns, using Google’s might to help the former get elected, and exerting policy influence afterward that is worrisome, to say the least.25 While this obviously isn’t problematic in the same way that allowing the Trump campaign to spread racist dog whistles and fake news during the 2016 elections was, it underscores the point that these companies hold undue influence over our political system as a whole, in ways that undermine public trust.26 Schmidt is certainly not alone in playing both sides of the political fence. Take a look at the first meeting of Silicon Valley’s tech titans with Donald Trump in 2017, and you’ll see Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Cook, and many other avowed Democrats leaning in to the president, literally. Despite Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s ownership of The Washington Post, which is often critical of the president, Amazon pushed its facial recognition technology to ICE, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement division—the very one that was keeping children in cages at the Mexican border.27 Most Democrats and an increasing number of Republicans have been bought out by Big Tech’s extensive lobbying.

Most recently, Amazon has gotten into healthcare—a $3.5 trillion industry—working to disrupt how we buy prescription drugs, pick and purchase health insurance plans, and more, by drawing on its supply chain and trove of personal background data that could easily be supplemented with real-time reports from health monitors in homes, hospitals, and doctors’ offices.44 It is ambitions like this that have made Amazon possibly the deadliest of the killer apps in terms of sheer market power. No wonder that Jeff Bezos, with a net worth of $112 billion, has emerged the richest of the tech oligarchs—indeed, perhaps the richest person of all time.45 The network effect is one way the big get bigger. Another is simply by intimidating smaller players and stealing their intellectual property. I think often of a story that one Boston-based venture capitalist and serial entrepreneur told me about how when one brand-name Big Tech firm was considering hiring his firm for a data analytics venture, they asked him to create open-source code, ostensibly as an audition of sorts, and then poached his idea and took it in-house.

Thiel is a Trump supporter and libertarian who is critical of government and even education: Each year, he famously offers hundreds of thousands of dollars to encourage students to drop out of college and start companies instead. One of his strange obsessions is the desire to cheat death. Thiel says he finds the general population’s acceptance of the prospect of death “pathological,” and, along with Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Google’s Sergey Brin, has spent millions supporting “life extension” research dedicated to “ending aging forever.”9 This, I suppose, is only slightly more ambitious a goal than those of his PayPal partner Elon Musk, also the founder of Tesla and SpaceX, who envisions supersonic commuter travel and colonizing Mars in the not too distant future (though how he’ll fund it is anyone’s guess, since he keeps tanking the price of Tesla’s stock with his security-law-violating tweets, whiskey-and-cannabis-induced rants, and false claims about the company’s financial profile).


pages: 349 words: 95,972

Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives by Tim Harford

affirmative action, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, assortative mating, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Broken windows theory, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Erdős number, experimental subject, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Frank Gehry, game design, global supply chain, Googley, Guggenheim Bilbao, Helicobacter pylori, high net worth, Inbox Zero, income inequality, industrial cluster, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Merlin Mann, microbiome, out of africa, Paul Erdős, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telemarketer, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the strength of weak ties, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, warehouse robotics, William Langewiesche

“Amazon Japan ‘Co-Operating’ with Tokyo Police After Raid,” BBC News, January 27, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31000904; “Islamic State Magazine Dabiq Withdrawn from Sale by Amazon,” BBC News, June 6, 2015, http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-33035453. 38. Tim Maly, “Algorithmic Rape Jokes in the Library of Babel,” Quiet Babylon (blog), http://quietbabylon.com/2013/algorithmic-rape-jokes-in-the-library-of-babel/. 39. Henry Blodget, “I Asked Jeff Bezos the Tough Questions,” Business Insider, December 13, 2014, http://uk.businessinsider.com/amazons-jeff-bezos-on-profits-failure-succession-big-bets-2014-12. 40. Marcus Wohlsen, “Amazon Could Finally Grow Its Profits—By Selling Other People’s Stuff,” Wired, January 5, 2015, http://www.wired.com/2015/01/secret-amazon-finally-making-profit-selling-peoples-stuff/. 41.

Virginia Cowles, The Phantom Major: The Story of David Stirling and the SAS Regiment (1958; Barnsley, England: Pen and Sword Books, 2010), pp. 12–15; Gavin Mortimer, Stirling’s Men: The Inside History of the SAS in World War II (London: Cassell, 2005), pp. 10–11. 44. Alan Deutschman, “Inside the Mind of Jeff Bezos,” Fast Company, August 1, 2004, http://www.fastcompany.com/50541/inside-mind-jeff-bezos. 45. Coram, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, p. 371. 46. Mortimer, Stirling’s Men, p. 28; Mortimer, The SAS in World War II, pp. 25–31. 47. Cowles, The Phantom Major, pp. 60–66. 48. Ibid., pp. 71–72. 49. Quoted ibid., p. 97. 50.

But Web traffic was over two thousand times busier than it had been a year earlier. That explosive growth meant a brief window of opportunity, the kind of opportunity that Erwin Rommel would have lunged for had he been a businessman rather than a general. Instead, it fell to a young computer scientist working on Wall Street to seize the moment. His name was Jeff Bezos. “When a company comes up with an idea, it’s a messy process,” Bezos told Brad Stone, the author of the definitive biography both of Bezos and of the company he created: Amazon.7 From the outside, that is a puzzling claim. To the consumer, Amazon is a byword for tidy efficiency: you want a product, you search Amazon, you find the product, you buy the product, the product arrives.


pages: 321 words: 89,109

The New Gold Rush: The Riches of Space Beckon! by Joseph N. Pelton

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, Carrington event, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, global pandemic, Google Earth, GPS: selective availability, gravity well, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, life extension, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megastructure, new economy, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Planet Labs, post-industrial society, private spaceflight, Ray Kurzweil, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tunguska event, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, X Prize

The New Space industry leaders may not be who you think they are. The new operatives in the commercial space game are organizations such as Google, Facebook, and the Tesla-SpaceX complex (within the empire of Elon Musk). Indeed this New Space push is fueled by who we call the space billionaires. At the head of the space billionaire pack are Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com; Paul Allen, co-founder of Microsoft; Elon Musk (founder of Space X, Paypal, and Tesla); Robert Bigelow, owner of Budget Suites; Sir Richard Branson, head of Virgin Galactic; Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; and electronic game inventor John Carmack, who created “Doom” and “Quake.”

Legislators, bankers, and aspiring space entrepreneurs are far more interested in the views of the super-rich capitalists called the space billionaires. A number of these billionaires and space executives have already put some very serious money into enterprises intent on creating a new pathway to the stars. No less than five billionaires with established space ventures—Elon Musk, Paul Allen, Jeff Bezos, Sir Richard Branson, and Robert Bigelow—have invested millions if not billions of dollars into commercializing space. They are developing new technologies and establishing space enterprises that can bring the wealth of outer space down to Earth. This is not a pipe dream, but will increasingly be the economic reality of the 2020s.

Just as Columbus and the Vikings had the imaginative drive that led them to discover the riches of a new world, we now have a cadre of space billionaires that are now leading us into this New Space era of tomorrow. These bold leaders, such as Paul Allen and Sir Richard Branson, plus other space entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Blue Origin, and Robert Bigelow, Chairman of Budget Suites and Bigelow Aerospace, not only dream of their future in the space industry but also have billions of dollars in assets. These are the bright stars of an entirely new industry that are leading us into the age of New Space commerce .


The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O'Mara

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business climate, Byte Shop, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, carried interest, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, continuous integration, cuban missile crisis, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, deindustrialization, different worldview, digital divide, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Gary Kildall, General Magic , George Gilder, gig economy, Googley, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, Hush-A-Phone, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, job-hopping, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, Palm Treo, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Paul Terrell, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, prudent man rule, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Solyndra, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, supercomputer in your pocket, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, tech worker, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the market place, the new new thing, The Soul of a New Machine, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, transcontinental railway, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, upwardly mobile, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty, Wargames Reagan, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, work culture , Y Combinator, Y2K

Founders Fund, http://foundersfund.com/the-future/, archived at https://perma.cc/82XW-VA2A. 15. Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune (December 2012); Jeff Bezos, “1997 Letter to Shareholders,” Investor Relations, Amazon.com. 16. Jeff Bezos, “2005 Letter to Shareholders,” Investor Relations, Amazon.com; Julia Kirby and Thomas A. Stewart, “The Institutional Yes,” Harvard Business Review, October 2007, 8, https://hbr.org/2007/10/the-institutional-yes, archived at https://perma.cc/XV5H-GULN. 17. Jeff Bezos, “2011 Letter to Shareholders,” Investor Relations, Amazon.com. 18. Ingrid Burrington, “Why Amazon’s Data Centers are Hidden in Spy Country,” The Atlantic, January 8, 2016. 19.

Bezos, job posting for Cadabra.Inc, Usenet, c. 1994, reproduced in Kif Leswing, “Check out the first job listing Jeff Bezos ever posted for Amazon,” Business Insider, August 22, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-first-job-listing-posted-by-jeff-bezos-24-years-ago-2018-8, archived at https://perma.cc/B3WS-PXS5. 19. “I did locate Amazon in Seattle because of Microsoft,” Bezos told an interviewer in 2018. “I thought that that big pool of technical talent would provide a good place to recruit talented people from.” Jeff Bezos, interview with David M. Rubenstein, The Economic Club of Washington, D.C., September 13, 2018. 20. “Jeff Bezos, Founder and CEO, Amazon.com.” Charlie Rose (interview #12656), November 16, 2012. 21. Julia Kirby and Thomas A.

Elizabeth Perez, “Store on Internet is Open Book,” The Seattle Times, September 19, 1995, E1; Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013); Randall E. Stross, The eBoys: The True Story of the Six Tall Men who Backed eBay and Other Billion-Dollar Startups (New York: Ballantine Books, 2000), 48–57. 16. Craig Torres, “Computer Powerhouse of D. E. Shaw & Co. May be Showing Wall Street’s Direction,” The Wall Street Journal, October 15, 1992, C1. 17. Robert Spector, Amazon.com: Get Big Fast (New York: HarperBusiness, 2000), 2–5. 18. Bezos, job posting for Cadabra.Inc, Usenet, c. 1994, reproduced in Kif Leswing, “Check out the first job listing Jeff Bezos ever posted for Amazon,” Business Insider, August 22, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-first-job-listing-posted-by-jeff-bezos-24-years-ago-2018-8, archived at https://perma.cc/B3WS-PXS5. 19.


pages: 308 words: 85,880

How to Fix the Future: Staying Human in the Digital Age by Andrew Keen

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Ada Lovelace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Andrew Keen, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, death from overwork, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gig economy, global village, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-truth, postindustrial economy, precariat, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech baron, tech billionaire, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, the High Line, the new new thing, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yogi Berra, Zipcar

If the GDPR legislation is properly enforced, Timmers added, it will also trigger enormous innovation around privacy. Trust, he reminded me, is the “most important currency” of our digital age. An entrepreneur who is able to build new companies based on what Margrethe Vestager called “privacy by design,” he predicted, will be the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, creating the next Amazon or Facebook of the digital age. So what are we to make of all these new laws? Some of this regulation, such as the EU’s determination to shine a light on how Facebook really uses its customers’ data or the EU’s efforts to make social media networks accountable for the fake news published on their platforms, is enormously valuable.

So what about the ethics of Big Tech’s other multibillionaires—the Cooks, Zuckerbergs, Benioffs, Bezoses, Pages, and Brins? None, of course, are as immature as Travis Kalanick. Nor are they as Kantian as Reid Hoffman. Their morality is, instead, a complicated question. Sometimes we can trust these plutocrats, sometimes we can’t. Some, like Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who at the time of writing has a net worth of $83 billion, making him the second-richest person on earth after Bill Gates, are simultaneously cutthroat businessmen and selfless philanthropists. On the one hand, Bezos is the much-feared leader of a semi-monopolistic e-commerce company that has highly questionable labor practices and a well-documented history of bullying publishers;9 on the other, he’s the public-spirited owner of the venerable Washington Post and—under a Trump regime that has castigated journalists as “enemies of the people”—among America’s most powerful defenders of both a free press and democracy.

But rather than borrowing the Carnegie model of investing money thoughtfully in the improvement of society, much of today’s tech philanthropy seems to simply reflect the particular enthusiasm of the donor or the donor’s spouse. Having frittered away $500 million in a wasted investment in New Jersey schools, Mark Zuckerberg, for example, seems to have settled on investing $3 billion of his wealth in the herculean effort to “cure, prevent and manage all disease.”17 Jeff Bezos, in contrast, is an avid space colonialist who even has a plan to set up an Amazon-like delivery service for “future human settlements” on the moon.18 And Google cofounder Sergei Brin is investing between $100 million and $150 million in building the world’s biggest aircraft to deliver supplies for humanitarian missions.


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

The next day, as Clinton: Gabrielle Bluestone, “The Washington Post Served Napkins Off a Woman’s Body at Its Election Party,” Jezebel, November 14, 2016, https://jezebel.com/the-washington-post-served-napkins-off-a-womans-body-at-1788966492. In 2016 Ryan celebrated: Nat Levy, “The Jeff Bezos Effect? Washington Post Is Profitable and Set to Hire Dozens of Journalists in 2017,” GeekWire, December 27, 2016, https://www.geekwire.com/2016/jeff-bezos-effect-washington-post-profitable-set-hire-dozens-journalists-2017/. It wasn’t the machine: Jennifer Steinhauer, “A Tailor-Made Publisher Taking Over Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post,” New York Times, September 22, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/23/business/media/beltway-insider-takes-helm-at-the-post.html.

When Bezos was asked: Olivia Solon, “Jeff Bezos Says Donald Trump’s Behavior ‘Erodes Democracy,’ ” Guardian, October 20, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/oct/20/jeff-bezos-donald-trump-criticism-amazon-blue-origin. Two days after the election: Deirdre Bosa, “Jeff Bezos Congratulates President-Elect Trump, after Offering to Shoot Him into Space,” CNBC.com, November 10, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/10/jeff-bezos-congratulates-president-elect-trump-after-offering-to-shoot-him-into-space.html. Less than a week later: Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump), “The #AmazonWashingtonPost, sometimes referred to as the guardian of Amazon not paying internet taxes (which they should) is FAKE NEWS!”

Steve Coll, a Pulitzer-winning: Sarah Ellison, “Ghosts in the Newsroom,” Vanity Fair, March 7, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/04/washington-post-watergate. The Post would have to look: Steven Mufson, “As Jeff Bezos Prepares to Take Over, a Look at Forces That Shaped the Washington Post Sale,” Washington Post, September 27, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/as-jeff-bezos-prepares-to-take-over-a-look-at-forces-that-shaped-the-washington-post-sale/2013/09/27/11c7d01a-2622-11e3-ad0d-b7c8d2a594b9_story.html. Coll was ready to present: Sarah Ellison, “Ghosts in the Newsroom,” Vanity Fair, March 7, 2012, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/04/washington-post-watergate.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He asked the requester if he would be willing to contact Amazon on his behalf, to explain that he did good work, that he was a reliable worker, and that he deserved to keep his account. Riyaz never heard back from the man. When he told us the story, it was clear he felt betrayed by someone he considered a professional colleague. Riyaz even went so far as to write a letter to Jeff Bezos. That was a huge risk for Riyaz. The subtext of this work is that workers remain invisible. Standing up and calling attention to yourself is a fast track to getting a “bad reputation.” Jeff Bezos never wrote back. Unfortunately, Riyaz’s case is not unusual. According to a national survey we conducted in partnership with Pew Research, 30 percent of on-demand gig workers reported not getting paid for work they performed.

One feature of Dynamo was that workers could “upvote” suggestions, meaning a radical idea could quickly be pushed to the top. And that’s exactly what happened. In short order, the suggestion of using the site to write to Jeff Bezos started trending. The emails could be fan mail or missives detailing how MTurk workers wanted to improve their work environment. The idea was fueled by Jeff Bezos’s repeated and public claims that he wasn’t happy if his customers weren’t satisfied with their Amazon experience. He’d even offered up his email address in a Business Insider interview. So why not use customer service logic to advocate for the often less visible “customer” on MTurk—the worker picking up tasks for hire?

Six Silberman, “Human-Centered Computing and the Future of Work: Lessons from Mechanical Turk and Turkopticon, 2008–2015” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2015). [back] 2. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013). [back] 3. Ibid. [back] 4. Ibid. [back] 5. It’s rumored that MTurk was a pet project of Jeff Bezos himself, who saw it as a tool that could not only serve MTurk internally but generate income as a new marketplace serving its sellers who also needed help cleaning up their listings. See Stone, The Everything Store. [back] 6.


pages: 231 words: 71,248

Shipping Greatness by Chris Vander Mey

business logic, corporate raider, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fudge factor, Google Chrome, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, performance metric, recommendation engine, Skype, slashdot, sorting algorithm, source of truth, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, two-pizza team, web application

Abashed, I went to Dartmouth, and studied at the Thayer School of Engineering and the Tuck School of Business, earning a master’s of engineering management degree. I left Dartmouth and joined Amazon, where I was a technical product program manager and an engineering manager (a.k.a. two-pizza team leader). On projects like customer reviews, identity, and fraud-fighting infrastructure, I saw how Jeff Bezos and his lieutenants worked and learned to mimic how some of the best in the business did the job. I eventually went to Google, and as a senior product manager I spent over five years focusing on scalability, business strategy, and the interpersonal dynamics inherent in software teams. I grew Google Pack, shipped the Google Update service used in dozens of products, and helped build the Google Apps program through mobile sync services, connectors for Microsoft Outlook, and data import tools.

road to product definition does not even come close to the wealth, fame, and success road signs. Your business likely caters to a segment of customers who have many different problems; how do you identify the critical problem you are going to solve first? Let’s try driving the road backward, starting with those who are actually successful, famous, and yes, ridiculously wealthy. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has made a small fortune for his company and shareholders by constantly emphasizing that teams “focus on customers, not competition.” The great clarity that this distinction provides is that your team remains problem focused, rather than reactive. Similarly, Larry Page, CEO of Google, frequently says, “Start with the customer and work outward.”

If you complete the steps one at a time and celebrate each milestone you pass, you can actually have a pretty good time. Most of these steps, except for steps 6 and 7, are fast and fun (if you’re a geek like me). So let’s start at step 1 and build a product. Step 1. Write a Press Release An unorthodox but otherwise great way to start defining your product is by writing a press release. Jeff Bezos and company pioneered the “write the press release first” approach at Amazon. The concept is that you have one page in which to make the marketing announcement. A great press release or blog post communicates critical information that succinctly describes the product. The benefit of starting with a press release instead of the FAQ or one-pager is that it is inherently brief, readable, and focused on what the real product will mean to real users.


pages: 265 words: 75,202

The Heart of Business: Leadership Principles for the Next Era of Capitalism by Hubert Joly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, big-box store, Blue Ocean Strategy, call centre, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, David Brooks, do well by doing good, electronic shelf labels (ESLs), fear of failure, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, imposter syndrome, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, lockdown, long term incentive plan, Marc Benioff, meta-analysis, old-boy network, pension reform, performance metric, popular capitalism, pre–internet, race to the bottom, remote working, Results Only Work Environment, risk/return, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, supply-chain management, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, young professional, zero-sum game

At a press conference in our Bellevue store across the water from Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, Jeff Bezos and I jointly announced an expanded partnership. Amazon gave Best Buy the exclusive rights to sell FireTV embedded in smart TVs. The only place to buy nearly a dozen models would be at a Best Buy store and through Best Buy on Amazon.com. “A TV is a considered purchase,” Jeff explained during the press conference. “People do want to come in and see the TV. They want to experiment with the TV—try it out.” The Star Tribune found the moment surreal. “Jeff Bezos, whose company many once thought would put Best Buy out of business, not only trading compliments with his competitor, but also acknowledging he could use its help to sell products,” it read.1 “Physical stores aren’t going anywhere,” Jeff said.

This is a must-read and an inspiration for any leader wanting to make a positive economic, social, and environmental impact.” —SOPHIE BELLON, Chairwoman, Sodexo “Best Buy’s turnaround under Hubert Joly’s leadership was remarkable—a case study that should and will be taught in business schools around the world. Bold and thoughtful—he has a lot to teach.” —JEFF BEZOS, founder and CEO, Amazon “The quest for meaning, and with it, questions about leadership and purpose in business, may very well be capitalism’s most pressing issue today. Drawing on his inspiring journey as Chair and CEO of Best Buy, Hubert Joly describes how placing people and their aspirations at the core of companies is the key to aligning personal fulfilment, business success, and a positive impact on the world.

I just did not know. If someone asks you about last month’s market share or what section 1502 of the Dodd-Frank Act is all about, there is nothing wrong with saying, “I don’t know. Let me look into it!” Alan Mulally thwarted perfectionism so problems could be acknowledged and resolved. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos points out that perfectionism also impedes innovation by making us afraid to fail. “I believe we are the best place in the world to fail,” he wrote in a letter to shareholders. “Failure and invention are inseparable twins. To invent, you have to experiment, and if you know in advance that it’s going to work, it’s not an experiment.


pages: 1,239 words: 163,625

The Joys of Compounding: The Passionate Pursuit of Lifelong Learning, Revised and Updated by Gautam Baid

Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andrei Shleifer, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, backtesting, barriers to entry, beat the dealer, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, business process, buy and hold, Cal Newport, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commoditize, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, diversification, diversified portfolio, dividend-yielding stocks, do what you love, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Everything should be made as simple as possible, fear index, financial independence, financial innovation, fixed income, follow your passion, framing effect, George Santayana, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, index fund, intangible asset, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Masayoshi Son, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive income, passive investing, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, six sigma, software as a service, software is eating the world, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, tail risk, Teledyne, the market place, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, time value of money, transaction costs, tulip mania, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, wealth creators, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

., July 22, 2016, https://www.inc.com/elle-kaplan/why-warren-buffett-s-20-slot-rule-will-make-you-insanely-wealthy-and-successful.html. 3. Adi Ignatius, “Jeff Bezos on Leading for the Long-Term at Amazon,” Harvard Business Review, January 2013, https://hbr.org/2013/01/jeff-bezos-on-leading-for-the. 4. Jeff Bezos, Amazon 2014 Letter to Shareholders, https://ir.aboutamazon.com/static-files/a9bd5c6a-c11c-4b38-9532-ae2f73d8bd10. 5. Ignatius, “Jeff Bezos on Leading.” 6. James B. Stewart, “Amazon Says Long Term and Means It,” New York Times, December 16, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/17/business/at-amazon-jeff-bezos-talks-long-term-and-means-it.html. 7. Jeff Bezos, Amazon 1997 Letter to Shareholders, http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/reports/Shareholderletter97.pdf. 8.

Over two thousand years ago, Aristotle defined a first principle as “the first basis from which a thing is known.” These are the fundamental assumptions that we know are true. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it. —Jeff Bezos First principles thinking is a way of saying, “Think like a scientist.” Scientists don’t assume anything. They start with questions like “What are we absolutely sure is true?” or “What has been proven?” When Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com, in 1995, he clearly identified the first principles that would guide his business philosophy—that is, long-term thinking and a relentless focus on the customer rather than on the competition.

Collaborative Fund (blog), July 5, 2017. http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/what-i-believe-most. Howe, Rich. “What Klarman and Greenblatt Have to Say About Investing in Spinoffs—Part II.” ValueWalk, March 15, 2018. https://www.valuewalk.com/2018/03/klarman-greenblatt-investing-spinoffs. Ignatius, Adi. “Jeff Bezos on Leading for the Long-Term at Amazon.” Harvard Business Review, January 2013. https://hbr.org/2013/01/jeff-bezos-on-leading-for-the. “Investing Instinct.” Investment Masters Class. http://mastersinvest.com/investinginstinctquotes. Jobs, Steve. “ ‘You’ve Got to Find What You Love,’ Jobs Says.” Stanford News, June 14, 2005. https://news.stanford.edu/2005/06/14/jobs-061505.


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Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol

Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Boeing 747, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, delayed gratification, different worldview, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Gary Taubes, Gene Kranz, George Santayana, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Inbox Zero, index fund, Isaac Newton, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, late fees, lateral thinking, lone genius, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occam's razor, out of africa, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skinner box, SpaceShipOne, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subprime mortgage crisis, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tyler Cowen, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra

Chuck Salter, “Failure Doesn’t Suck,” Fast Company, May 1, 2007, www.fastcompany.com/59549/failure-doesnt-suck. 11. Hans C. Ohanian, Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2009). 12. Jillian D’Onfro, “Jeff Bezos: Why It Won’t Matter If the Fire Phone Flops,” Business Insider, December 2, 2014, www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-on-big-bets-risks-fire-phone-2014-12. 13. D’Onfro, “If the Fire Phone Flops.” 14. Derek Thompson, “Google X and the Science of Radical Creativity,” Atlantic, November 2017, www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/11/x-google-moonshot-factory/540648. 15.

It was developed in response to yesterday’s troubles. If we treat it like a sacred pact—if we don’t question it—process can impede forward movement. Over time, our organizational arteries get clogged with outdated procedures. Complying with these procedures then becomes the benchmark for success. “It’s not that rare,” Jeff Bezos says, “to hear a junior leader defend a bad outcome with something like, ‘Well, we followed the process.’” “If you’re not watchful,” Bezos warns, “the process can become the thing.” But you don’t need to throw your standard operating procedures into the shredder and create a corporate free-for-all.

If these scientists lived by the “failure is not an option” mantra, the self-loathing, the shame, and the embarrassment would all cripple them. A moratorium on failure is a moratorium on progress. If you’re in the business of taking moonshots—if you’re going to experiment with bold ideas—you’re going to miss more often than you connect. “Experiments are by their very nature prone to failure,” Jeff Bezos explained. “But a few big successes compensate for dozens and dozens of things that didn’t work.”12 Remember the Amazon Fire phone? The company lost $170 million over that misfire.13 Or Google Glass, designed by X, Google’s moonshot factory?14 The Glass was supposed to be the next best thing after the smartphone, but it flopped.


pages: 237 words: 64,411

Humans Need Not Apply: A Guide to Wealth and Work in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Jerry Kaplan

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, bank run, bitcoin, Bob Noyce, Brian Krebs, business cycle, buy low sell high, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, driverless car, drop ship, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flash crash, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, haute couture, hiring and firing, income inequality, index card, industrial robot, information asymmetry, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, Satoshi Nakamoto, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, Turing test, Vitalik Buterin, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

For example, see “Family Health, May 2011: Local Assistance Estimate for Fiscal Years 2010–11 and 2011–12; Management Summary,” Fiscal Forecasting and Data Management Branch State Department of Health Care Services, last modified May 10, 2011, http://www.dhcs.ca.gov/dataandstats/reports/Documents/Fam_Health_Est/M11_Mgmt_Summ_Tab.pdf. 5. Kristina Strain, “Is Jeff Bezos Turning a Corner with His Giving?” Inside Philanthropy, April 9, 2014, http://www.insidephilanthropy.com/tech-philanthropy/2014/4/9/is-jeff-bezos-turning-a-corner-with-his-giving.html. 6. William J. Broad, “Billionaires with Big Ideas Are Privatizing American Science,” New York Times, March 15, 2014, science section, http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/science/billionaires-with-big-ideas-are-privatizing-american-science.html. 7.

Superhuman omniscient systems observe our individual and group behavior, then guide us to what we purchase, listen to, watch, and read—while the profits quietly pile up elsewhere. You don’t have to look very far to find an example of how this affects you—there’s no waiting on checkout 1 in the Amazon cloud! 6. America, Land of the Free Shipping I first met Jeff Bezos at a 1996 retreat for CEOs of the venture capital firm of Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers. This may sound like a Davos- or Bohemian Club–style conclave of movers and shakers, but nothing could be farther from the truth. Most of the thirty or so attendees were relative newcomers to the Silicon Valley scene.

No problem, charge your competitors more to stock and ship their inventory than it costs you to handle the same products. The common thread behind these business tactics is to acquire an enduring information advantage over customers and competitors, deftly wrapped in a narrative of low prices, outstanding service, and fair play. I think Amazon is an amazing company and Jeff Bezos is a great guy, but there’s another reason the financial markets value the company at more than six hundred times earnings (2013), when the average is around twenty times earnings: they look forward to the inevitable time when the company extracts monopoly prices after locking in its customers and scorching the earth of competitors.


pages: 222 words: 70,132

Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy by Jonathan Taplin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "there is no alternative" (TINA), 1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, bitcoin, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Clayton Christensen, Cody Wilson, commoditize, content marketing, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, decentralized internet, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, future of journalism, future of work, George Akerlof, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Google bus, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Silverman, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, packet switching, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, revision control, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skinner box, smart grid, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, software is eating the world, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tech billionaire, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, unpaid internship, vertical integration, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, you are the product

The foundations of an Internet economy that operates with little regulation have been the basis of their fortunes. 5. But perhaps the greatest beneficiary of the no-taxes, no-regulation regime of the Internet has been Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. Bezos was schooled in the libertarian ethos by his family. His stepfather, Miguel Bezos, had emigrated from Cuba after the rise of Castro and was an engineer for Exxon in Houston, Texas. Mike Bezos (as he is now known) contributed to Gary Johnson’s Libertarian Party presidential campaign in 2012. Jeff Bezos outlined his core libertarian philosophy in an interview for the Academy of Achievement: I think people should carefully reread the first part of the Declaration of Independence.

As Ben Tarnoff, writing in the Guardian noted, one of the reasons Peter Thiel was drawn to Donald Trump’s authoritarian candidacy was that “he would discipline what Thiel calls ‘the unthinking demos’: the democratic public that constrains capitalism.” But for now there are few constraints on Tech capitalism. The monopoly profits of this new era have been very, very good to a few men. The Forbes 400 list, which ranks American wealth, places Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the top ten. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham (CEO of Y Combinator), in a 2016 blog post, was quite open about celebrating income inequality. He wrote, “I’ve become an expert on how to increase economic inequality, and I’ve spent the past decade working hard to do it.

Google and YouTube are ad-supported “free riders” driven by a permissionless philosophy. Facebook, with its libertarian financier’s roots, takes much of the same stance toward content and advertising, but there are signs that its CEO has real ethical questions about where the company is going. Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, embraces the libertarian creed but has not taken the “don’t ask permission” route, has instead opened a new front: a relentless push to lower prices and commoditize content (especially books), which presents a different danger. And then there is Apple, the dissenter from the libertarian creed.


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Elon Musk by Walter Isaacson

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, ChatGPT, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, estate planning, fail fast, fake news, game design, gigafactory, GPT-4, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, hive mind, Hyperloop, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, Kwajalein Atoll, lab leak, large language model, Larry Ellison, lockdown, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Michael Shellenberger, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, OpenAI, packet switching, Parler "social media", paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, remote working, rent control, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, supply-chain management, tech bro, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, wikimedia commons, William MacAskill, work culture , Y Combinator

Angus MacKenzie, “Shocking Winner: Proof Positive That America Can Still Make (Great) Things,” Motor Trend, Dec. 10, 2012; Peter Elkind, “Panasonic’s Power Play,” Fortune, Mar. 6, 2015; Vance, Elon Musk; Higgins, Power Play. 37. Musk and Bezos: Author’s interviews with Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Nelson, Tim Buzza. Dan Leone, “Musk Calls Out Blue Origin,” SpaceNews, Sept. 25, 2013; Walter Isaacson, “In This Space Race, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Are Eager to Take You There,” New York Times, Apr. 24, 2018; Jeff Bezos, Invent and Wander (Public Affairs/Harvard Business Review, 2021); Explorers Club 2014 dinner video, https://vimeo.com/119342003; Amanda Gordon, “Scene Last Night: Jeff Bezos Eats Gator, Elon Musk Space,” Bloomberg, Mar. 17, 2014; Jeffrey P. Bezos, Gary Lai, and Sean R.

At the dinner, Tsuga agreed to be a 40 percent partner in the Gigafactory. When asked why Panasonic decided to do the deal, he replied, “We are too conservative. We are a ninety-five-year-old company. We have to change. We have to use some of Elon’s thinking.” 37 Musk and Bezos SpaceX, 2013–2014 Having dinner in 2004 Jeff Bezos Jeff Bezos, the supercharged Amazon billionaire with a boisterous laugh and boyish enthusiasms, pursues his passions with a talent for being, at the same time, both exuberant and methodical. Like Musk, he was a childhood addict of science fiction, racing through the shelves of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein books at his local library.

But he took away his oversight duties and eased him out in a few months. “You did an awesome job over many years, but eventually everybody’s time comes to retire,” Musk told him in an email. “Yours is now.” 58 Bezos vs. Musk, Round 2 SpaceX, 2021 Jeff Bezos right after his trip Richard Branson right before his Goading each other Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk had tangled, beginning in 2013, over who would lease the storied Pad 39A at Cape Canaveral (Musk won), be first to land a rocket that went to the edge of space (Bezos), land a rocket that launched to orbit (Musk), and send humans into orbit (Musk).


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Binge Times: Inside Hollywood's Furious Billion-Dollar Battle to Take Down Netflix by Dade Hayes, Dawn Chmielewski

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Big Tech, borderless world, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, digital rights, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, George Floyd, global pandemic, Golden age of television, haute cuisine, hockey-stick growth, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, late fees, lockdown, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, Netflix Prize, Osborne effect, performance metric, period drama, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, QR code, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, remote working, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech bro, the long tail, the medium is the message, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, WeWork

CHAPTER 21: AMAZON ON THE MARCH Mike Hopkins, Jenifer Salke, and Roy Price were interviewed by the authors. The chapter also draws upon Dawn Chmielewski and David Jeans, “Why Amazon Is Paying More for MGM Than Disney Did for Star Wars and Marvel,” Forbes, May 26, 2021; Peter Bart, “Jeff Bezos Is Taking Aim at Hollywood,” Deadline, December 9, 2016; and Jeff Bezos comments in Amazon’s April 29, 2021, quarterly earnings release. CHAPTER 22: PACIENCIA Y FE Details of the premiere of In the Heights and interviews with the principals are the authors’ firsthand accounts and from Dade Hayes, “In the Heights Moves the Masses at Tribeca Festival Premiere,” Deadline, June 9, 2021.

Chapter 15: “If You Want to Grab People’s Attention, You Have to Tease” Chapter 16: The IQ Test Part IV: The Incumbent Responds Chapter 17: Netflix Bets on Itself Part V: Meeting the Public Chapter 18: Liftoff Chapter 19: In Space, No One Can Hear You Stream Part VI: Navigating the Recovery Chapter 20: To Everything (Churn, Churn, Churn) Chapter 21: Amazon on the March Chapter 22: Paciencia y Fe Epilogue Acknowledgments Notes Index About the Authors Copyright About the Publisher Streamatis Personae Amazon Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman, former CEO Andy Jassy, CEO Mike Hopkins, senior vice president, Prime Video and Amazon Studios Jennifer Salke, head of Amazon Studios Albert Cheng, chief operating officer, co-head of television Roy Price, former head of global video content and Amazon Studios Bob Berney, former head of marketing and distribution, Amazon Studios Apple Steve Jobs, late cofounder and CEO Tim Cook, CEO Zack Van Amburg, co-head of Apple TV+ Jamie Erlicht, co-head of Apple TV+ Eddy Cue, senior vice president, internet software and services AT&T/WarnerMedia Randall Stephenson, former CEO, AT&T John Stankey, CEO, AT&T; former CEO, WarnerMedia Jason Kilar, CEO, WarnerMedia Andy Forssell, executive vice president and general manager, WarnerMedia direct-to-consumer Bob Greenblatt, former chairman, WarnerMedia Kevin Reilly, former chief content officer, HBO Max Jeremy Legg, former chief technology officer, WarnerMedia Richard Plepler, former chairman and CEO, HBO Comcast/NBCUniversal Brian Roberts, CEO, Comcast Steve Burke, former CEO, NBCUniversal Bonnie Hammer, vice chairman, NBCUniversal Matt Strauss, chairman, direct-to-consumer and international Jeff Shell, CEO, NBCUniversal Netflix Reed Hastings, cofounder, co-CEO Marc Randolph, cofounder, former CEO Ted Sarandos, co-CEO Cindy Holland, former vice president, content acquisition and original series Bela Bajaria, vice president, content Scott Stuber, vice president, original films Neil Hunt, former chief product officer Patty McCord, former head of HR Quibi Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder Meg Whitman, CEO Roku Anthony Wood, founder, CEO Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president, platform business The Walt Disney Co.

This singular focus is something Netflix shares with another interloper, Amazon, which thought of movies and TV shows as a glittery lure to attract customers—much as banks once handed out free toasters for opening an account. “When we win a Golden Globe, it helps us sell more shoes,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos once said in a 2016 interview. “And it does that in a very direct way. Because if you look at Prime members, they buy more on Amazon than non-Prime members, and one of the reasons they do that is once they pay their annual fee, they’re looking around to see, ‘How can I get more value out of the program?’”


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The Alliance: Managing Talent in the Networked Age by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha, Chris Yeh

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centralized clearinghouse, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, new economy, pre–internet, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, Steve Jobs

dept=product-management&req=a0IA000000CwBjlMAF. 3 Rachel Emma Silverman and Lauren Weber, “An Inside Job: More Firms Opt to Recruit from Within,” Wall Street Journal, May 29, 2012, http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303395604577434563715828218. 4 Reid Hoffman, “If, Why, and How Founders Should Hire a ‘Professional,’” CEO, January 21, 2013, http://reidhoffman.org/if-why-and-how-founders-should-hire-a-professional-ceo/. 5 “Rich Corporate Culture at McDonald’s Is Built on Collaboration,” Financial Post, February 4, 2013, http://business.financialpost.com/2013/02/04/rich-corporate-culture-at-mcdonalds-is-built-on-collaboration/. 6 Kim Bhasin, “Jeff Bezos Talks About His Old Job at McDonald’s, Where He Had to Clean Gallons of Ketchup off the Floor,” Business Insider, July 23, 2012, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-reflects-on-his-old-job-at-mcdonalds-2012-7. 7 Anne Fulton, “Career Agility: The New Employer-Employee Bargain,” blog post, March 21, 2013, http://www.careerengagementgroup.com/blog/2013/03/21/career-agility-the-new-employer-employee-bargain/. 8 Jeffrey Pfeffer, “Business and the Spirit: Management Practices That Sustain Values,” Stanford University Graduate School of Business Research Paper Series, no. 1713, October 2001, https://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/library/1713.pdf.

Amazon has become a leader in the field of cloud computing, thanks to Amazon Web Services (AWS), which allows companies to rent online storage and computing power, rather than buying and operating their own servers. Companies ranging from Fortune 500 giants to one-person start-ups run their businesses on AWS. What most people don’t realize is that the idea for AWS didn’t come from Amazon’s famed entrepreneurial founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, or even from a member of his executive team, but rather from an “ordinary” employee. In 2003, website engineering manager Benjamin Black wrote a short paper describing a vision for Amazon’s infrastructure and suggested selling virtual servers as a service.10 He realized that the same operational expertise that made Amazon an efficient retailer could be repurposed to serve the general market for computing power.

You can take many of the competencies we will help you develop in whatever it is you choose to do—whether it’s with McDonald’s or whether it’s outside of McDonald’s.”5 Some people, like Jillard himself, stay at the company a very long time. Most leave the company after a tour or two—but they can draw useful lessons from their experience. Before he was a famous CEO, a young Jeff Bezos flipped burgers for McDonald’s. Years later, he said that his manager at McDonald’s was “excellent” and taught him the importance of responsibility!6 An organization doesn’t have to be a for-profit business to use tours of duty to build adaptive teams. Endeavor is a global nonprofit that serves entrepreneurs; this makes adaptability essential.


pages: 190 words: 62,941

Wild Ride: Inside Uber's Quest for World Domination by Adam Lashinsky

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, asset light, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, Benchmark Capital, business process, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, gig economy, Golden Gate Park, Google X / Alphabet X, hustle culture, independent contractor, information retrieval, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, new economy, pattern recognition, price mechanism, public intellectual, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, young professional

Once involved with Uber, he recruited a bevy of these celebrities to invest. The boldface names he lined up included actors Edward Norton, Sophia Bush, Olivia Munn, and Ashton Kutcher. Pishevar also was responsible for bringing in the likes of agent Ari Emanuel, director Lawrence Bender, and music impresario Jay Z. He introduced Kalanick to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, whose private investment arm, Bezos Expeditions, took a piece of the action. Another critical new investor was Goldman Sachs, which would go on to act as Uber’s unofficial financial adviser as well as a source of much of its nonengineering talent for the next several years. As Uber grew in popularity, it began to court controversy wherever it went.

Still, Uber was growing rapidly, and surely the criticism was a reflection that people cared about Kalanick’s product enough to complain about it. What’s more, if he was beginning to feel the heat from the public, he also was gaining fans among like-minded entrepreneurs. Bill Gurley recounts a dinner with Jeff Bezos, an Uber investor, where Bezos praised Kalanick for his entrepreneurial chops. It was the very controversy around Kalanick that had won him praise from Bezos. “He is so correct on surge pricing,” Bezos told Gurley. “He is fundamentally, absolutely correct. And a large contingent of the press and others want to talk him out of it.

“The button quickly became the single largest source of organic sign-ups for us,” says Baker, organic meaning free, or not generated by paid marketing. “So it was a very good ‘today’ decision.” In early 2014, Kalanick hired a former Amazon executive named Jeff Holden to oversee Uber’s products. Holden had worked with Jeff Bezos during his pre-Amazon career on Wall Street at a firm called D. E. Shaw and then at Amazon. When he connected with Kalanick he was at Groupon, an e-commerce site in Chicago that had grown at a torrid pace and then stalled. His assignment was to professionalize Uber’s product development. “When I got here very little new product development was going on,” says Holden.


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This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World by Yancey Strickler

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, accelerated depreciation, Adam Curtis, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, business logic, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dutch auction, effective altruism, Elon Musk, financial independence, gender pay gap, gentrification, global supply chain, Hacker News, housing crisis, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Nash: game theory, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, Mr. Money Mustache, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, offshore financial centre, Parker Conrad, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Solyndra, stem cell, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, white flight, Zenefits

one for every 104,000 people: Here’s the math on Jeff Bezos’s personal police force if security were distributed like income. All data is current as of February 2019. Total net worth of United States: $123.8 trillion Total wealth of top 1%: $33.4 trillion Total wealth of Jeff Bezos: $135 billion Total wealth of bottom 50%: $250 billion Applying these ratios to law enforcement numbers in America: Total number of law enforcement officers in United States: 775,000 (as found in online estimates) Total law enforcement officers for top 1%: 209,087 Total law enforcement officers for Jeff Bezos: 845 cops Total law enforcement for bottom 50%: 1,565 cops for 163 million people (1 cop for every 104,000 people) study at Carnegie Mellon in 1969: The experiment was conducted by Edward Deci, the same researcher behind the college student life goal study that surveyed students after graduation.

Unlike money, both are made equally available to all. But if physical safety were distributed like wealth is today at our current levels of inequality, Jeff Bezos would have a personal police force of 845 cops while 163 million Americans would share 1,565 police officers between them. That’s one for every 104,000 people. At that ratio, all of New York City would have a total police force of just 82 cops wearing NYPD blue. This is obviously absurd. Jeff Bezos’s 837th cop wouldn’t be making him any safer. They’d just be getting Bezos’s 836th cop his or her coffee. Those officers would mean much more in a neighborhood that needs them.

PART TWO CHAPTER SIX WHAT’S REALLY VALUABLE? If you had the opportunity to redesign your life, chances are you’d give yourself a raise. That doesn’t make you greedy or selfish. It makes you practical. Financial security is correlated with a quality life. These are the ten wealthiest people in the world in 2019: Jeff Bezos (Amazon) Bill Gates (Microsoft) Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway) Bernard Arnault (LVMH) Carlos Slim Helu (America Movil) Amancio Ortega (Zara) Larry Ellison (Oracle) Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) Michael Bloomberg (Bloomberg LP) Larry Page (Alphabet/Google) Are these the ten happiest people in the world?


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Test Gods: Virgin Galactic and the Making of a Modern Astronaut by Nicholas Schmidle

Apollo 11, bitcoin, Boeing 737 MAX, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, crew resource management, crewed spaceflight, D. B. Cooper, Dennis Tito, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, game design, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Neil Armstrong, no-fly zone, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, overview effect, private spaceflight, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, time dilation, trade route, twin studies, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

Charles Darwin’s grandfather used to: Nicholas J. Wade, “The Original Spin Doctors—The Meeting of Perception and Insanity,” Perception 34 (2005): 253–60. “Slow is smooth and smooth”: Cecilia Kang, “Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s Moon Shot, Gets First Paying Customer,” New York Times, March 7, 2017. “You can’t cut any corners”: Steve Taylor interview with Jeff Bezos, Pathfinder Awards, The Museum of Flight, October 3, 2016. $215 million a day: Julia Limitone, “Amazon Chief Jeff Bezos Rakes in $215 Million a Day,” FoxBusiness.com, October 3, 2018. “plagued with dated paradigms”: Jack Fischer, Presentation at the Space Power Workshop, April 2009.

Conroy, Pat. The Great Santini (New York: Random House, 1976). Davenport, Christian. The Space Barons: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the Quest to Colonize the Cosmos (New York: Public Affairs, 2018). Dyson, Freeman. Disturbing the Universe (New York: Harper & Row, 1979). Esposito, Joseph A. Dinner in Camelot: The Night America’s Greatest Scientists, Writers, and Scholars Partied at the Kennedy White House (Lebanon, NH: ForeEdge, 2018). Fernholz, Tim. Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2018). Glenn, John, and Nick Taylor. John Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam Books, 1999).

When Norman Mailer first embarked on his book about the Apollo program, he couldn’t make up his mind whether Apollo was “the noblest expression of the Twentieth Century or the quintessential statement of our fundamental insanity.” Branson was not the only one with such ambitions. He had rivals, like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with his space company Blue Origin, and Tesla founder Elon Musk, with his company SpaceX. They were all building rockets to take people into space, and Branson was clear that he wanted to be “the first of the three entrepreneurs fighting to put people into space to get there.” Each had distinct visions for the journey.


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The Messy Middle: Finding Your Way Through the Hardest and Most Crucial Part of Any Bold Venture by Scott Belsky

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, blockchain, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, cryptocurrency, data science, delayed gratification, DevOps, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, endowment effect, fake it until you make it, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, private spaceflight, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, sugar pill, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the medium is the message, Tony Fadell, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional

IN ALMOST ALL CASES, BEST TO IGNORE SUNK COSTS. “If I didn’t have this”: Tom Stafford, “Why We Love to Hoard . . . and How You Can Overcome It,” BBC, July 17, 2012, www.bbc.com/future/story/20120717-why-we-love-to-hoard. Jeff Bezos once remarked: Jason Fried, “Some Advice from Jeff Bezos,” Signal v. Noise, October 19, 2012, https://signalvnoise.com/posts/3289-some-advice-from-jeff-bezos. CRAFTING BUSINESS INSTINCTS MINE CONTRADICTORY ADVICE AND DOUBT TO DEVELOP YOUR OWN INTUITION. “Look for investors”: Joe Fernandez (@JoeFernandez), “Look for investors that respect the fact you’re not always going to follow their advice,” Twitter, May 20, 2016, 7:03 A.M., https://twitter.com/JoeFernandez/status/733659372535091200.

STRATEGY IS NOURISHED BY PATIENCE. “Because of our emphasis”: Jeffrey P. Bezos, “1997 Letter to Shareholders,” Amazon, accessed March 22, 2018, www.amazon.com/p/feature/z6o9g6sysxur57t. “If we have a good quarter”: Arjun Kharpal, “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Has a Pretty Good Idea of Quarterly Earnings 3 Years in Advance,” CNBC, May 8, 2017, www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-long-term-thinking.html. “Startups win by”: Aaron Levie (@levie), “Startups win by being impatient over a long period of time,” Twitter, January 12, 2013, 5:17 P.M., https://twitter.com/levie/status/290266267682758656. 83–84 Netflix CEO Reed Hastings: Marc Graser, “Epic Fail: How Blockbuster Could Have Owned Netflix,” Variety, November 12, 2013, http://variety.com/2013/biz/news/epic-fail-how-blockbuster-could-have-owned-netflix-1200823443.

If you’re really playing the long game and turning down immediate opportunities, people will probably start scratching their heads. The seeds you’re planting—long-term relationships, curiosity-driven explorations, thought experiments—are less likely to be supported by others both socially and financially. In a talk he gave at the Aspen Institute in 2009, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, legendary for his long-term vision, reiterated this point. “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood,” he said. “When you do something that you genuinely believe in, that you have conviction about, for a long period of time, well-meaning people may criticize that effort.” To sustain yourself over this time, you can’t look for accolades, and you can’t rely on being understood.


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The Price of Tomorrow: Why Deflation Is the Key to an Abundant Future by Jeff Booth

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate raider, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, deep learning, DeepMind, deliberate practice, digital twin, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, game design, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Hyman Minsky, hype cycle, income inequality, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, late fees, low interest rates, Lyft, Maslow's hierarchy, Milgram experiment, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, OpenAI, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, software as a service, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, zero-sum game

Sanford, “Argument against Women’s Suffrage,” California State Archives, Secretary of State Elections Papers, 1911 Special Election. Available at sfpl.org/pdf/libraries/main/sfhistory/suffrageagainst.pdf. 18. Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Random House, 2011), page 2. 19. Jeff Bezos, speaking at Re:MARS conference, June 2019. Quoted in “Jeff Bezos Says the True Secret to Business Success Is to Focus on the Things That Won’t Change, Not the Things That Will,” Business Insider, June 6, 2019. businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-asks-himself-simple-question-when-planning-for-future-2019-6. 20. Kenneth Flamm, “Moore’s Law and the Economics of Semi-conductor Price Trends,” Productivity and Cyclicality in Semiconductors (The National Academies Press, 2004), pages 151–170. doi.org/10.17226/11134. 21.

Trapped—wondering how they will provide for their families and basic needs when the other shoe drops. At the same time, we are seeing a massive rise in inequality: in the United States, the top 5 percent of the population now holds more than two-thirds of the wealth, while the remaining 95 percent of the population fights for their share of the other third.1 Just three people—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett—account for more wealth than 50 percent of the population. It is easy to point at the wealthy and assign blame, but the focus should instead be on a broken system that reinforces radical inequality. In fact, many of the wealthiest families are aware of the very same risk to society and are intent on trying to fix it, either by entering the debate and making their voices heard and/or committing to philanthropy.

Do they get caught in what made them successful in the past, keeping them from evolving in the changing landscape? For many companies, that is an important question today due to an incredibly fast-changing environment that will make it ever more difficult to compete using past successes as any guide to the future. Most people will forget that even Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon and one of the great visionaries and operators of our time, was at one time precipitously close to the edge of disaster and criticized widely for the very things that would make his company so successful and celebrated today. In 2001, Amazon had lost about 94 percent of its market value from its peak in 1999, and the analysts were all over it, with some saying that it would not survive.


pages: 272 words: 76,154

How Boards Work: And How They Can Work Better in a Chaotic World by Dambisa Moyo

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset allocation, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, financial engineering, gender pay gap, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, hiring and firing, income inequality, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, long term incentive plan, low interest rates, Lyft, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, old-boy network, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Pershing Square Capital Management, proprietary trading, remote working, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, surveillance capitalism, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, Washington Consensus, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Hallett, Rachel. “These Countries Are Facing the Greatest Skills Shortages.” World Economic Forum, July 5, 2016. www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/07/countries-facing-greatest-skills-shortages/. Hamilton, Isobel A. “Amazon Turned 25 Today, Which According to Jeff Bezos Means It Will Die in as Little as 5 Years Time.” Business Insider, July 5, 2019. www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-keeps-talking-about-amazons-inevitable-death-2018-12. Hamlin, Katrina. “Hong Kong Death Offers Humbling Reminder to CEOs.” Canadian HR Reporter, August 21, 2018. www.hrreporter.com/opinion/hr-guest-blog/hong-kong-death-offers-humbling-reminder-to-ceos/298697.

., 2016. www.frc.org.uk/getattachment/ca7e94c4-b9a9-49e2-a824-ad76a322873c/UK-Corporate-Governance-Code-April-2016.pdf. Ulukaya, Hamdi. “Chobani Founder: Higher Wages Important to Our Success.” CNN Business, March 31, 2016. https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/31/news/economy/chobani-minimum-wage/index.html. Umoh, Ruth. “Why Jeff Bezos Wants Amazon Employees to ‘Wake Up Every Morning Terrified.’” CNBC Make It, August 28, 2018. www.cnbc.com/2018/08/28/why-jeff-bezos-wants-amazon-employees-to-wake-up-terrified.html. UN Climate Change. “The Paris Agreement.” https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-paris-agreement/the-paris-agreement. UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs. “Growing at a Slower Pace, World Population Is Expected to Reach 9.7 Billion in 2050 and Could Peak at Nearly 11 Billion Around 2100.”

While there are examples of companies that are one hundred years old or more, they are in a small minority. As John Elkann of Fiat remarked, “If you look at companies that have lasted more than one hundred years, it is forty-five companies for one million.” Perhaps more pointedly, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos made the sobering prediction that his company will not make it to one hundred: “Amazon is not too big to fail,” he declared. “In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their life spans tend to be thirty-plus years, not a hundred-plus years.”


pages: 201 words: 60,431

Long Game: How Long-Term Thinker Shorthb by Dorie Clark

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Blue Ocean Strategy, buy low sell high, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, fail fast, Google X / Alphabet X, hedonic treadmill, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lake wobegon effect, Lean Startup, lockdown, minimum viable product, passive income, pre–internet, rolodex, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, solopreneur, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steven Levy, the strength of weak ties, Walter Mischel, zero-sum game

Keith Caulfield, “Lady Gaga Scores Sixth No. 1 Album on Billboard 200 Chart with ‘Chromatica,’” Billboard, June 7, 2020. 2. Maria Konnikova, “The Struggles of a Psychologist Studying Self-Control,” The New Yorker, October 9, 2014. 3. BJ Fogg, “Start Tiny,” Tinyhabits.com, accessed March 9, 2021. 4. Jeff Bezos, “2017 Letter to Shareholders,” About Amazon. Amazon, April 18, 2018, https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2017-letter-to-shareholders. 5. Steven Levy, “Jeff Bezos Owns the Web in More Ways Than You Think,” Wired, November 13, 2011, https://static.longnow.org/media/djlongnow_media/press/pdf/020111113-Levy-JeffBezosOwnstheWebinMoreWaysThanYouThink.pdf. Index accomplishments, savoring, 203–205 adaptability, 200–201.

They heard from their college career counselor that it’s a good idea to “ask people to coffee” and “pick their brain,” and that’s what they’ve been doing ever since. They may have a hazy sense of why they want to speak with you (a friend recommended it for unclear reasons, or they saw your name in an alumni magazine or on LinkedIn), an inaccurate view of what you actually do, or unrealistic expectations of what you can provide (“Can you introduce me to Jeff Bezos?”). It would be great if they’d do the homework themselves, but typically they don’t—which means that your job is protecting yourself from unwanted incursions into your calendar. Your time is precious, and you should allocate it accordingly. Of course, you’ll always want to help a good friend or a client, and you’ll likely want to meet fascinating people or high-potential business leads.

Too often, professionals—even smart, accomplished ones who have no problem pitching major clients or delivering on high-stakes engagements—assume they have no agency when it comes to networking. They think, “Why would he want to meet with me?” or “She’s way too busy” or “I wouldn’t want to impose” or “I don’t want to look needy.” And it’s true: not everyone wants to have coffee with you. I can guarantee that Jeff Bezos is probably too busy, and Warren Buffett would turn you (or me) down. But that doesn’t mean no one wants to connect. In fact, what I realized during that lonely New York summer was that other people are often just as hungry to connect. They’re waiting for an invitation that never comes—and if you’re the one to step up and proffer it, they’ll be enormously grateful.


pages: 165 words: 47,193

The End of Work: Why Your Passion Can Become Your Job by John Tamny

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, asset allocation, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, cloud computing, commoditize, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, do what you love, Downton Abbey, future of work, George Gilder, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuckerberg, Palm Treo, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Yogi Berra

., 108. 6.Konstantin Kakaes, “New Directions,” Wall Street Journal, June 25–26, 2016. 7.Isaacson, Steve Jobs, 339. 8.Dawn Kawamoto, Ben Heskett, and Mike Ricciuti, “Microsoft to invest $150 million in Apple,” CNET, August 6, 1997. 9.Alexis Tsotsis, “Uber Gets $32 Million From Menlo Ventures, Jeff Bezos, and Goldman Sachs,” Tech Crunch, December 7, 2011. 10.Source: Forbes, http://www.forbes.com/profile/jeff-bezos/. 11.Peter Thiel with Blake Masters, Zero to One (New York: Crown Business, 2014), 84. 12.Noam Cohen, “Technology’s Trumpian Visions,” New York Times, July 27, 2016. 13.Enrico Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2012), 37. 14.Ibid., 13. 15.Ibid., 168. 16.Ibid., 52. 17.Ibid., 60. 18.Ibid., 62. 19.Michael Freeman, ESPN: The Uncensored History (Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2000), 58. 20.Ibid., 59. 21.Ibid. 22.Ibid., 7. 23.Ibid., 77. 24.Thomas Kessner, Capital City: New York City and the Men Behind Its Rise to Economic Dominance, 1860–1900 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2003). 25.T.

It’s hard to believe, now that Apple is the most valuable company on Earth, but when Steve Jobs returned from exile in 1997 to run the company he had co-founded, it was “less than ninety days from being insolvent.”7 Bill Gates, one of the world’s richest men, invested $150 million in Jobs’s return to Apple.8 How many more investments might Gates have made, how many more world-changing companies might he have saved, how many more global problems might his foundation have solved with the billions that he and Microsoft have handed over in taxes over the years? Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, was part of an investor group that placed $32 million with the start-up Uber back in 2011.9 Uber, itself a direct result of previous investment-driven advances in smartphones and GPS, now employs tens of thousands around the world. Bezos, the world’s richest man,10 is an aggressive investor. Imagine how much more capital he could put to work if the tax man weren’t constantly lying in wait.

According to Forbes, LeBron James, Cam Newton, Kevin Durant, Phil Mickelson, Jordan Spieth, and Kobe Bryant are among the ten highest paid athletes in the world, with annual incomes ranging from $77 million to $50 million.4 The highest paid celebrity is Taylor Swift, with $170 million in annual earnings; Howard Stern takes in $85 million, and Adele earns $80 million.5 As for the richest people in the world, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, sits at the top of the heap with a net worth of $112 billion, followed by Microsoft’s co-founder, Bill Gates ($90 billion), and Warren Buffett ($84 billion).6 Whether it’s James, Swift, or Gates, the simple truth is that none of them can spend all that he or she has. And that’s the point. Precisely because they can’t spend all that they’ve earned and saved, we all benefit.


pages: 524 words: 154,652

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

The man who is, if he is not already, on his way to becoming the biggest factory boss in history—Jeff Bezos. “Amazon, along with Walmart,” the labor reporter Luis Feliz Leon wrote in 2021, “is the twenty-first century’s quintessential factory floor.” What distinguishes Amazon from its forebears, and links it to contemporaries like Uber and InstaCart, is the way this next-level factory floor isolates, alienates, and cyborgizes its workers for maximum productivity. Andrew Ure celebrated Richard Arkwright for training humans to work long hours alongside machinery; future business theorists may laud Jeff Bezos for making workers themselves as machinelike as possible, and for making the working experience as inhuman as conceivable.

In another parallel between Arkwright and Jobs, the courts determined that Arkwright’s patent for his chief invention, the water frame, was invalid because it was actually invented by a former partner, John Kay, who, not unlike Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak, was pushed out of the partnership and thus missed out on the lion’s share of the company’s eventual riches. 10. Like Jeff Bezos A line can be drawn back from Jeff Bezos and Amazon, whose warehouses are laboratories for advancing new technologies to discipline workers for maximum productivity; through the big auto manufacturers’ automated car plants of the 1960s, which demanded workers become freshly subservient to heavy machinery; to the scientific management theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor in the 1910s, when he timed workers with a stopwatch to ensure they were meeting productivity standards; to the textile factories of the Industrial Revolution in the 1800s, and to Arkwright, where the model saw its most successful case study. 11. compared to the previous engine The Newcomen was the previously dominant steam engine, but was too inefficient to be widely affordable. 12.

Arkwright’s brashness rhymes with that of bullheaded modern tech executives who see virtue in a willingness to ignore regulations and push their workforces to extremes, or who, like Elon Musk, would gleefully wage war with perceived foes on Twitter rather than engage any criticism of how they run their businesses. Like Steve Jobs, who famously said, “We’ve always been shameless about stealing great ideas,” Arkwright surveyed the technologies of the day, recognized what worked and could be profitable, lifted the ideas, and then put them into action with an unmatched aggression. Like Jeff Bezos, Arkwright hyper-charged a new mode of factory work by finding ways to impose discipline and rigidity on his workers, and adapting them to the rhythms of the machine and the dictates of capital—not the other way around. We can look back at the Industrial Revolution and lament the working conditions, but popular culture still lionizes entrepreneurs cut in the mold of Arkwright, who made a choice to employ thousands of child laborers and to institute a dehumanizing system of factory work to increase revenue and lower costs.


pages: 125 words: 28,222

Growth Hacking Techniques, Disruptive Technology - How 40 Companies Made It BIG – Online Growth Hacker Marketing Strategy by Robert Peters

Airbnb, bounce rate, business climate, citizen journalism, content marketing, crowdsourcing, digital map, fake it until you make it, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, pull request, revision control, ride hailing / ride sharing, search engine result page, sharing economy, Skype, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, turn-by-turn navigation, Twitter Arab Spring, ubercab

Originally, the site sold only books, but as its offerings have diversified, virtually anything can now be purchased through its online stores. Additionally, the company produces a popular line of Kindle ebook readers that is largely credited with helping the digital book format to explode in popularity in recent years. Before the site was ever launched, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, attracted by the then projected web commerce growth of 2300%, analyzed the potential for various items to be sold online. He settled on books due to historic demand, low inventory price points, and the large number of titles in print. Within two months, Amazon’s sales reached $20,000 a week, a degree of success no doubt aided by Bezos’ friendship with John Ingram of the Ingram Content Group, the largest distributor of books in the world.

For ebooks published for the Kindle priced from $2.99-$9.99, authors earn 70% royalties. Is the lack of profitability in the face of such variety evidence that Amazon is trying to do too much? That it cannot be all things to all people? Or is it simply an obstacle to be overcome on the way to building what has now become in Jeff Bezos’ mind an online content ecosphere? Critics are sharply divided in their answers, but one thing is clear. If you do your market research as Bezos did, and if you offer a quality users experience with a high value proposition and low friction, you can grow your site. In the days leading up to Christmas 2013, Amazon sold 426 items per second!

Just look at Goodreads and Amazon. Goodreads was founded by a voracious reader who also happened to be a coder. Amazon was founded by an entrepreneur who looked at what could be sold online and settled on books due to historic demand and the passionate attachment of readers to literature. It’s worth noting that Jeff Bezos ruled out video, audio, and computers as the basis for the Amazon store, but then came back when he had the capital and incorporated those items and many more into the now giant retail site. His reason for the gradual expansion was incredibly sound. People who buy books also tend to buy music and videos.


pages: 382 words: 114,537

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

Overhead, a banner that must be as tall as my house hangs from the ceiling, proclaiming WORK HARD. HAVE FUN. MAKE HISTORY. Amazon.com went live on July 16, 1995, selling books out of a two-hundred-square-foot basement room in an industrial area of Seattle that had once been used for band practice and still had SONIC JUNGLE spraypainted on the door. By 1997, as founder Jeff Bezos was trying to find funders for Amazon’s IPO, the warehouse had relocated to a 93,000-square-foot space on Seattle’s Dawson Street. Still, investors were skeptical about Bezos’s business plan. “If you’re successful, you’re going to need a warehouse the size of the Library of Congress,” Bezos remembers one man explaining before turning him down.

And, at least anecdotally, workers complain about a lot of the same things. Still, Amazon consistently places near the top of lists of the most admired and respected companies in the world, while Walmart never does. Why? The Everything Store reprints an interesting memo on this topic, titled “Amazon.love,” from Jeff Bezos to his senior staff. At the time, Walmart was in the middle of yet another PR crisis over their labor practices, and Bezos mused about why that was: “Some big companies develop ardent fan bases, are widely loved by their customers, and are even perceived as cool,” [Bezos] wrote. “For different reasons, in different ways and to different degrees, companies like Apple, Nike, Disney, Google, Whole Foods, Costco and even UPS strike me as examples of large companies that are well-liked by their customers.”

Miguel smiles encouragingly. “I’m going to put it this way so you can understand how it should be fair on both ends,” he tells us. Say you worked a full forty-hour week, but Amazon only paid you for thirty. Wouldn’t they be stealing from you? Wouldn’t you be mad? Yes! we chorus. So then doesn’t Jeff Bezos have a right to be mad if you’re clocked in for forty hours but only actually working for thirty? Aren’t you stealing from him? Yes, we agree, with less enthusiasm. And, unlike other places we may have worked, Amazon will know if you’re only on task for thirty hours. “Amazon knows how your day is spent,” Miguel says.


pages: 393 words: 91,257

The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class by Joel Kotkin

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bread and circuses, Brexit referendum, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, clean water, company town, content marketing, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, deplatforming, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Future Shock, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guest worker program, Hans Rosling, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, income inequality, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job polarisation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, life extension, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, megacity, Michael Shellenberger, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Occupy movement, Parag Khanna, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-work, postindustrial economy, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Satyajit Das, sharing economy, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, technological determinism, Ted Nordhaus, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade route, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, We are the 99%, Wolfgang Streeck, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population, Y Combinator

mod=hp_lead_pos3; Erin Griffith, “Google Is On the Prowl for Cloud and AI Deals in 2017,” Fortune, January 30, 2017, http://fortune.com/2017/01/30/google-acquisitions-2017/; Cathy O’Neil, “Silicon Valley’s unchecked influence in the classroom,” Metro West Daily News, June 16, 2017, http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/opinion/20170616/oneil-silicon-valleys-unchecked-influence-in-classroom; Jon Fingas, “Jeff Bezos outlines Blue Origin’s space colony ambitions,” Engadget, May 27, 2018, https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/27/jeff-bezos-outlines-blue-origin-space-colony-ambitions/; Gregory Zuckerman and Bradley Hope, “The Quants Run Wall Street Now,” Wall Street Journal, May 21, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-quants-run-wall-street-now-1495389108. 25 Evgeny Morozov, “Tech titans are busy privatizing our data,” Guardian, April 24, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/24/the-new-feudalism-silicon-valley-overlords-advertising-necessary-evil. 26 Matthew B.

utm_term=.jf1qexXmj#.iajjZb6x8; Julie Carrie Wong, “Tesla factory workers reveal pain, injury and stress: ‘Everything feels like the future but us,’” Guardian, May 18, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/18/tesla-workers-factory-conditions-elon-musk; https://www.revealnews.org/article/tesla-says-its-factory-is-safer-but-it-left-injuries-off-the-books/. 4 Macrotrends, “Amazon: Number of Employees 2006–2019,” https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AMZN/amazon/number-of-employees. 5 Stacy Mitchell and Olivia LaVecchia, “Report: Amazon’s Stranglehold: How the Company’s Tightening Grip on the Economy Is Stifling Competition, Eroding Jobs, and Threatening Communities,” Institute for Local Self-Reliance, November 29, 2016, https://ilsr.org/amazon-stranglehold/; “What Amazon does to wages,” Economist, January 20, 2018, https://www.economist.com/united-states/2018/01/20/what-amazon-does-to-wages; Luke Barnes, “A large number of Amazon workers rely on food stamps for assistance,” Think Progress, April 20, 2018, https://thinkprogress.org/amazon-workers-rely-on-food-stamps-24ab86dd6495/; Joseph Pisani, “Amazon’s $15 an hour a win? Not so, some workers say,” AP News, October 4, 2018, https://www.apnews.com/8e60d4d9e1b74171a34d3196081910d1. 6 Julia Glum, “The Median Amazon Employee’s Salary Is $28,000. Jeff Bezos Makes More Than That in 10 Seconds,” Money, May 2, 2018, http://time.com/money/5262923/amazon-employee-median-salary-jeff-bezos/. 7 Chris Pollard, “Rushed Amazon warehouse staff pee into bottles as they’re afraid of ‘time-wasting,’” Sun, April 15, 2018, https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6055021/rushed-amazon-warehouse-staf-time-wasting/; Ceylan Yeginsu, “If Workers Slack Off, the Wristband Will Know.

., “China Tightens Restrictions on Messaging Apps,” Wall Street Journal, August 7, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-issues-new-restrictions-on-messaging-apps-1407405666; Maya Wang, “China’s Chilling ‘Social Credit’ Blacklist,” Wall Street Journal, December 11, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-chilling-social-credit-blacklist-1513036054. 7 Arjun Kharpal, “A.I. is in a ‘golden age’ and solving problems that were once in the realm of sci-fi, Jeff Bezos says,” CNBC, May 8, 2017, https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/08/amazon-jeff-bezos-artificial-intelligence-ai-golden-age.html; Michael Knox Beran, “The Narrowing of the Elite: Part One,” National Review, September 19, 2018, https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/09/educated-elites-faith-in-salvation-through-technology/. 8 Jill Priluck, “America’s corporate activism: the rise of the CEO as social justice warrior,” Guardian, July 2, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/01/americas-corporate-activism-the-rise-of-the-ceo-as-social-justice-warrior. 9 Irving Kristol, “Is Technology a Threat to Liberal Society?”


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The question was no longer whether the internet would be a business, but what kind of business it would be. Companies big and small were racing to come up with the answer. In May, Bill Gates circulated a memo at Microsoft announcing that the internet was the company’s top priority. In July, a former investment banker named Jeff Bezos launched an online storefront called Amazon.com, which claimed to be “Earth’s biggest bookstore.” In August, Netscape, creator of the most popular web browser, held its initial public offering (IPO). By the end of the first day of trading, the company was worth almost $3 billion—despite being unprofitable.

Amazon opened its online bookstore in July 1995, a couple months before the website that would become eBay appeared. The two founders struck a clear contrast. Pierre Omidyar was a programmer with a ponytail pursuing a side project. His initial motivation—creating the perfect market—was essentially utopian. Jeff Bezos was a Wall Street hedge fund manager without a utopian bone in his body. He was pure calculation, relentless and methodical, the logic of capital personified. He saw a business opportunity with the internet and didn’t want to miss it. Yet an early observer would probably consider Omidyar the better businessman.

And this is where Amazon converged with Google and Facebook: its rise, like theirs, rested on the manufacture and processing of large quantities of information. “They happen to sell products,” former executive James Thomson later told the BBC, “but they are a data company.” This identity had started to take shape in the late 1990s, as Jeff Bezos began placing greater emphasis on technology and hiring more technical people. Personalization became a priority. Software engineers created a system that used data about customers—what they bought, what they looked at—to generate automated product recommendations. Just like at Google around the same time, user behavior would be monitored in order to make automated predictions about what someone might buy.


pages: 267 words: 72,552

Reinventing Capitalism in the Age of Big Data by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Thomas Ramge

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Apollo 11, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, banking crisis, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, gig economy, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land reform, Large Hadron Collider, lone genius, low cost airline, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market design, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, Parag Khanna, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price anchoring, price mechanism, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, random walk, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, statistical model, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tacit knowledge, technoutopianism, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, universal basic income, vertical integration, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

Whenever there is a clearly delimited set of parameters, it’s easier to discover the products most appropriate for any given consumer. Because publishers have more than a century of experience classifying books into discrete categories, following the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress systems, if you’d like to buy a book on the history of women during the Civil War, you can probably find it. Indeed, one reason Jeff Bezos started Amazon as an online bookstore in 1994 was because publishers’ seasonal catalogs had recently been digitized, and he planned to build his company from the foundation of that data. The same foundation allows Amazon shoppers to select, filter for, and compare consumer goods not only according to brand, price, and buyer reviews but also according to many other less obvious characteristics.

Yet this is far from the full story. In a number of important ways, Amazon embodies the hierarchically organized, command-and-control structure of the firm that has coordinated much of the world’s phenomenal economic growth over the past few hundred years. Amazon is structured as a traditional firm, and Jeff Bezos is a traditional CEO, looking for ever more efficient and effective ways to control every aspect of his organization, and comprehensive information is his tool of choice. Bezos’s attention to every pixel is legendary. In 2011, a former Amazon engineer named Steve Yegge garnered international attention when he shared his thoughts on his ex-boss in a rant on Google Plus that he had not meant to post publicly.

Far from being an outlier, it would seem that Amazon is the embodiment of a new trend”—what the magazine branded “digital Taylorism,” after the scientific management principles of Frederick Winslow Taylor. It seemed that new technologies were ushering in a supercharged version of command-and-control, fueled by data about employees, processes, products, services, and customers. But why would a celebrated marketplace innovator like Jeff Bezos embrace the centralized structures, rules, and behaviors of the firm to manage the vast majority of his business empire rather than developing technology to capture the decentralized magic of the market? Are Amazon and other digital unicorns (as well as many of their smaller brethren) not realizing that the data-rich marketplaces they are helping to evolve also have consequences for them as firms and may force them to rethink their own raison d’être, or at the very least their organizational setup?


pages: 222 words: 75,778

Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hsieh

call centre, crowdsourcing, drop ship, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, pre–internet, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, Tony Hsieh, Y2K

The idea was to raise money from them for a stake in the company so that we could then buy out Sequoia and some of our other shareholders and board members. As we were going through the process of talking with these different potential investors, Amazon contacted us. We had been in touch with them for the past several years. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, first contacted me back in 2005 and paid us a visit in Las Vegas. Even before he flew down, we let him know that we weren’t looking to sell the company. Date: August 16, 2005 From: Tony Hsieh To: Jeff Bezos Subject: Thursday’s Amazon/Zappos meeting Hi Jeff— I’m looking forward to meeting you in person on Thursday. I just wanted to set proper expectations before the meeting and reiterate that we are looking to grow Zappos as an independent company at this point in time, but are always open to exploring partnership opportunities.

The whole point of this combination is to accelerate our growth, so if anything, we are actually anticipating more growth opportunities for everyone. Q: Will we continue to do the special things we do for our customers? Are our customer service policies going to change? Just like before, that’s completely up to us to decide. Q: Can you tell me a bit more about Jeff Bezos (Amazon CEO)? What is he like? We’d like to show an 8-minute video of Jeff Bezos that will give you some insight into his personality and way of thinking. He shares some of what he’s learned as an entrepreneur, as well as some of the mistakes he’s made. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hxX_Q5CnaA Q: I’m a business/financial reporter.

It just goes to show that you never know when something you perceive as a negative will ultimately turn out to be a good thing. The hardest part about the whole process was having to keep everything secret from our employees for the several months leading up to the signing of the paperwork. We didn’t want to do it, but were legally required to by the SEC because Amazon was a public company. Jeff Bezos flew to Vegas and came to my house to meet Alfred, Fred, and myself right before the actual signing of the legal paperwork. I barbecued burgers for him in my backyard and we all talked for a few hours. Later that night, Fred and I randomly ended up spending two hours in a recording studio talking and hanging out with Snoop Dogg.


pages: 269 words: 70,543

Tech Titans of China: How China's Tech Sector Is Challenging the World by Innovating Faster, Working Harder, and Going Global by Rebecca Fannin

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, call centre, cashless society, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, cloud computing, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, electricity market, Elon Musk, fake news, family office, fear of failure, fulfillment center, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, megacity, Menlo Park, money market fund, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, QR code, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, WeWork, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, young professional

But in the span of little more than a decade since I wrote Silicon Dragon,1 which was the first chronicle of China’s emerging Silicon Valley, the world’s second-largest economy and its expanding tech empire can no longer be underestimated. Today, young people in China looking for role models think of Robin Li, Jack Ma, and Pony Ma (founders of Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent, respectively) more than they do Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, or Steve Jobs of Apple. High-tech China is inventing the next new thing at a rapid clip in frontier technologies: artificial intelligence, biotech, green energy, robotics, and superfast mobile communications. China also is angling to get ahead in fifth-generation wireless standards, which is being compared in impact to the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.2 Large sweeps of the Chinese economy—transportation, commerce, finance, health care, entertainment, and communications—are being reimagined and reshaped by China’s assertive effort to forge ahead by leveraging technology.

Tencent’s CEO, a press-shy engineer born and educated in southern China, has been described as a scorpion who will lie in wait before attacking, has a $44 billion fortune.2 His QQ instant messaging service was based on the Israeli invention ICQ, initially acquired by AOL and then bought by Russia’s largest internet company, Mail.Ru. Today, China’s titans have left copying behind and are managing broad and deep power bases in tech. With that power comes lots of headaches. Like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page, who confront a tech backlash and constant challenges to their clout, China’s leaders face daunting issues that could weaken them: privacy concerns, counterfeit charges, restrictions on their most addictive products, and competitive threats. Baidu faces a possible reentry of Google to the Middle Kingdom some 10 years after googling didn’t knock out China’s search leader.

Renren is now left with a used car sales platform in China, a trucking app in the United States, a (software-as-a-service) business for the US real estate market—and a sagging stock price on the NYSE. Similarly, China’s once promising Amazon-like book retailer, Dangdang, and its cofounding wife-and-husband team, Peggy YuYu and Li Guoqing, faltered. Looking to one-up Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in China, YuYu used her Wall Street smarts to expand Dangdang (sounds like a cash register) into selling apparel, toys, and linens and list the company on NYSE in 2010. But she ended up taking her e-commerce offspring private in 2016 following a wave of Chinese companies heading home for higher valuations.


pages: 491 words: 77,650

Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy by Jeremias Prassl

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrei Shleifer, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, call centre, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death from overwork, Didi Chuxing, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, global supply chain, Greyball, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine readable, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market friction, means of production, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Productivity paradox, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, scientific management, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Singh, software as a service, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two tier labour market, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, warehouse automation, work culture , working-age population

Well, as so often in life, if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is: crouching in a hidden compartment inside the Turk’s chessboard was a human player, moving pieces around the board above. During pre-game presentations, the operator was quite literally hidden behind modern technology, moving around between whirring wheels, shiny dials, and complicated machinery as each side panel was opened in turn.1 * * * Over two centuries later, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos took to the stage at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to set out his vision for Amazon’s future. He hadn’t come to talk about selling books, groceries, or even drones; rather, the plan was to rent out ‘Amazon’s guts’ and become the world’s leading provider of ‘web services’. Software developers requiring processing Humans as a Service: The Promise and Perils of Work in the Gig Economy.

* * * 2 Introduction power and data storage would no longer need to buy expensive hardware to meet their needs; they could tap into Amazon’s servers instead and pay a fractional price for the services required. Amazon’s mighty servers, however, weren’t the only new product on offer that morning. Jeff Bezos revealed that the company’s algorithms were still struggling with some fairly basic tasks—from working out how to categor- ize photographs to determining which products on its website had double listings. Amazon’s solution? To develop an internal platform that outsourced these tasks to humans.

On the one hand, there are those who enthusiastically promote the gig economy as nothing less than a fundamental reinvention of labour markets, weaving ‘a fascinating tapestry of innovation, one that provides an early glimpse of what capitalist societies might evolve into over the coming decades’5—a story of platforms facilitating ‘the exchange of goods, services, or social currency, thereby enabling value creation for all participants’.6 Vociferous critics, on the other hand, castigate gig platforms for extend- ing ‘a harsh and deregulated free market into previously protected areas of our lives’,7 thus: forging an economic system in which those with money will be able to use faceless, anonymous interactions via brokerage websites and mobile apps to hire those without money by forcing an online bidding war to see who will charge the least for their labor.8 Humans as a Service Back in 2006, Jeff Bezos had no such qualms. The CEO of one of the world’s largest tech companies was excited by MTurk’s business promise. In addition to books, groceries, and gadgets, Amazon would henceforth sell work: You’ve heard of software as a service— —Well, this is basically humans as a service.9 Humans have always provided services to their employers and customers, of course.


pages: 285 words: 58,517

The Network Imperative: How to Survive and Grow in the Age of Digital Business Models by Barry Libert, Megan Beck

active measures, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset allocation, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, call centre, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, diversification, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, future of work, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, late fees, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Oculus Rift, pirate software, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, software as a service, software patent, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Wall-E, women in the workforce, Zipcar

Although it started with a simple physical product—books—you can now buy anything you might need from Amazon.com, from web hosting services to streaming videos, to cutting-edge tablets, and a lot more. Amazon also partners with sellers all over the world and allows its customers to sell on the website, too. Now you may raise the point that some of Amazon’s other practices don’t seem very open. In The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, CEO Bezos is described as “a micromanager with rigorous standards who is often uninterested in other people’s opinions.”4 To this, we reemphasize that each of the principles must be applied carefully, with consideration for your firm and the networks you are serving. You don’t need to shift to the far right edge of the business model spectrum on every principle discussed in this book, but you should consider each one deliberately and conscientiously to determine which will produce the greatest difference, and thereby the most value, for your organization.

With the starting place identified, they felt ready to start identifying all the assets (tangible and intangible) they had at their disposal. They knew it wouldn’t be an easy task, but they all agreed it was worth the effort. Next, we turn to the step of inventorying your assets. INVENTORY Take Stock of All Your Assets What’s dangerous is not to evolve. —Jeff Bezos, CEO, Amazon.com RETAIL IS CHANGING. In many us cities, Amazon now delivers Double Stuf Oreos (or whatever else you currently need) to your door in less than two hours, while allowing you to track the product from shelf to door. This is an amazing feat for a company that didn’t exist twenty years ago, in an industry—internet retailing—that barely existed before its arrival.

With funding pending approval, and an inspiring vision, the team got to work. TRACK Measure What Matters for a Network Business Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine. —Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president, Gartner Research AMAZON.COM HAS WHAT JEFF BEZOS CALLS A “CULTURE OF METRICS.” Amazon tracks its performance against about five hundred measurable goals, nearly 80 percent of them related to customer objectives. It gathers so much data about customers that it eschews classic customer segments—“millennial outdoorsman,” “preteen fashionista”—in favor of segments of one: you.


pages: 207 words: 59,298

The Gig Economy: A Critical Introduction by Jamie Woodcock, Mark Graham

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Californian Ideology, call centre, collective bargaining, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deindustrialization, Didi Chuxing, digital divide, disintermediation, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gig economy, global value chain, Greyball, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, inventory management, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low interest rates, Lyft, mass immigration, means of production, Network effects, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, precariat, rent-seeking, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, TaskRabbit, The Future of Employment, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Gizmodo, 28 October. Available at: https://gizmodo.com/my-brief-and-curious-life-as-a-mechanical-turk-1587864671 20. Shontell, A. (2013) When Amazon employees receive these onecharacter emails from Jeff Bezos, they go into a frenzy. Business Insider, 10 October. Available at: https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-customer-service-and-jeff-bezos-emails-2013-10?IR=T 21. Dynamo (2014) Dear Jeff Bezos. Available at: http://www.wearedynamo.org/dearjeffbezos 22. See http://www.wearedynamo.org/dearjeffbezos 23. https://www.freelancer.com/about 24. Despite having one of the smallest GDPs in the world (129th in 2017), Palestine is the world’s 50th largest destination for online freelancing work. 4 How are workers reshaping the gig economy?

The result was finding the article published under someone else’s name, and Adam explained, ‘if that wasn’t creepy enough, there was a video made for the “Alternative News Network” (ew…) which is just a narrated version of my article as read by a robot from the dystopian future’ (Badger, 2018). Another glimpse into the experiences of microworkers can be found with the ‘Dear Mr. Bezos’ letters organized by Mechanical Turk workers to the founder and CEO of Amazon. This followed an article in Business Insider, which noted that ‘Jeff Bezos may run Amazon and he may be a billionaire, but he is very accessible to his customers with an easy-to-find email address, jeff@amazon.com.’20 Through Dynamo,21 a workers campaign was organized to send emails to Bezos with three aims: first, to point out that ‘Turkers [workers on Mechanical Turk] are human beings, not algorithms, and should be marketed accordingly’; second, that ‘Turkers should not be sold as cheap labour, but instead skilled, flexible labour which needs to be respected’; and third, that ‘Turkers need to have a method of representing themselves to Requesters and the world via Amazon’.

Duffy, A.E.P. (1961) New unionism in Britain, 1889–1890: A reappraisal. Economic History Review, 14(2): 306–19. Duménil, G. and Lévy, D. (2005) The neoliberal (counter-)revolution. In A. Saad-Filho and D. Johnston (eds.), Neoliberalism: A Critical Reader. London: Pluto Press. Dynamo (2014) Dear Jeff Bezos. Available at: http://www.wearedynamo.org/dearjeffbezos Eubanks, V. (2019) Automating Inequality: How High-Tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor. New York: St. Martin’s Press. European Commission (2008) Communication from the Commission to the European Council: A European Economic Recovery Plan.


pages: 340 words: 97,723

The Big Nine: How the Tech Titans and Their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity by Amy Webb

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Ada Lovelace, AI winter, air gap, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bioinformatics, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Flynn Effect, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, Inbox Zero, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, optical character recognition, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing machine, Turing test, uber lyft, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Hernandez, “A Hong Kong Newspaper on a Mission to Promote China’s Soft Power,” New York Times, March 31, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/31/world/asia/south-china-morning-post-hong-kong-alibaba.html. 32. Paul Farhi, “Washington Post Closes Sale to Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos,” Washington Post, October 1, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/washington-post-closes-sale-to-amazon-founder-jeff-bezos/2013/10/01/fca3b16a-2acf-11e3-97a3-ff2758228523_story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=.3d04830eab75. 33. Jason Lim, “WeChat Is Being Trialled To Make Hospitals More Efficient In China,” Forbes, June 16, 2014, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jlim/2014/06/16/wechat-is-being-trialed-to-make-hospitals-more-efficient-in-china/#63a2dd3155e2. 34.

Phil Stewart, “China Racing for AI Military Edge over US: Report,” Reuters, November 27, 2017, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-china-ai/china-racing-for-ai-military-edge-over-u-s-report-idUSKBN1DS0G5. 54. Kate Conger, “Google Employees Resign in Protest Against Pentagon Contract,” Gizmodo, May 14, 2018, https://gizmodo.com/google-employees-resign-in-protest-against-pentagon-con-1825729300. 55. Nitasha Tiku, “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos Says Tech Companies Should Work with the Pentagon,” Wired, October 15, 2018. https://www.wired.com/story/amazons-jeff-bezos-says-tech-companies-should-work-with-the-pentagon/. 56. Stewart, “China Racing for AI Military Edge.” 57. State Council, People’s Republic of China, “China Issues Guideline on Artificial Intelligence Development,” English.gov.cn, last modified July 20, 2017, http://english.gov.cn/policies/latest_releases/2017/07/20/content_281475742458322.htm. 58.

The sale was significant because in China most media are state-sponsored, and the English-language SCMP was known for hard-hitting stories that could be critical of the Chinese government.31 When I lived in Hong Kong, I used to have drinks with a group of SCMP reporters who were best-in-class muckrakers. Ma’s purchase was a show of loyalty to the Communist Party. Three years earlier, Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, a move that eventually made him an enemy of the Trump White House for the paper’s dogged investigative reporting, its critical analysis of administration policies, and its relentless pursuit of unraveling propaganda.32 Finally, the biggest and in many ways most influential member of the BAT is Tencent.


pages: 197 words: 59,946

The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Cornelius Vanderbilt, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Golden age of television, hiring and firing, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, new economy, pre–internet, Skype, social software, Tony Hsieh

They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic. Baloney.” —Cliff Stoll, author, astronomer, professor, 1995 “If I had a nickel for every time an investor told me this wouldn’t work…” —Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon Contents Epigraph Preface Part I. Welcome to the Thank You Economy 1 How Everything Has Changed, Except Human Nature 2 Erasing Lines in the Sand 3 Why Smart People Dismiss Social Media, and Why They Shouldn’t Part II. How to Win 4 From the Top: Instill the Right Culture 5 The Perfect Date: Traditional Media Meets Social 6 I’m on a Horse: How Old Spice Played Ping-Pong, Then Dropped the Ball 7 Intent: Quality versus Quantity 8 Shock and Awe Part III.

PowerPoint asked the audience, “How many of you have heard of Amazon?” A solid number of people raised their hands. He went on to ask if they really thought people would abandon the relationships they’d built over the years with their local bookstores, or even bypass super-stocked Barnes & Noble. They didn’t. It would be another two years before CEO Jeff Bezos would be named Time’s Person of the Year, his name underscored on the cover by the subhead “E-commerce is changing the way the world shops.” It would be another four years before Amazon reached its first quarterly net profit. Mr. PowerPoint compared the company’s rising market share to its nonexistent profits and said that one day we would all look back and say, “Remember Amazon?”

PART II How to Win CHAPTER FOUR From the Top: Instill the Right Culture I can point to the date when the Thank You Economy’s existence became a matter of public record. It was July 22, 2009, a Wednesday. That’s the day it was announced that Amazon had bought Zappos for $1.2 billion. Jeff Bezos is a hell of a smart guy, yet I heard more than one venture capitalist insider mutter that Zappos pulled a coup. There’s just no way the online retail company was worth that much money, they said. But Zappos wasn’t overpriced, and Bezos knew exactly what he was doing. It seems to me that anyone who knows Bezos’s track record and still criticizes this acquisition is someone for whom numbers tell the entire story.


pages: 239 words: 80,319

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Rubin, benefit corporation, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Chris Wanstrath, citation needed, cloud computing, context collapse, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, decentralized internet, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, eternal september, fake news, feminist movement, Firefox, gentrification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, green new deal, helicopter parent, holacracy, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Julie Ann Horvath, Kim Stanley Robinson, l'esprit de l'escalier, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Mondo 2000, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, pre–internet, profit motive, Project Xanadu, QAnon, real-name policy, recommendation engine, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Turing complete, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, web application, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, you are the product

For more information on racism and public parks, I recommend the scholarship of Kangjae Jerry Lee and David Scott (“Bourdieu and African Americans’ Park Visitation: The Case of Cedar Hill State Park in Texas,” Leisure Sciences, 2016). Blue Origin and Amazon are structured as independent companies, but Jeff Bezos uses his Amazon stock to fund his aerospace company. He is constantly making comments like “Every time you buy shoes, you’re helping fund Blue Origin,” as he did at the Yale Club in New York in 2019; the transcript of this conversation is available at Business Insider (“Jeff Bezos Just Gave a Private Talk in New York. From Utopian Space Colonies to Dissing Elon Musk’s Martian Dream, Here Are the Most Notable Things He Said,” February 23, 2019).

Although it is amusing to read things like Stewart Brand’s review of From Counterculture to Cyberculture (“As the guy in the subtitle, I might be expected to have all kinds of eye-rolling cavils with [Fred] Turner’s book, but I don’t”) or MacKenzie Bezos’s one-star review of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (“Jeff didn’t read Remains of the Day until a year after he started Amazon”), as of now, Amazon is primarily a retailer and not a social site. Its issues of labor exploitation, monopolistic practices, surveillance, and control relate to the domain of private infrastructure and merchandising.

Instant messages he sent when he was nineteen and just founding Facebook were leaked to Business Insider: ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard ZUCK: just ask ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns FRIEND: what!? how’d you manage that one? ZUCK: people just submitted it ZUCK: i don’t know why ZUCK: they “trust me” ZUCK: dumb fucks Mark Zuckerberg is tied with Bill Gates as Harvard’s most famous dropout, and as with Gates—as well as Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and plenty of other tech industry titans—family wealth spurred on his success. The dorm room eureka moment might be what the company touts as its own origin story, but the “initial working capital” Dr. Edward Zuckerberg offered his son in 2004 and 2005 meant the company could make a play for the virtual souls of students at other Ivies, all while the younger Zuckerberg was leaving analog Harvard.


pages: 328 words: 84,682

The Business of Platforms: Strategy in the Age of Digital Competition, Innovation, and Power by Michael A. Cusumano, Annabelle Gawer, David B. Yoffie

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collective bargaining, commoditize, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deep learning, Didi Chuxing, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, general purpose technology, gig economy, Google Chrome, GPS: selective availability, Greyball, independent contractor, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Metcalfe’s law, move fast and break things, multi-sided market, Network effects, pattern recognition, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, too big to fail, transaction costs, transport as a service, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, web application, zero-sum game

The rising number of new transaction platforms among the billion-dollar unicorns, especially those competing within the gig economy, may also help explain why so many new platforms have been unprofitable as businesses. At the same time, digital innovations have enabled new scale and scope economies, or enabled entry for some and raised entry barriers for others, in ways unimaginable in the pre-digital era. Think about how Amazon, founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994, expanded from being an online store selling books to an online store selling nearly everything, from electronics products to groceries, and with same-day delivery for some products.38 Even in the early days, Amazon used digital technology to promote online store sales, building a recommendation engine and collecting user evaluations.

In 2018, Walmart made its largest acquisition in history by investing $15 billion for a 75 percent stake in Flipkart, India’s leading e-commerce player. As one of the world’s largest and fastest-growing new markets for online commerce, India was an attractive target for Walmart. Flipkart had been founded by two former Amazon employees in 2007 but was facing stiff competition from Amazon, which entered India in 2013. Jeff Bezos decided to pour $5 billion into the India operations, which in 2018 included fast delivery and Prime video streaming. Flipkart struggled to maintain its lead and needed additional financing. Meanwhile, Walmart was also struggling in India, operating only twenty-one wholesale stores, limited by rules that restricted foreign companies’ ownership of local retail operations.

Many sellers take advantage of an additional program, called Fulfillment by Amazon, through which Amazon stores and ships their inventory. The sellers pay Amazon fees for those services, but the e-commerce giant leaves it up to them to collect sales tax where they are required to do so. We applaud the decision to self-regulate on state and local taxes. Amazon was becoming a powerhouse in American e-commerce. Jeff Bezos and other managers must have understood that, like Walmart before it, powerful retailers are frequent targets of attack by local communities afraid of the loss of jobs and competition with local vendors. By taking sales taxes off the table, Amazon eliminated a potentially serious source of friction.


pages: 282 words: 85,658

Ask Your Developer: How to Harness the Power of Software Developers and Win in the 21st Century by Jeff Lawson

Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, create, read, update, delete, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, DevOps, Elon Musk, financial independence, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microservices, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, software as a service, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, transfer pricing, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, Y Combinator

Part I Why Developers Matter More Than Ever Chapter 1 Build vs. Die It is not the strongest species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change. —Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species In September 2004 I joined Amazon as a product manager, and at the first all-hands meeting I attended, our founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, said something that has stuck with me ever since. When we got to Q&A time, someone in the crowd of about five thousand people got up and asked a question about retailing—I don’t even remember exactly what it was. But Jeff came back with an answer most of us didn’t expect. “Amazon,” he said, “is not a retailer.

What’s more, the quality of our software would determine whether we succeeded: “Our ability to win,” Jeff said, “is based on our ability to arrange magnetic particles on hard drives better than our competition.” I still think that’s an incredibly cool way to describe what we did. If you have ever wondered how Amazon became such a global powerhouse over the years that have followed that 2004 all-hands—it’s contained in that statement. The key to Amazon’s success is that Jeff Bezos understood way sooner than everyone else that he was actually in the software business. In the early 2000s it seemed that retailers would be threatened by disruption from e-commerce. But as the century progresses on, it’s apparent that not just retailers are under siege. Why is it that every industry is rapidly becoming a software industry?

I learned about technology they were inventing to deal with the scale of Amazon—distributed systems, consistent hashing, idempotency, the CAP theorem—far beyond anything I’d dealt with. When I arrived, there were about thirty people on AWS, where I was a product manager, working from the sixth floor of the Pacific Medical Center—or PacMed for short—the old art deco hospital that had been converted into Amazon’s headquarters. Jeff Bezos worked on the seventh, and if you were near him, it meant he cared about what you were working on. AWS was his pet project, thus our presence on the sixth floor. We were building products not for consumers, but for developers like myself. The people I was working with were truly inventing something new.


pages: 472 words: 117,093

Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future by Andrew McAfee, Erik Brynjolfsson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, asset light, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, backtesting, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, British Empire, business cycle, business process, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chris Urmson, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, complexity theory, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, family office, fiat currency, financial innovation, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, law of one price, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Lyft, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Mustafa Suleyman, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, plutocrats, precision agriculture, prediction markets, pre–internet, price stability, principal–agent problem, Project Xanadu, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Thomas Davenport, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transaction costs, transportation-network company, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, Two Sigma, two-sided market, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, yield management, zero day

Benedict Evans (blog), January 11, 2015, http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2015/1/11/whatsapp-sails-past-sms-but-where-does-messaging-go-next. 142 CEO Jeff Bezos assigned Rick Dalzell the task: Staci D. Kramer, “The Biggest Thing Amazon Got Right: The Platform,” Gigaom, October 12, 2011, https://gigaom.com/2011/10/12/419-the-biggest-thing-amazon-got-right-the-platform. 142 Dalzell was described as a bulldog: Matt Rosoff, “Jeff Bezos ‘Makes Ordinary Control Freaks Look like Stoned Hippies,’ Says Former Engineer,” Business Insider, October 12, 2011, http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-makes-ordinary-control-freaks-look-like-stoned-hippies-says-former-engineer-2011-10. 143 launched Amazon Web Services in 2006: Amazon Web Services, “About AWS,” accessed February 4, 2017, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws. 143 Amazon S3: Amazon Web Services, “Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3)—Continuing Successes,” July 11, 2006, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2006/07/11/amazon-simple-storage-service-amazon-s3---continuing-successes. 143 Amazon EC2: Amazon Web Services, “Announcing Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2)—Beta,” August 24, 2006, https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2006/08/24/announcing-amazon-elastic-compute-cloud-amazon-ec2---beta. 143 more than 290,000 developers using the platform: Amazon, “Ooyala Wins Amazon Web Services Start-up Challenge, Receives $100,000 in Cash and Services Credits Plus Investment Offer from Amazon.com,” December 7, 2007, http://phx.corporate-ir.net/phoenix.zhtml?

Perry, “Creative Destruction: Newspaper Ad Revenue Continued Its Precipitous Free Fall in 2013, and It’s Probably Not Over Yet,” AEIdeas, April 25, 2014, https://www.aei.org/publication/creative-destruction-newspaper-ad-revenue-continued-its-precipitous-free-fall-in-2013-and-its-probably-not-over-yet. 132 $3.4 billion: Pew Research Center, “State of the News Media 2015,” April 29, 2015, http://www.journalism.org/files/2015/04/FINAL-STATE-OF-THE-NEWS-MEDIA1.pdf. 132 “print dollars were being replaced by digital dimes”: Waldman, “Information Needs of Communities.” 132 13,400 newspaper newsroom jobs: Ibid. 132 Tucson Citizen: Tucson Citizen, accessed January 31, 2017, http://tucsoncitizen.com. 132 Rocky Mountain News: Lynn DeBruin, “Rocky Mountain News to Close, Publish Final Edition Friday,” Rocky Mountain News, February 26, 2009, http://web.archive.org/web/20090228023426/http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2009/feb/26/rocky-mountain-news-closes-friday-final-edition. 132 lost more than 90% of their value: Yahoo! Finance, “The McClatchy Company (MNI),” accessed January 31, 2017, http://finance.yahoo.com/quote/MNI. 132 On August 5, 2013, the Washington Post: Paul Farhi, “Washington Post to Be Sold to Jeff Bezos, the Founder of Amazon,” Washington Post, August 5, 2013, https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/washington-post-to-be-sold-to-jeff-bezos/2013/08/05/ca537c9e-fe0c-11e2-9711-3708310f6f4d_story.html. 132 Penthouse (General Media): Bloomberg News, “Company News; General Media’s Plan to Leave Bankruptcy Is Approved,” New York Times, August 13, 2004, http://www.nytimes.com/2004/08/13/business/company-news-general-media-s-plan-to-leave-bankruptcy-is-approved.html. 132 National Enquirer and Men’s Fitness (American Media): Eric Morath, “American Media Files for Bankruptcy,” Wall Street Journal, November 17, 2010, https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704648604575621053554011206. 133 Newsweek: Rob Verger, “Newsweek’s First Issue Debuted Today in 1933,” Newsweek, February 17, 2014, http://www.newsweek.com/newsweeks-first-issue-debuted-today-1933-229355. 133 a circulation of 3.3 million: Ryan Nakashima, “Newsweek Had Unique Troubles as Industry Recovers,” U.S.

Newspaper companies including the Tucson Citizen (Arizona’s oldest continuously published daily newspaper) and the Rocky Mountain News went bankrupt. Others, like the McClatchy Company, lost more than 90% of their value. On August 5, 2013, the Washington Post made a surprise announcement that it had been acquired by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos for $250 million. Similar patterns held in magazine publishing, with total circulation and advertising revenue in precipitous decline. The parent companies of magazines as diverse as Penthouse (General Media) and the National Enquirer and Men’s Fitness (American Media) declared bankruptcy. Newsweek, which had been in print since 1933 and at one point had a circulation of 3.3 million, saw its total circulation dropped by more than 50% between 2007 and 2011 and ceased publishing a print edition altogether in 2012.


The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot by Yolande Strengers, Jenny Kennedy

active measures, Amazon Robotics, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Boston Dynamics, cloud computing, cognitive load, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, data science, deepfake, Donald Trump, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, game design, gender pay gap, Grace Hopper, hive mind, Ian Bogost, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, Masayoshi Son, Milgram experiment, Minecraft, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, pattern recognition, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Turing test, Wall-E, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

Alexa’s development and success is commonly attributed to engineer Rohit Prasad (responsible for her technology development) and anthropologist Toni Reid (responsible for customer experience). 29. Nick Wingfield and Nellie Bowles, “Jeff Bezos, Mr. Amazon, Steps Out,” New York Times, January 12, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/technology/jeff-bezos-amazon.html. 30. Stone, Everything Store; John Rossman, The Amazon Way: 14 Leadership Principles behind the World’s Most Disruptive Company (North Charleston, SC: CreateSpace, 2014). 31. Angel Au-Yeung, “How Jeff Bezos Became the Richest Person in America and the World,” Forbes, October 3, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2018/10/03/how-jeff-bezos-became-the-richest-person-in-the-world-2018-forbes-400/#3847d381beeb. 32.

Sixty percent of the voice-enabled speaker device market in the United States was controlled by Alexa in 2019, far ahead of Google Home’s 24 percent.1 And this leader also dominates in other markets such as China. Alexa’s inspiration came from the computer voice featured onboard the Starship Enterprise in the 1960–1990s’ Star Trek franchise. (In fact, her company’s founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos, is also a Trekkie—another link between popular science fiction and the smart wives of Silicon Valley.) Alexa’s name was chosen because it isn’t a usual word in the lexicon of most households, and the hard x consonant makes it easy for her voice recognition software to pick up.2 According to Amazon senior vice president David Limp, her name was also inspired by the library of Alexandra, which has been culturally viewed in the West as a source of great knowledge.3 When she answers her name, Alexa can help put the kids to bed (by adjusting the lights or telling stories), set the right vibe for a party, order groceries (or pretty much anything), check the weather, play music, and read you the news.

Stone, Everything Store. 10. “7 Potential Bidders, a Call to Amazon, and an Ultimatum: How the Whole Foods Deal Went Down,” Business Insider, December 30, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/breaking-it-down-amazon-tough-negotiations-how-the-whole-foods-deal-went-down-2017-12?r=US&IR=T. 11. Stone, Everything Store. 12. Virginia Heffernan, “An Infinite Space Utopia Can’t Replicate Earth’s Humanity,” Wired, December 17, 2018, https://www.wired.com/story/infinite-space-utopia-cant-replicate-earths-humanity/. 13. Stone, Everything Store; Ann Byers, Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com, Internet Career Biographies (New York: Rosen, 2007). 14. Erin Duffin, “Top Companies in the World by Market Value 2019,” Statista, August 12, 2019, https://www.statista.com/statistics/263264/top-companies-in-the-world-by-market-value/; Nick Routley, “Walmart Nation: Mapping America’s Biggest Employers,” Visual Capitalist, January 24, 2019, https://www.visualcapitalist.com/walmart-nation-largest-employers/. 15.


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The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay by Emmanuel Saez, Gabriel Zucman

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, classic study, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cross-border payments, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, government statistician, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, informal economy, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, labor-force participation, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, patent troll, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Steve Jobs, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, very high income, We are the 99%

Without a wealth tax, it will be hard to reach average rates of 60% at the highest reaches of the wealth scale. Raising the top marginal income tax rate wouldn’t affect the tax bill of Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett notably, since neither of them has much taxable income in the first place. Raising other taxes, such as the estate tax, would not do either. We might take comfort in the idea that the richest man in the world, Jeff Bezos, will one day pay estate taxes on his immense wealth. But since the founder of Amazon turned fifty-five in 2019, that won’t (hopefully) happen before 2050. And let’s not mention Mark Zuckerberg, born in 1984—is it wise to wait until 2075 for him to contribute to the public coffers?

This is, and has always been, the core reason why extreme wealth owned by some can reduce what remains for the rest of us. Why the income of today’s super-rich can be gained at the expense of the rest of society. That’s what earned John Astor, Andrew Carnegie, John Rockefeller, and other Gilded Age industrialists their epithet of “robber barons.” What do Apple, Jeff Bezos, and the Walton heirs do today? They protect their wealth. They defend their established positions. They buy new entrants before they become a threat to their business. They fight competitors, regulators, and the IRS. They buy newspapers. That’s what those who’ve accumulated billions, always and everywhere, do.

A person with $1 billion in wealth would pay the same $19 million as under a moderate wealth tax.* A radical wealth tax would not make it harder to become a billionaire; it would make it harder to remain a multibillionaire. A person with $2 billion would pay almost 5% a year, a decabillionaire like George Soros 9%, and a centibillionaire like Jeff Bezos 10%. Just as Roosevelt’s 90% top marginal income tax sharply reduced the number of families earning more than $10 million of today’s dollars, a radical wealth tax would lead to a reduction in the number of multibillionaires. More than collecting revenue, it would de-concentrate wealth. There would still be multibillionaires, no doubt.


pages: 505 words: 138,917

Open: The Story of Human Progress by Johan Norberg

Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon tax, citizen journalism, classic study, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, green new deal, humanitarian revolution, illegal immigration, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, indoor plumbing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Lao Tzu, liberal capitalism, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, negative emissions, Network effects, open borders, open economy, Pax Mongolica, place-making, profit motive, RAND corporation, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Republic of Letters, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Schrödinger's Cat, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Solyndra, spice trade, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, ultimatum game, universal basic income, World Values Survey, Xiaogang Anhui farmers, zero-sum game

It is not always fair and it is not always the ‘right’ person who makes it through, but that is not the point. The point is that this is what gets us to the other side. The Jeff Bezos test Our focus on inequality in dollars and cents sometimes neglects what is more important: what we can buy with those dollars and cents. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos might be ten million times richer than we are, but is he really ten million times better off than we are? Forget about dollars and cents for a minute, and think of all the things that create the good life. Sure, Jeff Bezos can travel by private jet and doesn’t have to wait in line at security, but the major difference over the last half-century is that even broad swathes of the population can travel internationally.

On those devices, thanks to the internet, he doesn’t have a million times better access to the world’s knowledge or entertainment than we do. While en route, Jeff Bezos probably eats similar food to the rest of us, since most people can now also afford exotic food, even previous luxuries like meat and fresh fruit. Traditionally, being poor meant chronic undernourishment, and stunting was a common result. As a result, the average British worker was 13 centimetres shorter than a typical upper-class male two centuries ago.26 The difference is now negligible. Of course, Jeff Bezos can waste his money on the most exclusive clothing brands, but the major difference compared to other eras is that now even low- and middle-income households can afford comfortable clothes that are not that much poorer in quality, whereas most people used to wear itchy unwashed wool before the Industrial Revolution.

You might ask yourself why entrepreneurs get themselves deep into debt and neglect friends and family to work long hours for a tiny chance at a success that would give them no more than 2.2 per cent of the gains. Perhaps they just love their work, or they might be chronic optimists who falsely assume they have a much better chance than others of triumphing. Or perhaps that 2.2 per cent, and the tiny chance of becoming the next Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates, is sufficiently attractive to make it all worthwhile. Super-rich entrepreneurs have the same effect on the great mass of experimenters that James Watt’s riches had on hopeful innovators during the Industrial Revolution. An entrepreneur once described the market to me as a minefield.


pages: 460 words: 130,820

The Cult of We: WeWork, Adam Neumann, and the Great Startup Delusion by Eliot Brown, Maureen Farrell

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, asset light, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, business logic, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Didi Chuxing, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Earth, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greensill Capital, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, index fund, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plant based meat, post-oil, railway mania, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, rolodex, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, super pumped, supply chain finance, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, Zenefits, Zipcar

Wall Street was even more enamored: the CEOs of both JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs lavished him with attention. And Masayoshi Son, chairman of the Tokyo-based SoftBank Group and the most prolific tech investor in the entire world, had taken a particular shine to him, anointing Neumann the planet’s next great tech CEO. Admirers compared Neumann to Jeff Bezos or Steve Jobs—a business titan who could see around corners and would chart a revolutionary course. The fund-raising conveyor belt had provided Neumann with the money not only for extravagant parties but also for constant, rapid expansion. By the beginning of 2019, WeWork had grown enormous, with 425 locations in twenty-seven countries around the globe.

Founders frequently stood aside as their companies grew up, ceding the day-to-day leadership to a professional CEO handpicked by the VCs. By 2010, the herd had begun to question the traditional wisdom, influenced by a few data points that were impossible to ignore. Amazon was booming, having been led since its inception by Jeff Bezos, who had transformed the company from the plucky bookselling firm started in his garage to the world’s dominant e-commerce company. Mark Zuckerberg stayed firmly in control of Facebook, by far the most successful new tech company started in the twenty-first century. Then there was Apple’s co-founder Steve Jobs, who had a cultlike following in the Valley and was in the midst of making Apple the country’s most valuable corporation.

He’d been building SoftBank for three decades, and by the summer of 2016 his personal fortune was estimated at around $17 billion. He’d trade the number one spot on the Forbes Billionaires’ List in Japan with Tadashi Yanai, the founder of Uniqlo, over the course of the year. But it wasn’t enough. He was fifty-eight years old and rarely mentioned in the same breath—or even conversation—as the biggest names in tech like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Bill Gates. He still longed to fulfill his vision of building the world’s largest company within his lifetime. However, the main vehicle he was relying on to vault SoftBank into the upper echelons of U.S. business circles—mobile carriers—wasn’t going well. SoftBank had purchased Sprint for nearly $22 billion in 2013 with a plan to consolidate it with T-Mobile and make it a clear force in U.S. wireless—following a playbook he’d executed successfully in the Japanese telecom market.


pages: 524 words: 130,909

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power by Max Chafkin

3D printing, affirmative action, Airbnb, anti-communist, bank run, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Boeing 747, borderless world, Cambridge Analytica, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, David Brooks, David Graeber, DeepMind, digital capitalism, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Extropian, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Frank Gehry, Gavin Belson, global macro, Gordon Gekko, Greyball, growth hacking, guest worker program, Hacker News, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hockey-stick growth, illegal immigration, immigration reform, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, life extension, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, operational security, PalmPilot, Paris climate accords, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Gregory, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, randomized controlled trial, regulatory arbitrage, Renaissance Technologies, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social distancing, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, techlash, technology bubble, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vitalik Buterin, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Y2K, yellow journalism, Zenefits

bully media outlets: Marina Hyde, “Peter Thiel’s Mission to Destroy Gawker Isn’t ‘Philanthropy.’ It’s a Chilling Taste of Things to Come,” The Guardian, May 27, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/27/peter-thiel-gawker-philanthropy-paypal-mogul-secret-war-billionaire. “You can’t stop it”: Edmund Lee, “Jeff Bezos on Gawker vs. Peter Thiel,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://www.vox.com/2016/5/31/11826118/jeff-bezos-gawker-peter-thiel. compared him to Batman: Jonathan Taplin, Move Fast and Break Things (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), 155; Milo, “How Peter Thiel Saved Free Speech on the Web,” Breitbart, May 31, 2016, https://www.breitbart.com/social-justice/2016/05/31/peter-thiel-free-speech/.

Back to the Future Epilogue: You Will Live Forever Photographs Acknowledgments Notes Image Credits Index About the Author INTRODUCTION It may seem hard to remember, but there was a time when the world seemed ready to put Silicon Valley in charge of everything. This was 2016—the “Age of Unicorns,” as business magazines called it, referring to tech companies that were growing so quickly, and had become so valuable, that they seemed almost mythical. Jeff Bezos had saved one of America’s great newspapers, Mark Zuckerberg was romancing San Francisco politicos, who’d just named a hospital after him, and transportation activists were showing up in major cities to protest in favor of the disruptions brought on by Uber. President Barack Obama, his term winding down, was musing about relocating to California and becoming a tech investor as his next act.

But it had taken Peter Thiel to bring those ideas above the surface, and then to weaponize them. * * * — thiel is sometimes portrayed as the tech industry’s token conservative—a view that wildly understates his influence. More than any other Silicon Valley investor or entrepreneur—more so even than Jeff Bezos, or Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, or Zuckerberg himself—he has been responsible for creating the ideology that has come to define Silicon Valley: that technological progress should be pursued relentlessly—with little, if any, regard for potential costs or dangers to society. Thiel isn’t the richest tech mogul—though he’s almost certainly better at shielding his assets than the average Valley billionaire, having arranged to pay little in taxes on an investment portfolio worth something like $10 billion—but he has been, in many ways, the most influential.


pages: 573 words: 142,376

Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand by John Markoff

A Pattern Language, air freight, Anthropocene, Apple II, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Beryl Markham, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Biosphere 2, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, Danny Hillis, decarbonisation, demographic transition, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, feminist movement, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, Filter Bubble, game design, gentrification, global village, Golden Gate Park, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, intentional community, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Menlo Park, Michael Shellenberger, microdosing, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, North Sea oil, off grid, off-the-grid, paypal mafia, Peter Calthorpe, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Hackers Conference, Thorstein Veblen, traveling salesman, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, young professional

That would become his exposure to the mail-order business, as well as to a bookstore. It also gave him a front-row seat as a parade of interesting people would file in to visit Brand that summer, including Richard Brautigan, Ken Kesey, and Hugh Romney Jr. It was a great summer job. Kaphan would go on to become an early computer software hacker and would be hired by Jeff Bezos as the first Amazon employee. And so it was. A growing group of hobbyists who had emerged from the institute discovered that computers could be used for more than just crunching numbers and were captivating even in their most primitive state—even machines that had to be laboriously programmed by toggling switches to enter individual instructions to start.

(It was also where Brand had been assigned to do his reserve training all those years ago when he’d been allowed early military leave to take classes at the San Francisco Art Institute and San Francisco State.) Soon they would begin to acquire their first round of financial backers, including Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos; Shel Kaphan, Amazon’s first employee and a former Whole Earth Truck Store worker; Jacqui Safra; and Priceline founder Jay Walker. Shortly after the Clock Library project was launched, Brand returned to the Black Rock Desert to attend the annual Burning Man festival, which since 1990 had been held annually on the Black Rock playa, which he had first visited in the early sixties.

At the end of September 1998, he drove his Range Rover across Nevada to Ely, where he met Danny Hillis and his then wife, Patti; Rose; Kennedy; Saffo; and Brewster Kahle. Kahle, a New Yorker who had studied computer science at MIT and then worked for Hillis at Thinking Machines, had come to the West Coast to create Alexa, an early search engine he had sold to Jeff Bezos for $250 million in Amazon stock. Concerned that the ephemeral digital information that made up the World Wide Web would be easily lost, in 1996 Kahle had created the Internet Archive as a nonprofit repository for the world’s digital information. Given his preservationist inclinations, he seemed well suited for this new mission.


pages: 384 words: 93,754

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism by John Elkington

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, anti-fragile, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Attenborough, deglobalization, degrowth, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Future Shock, Gail Bradbrook, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, impact investing, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, John Elkington, Jony Ive, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, microplastics / micro fibres, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, placebo effect, Planet Labs, planetary scale, plant based meat, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, systems thinking, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog

Much of the recent interest in business models flows from California in general, and Silicon Valley in particular. One of the peculiarities of the thinking coming from such places has been that some of the business models that have been most successful often started out by burning cash for much longer than would once have seemed desirable or viable. A prime case in point has been Amazon, where CEO Jeff Bezos has long argued that investing in future growth is much more important than hitting quarterly earnings targets, to the horror of many traditionalists on Wall Street. The obvious question is, If business models can be bent so far, apparently without breaking, how might tomorrow’s breakthrough, and increasingly “future-fit,” business models be designed, operated, and, crucially, sold to investors?

“We’re at what we call a ‘critical density,’” says Donald Kessler, a former NASA scientist who used to run the agency’s Orbital Debris Program Office, “where there are enough large objects in space that they will collide with one another and create small debris faster than it can be removed.”35 He predicted that eventually there will be so much space junk that leaving Earth to explore deep space will become highly risky, if not impossible. That, someone might want to tell Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, might also eventually rule out sending manned missions to Mars. Anyone who has seen the film Gravity will have some sense of where all of this could now be headed. Talk about a wicked problem with super wicked characteristics. So how do serious space people themselves view the space junk challenge?

After the magazine had published its profile, I asked HBR editorin-chief Adi Ignatius why his design team had stuck the sticky on the image of Sørensen, who had just shot to the top of the magazine’s ranking of CEOs.11 Ignatius explained that, despite his extraordinary track record, Sørensen was a virtual unknown outside Denmark. But why had Sørensen rocketed up the rankings in such an extraordinary way? I wondered. He had dislodged Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who tumbled to the eighty-seventh slot. Ignatius’s answer for my query was simple: HBR had decided to change its ranking system, with 20% of the final score now allocated to environmental, social, and governance factors. A fascinating example of how the system change agenda is going to upset existing pecking orders.


pages: 318 words: 91,957

The Man Who Broke Capitalism: How Jack Welch Gutted the Heartland and Crushed the Soul of Corporate America—and How to Undo His Legacy by David Gelles

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Adam Neumann (WeWork), air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 737 MAX, call centre, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, collateralized debt obligation, Colonization of Mars, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, disinformation, Donald Trump, financial deregulation, financial engineering, fulfillment center, gig economy, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, inventory management, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, Neil Armstrong, new economy, operational security, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QAnon, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, remote working, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Ballmer, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, technoutopianism, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, WeWork, women in the workforce

It’s a delusion common to the wealthy, and Welch has hardly been the only one to turn his attention to repairing our public schools. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, flush with a $50 billion endowment made possible by Microsoft’s early monopolizing, tried to use technology to overhaul curriculums in Washington State. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has launched the Bezos Academy, a preschool designed to cultivate entrepreneurial thinking. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg donated $100 million to revamp the Newark public school system, an effort later deemed unsuccessful. And Adam Neumann, the WeWork cofounder, started a high-priced school for his children and their friends and let his wife design the curriculum.

Yet even while employing such a significant swath of the populous, Amazon’s overriding concern is not the resilience and economic security of the many souls that don safety vests emblazoned with its ubiquitous curved arrow logo. Instead, after many years running a loss as it built market share, the company is now focused on churning out ever-larger quarterly profits for investors. Like Welch before him, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos seemed to arrive on the job with a zealot’s conviction that workers were fundamentally expendable. According to an executive who helped design Amazon’s warehouse systems, Bezos articulated early on that he wanted to avoid having an entrenched, loyal workforce. If employees grew too comfortable, Bezos believed, it would be an inevitable “march to mediocrity.”

It was a damning portrait of one of the country’s most powerful companies, and Bezos responded with a letter to Amazon employees defending the culture. “The people we hire here are the best of the best,” Bezos wrote. “You are recruited every day by other world-class companies, and you can work anywhere you want.” Bromides from a billionaire were cold comfort to Amazon employees, but Bezos found at least one sympathetic ear. “Love Jeff Bezos’ response to ridiculous NYTimes article on Amazon,” Welch wrote on Twitter, throwing in a couple chest-thumping hashtags for good measure. “#leadership #winning.” “We’ve sort of put it all together” Dealmaking and financialization are also now firmly established features of the modern economy.


pages: 373 words: 112,822

The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World by Brad Stone

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Boris Johnson, Burning Man, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collaborative consumption, data science, Didi Chuxing, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, East Village, fake it until you make it, fixed income, gentrification, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, inflight wifi, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Necker cube, obamacare, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, race to the bottom, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, semantic web, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech bro, TechCrunch disrupt, Tony Hsieh, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

(Justin.tv later spun off a video-game service, Twitch.tv, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014 for $970 million.) Continuing this education, they attended a one-day event called Startup School, organized by the startup incubator Y Combinator and hosted by Stanford University. The speakers that year included Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and the investor Marc Andreessen, an inventor of the web browser. But the speech the founders remembered best was by Greg McAdoo, a venture capitalist at the top-tier VC firm Sequoia Capital, a man whom they would soon get to know well. McAdoo spoke about why being a great entrepreneur required the precision of a great surfer.

With Airbnb bookings growing 40 to 50 percent every month, TechCrunch had called it “the sleeper hit of the startup world.”6 Andreessen Horowitz, which passed on the Series A, beat out a crop of other top-tier venture firms in a hotly competitive fund-raising round. It led the Series B and a group that included Yuri Milner’s DST, the personal investment funds of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the actor Ashton Kutcher for a total $112 million investment that valued the company at $1.3 billion. The financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz’s Jeff Jordan, a former eBay president. Jordan had gone from thinking “this is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard” to practically jumping out of his seat at the Allen and Company conference when he recognized the similarities between Airbnb and his old company.

“It’s less of a political statement,” Kalanick told the Washington Post reporter who asked about it in 2012. “It’s just personally one of my favorite books. I’m a fan of architecture.” But Kalanick’s stubborn defense of surge pricing impressed at least one observer. “Travis is a real entrepreneur,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told board member Bill Gurley after a surge fracas, according to Gurley. “Most CEOs would have caved.” In the fall of 2011, Travis Kalanick once again set out to raise capital. The rancor surrounding surge pricing would be nothing compared to the animosity that was about to be unleashed behind the scenes.


pages: 396 words: 113,613

Chokepoint Capitalism by Rebecca Giblin, Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, book value, collective bargaining, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate personhood, corporate raider, COVID-19, disintermediation, distributed generation, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, Firefox, forensic accounting, full employment, gender pay gap, George Akerlof, George Floyd, gig economy, Golden age of television, Google bus, greed is good, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hush-A-Phone, independent contractor, index fund, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microplastics / micro fibres, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, Network effects, New Journalism, passive income, peak TV, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, regulatory arbitrage, remote working, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, tech worker, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, time value of money, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing complete, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, WeWork

Carstensen, Competition Policy and the Control of Buyer Power, 12. 33. Carstensen, Competition Policy and the Control of Buyer Power, 12. 34. Adam Lashinsky, Doris Burke, and J. P. Mangalindan, “Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune 166, no. 9 (Dec. 3, 2012): 100. 35. Nicole Goodkind, “Jeff Bezos Thanks Amazon Workers and Customers After Space Flight: ‘You Paid for All of This,’” Fortune, July 21, 2021, https://fortune.com/2021/07/20/jeff-bezos-thanks-amazon-workers-and-customers-after-space-flight-you-paid-for-all-of-this. 36. Executive Office of the President [Joseph R. Biden Jr.], Executive Order no. 14036: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, July 9, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/07/09/executive-order-on-promoting-competition-in-the-american-economy. 37.

—while being far less likely to attract unwanted scrutiny from regulators. In fact, Chicago School thinking practically invites corporations to turn the screws on suppliers and workers. A corporation that does so drives down the cost of inputs, which can lead (at least temporarily) to lower prices and thus appear to promote consumer welfare. Jeff Bezos perfectly understands this—it’s right there in his famous aphorism: “Your margin is my opportunity.”34 Of course, this ignores the fact that those workers and suppliers will then have less money to spend, which ultimately has the same effect as prices going up, in that people are less able to afford the services and goods they need.

Network effects were weak—you didn’t get more value from shopping on Amazon just because your sister or friends did, and since books are the same wherever you get them, there was no particular reason for you to buy there instead of somewhere else. It had no economies of scale, either. In fact, early on Amazon couldn’t even meet the ten-book minimum order the distributors required for shipping. Jeff Bezos boasts of getting around that by ordering the book they wanted plus nine copies of an obscure out-of-print book on lichens, tricking the distributors into shipping it anyway.1 That’s right—Amazon’s business was based on whittling down other people’s margins to boost their own from the get-go. Today, Amazon enjoys a lock on the trade book market, selling more than 50 percent of physical copies in the US, and even more ebooks and audiobooks.


pages: 338 words: 74,302

Only Americans Burn in Hell by Jarett Kobek

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", AltaVista, coherent worldview, corporate governance, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, East Village, General Magic , ghettoisation, Google Chrome, Great Leap Forward, haute couture, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, mandelbrot fractal, microdosing, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, pre–internet, sexual politics, Seymour Hersh, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Telecommunications Act of 1996

Amazon.com was owned by Jeff Bezos, who also owned Goodreads.com, the Internet Movie Database, Blue Origin, and the Washington Post, which was a newspaper with a slogan that said: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” This motto implied that without a free press casting illumination upon the powerful, American democracy would devolve into a hollow shell. This motto had been handpicked by Jeff Bezos. Depending on fluctuations in the stock market, on some days Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world. Which meant that the motto was slightly disingenuous. You don’t get as rich as Jeff Bezos without knowing exactly how people beyond the Cash Horizon wreaked havoc upon democracy: they said what they were going to do, in public, and then they did it.

And I won’t escape them with this book! Total theft from Breakfast of Champions! Even down to Fairy Land! Most of the comparisons between this book and the writings of the late Kurt Vonnegut will occur in cheap little reviews on Goodreads.com and Amazon.com, which are Internet websites owned by a guy named Jeff Bezos. These websites are where the American readership makes sure that American authors know their fucking place, and further ensures American authors know that their place is the equivalent to that of a moon-faced kid being shoved into some mud by a bully. “How do you like that mud, you little shit?”


The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte

The top ten apps people kept on their smartphones in 2017 were the following: 1. Facebook 2. Gmail 3. Google Maps 4. Amazon 5. Facebook Messenger 6. YouTube 7. Google Search 8. Google Play Store 9. Instagram 10. Apple App Store Mark Zuckerberg, Sergei Brin, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos—these are the titans of today. Facebook is social media. Google is search. Amazon is e-commerce. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, is worth $112 billion. Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Facebook, is worth $69 billion. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, more than $50 billion each. But these men’s titanic profiles are based on more than their wealth.

The result is the formation of “natural” and essentially harmless monopolies. According to this line of argument, if we try to regulate these (harmless) monopolies, we’ll destroy the network effects. We’ll kill the goose.20 Besides, who cares if these companies are dominant? They are for the people! Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, put his shareholders on notice in a 1997 letter that the company would “focus relentlessly on our customers” and market leadership over “short-term profitability.” It would make its employees sweat in the service of those customers. “It’s not easy to work here . . . but we are working to build something important.”21 Facebook and Google meanwhile offer most of their services—services billions of users rely on —for free.

Moonshots and Teddy Bears Despite its deep roots in the military and ongoing partnership with the American intelligence establishment, Silicon Valley has long projected a wild and free image—a land of tech hippiecowboy hackers embodying the rugged individualism of “the West” mythologized by Frederick Jackson Turner: “that coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that restless, nervous energy . . . that dominant individualism, . . . that buoyancy and exuberance which comes from freedom.”7 Ellen Ullman, with the clarifying gaze afforded by a brilliant mind and the experience of being one of the few female software engineers in the Valley in the 1990s, recalls meeting someone who seemed to be the embodiment of Turner’s archetype: a “rebel cryptographer” sporting long hair and baggy jeans named Brian: “In appearing to be a genius on a skateboard,” Ullman recalls, “he couldn’t be playing his part better.”8 Brian cut quite a different figure from the slick haircuts running the show on Wall Street. He embodied a worldview that looked beyond quarterly returns, that saw companies as something more than a stream of assets, saw people as more than a locus of human capital. Tech giants also seemed to embody this worldview. In Amazon’s first letter to its shareholders in 1997 Jeff Bezos declared, “We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions.” In a 1998 research paper, Larry Page and Sergei Brin, the Google founders, wrote, “We expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of consumers.”


pages: 410 words: 101,260

Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World by Adam Grant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bluma Zeigarnik, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dean Kamen, double helix, Elon Musk, emotional labour, fear of failure, Firefox, George Santayana, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job satisfaction, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum viable product, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Wisdom of Crowds, women in the workforce

Steve Jobs called it the most amazing piece of technology since the personal computer. Enamored with the prototype, Jobs offered the inventor $63 million for 10 percent of the company. When the inventor turned it down, Jobs did something out of character: he offered to advise the inventor for the next six months—for free. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos took one look at the product and immediately got involved, telling the inventor, “You have a product so revolutionary, you’ll have no problem selling it.” John Doerr, the legendary investor who bet successfully on Google and many other blue-chip startups, pumped $80 million into the business, predicting that it would be the fastest company ever to reach $1 billion and “would become more important than the internet.”

.* Conviction in our ideas is dangerous not only because it leaves us vulnerable to false positives, but also because it stops us from generating the requisite variety to reach our creative potential. But Kamen and his team weren’t the only ones who were too bullish on the Segway. Where did virtuosos like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and John Doerr misstep in their judgments about the device? To find out, let’s first take a look at why many executives and test audiences failed to see the potential in Seinfeld. Prisoners of Prototypes and Parochial Preferences When the first Seinfeld script was submitted, executives didn’t know what to do with it.

Three major forces left him overconfident about the Segway’s potential: domain inexperience, hubris, and enthusiasm. Let’s start with experience. Whereas many NBC executives were too experienced in traditional sitcoms to appreciate the unorthodox genius of Seinfeld, the Segway’s early investors had the opposite problem: they didn’t know enough about transportation. Jobs specialized in the digital world, Jeff Bezos was the king of internet retail, and John Doerr had made his fortune investing in software and internet companies like Sun Microsystems, Netscape, Amazon, and Google. They had all been originals in their respective arenas, but being a creator in one particular area doesn’t make you a great forecaster in others.


pages: 349 words: 99,230

Essential: How the Pandemic Transformed the Long Fight for Worker Justice by Jamie K. McCallum

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Anthropocene, antiwork, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, occupational segregation, post-work, QR code, race to the bottom, remote working, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, side hustle, single-payer health, social distancing, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, subprime mortgage crisis, TaskRabbit, The Great Resignation, the strength of weak ties, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

We turn now to the streets and picket lines of the early pandemic labor movement, where workers took on even more uncertainty in the hopes of better jobs, inadvertently invoking the radical adage: what you risk shows what you value. CHAPTER 3 THE PANDEMIC PROLETARIAT For someone who has been publicly derided as “inarticulate,” Christian Smalls sure knows how to make a point. It was late August 2020 when Chris, a former Amazon worker, along with a few hundred protesters, erected a guillotine outside of Jeff Bezos’s $23 million DC mansion. “The point was obviously not to chop off anyone’s head,” Smalls told me. “The point was to show that we’re not backing down until we get unions at Amazon.” Chris had worked at Amazon for five years as a pick floor supervisor, most recently at its JFK8 facility in Staten Island.

During an executive meeting one week later, Amazon’s general counsel David Zapolsky, in notes that were leaked to Vice magazine, wrote: “He’s not smart, or articulate, and to the extent the press wants to focus on us versus him, we will be in a much stronger PR position than simply explaining for the umpteenth time how we’re trying to protect workers.”1 Zapolsky continued: “We should spend the first part of our response strongly laying out the case for why the organizer’s conduct was immoral, unacceptable, and arguably illegal, in detail, and only then follow with our usual talking points about worker safety.… Make him the most interesting part of the story, and if possible make him the face of the entire union/organizing movement.”2 It’s hard to imagine a worse calculation. “Amazon wants to make this about me,” he responded in a prepared statement. “But whether Jeff Bezos likes it or not, this is about Amazon workers—and their families—everywhere,” he said. “Instead of protecting workers and the communities in which they work, however, Amazon seems to be more interested in managing its image.… This is not about me. This is about all of us.”3 Chris’s firing and the leaked memo attracted widespread condemnation from activists and politicians, including New York City mayor Bill de Blasio and Senator Bernie Sanders, who called the firing “disgraceful.”4 It also engendered support from other social movements.

According to Strikewave, over twenty-eight thousand healthcare workers had participated in almost thirty strikes from March to September 2020. They’ve also founded more than one hundred new unions in twenty-two states.22 Given all he faced in 2020, it’s no wonder Chris Smalls ended up outside Jeff Bezos’s house in August with a personalized guillotine. In May, George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck long after he had stopped breathing. As many as twenty-six million people are estimated to have joined the thousands of Black Lives Matter protests across the country that followed that summer—there was a protest in 40 percent of US counties.


pages: 452 words: 126,310

The Case for Space: How the Revolution in Spaceflight Opens Up a Future of Limitless Possibility by Robert Zubrin

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Apollo 11, battle of ideas, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, cosmic microwave background, cosmological principle, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, double helix, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, flex fuel, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gravity well, if you build it, they will come, Internet Archive, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Menlo Park, more computing power than Apollo, Naomi Klein, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off grid, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, private spaceflight, Recombinant DNA, rising living standards, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, Strategic Defense Initiative, Stuart Kauffman, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, time dilation, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine

Adam Mann, “Private Plan to Send Humans to Mars in 2018 Might Not Be So Crazy,” Wired, February 27, 2013, https://www.wired.com/2013/02/inspiration-mars-foundation/ (accessed October 14, 2014). 7. Gerard K. O'Neill, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (New York: William Morrow, 1976). 8. Nicholas St. Fleur, “Jeff Bezos Says He Is Selling $1 Billion a Year in Amazon Stock to Finance Race to Space,” New York Times, April 5, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/05/science/blue-origin-rocket-jeff-bezos-amazon-stock.html (accessed October 14, 2018). 9. It is interesting to note that an innovative American-founded space launch start-up called Firefly has chosen to locate its research and development branch in Ukraine rather than in Russia.

Such a market would drive a radical cheapening of space technology, finally making possible all the dreams of space tourism, industrialization, and colonization that have been within view but out of reach since the dawn of the space age. So the dam has been broken, and the four-decade-long post-Apollo age of stagnation in space launch and human spaceflight technology has come to an end. An entrepreneurial space race has erupted with players including Firefly, Vector Launch, Virgin Galactic, Stratolaunch, and, most important, Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin—which will soon launch its own reusable New Glenn booster with similar capabilities to the Falcon Heavy—competing to take their share of a market that will soon explode in size. They will soon have plenty of company. SpaceX has shown that it is possible for lean, hard-driving entrepreneurial ventures to do—better—what it previously was thought only the governments of major powers could attempt.

This would be particularly true if Musk were to go public and had to explain his business decisions to dividend-driven investors. Fortunately, he's not going to have that option for long. Where Musk has gone, others are already following. The most important of the SpaceX emulators is the Blue Origin company, founded by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Once again, we see the power of the space idea. I had no direct involvement with the chain of events that led to this rather secretive start-up, so I don't know all the details, but it appears that the key formative influence was Princeton professor Gerard K. O'Neill, whose visionary concepts, published in the 1970s, of building orbiting space cities financed by solar power satellites beaming power down to Earth inspired a large following.7 Among these followers was the young Bezos, who included many O'Neillian ideas in his high school graduation address and then went to Princeton, where he studied with O'Neill directly.


pages: 176 words: 55,819

The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career by Reid Hoffman, Ben Casnocha

Airbnb, Andy Kessler, Apollo 13, Benchmark Capital, Black Swan, business intelligence, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, follow your passion, future of work, game design, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, late fees, lateral thinking, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, out of africa, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, recommendation engine, Richard Bolles, risk tolerance, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the strength of weak ties, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

AnnaLee Saxenian, Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 34. 9. Michael Eisner and Aaron D. Cohen, Working Together: Why Great Partnerships Succeed (New York: Harper Business, 2010), 202. 10. Nicholas Carlson, “Jeff Bezos: Here’s Why He Won,” Business Insider, May 16, 2011, http://​www.​businessinsider.​com/​jeff-​bezos-​visionary-​2011​–​4#ixzz1​NsYA4QfS 11. Claire Cain Miller, “How Pandora Slipped Past the Junkyard,” New York Times, March 7, 2010, http://​dealbook.​nytimes.​com/​2010/​03/​08/​how-​pandora-​slipped-​past-​the-​junkyard Chapter 6 1. Reannon Muth, “Are Risk-Takers a Dying Breed?”

The Start-up of You Mind-set: Permanent Beta Technology companies sometimes keep the beta test phase label on software for a time after the official launch to stress that the product is not finished so much as ready for the next batch of improvements. Gmail, for example, launched in 2004 but only left official beta in 2009, after millions of people were already using it. Jeff Bezos, founder/CEO of Amazon, concludes every annual letter to shareholders by reminding readers, as he did in his first annual letter in 1997, that “it’s still Day 1” of the Internet and of Amazon.com: “Though we are optimistic, we must remain vigilant and maintain a sense of urgency.”19 In other words, Amazon is never finished: it’s always Day 1.

And their resourcefulness impressed enough investors that they were able to raise outside financing, including a Series A investment that I led with Greylock. Hundreds of thousands of travelers have since happily stayed on the bed or air mattress of a host. It’s hard to capture the essence of resourcefulness, but most of us know it when we see it. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos was looking for a wife, he told friends who were setting him up on dates that he wanted a woman who was resourceful. But they didn’t get it. So he told them, “I want a woman who could help me get out of a Third World prison!” That did the trick.10 The Airbnb guys, if they had to, could probably break out of a Third World prison.


pages: 199 words: 56,243

Trillion Dollar Coach: The Leadership Playbook of Silicon Valley's Bill Campbell by Eric Schmidt, Jonathan Rosenberg, Alan Eagle

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, cloud computing, El Camino Real, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PalmPilot, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, Tim Cook: Apple

Bill had been a transcendent figure in the technology business since moving west in 1983, playing a critical role in the success of Apple, Google, Intuit, and numerous other companies. To say he was tremendously respected would be a gross understatement—loved is more like it. Among the audience that day were dozens of technology leaders—Larry Page. Sergey Brin. Mark Zuckerberg. Sheryl Sandberg. Tim Cook. Jeff Bezos. Mary Meeker. John Doerr. Ruth Porat. Scott Cook. Brad Smith. Ben Horowitz. Marc Andreessen. Such a concentration of industry pioneers and power is rarely seen, at least not in Silicon Valley. We—Jonathan Rosenberg and Eric Schmidt—sat among the audience, making subdued small talk, soft sunshine contrasting with the somber mood.

Although the deal failed, she and Bill stayed in touch. She later left Microsoft and joined a Seattle startup called Amazon, and soon thereafter called up Bill and asked for an introduction to John Doerr. Bill made the introductions, and Kleiner Perkins ended up investing in Amazon. A few years later, in 2000, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, took some time off to spend time with his family. He had hired a COO, Joe Galli, but when he returned from his leave, the company was struggling. The board, which included Doerr and Scott Cook, was wondering if perhaps Jeff should step aside as CEO and elevate Joe to that role.

They asked Bill to spend some time in Seattle and report back. Bill started traveling back and forth to the Pacific Northwest, going to the Amazon offices a couple of days per week, sitting in on management meetings and observing the company’s operations and culture. After a few weeks, he reported back to the board that Jeff Bezos needed to stay as CEO. In his book about Amazon, The Everything Store, Brad Stone writes that “Campbell concluded Galli was unnaturally focused on issues of compensation and on perks like private planes, and he saw that employees were loyal to Bezos.”9 Bill’s recommendation came as a surprise to some board members, but his assessment carried the day and Jeff stayed as CEO, obviously with great success.


pages: 394 words: 57,287

Unleashed by Anne Morriss, Frances Frei

"Susan Fowler" uber, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, Black Lives Matter, book value, Donald Trump, future of work, gamification, gig economy, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, Greyball, Jeff Bezos, Netflix Prize, Network effects, performance metric, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, super pumped, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture

Kent Bowen, “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System,” Harvard Business Review, September 1, 1999. 23. Shawn Achor et al., “9 Out of 10 People Are Willing to Earn Less Money to Do More-Meaningful Work,” Harvard Business Review, November 6, 2018. 24. Brittain Ladd, “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Believes This Is the Best Way to Run Meetings,” Observer, June 10, 2019, https://observer.com/2019/06/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-meetings-success-strategy/. 25. “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos: It Is Always Day One,” YouTube, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPbKeNghRYE. 26. We are paraphrasing one of Anne’s writing teachers, the wonderful Rhoda Flaxman. Flaxman taught British and American Literature at Brown University, where she also directed Brown’s writing-across-the curriculum program and published on Victorian literature. 27.

Your people will be continuously tempted to deviate from the strategy—usually for excellent reasons, like responding to a customer service request. A strategic North Star, simply described, gives us all a fighting chance at staying the course. Pick any mode(s) of communication you want and certainly play to your strengths. Every year Jeff Bezos writes a long letter to his shareholders in which he reinforces the pillars of Amazon’s strategy. It’s addressed to investors who own a piece of the company but clearly written for every stakeholder in his orbit. Bezos is a clear, persuasive writer, and these annual letters are a great example of “deeply/simply” communication.


pages: 252 words: 78,780

Lab Rats: How Silicon Valley Made Work Miserable for the Rest of Us by Dan Lyons

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, antiwork, Apple II, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, full employment, future of work, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Hacker News, hiring and firing, holacracy, housing crisis, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, John Gruber, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, move fast and break things, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parker Conrad, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, RAND corporation, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, telemarketer, Tesla Model S, Thomas Davenport, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, web application, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

Techies now dominate Vanity Fair’s annual “New Establishment” list, a barometer of the zeitgeist, grabbing 40 of the 100 spots on the 2017 roster. Unfortunately many of these new oligarchs seem to possess a decidedly anti-worker, and even anti-human worldview. At the top of the list was Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who is worth $140 billion, the largest fortune (in absolute terms, not adjusted for inflation) ever accumulated. Some see Bezos as a hero, but his fortune has been built on the backs of warehouse workers who toil away in abominable conditions under huge amounts of stress, sometimes earning so little that they qualify for food stamps.

In 1997 he founded a company called aQuantive which he sold a decade later to Microsoft for $6 billion. But an even greater part of his wealth comes from a single investment that might turn out to have been the single smartest bet of the last hundred years. In the early 1990s, Hanauer met a nerdy young guy named Jeff Bezos and became the first person to put money into Amazon. Instead of normal billionaire hobbies—starting a space exploration company, purchasing a private island—Hanauer became an unlikely advocate for the working class. He says he had a kind of epiphany one day in 2008 when he was poring over Internal Revenue Service data (how’s that for a hobby?)

Amazon generates about half as much revenue as Walmart, but does it with only a quarter as many people—which means Amazon generates roughly twice as much revenue per employee as Walmart does. Even if newly unemployed retail workers could get jobs in Amazon shipping centers, they might not want them. You might imagine that since Amazon makes so much money with (relatively) few employees, the company probably pays those workers exceedingly well. Especially since Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, is the world’s richest man, worth $140 billion. Can you imagine the kind of holiday bonus you must get when you work for the world’s richest man? Bah, humbug. Bezos is a modern-day Ebenezer Scrooge. Amazon, the Silicon Sociopath Amazon’s warehouse workers earn on average about 15 percent less than other warehouse workers, according to a study by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, a Washington, DC, advocacy group.


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Trees on Mars: Our Obsession With the Future by Hal Niedzviecki

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, anti-communist, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, big-box store, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, computer age, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Zinn, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, independent contractor, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John von Neumann, knowledge economy, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Neil Armstrong, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Ponzi scheme, precariat, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Virgin Galactic, warehouse robotics, working poor

“The Art of Innovation: Lessons in Creativity from IDEO, America’s Leading Design Firm,” Amazon.com, accessed April 28, 2015, http://www.amazon.com/The-Art-Innovation-Creativity-Americas/dp/0385499841. 21. Quentin Hardy, “How Tech Remakes Space, Food and Urgency,” The New York Times, September 4, 2013, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/04/how-tech-remakes-space-food-and-urgency/. 22. Eric Jackson, “6 Things Jeff Bezos Knew Back in 1997 That Made Amazon a Gorilla,” Forbes, accessed April 13, 2015, http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2011/11/16/6-things-jeff-bezos-knew-back-in-1997-that-made-amazon-a-go-rilla/. 23. Moretti, The New Geography of Jobs, 11. 24. “Americans Predict a Future Like Science Fiction,” Bits Blog, accessed April 22, 2014, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/americans-predict-a-future-like-science-fiction/. 25.

At Facebook, recently hired engineers are “encouraged to change something small on the site as early as the first day, so they can feel as if no product is ever really done.”21 At Google, programmers and technologists are expected to spend as much as 20 percent of their time pursuing their own pet projects for changing the future of the company and the world. “It’s all about the long term,” went the title of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s first letter to shareholders way back in 1997.22 Everything is about shaping the future. Everything is about “visionary product insight.” If the new media monoliths of the twenty-first century can be said to have put forth one cohesive vision, it’s this: own the future, or the future will own you.

Everyone knows, because it really is.”43 “Hard to believe,” notes a tech columnist, “but there was once a time when the visionaries worked for the government.” The writer goes on to list the men (interestingly, only men) and companies at the forefront of change, noting, “The wild dreamers these days work for technology companies.”44 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a hero. The late Steve Jobs, whose autobiography was a best seller throughout 2011 and who was all but canonized after his death, is a hero. A six-year-old given the “Most Likely to Be the Next Zuckerberg” award at the Seattle Startup Weekend for his ideas about a water-dissolving sticker business is a potential hero.


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The Startup Way: Making Entrepreneurship a Fundamental Discipline of Every Enterprise by Eric Ries

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Ben Horowitz, billion-dollar mistake, Black-Scholes formula, Blitzscaling, call centre, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, connected car, corporate governance, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, hockey-stick growth, index card, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loss aversion, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, move fast and break things, obamacare, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, place-making, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, the scientific method, time value of money, Toyota Production System, two-pizza team, Uber for X, universal basic income, web of trust, Y Combinator

Byrne, Jack: Straight from the Gut (New York: Warner Business Books, 2001), p. 330. 7. forbes.com/​sites/​miguelhelft/​2015/​09/​21/​dropboxs-houston-were-building-the-worlds-largest-platform-for-collaboration/#58f0ccd9125e; fortune.com/​2016/​03/​07/​dropbox-half-a-billion-users. 8. techcrunch.com/​2013/​11/​02/​welcome-to-the-unicorn-club/. 9. forbes.com/​sites/​howardhyu/​2016/​11/​25/​this-black-friday-jeff-bezos-makes-amazon-echo-sound-better-than-google-home/​#11dc97a66cc4; wired.com/​2014/​12/​jeff-bezos-ignition-conference/; fastcompany.com/​3040383/​following-fire-phone-flop-big-changes-at-amazons-lab126. 10. bloomberg.com/​features/​2016-amazon-echo. 11. fastcompany.com/​3039887/​under-fire. 12. sec.gov/​Archives/​edgar/​data/​1018724/​000119312505070440/​dex991.htm.

Initially priced at $199, the Fire soon cost only $0.99, and by the following winter, the company took a $170 million write-down based mostly on unsold phones.9 Where a more traditional company might have fired people and destroyed morale, Amazon used this opportunity to learn and reorganize. As Jeff Bezos said at the time: I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally. None of these things are fun, but they also don’t matter. What matters is that companies that don’t continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence.

To measure success, project teams track and share numbers designed to look as good as possible (“vanity metrics”)—but not necessarily to reveal the truth. A MODERN COMPANY attempts to maximize the probability and scale of future impact. Project teams report and measure leading indicators using innovation accounting. In a for-profit context, this goal often follows Jeff Bezos’s advice to “focus on long-term growth in free cash-flow per share” rather than traditional accounting measures.12 AN OLD-FASHIONED COMPANY is full of multitasking: meetings and deliberations where participants are only partly focused on the task at hand. There are lots of middle managers and experts in the room to give their input, even if they don’t have direct responsibility for implementation.


pages: 363 words: 109,077

The Raging 2020s: Companies, Countries, People - and the Fight for Our Future by Alec Ross

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, clean water, collective bargaining, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, dumpster diving, employer provided health coverage, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, mass immigration, megacity, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, mortgage tax deduction, natural language processing, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, OpenAI, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, special economic zone, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, working poor

Women fill just 20 percent: Subodh Mishra, “U.S. Board Diversity Trends in 2019,” Harvard Law School Forum on Corporate Governance, June 18, 2019, https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2019/06/18/u-s-board-diversity-trends-in-2019/. In 2020, Jeff Bezos: Karen Weise, “Jeff Bezos Commits $10 Billion to Address Climate Change,” New York Times, February 17, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/17/technology/jeff-bezos-climate-change-earth-fund.html. Bill Gates has committed his fortune: Matthew Brown, “Fact Check: Bill Gates Has Given Over $50 Billion to Charitable Causes over Career,” USA Today, June 11, 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/06/11/fact-check-bill-gates-has-given-over-50-billion-charitable-causes/3169864001/.

A system that is amoral and imbecilic enough to compel selling Amazon’s stock because it invested in protecting its workers during a pandemic is not one that we should trust to steward the overall health and well-being of our economy. And it is worth noting that many other companies might well have hesitated to invest in workers’ safety, knowing all too well that it would bring the ire of shareholders. The vast majority of CEOs are working on smaller time scales than Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and are more vulnerable to the whims of their boards. So, instead of protecting workers, that rival CEO could take an easier route by opting for a stock buyback instead. What makes this even more obvious is that it is not just Wall Street analysts overthinking the short-term effects of a CEO’s actions; it’s a bunch of dumb algorithms.

More and more business leaders are reaching this conclusion and trying to find ways to use their power for more than just the bottom line. In 2019, Robert Smith, the founder of the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners and the wealthiest African American person in the United States, committed to paying off the student loans of all 402 students in the graduating class of Morehouse College. In 2020, Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO and the richest man alive, committed to investing $10 billion toward combating climate change. For decades now, Bill Gates has committed his fortune to humanitarian causes through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with the couple’s contributions rising to $50 billion since 1994.


pages: 532 words: 139,706

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, Burning Man, carbon footprint, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, death of newspapers, digital rights, disintermediation, don't be evil, facts on the ground, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Google Earth, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet Archive, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, semantic web, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social graph, spectrum auction, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, Susan Wojcicki, systems thinking, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, X Prize, yield management, zero-sum game

., April 29, 2009. 311 “The official answer”: author interviews with Eric Schmidt, March 26, 2008 and April 1, 2009. 312 “Our industry faces”: author e-mail exchange with Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., April 29, 2009. 313 10 percent of these were downloaded: author interview with Jeff Bezos, July 9, 2008. When I sought to update this number, Bezos’s deputy Craig Berman, reported in a May 2009 e-mail that it had grown to 35 percent. 313 What gives publishers pause: Motoko Rich, “Preparing to Sell E-Books, Google Takes on Amazon,” New York Times, June 1, 2009. 313 “Physical books”: Jeff Bezos interviewed at the D Conference attended by author, May 28, 2008, and interview with author, July 9, 2008. 314 nightly audience has plunged: nightly news audience decline from Richard Perez-Pena, New York Times, May 11, 2009. 314 Jack Myers projects: Myers Advertising and Marketing Investment Insights, March 10, 2009. 315 Neilson reported in early 2009: Nielsen report on fourth quarter 2008 television and Internet video cited in the Wall Street Journal, February 23, 2009. 315 If four million: Bobbie Kotick interviewed at D Conference attended by author, May 28, 2008. 315 “To survive”: author interviews with Quincy Smith, January 23, 2008, and April 9, 2008, May 19 and 25, 2009, and with Les Moonves, July 8, 2009. 316 The biggest box office : Brian Stelter and Brad Stone, “Digital Pirates Winning Battle with Major Hollywood Studios,” New York Times, February 5, 2009. 316 Sergey Brin described going on a boat in Europe: author interview with Sergey Brin, March 26, 2008. 317 So they initiated efforts: Sam Schechner and Vishesh Kumar, “Cable Firms Look to Offer TV Programs Online,” Wall Street Journal, February 20, 2009, and interviews with senior television executives. 317 Eric Schmidt saw a demonstration: author interview with Eric Schmidt, April 1, 2009, and Sezmi.com. 318 “We can go directly”: author interview with Ivan Seidenberg, October 30, 2008. 319 Irwin Gotlieb also dismisses: author interview with Irwin Gotlieb, February 9, 2009. 321 “Do you feel bad”: author interview with Eric Schmidt, March 26, 2008.

And second, Google was not relying on a promise of advertising revenues to reach an agreement; rather, it agreed to an up-front compensation formula of a sort it had refused to make with other traditional media companies, with the exception of the Associated Press and some wire services. “It’s a new model for us,” admitted Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond. This new model was lavishly praised by authors and publishers, but it raised new questions. Was Google going to enter the online book-selling business, competing against an early investor, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos? With Microsoft dropping its book search project and no other deep-pocketed competitor jumping in, did the agreement concentrate too much informational power in the hands of a single company? Did Google have the right, as it claimed, to sell digital copies of books whose copyright had expired? If it is true—as the Internet Archive, a competitive book digitizer, claims—that the settlement grants Google immunity from copyright infringement, will the courts permit this?

And an entirely new class of books-user-generated serial novels written online—now appear on cell phones in Japan, and will elsewhere. For readers, a digital book, like a digital newspaper or magazine, offers a multimedia dimension: video, music, games, interactivity between author and audience. Early in 2009, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that of the books that were available both in print and electronically at Amazon, 10 percent of these were downloaded and sold on its portable Kindle device. By May, Amazon said the number of electronic books it sold had soared to 35 percent. This figure had nearly quadrupled in a year. Although electronic books comprised but 1 percent to 2 percent of all books sold, it is clear that paper will continue to be replaced by bits.


pages: 386 words: 112,064

Rich White Men: What It Takes to Uproot the Old Boys' Club and Transform America by Garrett Neiman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, basic income, Bernie Sanders, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, clean water, confounding variable, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, Donald Trump, drone strike, effective altruism, Elon Musk, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, green new deal, high net worth, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, impact investing, imposter syndrome, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, white flight, William MacAskill, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor

Guttmann, “Advertising Spending in North America 2000–2004,” Statista, July 1, 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/429036/advertising-expenditure-in-north-america/. 25. Anna Cooban, Riley Charles, “Rotterdam May Dismantle Historic Bridge for Superyacht Reportedly Owned by Jeff Bezos,” CNN, February 4, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/02/04/business/jeff-bezos-rotterdam-yacht/index.html. Chapter 15: Embracing Feminine Leadership 1. Succession, season 2, episode 10, “This Is Not for Tears,” aired October 13, 2019, on HBO. 2. Kimberly Adams, “The Disturbing Parallels between Modern Accounting and the Business of Slavery,” Marketplace, August 14, 2018, https://www.marketplace.org/2018/08/14/disturbing-parallels-between-modern-accounting-business-slavery/. 3.

At the same time, though, I don’t want to imply that height carries the equivalent weight of other identity-based hundred advantages like socioeconomic status, gender, and race. I couldn’t find a specific study that analyzes these intersections explicitly, but I find it telling that there are more short white men worth at least $50 billion—Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Michael Bloomberg, Michael Dell, Charles Koch, Jim Walton, Mark Zuckerberg are all at most five foot seven—than there are Black people of any height who are CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. Nor do I want to suggest that gender inequities specifically would be resolved if American society had more tall women, since height is also another prism through which women face a double bind: tall women are perceived to be more masculine,7 which may help to explain why they can sometimes access additional leadership opportunities, but that same perception also leads some men to conclude that they are less likable and less fit for promotions.

When the American Investment Council aligns otherwise-competing private equity firms to protect the carried interest loophole, that’s anticompetitive—and antidemocratic, since the public’s desire to close the loophole is suppressed. Extractive actions like these enabled Amazon and Tesla—the companies led by Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, the world’s two richest men—to pay zero income taxes in 2018.9 When rich white guys deplete public infrastructure—such as the public universities that educate our workforces and the roads that get employees to our offices—without renewing it, we are engaging unsustainably, enriching ourselves at the expense of the public good.


pages: 290 words: 87,549

The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions...and Created Plenty of Controversy by Leigh Gallagher

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Blitzscaling, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, data science, don't be evil, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, gentrification, geopolitical risk, growth hacking, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, housing crisis, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Justin.tv, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Menlo Park, Network effects, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, RFID, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the payments system, Tony Hsieh, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, Y Combinator, yield management

Cracks Down on Airbnb,” Crain’s New York Business, October 2, 2014, http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20141002/BLOGS04/141009955/landlord-related-cos-cracks-down-on-airbnb. 120 “he’s trying to punk me”: Mike Vilensky, “Airbnb Wins Big-Name Allies in Albany Battle,” Wall Street Journal, August 9, 2016, http://www.wsj.com/articles/airbnb-wins-big-name-allies-in-albany-battle-1470788320. 120 “ignore state law”: Rich Bockmann, “Airbnb Is Not Taking It Lying Down,” The Real Deal, March 1, 2016, http://therealdeal.com/issues_articles/as-opponents-line-up-airbnb-fights-to-win-legitimacy-in-nyc/. 120 (snarky voice-over): “New Ad Highlights Airbnb’s Problem with the Law, from Los Angeles to New York, San Francisco to Chicago and Everywhere in Between,” Share Better, accessed October 9, 2016, http://www.sharebetter.org/story/share-better-releases-new-ad-airbnb-problems-everywhere/. 120 the authors wrote: Rosa Goldensohn, “Council Members Threaten Ashton Kutcher, Jeff Bezos with Airbnb Crackdown,” Crain’s New York Business, March 11, 2016, http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/20160311/BLOGS04/160319990/new-york-city-council-threaten-ashton-kutcher-jeff-bezos-with-airbnb-crackdown. 120 as “theatrics”: Ibid 120 (“#RunFromAirbnb”): Lisa Fickenscher, “Activists Call on Brooklyn Half Organizers to Dump Airbnb as Sponsor,” New York Post, May 20, 2016, http://nypost.com/2016/05/20/activists-call-on-brooklyn-half-organizers-to-dump-airbnb-as-sponsor/. 122 “to see an organization lose”: Erin Durkin, “Airbnb Foes Celebrate Win after Gov.

“By the way, I’m learning from this,” he said, pointing to my notes. “If I wanted to learn how to interview a candidate, the obvious place to go would be another executive. But the better place to go would be a reporter.” Of course, Chesky is operating at a level of highly privileged access; not everyone can call up Jony Ive or Mark Zuckerberg or Jeff Bezos. But Chesky insists there are always good mentors, regardless of someone’s level. “When I was unemployed and a designer, I also met with people, and I was [just as] shameless,” he says. In fact, if he had been meeting with some of these heavy hitters when he was an unemployed designer, he points out, it wouldn’t have been useful.

He met with Disney CEO Bob Iger but also brought in Jay Rasulo, the former Disney CFO who later ran all its theme parks; and the company’s former chairman for theme parks and resorts, Paul Pressler (who later served as CEO of Gap Inc.). “This product was designed around the principles of Disneyland,” Chesky says. He also met with his sources at other companies that had branched out: Jony Ive at Apple, and in probably the best, if aspirational, model for what Chesky is trying to do, Jeff Bezos, who had turned Amazon from an online bookseller into a mega-retailer. Chesky also says he took some advice from Elon Musk of Tesla. Musk cautioned him against becoming a company that gets so big that it enters what he calls the “administration era”: a phase of 10 or 20 percent growth that a company settles into after the “creation era” and then the “building era” and signals a mature business.


pages: 372 words: 94,153

More From Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources – and What Happens Next by Andrew McAfee

back-to-the-land, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, congestion pricing, Corn Laws, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, DeepMind, degrowth, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Garrett Hardin, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, humanitarian revolution, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, Landlord’s Game, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, means of production, Michael Shellenberger, Mikhail Gorbachev, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, precision agriculture, price elasticity of demand, profit maximization, profit motive, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Ted Nordhaus, TED Talk, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, Tragedy of the Commons, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Veblen good, War on Poverty, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, World Values Survey

six of the eight highest public-market valuations ever recorded: Jeff Sommer and Karl Russell, “Apple Is the Most Valuable Public Company Ever. But How Much of a Record Is That?,” New York Times, December 21, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/05/your-money/apple-market-share.html. Jeff Bezos, for example, became known as the “richest man in modern history”: Robert Frank, “Jeff Bezos Is Now the Richest Man in Modern History,” CNBC, July 16, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/07/16/jeff-bezos-is-now-the-richest-man-in-modern-history.html. in 2016, 50.7 percent of US households owned no stocks at all: Christopher Ingraham, “For Roughly Half of Americans, the Stock Market’s Record Highs Don’t Help at All,” Washington Post, December 18, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/18/for-roughly-half-of-americans-the-stock-markets-record-highs-dont-help-at-all/?

Since 1925 (when systematic data collection began), six of the eight highest public-market valuations ever recorded for American companies have belonged to modern high-tech superstars such as Amazon, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), Intel, and Microsoft. The people who were smart or lucky enough to acquire large amounts of stock in these companies have become fantastically affluent. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for example, became known as the “richest man in modern history” in July of 2018, when his wealth passed $150 billion. Most Americans, however, don’t own stock in Amazon. Or in any other company. Economist Edward Wolff found that, in 2016, 50.7 percent of US households owned no stocks at all, either directly or in retirement accounts.

In Douglas Adams’s iconic science fiction novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 42 is the answer to “the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.” CONCLUSION Our Next Planet We’ve sent robotic probes to every planet in this solar system. Earth is BY FAR the best one. —Jeff Bezos, Twitter, 2018 Imagine that a genius invents time travel and uses the capability to offer nature lovers tours around the world of two hundred thousand years ago, before we Homo sapiens burst out from our African homeland and began to swarm all over the earth.I What would these travelers see?


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The Hilarious World of Depression by John Moe

Amazon Robotics, benefit corporation, David Sedaris, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI)

Finally, I noticed the driver of the car briefly look back and noted that he was small of build and bald. This distracted me long enough to ask myself if that was, in fact, Jeff Bezos himself that I had been road raging all over. Had I stalked and bullied the founder and CEO of Amazon.com? Later that day, I sat at my desk and waited for an email or a phone call to tell me that I could go home for the day and never return. Tried to review a toy or two. Failed at that. Hard to appreciate the nuances of an Elmo bath toy when you’re having a mental breakdown after road raging Jeff Bezos. Maybe it was too much sugar? All I’d eaten that day was a bagel. Too much caffeine? I’d had my usual one cup of coffee.

The idea was that when recipients went to “get” their cards by clicking on a link in an email, they would see ads on the web page where they arrived. Web banner ads were thought to be extremely effective marketing devices back in the ’90s; thus the exorbitant sale price Excite! had paid. (As Americans, we were also way into Hootie & the Blowfish back then. It was a different time.) Apparently Jeff Bezos thought this business model was a great idea, so much so that he acquired an e-card company of his own. My job was to take what I could from that acquired site and build a new Amazon e-cards site—and I was expected to have it all up and running in a few months. It was like being told to build an airplane but with no blueprints and also you’re a cocker spaniel.

You have achieved something only to have depression yank it away. That’s kind of funny. Even when there was ample evidence against the impostor notion, it persisted. At one point, I was asked to emcee the annual all-company meeting held at the big convention center in Seattle, and it went great. When Jeff Bezos was named Time’s Person of the Year, I was interviewed and photographed for the issue. However, honors like those only increased the impostor feeling because my ineptitude was being put on ever-bigger stages. I even went to an Amazon party where Bezos put a hula skirt on me, for reasons I did not and still do not understand.


pages: 265 words: 70,788

The Wide Lens: What Successful Innovators See That Others Miss by Ron Adner

ASML, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, call centre, Clayton Christensen, Ford Model T, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, M-Pesa, minimum viable product, mobile money, new economy, RAND corporation, RFID, smart grid, smart meter, SoftBank, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, supply-chain management, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, vertical integration

Well, Maybe You Can,” New York Times, November 24, 2006. 94 difference between the cost: Peter Wayner, “An Entire Bookshelf, in Your Hands,” New York Times, August 9, 2007. 96 “downright industrially ugly”: Tom Regan, “Costly ‘Kindle’ Reader Gets a Lot of It Right,” Christian Science Monitor, November28, 2007, http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/1127/p25s01-stct.xhtml. 96 weighed more, and had an inferior screen: Product specs (4-shade gray scale vs. 8), Amazon.com, http://www.amazon.com/Kindle-Amazons-Original-Wireless-generation/dp/B000FI73MA/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top. 96 “This isn’t a device, it’s a service”: Levy, “The Future of Reading.” 96 330,000 within two years: Motoko Rich, “Barnes & Noble Jumps into E-Book Sales with Both Feet,” International Herald Tribune, July 22, 2009. 97 $9.99 or less: David Pogue, “Books Pop Up, Wirelessly,” New York Times, November 22, 2007. 97 “works as a stand-alone device”: “A Conversation with Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos,” Charlie Rose, November 19, 2007. 97 “King of the Retail Jungle”: Farhad Manjoo, “Amazon, King of the Retail Jungle,” Washington Post, February 8, 2009. 97 30 percent of books sold in the United States: “40: Jeff Bezos—CEO, Amazon.com [The Global Elite],” Newsweek, December 19, 2008, http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2008/12/19/40-jeff-bezos.xhtml. 97 Kindle was both closed and proprietary: Rob Pegoraro, “Kindled, but Not Enlightened,” Washington Post, December 6, 2007. 98 Amazon sacrificed some e-book profits up-front: David Gelles and Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, “A Page Is Turned,” Financial Times, February 9, 2010. 98 able to make up much of the difference: Mark Muro, “The New Republic: The Kindle, America’s Decline,” NPR.org, February 26, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?

Take a look at Amazon’s value blueprint above. What is the primary difference between the approaches taken by Sony and Amazon? For readers, the Kindle provided a one-stop shop, a simple, inexpensive way to purchase and enjoy anything from Jane Eyre to the latest New York Times best seller. Presenting the Kindle, CEO Jeff Bezos announced, “This isn’t a device, it’s a service.” Unlike Sony’s Reader, the Kindle offered a complete experience for the customer: an expansive library of books, initially including more than 90,000 titles and growing to approximately 330,000 within two years; the right price (while a new hardcover usually costs around $25, most Kindle books, including new titles and best sellers, were $9.99 or less); and the ability to download the book instantly using Amazon’s wireless network.


pages: 233 words: 67,596

Competing on Analytics: The New Science of Winning by Thomas H. Davenport, Jeanne G. Harris

always be closing, Apollo 13, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, business intelligence, business logic, business process, call centre, commoditize, data acquisition, digital map, en.wikipedia.org, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, if you build it, they will come, intangible asset, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knapsack problem, late fees, linear programming, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Netflix Prize, new economy, performance metric, personalized medicine, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, recommendation engine, RFID, search inside the book, shareholder value, six sigma, statistical model, supply-chain management, text mining, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, traveling salesman, yield management

It’s also clear that decision makers have to use intuition when they have no data and must make a very rapid decision—as in Gladwell’s example of police officers deciding whether to shoot a suspect. Gary Klein, a consultant on decision making, makes similar arguments about fire-fighters making decisions about burning buildings.11 Even firms that are generally quite analytical must sometimes resort to intuition when they have no data. For example, Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com, greatly prefers to perform limited tests of new features on Amazon.com, rigorously quantifying user reaction before rolling them out. But the company’s “search inside the book” offering was impossible to test without applying it to a critical mass of books (Amazon.com started with 120,000).

Such changes don’t happen by accident; they must be led by senior executives with a passion for analytics and fact-based decision making. Ideally, the primary advocate should be the CEO, and indeed we found several chief executives who were driving the shift to analytics at their firms. These included Gary Loveman, CEO of Harrah’s; Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com; Rich Fairbank, the founder and CEO of Capital One; Reed Hastings of Netflix; and Barry Beracha, formerly CEO of Sara Lee Bakery Group. Each of these executives has stated both internally and publicly that their companies are engaged in some form of analytical competition.

It would be quite demoralizing for a CEO to preach the analytical gospel for everyone else but then to make excuses for his or her own performance as an executive. How Does Analytical Leadership Emerge? Some organizations’ leaders had the desire to compete analytically from their beginning. Amazon.com was viewed by founder Jeff Bezos as competing on analytics from its start. Its concept of personalization was based on statistical algorithms and Web transaction data, and it quickly moved into analytics on supply chain and marketing issues as well. Amazon.com has recently used analytics to explore whether it should advertise on television, and has concluded that it would not be a successful use of its resources.


Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow by Matthew Skelton, Manuel Pais

anti-pattern, business logic, business process, call centre, cognitive load, continuous integration, Conway's law, database schema, DevOps, different worldview, Dunbar number, holacracy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kubernetes, Lean Startup, loose coupling, meta-analysis, microservices, Norbert Wiener, operational security, platform as a service, pull request, remote working, systems thinking, two-pizza team, web application

Case Study: Strictly Independent Service Teams at Amazon As far back as 2002, Amazon adopted a team topology that used highly independent teams. This was a deliberate mandate from CEO Jeff Bezos to ensure that each service or application in the Amazon estate was truly independent—acknowledging Conway’s law—and ensured that the teams would be independent as well.3 Amazon is also known for limiting the size of its software teams to those that can be fed by two pizzas, in order to increase accountability and maximize speed of delivery and discovery.4 Around 2002, Jeff Bezos’ sent a mandate to the Amazon engineering division that set out very specific rules for team organization:5 Each team is fully responsible for developing and operating its own service (whereby a service can be seen as one or more features of Amazon.com or AWS products).

All the git repos for a particular team’s feature are wholly owned by that team and if another team is going to make an addition or change to that code base, they’ll either do it with a pull request or through cross-team pairing, where we would kind of send one half of a pair over to the dependency holding team and one half of that team’s pair back to the upstream team to work on that feature.28 An even more stringent team API approach is taken at cloud vendor AWS, where CEO Jeff Bezos insisted on almost paranoid levels of separation between teams. For example, each team at AWS must assume that “every [other team] becomes a potential DOS [denial of service] attacker requiring service levels, quotas, and throttling.”29 Many of the behaviors and patterns that make a good team API also make for a good platform and good team interactions in general.

., “Does Stress Lead to a Loss of Team Perspective,” 300. 25. Jay et al., “Cyclomatic Complexity and Lines of Code,” 137–143. 26. MacChrystal et al., Team of Teams, 94. 27. Lim and Klein, “Team Mental Models and Team Performance,” 403–418. 28. Evan Wiley, as quoted in Helfand, Dynamic Reteaming, 121. 29. Jeff Bezos, as quoted in Lane, “The Secret to Amazon’s Success.” 30. Axelrod, Complexity of Cooperation; Burgess, Thinking in Promises, 73. 31. Kniberg and Ivarsson, “Scaling Agile @ Spotify.” 32. Kniberg and Ivarsson, “Scaling Agile @ Spotify.” 33. Forsgren et al., Accelerate, 181. 34.


How to Make a Spaceship: A Band of Renegades, an Epic Race, and the Birth of Private Spaceflight by Julian Guthrie

Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, cosmic microwave background, crowdsourcing, Dennis Tito, Doomsday Book, Easter island, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed-gear, Frank Gehry, Gene Kranz, gravity well, Herman Kahn, high net worth, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Larry Ellison, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Neil Armstrong, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, pets.com, private spaceflight, punch-card reader, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, urban planning, Virgin Galactic

The goal of the Montrose gathering was to see whether a dozen men and women meeting over a weekend could hatch a new breed of rocket, finding inspiration in the improbable beginnings of many great companies: Harley-Davidson, Walt Disney, Hewlett-Packard, Apple, and Microsoft were conceived in garages or sheds. Likewise, engineers and pilots, not governments, had started the aviation industry. A space lover named Jeff Bezos—who had served as president of the SEDS chapter at Princeton while a student there—was reportedly starting a book company from his house to capitalize on the next big thing—the Internet. David and Myra Wine, who owned the outsized shack in the woods in Montrose, hoped that whatever prototype was dreamed up could be built in their backyard.

Yes, as he was known, had said no. Peter sat in shock. He wondered: “If Richard Branson says no, who will say yes?” — In early 1999, Peter landed another major meeting, with another major billionaire, who also seemed the perfect fit for the XPRIZE. This time, he was heading to Seattle to meet with Jeff Bezos, head of the impossibly fast-growing Amazon.com. The e-commerce company, not yet five years old, had a stock market value of more than $30 billion. The stock had risen 1,000 percent in a year, making the Seattle-based company more valuable than blue-chip giants like Texaco. Bezos, thirty-five years old, was worth at least $9 billion—and he was a space lover.

Still, at the very least, even if Elon and Adeo did nothing, Peter had met some smart guys who would be friends. Elon was a major Trekkie. He had watched all of the episodes as a kid in South Africa, dreamed of spaceships, and read Heinlein, Asimov, and Douglas Adams. He said his successes in Silicon Valley had paved the way for his future in space—not unlike what Jeff Bezos had told him. Adeo, Elon, and Peter shared an interest in using small teams to accomplish what only the government had done before, though Elon remarked that he saw the government as “a corporation—the biggest corporation.” And like Peter, Adeo and Elon didn’t see NASA as the bad guy, but instead saw the public’s expectation of perfection as an unnecessary speed limit on innovation.


pages: 159 words: 42,401

Snowden's Box: Trust in the Age of Surveillance by Jessica Bruder, Dale Maharidge

air gap, anti-communist, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Broken windows theory, Burning Man, Cambridge Analytica, cashless society, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, computer vision, crowdsourcing, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, messenger bag, Neil Armstrong, Nomadland, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Robert Bork, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, Tim Cook: Apple, web of trust, WikiLeaks

Law enforcement already has a formidable array of surveillance technologies, ranging from license plate readers to the cell site simulators nicknamed “stingrays” that mimic mobile phone towers to facial recognition and access to credit card transactions — an area of data that is mushrooming as some areas of the country move towards a cashless economy. Meanwhile, Amazon has quietly been licensing its own facial recognition software, called Rekognition, to law enforcement agencies. In November 2018, alarmed members of Congress wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos, demanding to know more about how Rekognition was being used. Weeks later, a new Amazon patent application went public. It described a neighborhood surveillance system, made up of networked doorbell cameras that recognize “suspicious” people and call the police. Alexa has already had a few brushes with the law.

A program description praised the “diversity and usefulness” of networked objects — ranging from “routers that connect a laptop to the internet” to “a crockpot (from WEMO) and slippers (from 24eight).” Back when Alexa’s random laughter was creeping out unsuspecting Echo users, the Today show ran a segment on the device. “Maybe it’s just Jeff Bezos, the richest man on planet earth, having a good laugh at all of us behind the scenes,” Carson Daly joked. Then he turned to his fellow hosts. “Do you guys have an Alexa? Where is it in your house?” “In the kitchen!” replied Savannah Guthrie. “And all I really do is ask what time it is, ’cause I’m too lazy to, like, get up and look at the microwave.”

Smith, “Cops Use Pacemaker Data to Charge Homeowner with Arson, Insurance Fraud,” CSO, Jan 30, 2017, csoonline.com. p. 103 “stingrays” that mimic mobile phone towers: “Stingray Tracking Devices: Who’s Got Them?,” America Civil Liberties Union, November 2018, Aclu.org. p. 104 alarmed members of Congress wrote a letter to Jeff Bezos about Recognition: Edward Markey et al., “Dear Mr. Bezos,” https://t.co/k9OGVIEQ05. p. 104 surveillance system made up of networked doorbell cameras: Jacob Snow, “Amazon’s Disturbing Plan to Add Face Surveillance to Your Front Door,” American Civil Liberties Union, December 12, 2018, Aclu.org; Matt McFarland, “Amazon May Want to Identify Burglars with Facial Recognition Tech,” CNN Business, November 30, 2018, Cnn. com; Mark Frauenfelder, “Amazon Patents Doorbell Camera that Calls Police When It Recognizes a ‘Suspicious’ Person,” BoingBoing, December 14, 2018, boingboing.net.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Galbi, “Some Economics of Personal Activity and Implications for the Digital Economy,” August 6, 2001, 7, https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=275346. richest person in modern history: See Robert Frank, “Jeff Bezos Is Now the Richest Man in Modern History,” CNBC, July 18, 2018, accessed November 18, 2018, www.cnbc.com/2018/07/16/jeff-bezos-is-now-the-richest-man-in-modern-history.html. Rhodes Scholars studying at Oxford: Tom Robinson, Jeff Bezos: Amazon.com Architect (Minneapolis: ABDO Publishing, 2010), 26. Jillian D’Onfro, “What Happened to 7 of the Earliest Employees Who Launched Amazon,” Business Insider, April 18, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.businessinsider.com/amazons-earliest-employees-2014-4.

put them into boxes: Amazon does this using highly skilled production process engineers, including some hired as consultants from industrial firms such as Toyota. See Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines Are Making Dumber Humans (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 29–46, hereafter cited as Head, Mindless; Niv Dror, “A Fireside Chat with Jeff Bezos: Innovation & All Things Amazon,” Data Fox, accessed October 22, 2018, https://blog.datafox.com/jeff-bezos-fireside-chat/; Marc Onetto, “When Toyota Met E-commerce: Lean at Amazon,” McKinsey Quarterly (February 2014), www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/operations/our-insights/when-toyota-met-e-commerce-lean-at-amazon [inactive]. buys each part individually: See Head, Mindless, 29–46; Simon Head, “Worse Than Walmart: Amazon’s Sick Brutality and Secret History of Ruthlessly Intimidating Workers,” Salon, February 23, 2014, accessed November 18, 2018, www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_history_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/.

Innovations in distribution, warehousing, and e-commerce displace middle-class independent merchants with subordinate Walmart greeters and Amazon warehouse workers at the bottom, and super-rich owners of megastores—including the world’s richest family (the Waltons of Walmart) and the world’s richest person (Jeff Bezos of Amazon)—at the very top. Derivatives and other new financial technologies allow elite workers on Wall Street to dispense with middle-class community bankers, loan officers, and stockbrokers. And new management techniques allow top executives and CEOs to discard middle and line managers and to exert immense powers directly to organize and control production workers.


Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? by Bill McKibben

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, Anne Wojcicki, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, biodiversity loss, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, CRISPR, David Attenborough, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, disinformation, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Flynn Effect, gigafactory, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Hyperloop, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Bridle, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kim Stanley Robinson, life extension, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, Menlo Park, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, ocean acidification, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, paperclip maximiser, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart meter, Snapchat, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, supervolcano, tech baron, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Y2K, yield curve

The world’s eight richest men possess more wealth than the bottom half of humanity. This trend, not surprisingly, is most pronounced in the United States, where the three richest men have more wealth than the bottom 150 million people taken together.7 The richest tenth of 1 percent own about as much as the poorest 90 percent combined.8 Jeff Bezos, pre-divorce the richest human, would have to spend $28 million every day just to keep his wealth from growing—which is funny in a sick way, given that in 2017 his median employee made $28,000 a year.9 One family, the Waltons, of Walmart lineage, have more wealth than 42 percent of American families combined.10 The situation, of course, is worst for precisely whom you’d expect.

In 2013 it launched its own venture, Calico, which stands for California Life Company. It’s been highly secretive—all anyone really knows about the operation is that it has squadrons of mice eating different diets—but its focus is “the challenge of aging,”8 and it’s definitely not alone. The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, has diverted some of his cash to the San Francisco–based start-up Unity Biotechnology, which is hard at work on “a cure for aging.” At a recent seminar on “the business of longevity,” hosted by The Economist, an “acolyte” of Peter Thiel (who has also invested in the company) rated it as one of the most likely start-ups to get a drug to market soon.

President Trump has proposed zeroing out the budget for the International Space Station, meaning that much of America’s reach into space will need to be funded by the band of tech billionaires who have seized the opportunity. On this day, it was Musk’s company SpaceX, but the flare of rocket engines also illuminated the vast hangar of Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin project. There are others: the late Paul Allen, with his six-engine space plane; Richard Branson, already taking reservations for a Virgin Galactic spacecraft that will carry passengers and satellites into space. It beats trying to build the biggest yacht (though Allen, whose 414-foot Octopus has two helipads and a Jet Ski dock, may have held that title, too).


Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us About Economics and Life by Alan B. Krueger

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, autonomous vehicles, bank run, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bob Geldof, butterfly effect, buy and hold, congestion pricing, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, endogenous growth, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, gig economy, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral hazard, Multics, Network effects, obamacare, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, power law, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, random walk, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Skype, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, too big to fail, transaction costs, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

One reason the entire economy has veered toward a superstar, winner-take-all affair is the rise of digital technology. Successful entrepreneurs can turn apps and digital technology into fortunes worth billions of dollars. Five of the six wealthiest Americans (Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, Michael Bloomberg, and Jeff Bezos)—whose combined wealth equals nearly that of half of the world’s population—made their fortunes because of digital technology.16 Digital technology is scalable. One day soon the top surgeons may be able to operate on a great many more patients due to improvements in digital technology. This technological revolution has brought many other profound economic and social changes, all of which are readily apparent in the music industry.

Commenting on the 1870s, Marshall wrote, “A business man of average ability and average good fortune gets now a lower rate of profits…than at any previous time, while the operations, in which a man exceptionally favoured by genius and good luck can take part, are so extensive as to enable him to amass a large fortune with a rapidity hitherto unknown.”3 Sound familiar? The same might be said of Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg today. Marshall’s explanation for the growing income gap between superstar businessmen and everyone else rested on new developments in communications technology—namely, the telegraph. The telegraph connected Great Britain with America, India, and even places as far away as Australia.

Several large streaming platforms are engaged in fierce competition for listeners and subscribers. Spotify and Apple Music both had more than 20 million paid subscribers in the United States as of mid-2018, and Amazon is not far behind.7 Amazon’s unlimited service doubled its subscribers in the last six months of 2017, according to CEO Jeff Bezos, and is available in forty countries. Worldwide, Spotify has 157 million active users and 71 million paying subscribers. Apple has an estimated 45 million paying subscribers worldwide; it does not offer a free ad-supported service. Pandora has 75 million active monthly users but only 5.5 million paying subscribers.


pages: 307 words: 96,543

Tightrope: Americans Reaching for Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof, Sheryl Wudunn

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, carried interest, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Brooks, Donald Trump, dumpster diving, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, epigenetics, full employment, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobless men, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, randomized controlled trial, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Shai Danziger, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, The Spirit Level, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor

These deaths from drugs, alcohol and suicide have been called “deaths of despair” by the Princeton University economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton, and that pretty much captures the mortality on the Number 6 bus. The despair arises in part from frustrations about loss of status, loss of good jobs, loss of hope for one’s kids. Inequality is currently believed to be greater than it was in the Gilded Age of the nineteenth century, and just three Americans—Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett—now possess as much wealth as the entire bottom half of the population. Senator Mark Warner, a moderate Democrat from Virginia who before entering politics was a successful telecommunications investor and executive, put it to us bluntly: “I don’t believe modern American capitalism is working.”

The problem is not the overall economy, which has been soaring. In Kevin’s lifetime, the U.S. economy quintupled in size, and American corporate profits rose tenfold. Just since 2000, private wealth in the United States has increased by $46 trillion, or an average of $365,000 per household. But that’s like saying that when Jeff Bezos walks into a bar, the average net worth of tipplers there surges by a few billion dollars. True, but misleading. The gains in wealth and income have gone largely to a tiny share of the population, as is common knowledge by now. The people in the top 0.1 percent did fantastically well after 1980, those in the top 1 percent did very well, those below them in the top 10 percent enjoyed incomes growing at the same pace as the economy and those in the bottom 90 percent all lost ground—their incomes grew more slowly than the overall economy—during the last four decades.

EISENHOWER America’s proudest boast throughout history has been that we have no class system, and that opportunity is available to all. Yet a starting point in an exploration of our nation must be to acknowledge that today we do have a class hierarchy, and the Greens and the Knapps are on the bottom tier. Billionaires like Jeff Bezos are the new American aristocrats, while people like the Kristofs and WuDunns, and probably you if you’re reading this book, constitute a new privileged class. This twenty-first-century version of feudalism rests not only on money but also on access to education and the ability to pass down inherited benefits and values to one’s children.


pages: 303 words: 100,516

Billion Dollar Loser: The Epic Rise and Spectacular Fall of Adam Neumann and WeWork by Reeves Wiedeman

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, asset light, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Burning Man, call centre, carbon footprint, company town, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital nomad, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, East Village, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, fake news, fear of failure, Gavin Belson, Gordon Gekko, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Maui Hawaii, medical residency, Menlo Park, microapartment, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, the High Line, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

The boast was one Neumann had repeated many times, but he had a way of delivering canned lines with an enthusiasm that made each one feel handcrafted for its recipient. By 2019, every hyperambitious start-up founder—was there now any other kind?—presented his or her business as having the makings of a world-changing global behemoth. But it took a special kind of hubris to claim you would one day stare down Jeff Bezos in the rearview mirror. “Think of the stage that we’re in as the books for Amazon,” he said. “They used books to enter into the Everything Store. We used the work mission to enter into a larger category.” What category was that? “The larger category of life.” WeWork had just announced a new location in Johannesburg, putting the company on its sixth continent.

“If you feel you need to, you will do whatever it takes to annihilate me right now.” At the time, Adam was winning a war of attrition. In 2011, General Assembly opened in Manhattan’s Flatiron District as a gathering space for New York’s tech scene, with a large coworking operation. GA was backed by big money—Jeff Bezos invested—and had no fear of WeWork. “Why are you worried?” Brad Hargreaves, one of its founders, told his partners. “They named the company WeWork.” But GA also had a robust business hosting computer programming classes, and coworking gave its founders pause. It was difficult to meaningfully differentiate their offering from anyone else’s, and the previous two recessions had wiped out office middlemen as tenants vacated and left them stuck with long-term leases.

No one at Benchmark was prepared to make a move on Adam, especially given the ongoing battle with Kalanick. Developing a reputation for ousting start-up founders was a sure way to have the promising entrepreneurs of the future look elsewhere for funding. Bruce Dunlevie remained Adam’s champion, expressing his belief in Adam’s expansive vision and comparing him to a new-age Jeff Bezos. But several of the firm’s partners, including Bill Gurley, who handled Benchmark’s Uber investment, were beginning to fear that Neumann might eventually present the same kind of problem that Kalanick had. In 2017, five Benchmark partners, including Gurley, flew to New York to confront Adam in his office.


pages: 154 words: 47,880

The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It by Robert B. Reich

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, Carl Icahn, clean water, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, financial deregulation, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job automation, junk bonds, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Michael Milken, mortgage debt, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, stock buybacks, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, union organizing, WeWork, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

As evidenced by their relentless lobbying for the large corporate tax cut, they are not prepared to raise taxes on themselves and their corporations to pay for needed services in their communities. Twenty-one of the corporations whose CEOs signed the statement paid no federal income taxes in 2018, courtesy of those lobbying efforts. One of the signers was Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO of Amazon and of its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after the statement appeared, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce—at a total annual savings of what Bezos himself made in two hours. If the Business Roundtable CEOs were serious about being committed to all their stakeholders, they’d seek legislation that would bind them and every other major corporation to those commitments—legislation, for example, requiring worker representatives on their boards, mandating that workers receive a certain percentage of shares of stock, requiring large companies to provide medical benefits even for part-time workers, forcing corporations to recognize a union when a majority of workers want one, and giving communities where they operate a say on whether corporations that have been their mainstays should be able to abandon them.

* * * — Even as the American middle class shrinks, America now has more billionaires than at any time in its history. There are basically only four ways to accumulate a billion dollars, and none of them is a product of so-called free market. They all depend on how the system has become organized. One way to make a billion is to exploit a monopoly. Jeff Bezos is worth $110 billion. You might say he deserves it because he founded and built Amazon. But, as I have pointed out, Amazon is a monopoly with nearly 50 percent of all e-commerce retail sales in America (and e-commerce is gaining the lion’s share of all retail sales). Consumers have few alternatives.

This doesn’t mean confiscating the wealth and assets of the super-rich. It does mean getting rid of monopolies, stopping the use of insider information, preventing the rich from buying off politicians, and making it harder for the super-rich to avoid paying taxes—in other words, creating a system in which economic gains are shared more widely. Entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos would be just as motivated to come up with dazzling innovations if he received $100 million, or even $50 million. But the current cost to our democracy of billionaires with enough wealth and power to change the system for their own benefit is incalculable. * * * — The standard explanation for widening inequality is that globalization and technological change have made most Americans less competitive because the tasks we used to do can now be done more cheaply by lower-paid workers abroad or by computer-driven machines.


pages: 268 words: 74,724

Who Needs the Fed?: What Taylor Swift, Uber, and Robots Tell Us About Money, Credit, and Why We Should Abolish America's Central Bank by John Tamny

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Bretton Woods, business logic, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, Glass-Steagall Act, Home mortgage interest deduction, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Michael Milken, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, NetJets, offshore financial centre, oil shock, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price stability, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, War on Poverty, yield curve

So it’s no major insight to say that if Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, or Marco Rubio had a clue about what companies and business concepts were going to prosper in the future, they would not be members of the political class. Simply put, wealth in the hands of politicians is not the same as wealth in the hands of Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Peter Thiel, or Jeff Bezos. Government can’t spend or invest us to prosperity for reasons of talent alone. My sermonizing, while true, ultimately amounts to shooting fish in the most crowded of barrels. While the talent differential between politicians and successful investors is blindingly obvious, to point it out is arguably to miss the greater point.

Indeed, in its early days, in the midst of the first technology boom of the late 1990s, sarcastic commentators took to calling the company Amazon.org. But, despite frequent quarterly losses, Amazon can claim a market capitalization of $296 billion.2 And even though it regularly loses money, its patient investors have in no way pulled their funding. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is engaged in constant experimentation. He employs thousands in what is called Lab126 who are charged with devising ways to improve the Amazon customer experience.3 Many experiments fail, such as the Amazon Fire mobile phone that proved undesirable to its massive customer base. Yet, investors have not lost faith in the Seattle-based company, as evidenced by its rich valuation.

To believe the popular notion that QE stimulated the economy one would have first to believe that the Fed’s subsidization of federal spending and borrowing somehow gave the economy a boost. If so, one would have to conclude that Paul Ryan and Nancy Pelosi are more skillful at allocating the economy’s resources than are Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and other captains of industry. Furthermore, a believer in the allegedly stimulative nature of QE would have to think that the economy is enhanced when the federal government creates programs that last forever and continuously cost the taxpayer more money no matter their efficacy or economic benefit.


pages: 270 words: 79,068

The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers by Ben Horowitz

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, business intelligence, cloud computing, financial independence, Google Glasses, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kiva Systems, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, new economy, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, six sigma, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Strategic Defense Initiative

At the time, Bill was in his sixties, with gray hair and a gruff voice, yet he had the energy of a twenty-year-old. He began his career as a college football coach and did not enter the business world until he was forty. Despite the late start, Bill eventually became the chairman and CEO of Intuit. Following that, he became a legend in high tech, mentoring great CEOs such as Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Eric Schmidt of Google. Bill is extremely smart, super-charismatic, and elite operationally, but the key to his success goes beyond those attributes. In any situation—whether it’s the board of Apple, where he’s served for over a decade; the Columbia University Board of Trustees, where he is chairman; or the girls’ football team that he coaches—Bill is inevitably everybody’s favorite person.

If you put something into your culture that is so disturbing that it always creates a conversation, it will change behavior. As we learned in The Godfather, ask a Hollywood mogul to give someone a job and he might not respond. Put a horse’s head in his bed and unemployment will drop by one. Shock is a great mechanism for behavioral change. Here are three examples: Desks made out of doors Very early on, Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, envisioned a company that made money by delivering value to rather than extracting value from its customers. In order to do that, he wanted to be both the price leader and customer service leader for the long run. You can’t do that if you waste a lot of money. Jeff could have spent years auditing every expense and raining hell on anybody who overspent, but he decided to build frugality into his culture.

If you can paint a brilliant vision, people will be patient with you as you learn the CEO skills and give you more leeway with respect to their interests. PEACETIME CEO/WARTIME CEO Bill Campbell always used to say to me, “Ben, you’re the best CEO that I work with.” This always seemed crazy to me, because he was working with Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Eric Schmidt at the time while my company was going straight into the wall. One day I called him on it and said, “Bill, why would you say that? Do results not count?” He said, “There are lots of good peacetime CEOs and lots of good wartime CEOs, but almost no CEOs that can function in both peacetime and in wartime.


pages: 381 words: 78,467

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And by Sonia Arrison

23andMe, 8-hour work day, Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, attribution theory, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Clayton Christensen, dark matter, disruptive innovation, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Frank Gehry, Googley, income per capita, indoor plumbing, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Nick Bostrom, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, placebo effect, post scarcity, precautionary principle, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, rolodex, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Singularitarianism, smart grid, speech recognition, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, sugar pill, synthetic biology, Thomas Malthus, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, X Prize

Whether or not his comments were meant as an endorsement of the field, the smart whiz kids who read Wired probably see it that way. And Gates isn’t the only technology mogul to express great interest in biology becoming a technology project. In a graduation speech at Princeton University, Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos told students that “we humans, plodding as we are, will astonish ourselves.... Atom by atom we’ll assemble small machines that can enter cell walls and make repairs. This month comes the extraordinary, but inevitable news that we’ve synthesized life, and in the coming years we’ll not only synthesize it, but engineer it to specifications.

Back in the 1970s, it was the Homebrew Club that brought together clever thinkers—such as future Apple founders Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak—to trade parts, circuits, and information for DIY computing devices. The point is that biology has become the latest and greatest engineering project, one that hobbyists celebrate. More importantly, eventually this passion will change the world. Those who have already made it big in the technology industry have not failed to notice. Aside from Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, other tech titans who are driving interest in the longevity meme include Oracle’s Larry Ellison, PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel, Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen. TECH TITANS TAKING ON BIOLOGY “Death has never made any sense to me,” Larry Ellison told investigative reporter Mike Wilson, who wrote an authorized biography of the so-called bad boy of Silicon Valley.

Policy makers, activists, journalists, educators, investors, philanthropists, analysts, entrepreneurs, and a whole host of others need to come together to fight for their lives. We now know that aging is plastic and that humanity’s time horizons are not set in stone. Larry Ellison, Bill Gates, Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Paul Allen have all recognized the wealth of opportunity in the bioinformatics revolution, but this is not enough. Other heroes must come forward—perhaps there is even one reading this sentence right now. The goal is more healthy time, which, as we have seen throughout this book, will lead to greater wealth and prospects for happiness.


pages: 444 words: 127,259

Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber by Mike Isaac

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chris Urmson, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, data science, Didi Chuxing, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, family office, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker News, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, off grid, peer-to-peer, pets.com, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech bro, tech worker, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, WeWork, Y Combinator

He became “Professor Kalanick” for the better part of the next three hours, explaining to his employees his vision for the company. He was introducing what he called his “philosophy of work,” the result of what he said was hundreds of hours of deliberation and discussion. The entire presentation was born directly from Kalanick’s obsession with Amazon, the online retailer led by Jeff Bezos, a founder every young entrepreneur idolized. Bezos’s path to success was the stuff of Kalanick’s dreams. The small online bookstore had become a multi-billion-dollar retail behemoth by skating on razor-thin profit margins, focusing on long-term growth over short-term gains, and relentlessly undercutting competitors on prices.

He looked like he would be more at home in a laboratory fabricating silicon chips—something he once did back at Intel in the ’70s—than zooming around the Valley hosting dinners for Barack Obama. As a partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, the storied Menlo Park venture firm, Doerr made an early investment in Netscape, a company that eventually became the world’s first consumer internet browser. Doerr was early to spot the potential of Amazon, back when Jeff Bezos’s operation was selling books in a run-down warehouse in Seattle. And perhaps most famously, in 1999 Doerr invested $12 million in Google, then just a search engine run by a couple of engineers in a garage. Five years later, when Google sold its shares on the public stock markets, that investment was worth more than $3 billion, a return of more than 240 times Doerr’s original investment.

Friends and co-workers invariably described him the same way; Ryan Graves was “a good dude.” Graves caught the entrepreneurial bug early. He worshiped entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin, idolizing the way they built something enormously successful out of nothing but an idea and a computer. Graves’s Tumblr was filled with photos of Jeff Bezos, quotes from Albert Einstein, articles about Elon Musk. One personal favorite was an iconic quote from Shawn Carter, better known by hip-hop fans as Jay-Z: “I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man.” In 2009, he was bored of his job as a database admin at GE’s health care unit in Chicago.


pages: 376 words: 110,796

Realizing Tomorrow: The Path to Private Spaceflight by Chris Dubbs, Emeline Paat-dahlstrom, Charles D. Walker

Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Dennis Tito, desegregation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Elon Musk, high net worth, Iridium satellite, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Society, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, private spaceflight, restrictive zoning, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, Skype, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, technoutopianism, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, X Prize, young professional

A number of the DC-X personnel have also been hired by another, more secretive vehicle developer, called Blue Origin, based in Seattle, Washington. Blue Origin was founded by space buff and multibillionaire entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com. Incorporated in 2002, Blue Origin did not go public until 2003, and the company remains tightlipped about its current development progress and schedule. Jeff Bezos took an early infatuation with space and a tech background on a circuitous career path to end up in the private space business. He was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, in 1964. A tinkerer from an early age, he dismantled his crib with a screwdriver while still a toddler.

Rick Tumlinson had already remarked that the promotion of public access to space had become something of a geeky status symbol. "It's not good enough to have a Gulfstream V, now you've got to have a rocket." "Space geeks" who had made their fortune in such technology-related ventures as PayPal (Elon Musk), Amazon.com (Jeff Bezos), Google (Larry Page), and computer games (John Carmack) were now directing their wealth into creating vehicles to carry people to space. Peter Diamandis, in acknowledging the rise of space money men as a unique moment in history, declared that "there is sufficient wealth controlled by individuals to start serious space efforts."

Space and the United States Navy. Washington Dc: Chief of Naval Operations, 1970. Periodicals and Online Articles Aaron, Kenneth. "Space Tourists: XCOR's Suborbital Rocket Could be the Ultimate Thrill in Adventure Travel." Cornell Engineering Magazine, May 2003. Academy of Achievement. "Biography: Jeff Bezos." http://www.achievement .org/autodoc/printmember/bezobio-i. Adams, Eric. "The New Right Stuff." Popular Science, November 2004. Artemis Project. "Where the Nss Local Chapters Came From." http://www .asi.org/adb/o6/o1/nss-chapters-origins.html. Asimov, Isaac. "The Cruise and I." The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1973.


pages: 335 words: 104,850

Conscious Capitalism, With a New Preface by the Authors: Liberating the Heroic Spirit of Business by John Mackey, Rajendra Sisodia, Bill George

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Buckminster Fuller, business process, carbon footprint, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, do well by doing good, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear of failure, Flynn Effect, income per capita, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, John Elkington, lone genius, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, shareholder value, six sigma, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, union organizing, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

When all stakeholders are aligned around a common higher purpose, they are less likely to care only about their immediate, narrowly defined self-interest. Having a higher purpose is the starting point of what it means to be a conscious business: being self-aware, recognizing what makes the company truly unique, and discovering how the company can best serve. Having a compelling purpose can also galvanize a company to strive for greatness. As Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com, says, “Choose a mission that is bigger than the company. The founder of Sony sets the mission for the company that they were going to make Japan known for quality.”1 Walter Robb, co-CEO of Whole Foods Market, speaks eloquently of our company’s purpose: “We are not so much retailers with a mission as missionaries who retail.

In a competitive market, unhappy customers always have the option of trading someplace else. Customers are clearly critical to every business, but surprisingly they are often forgotten. It is easy to get caught up in the internal processes of a company and lose sight of the primary reason for the company to exist. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com points out, “In a typical company, if you have a meeting, no matter how important it is there is always one party who is not represented: the customer. So it’s very easy inside the company to forget about the customer.”3 He started putting an empty chair in every meeting to remind participants of this.

You want investors who align with your purpose and understand your philosophy about stakeholders, so that when times become tough, they don’t pressure you to abandon your philosophy. In other words, you want investors who treat you the way T. Rowe Price treated Whole Foods Market during the Great Recession, as we describe below. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com describes his perspective on investors: “With respect to investors, there is a great Warren Buffett–ism. You can hold a rock concert and that can be successful, and you can hold a ballet and that can be successful, but don’t hold a rock concert and advertise it as a ballet. If you’re very clear to the outside world that you’re taking a long-term approach, then people can self-select in.”3 As Buffet has said, you get the investors you deserve.


pages: 392 words: 108,745

Talk to Me: How Voice Computing Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Think by James Vlahos

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, Cambridge Analytica, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, Colossal Cave Adventure, computer age, deep learning, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, TechCrunch disrupt, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

: Newnham, “The Story Behind Siri.” 37 “We know that he was watching the launch”: Cheyer, “Siri, Back to the Future.” 37 “If I were to anthropomorphize Siri”: Newnham, “The Story Behind Siri.” 3. Titans 39 Decades before he founded Amazon: Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on how he got a role in Star Trek Beyond, posted to YouTube on October 23, 2016, https://goo.gl/RJKBL1. 39 “build space hotels”: Luisa Yanez, “Jeff Bezos: A rocket launched from Miami’s Palmetto High,” Miami Herald, August 5, 2013, https://goo.gl/GxFrx8. 40 After the discussion with Hart: Greg Hart, interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “If we could build it”: this and subsequent quotes from Greg Hart come from interview with author, April 27, 2018. 41 “We think it [the project] is critical to Amazon’s success”: this and subsequent quotes from Al Lindsay, unless otherwise identified, come from interview with author, April 4, 2018. 42 Rohit Prasad, a scientist whom Amazon hired: Rohit Prasad, interview with author, April 2, 2018. 44 Bezos was reportedly aiming for the stars: Joshua Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo,” Bloomberg Businessweek, April 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/4SIi8F. 44 “hero feature”: Prasad, interview with author. 44 An article in Bloomberg Businessweek : Brustein, “The Real Story of How Amazon Built the Echo.” 45 “Amazon just surprised everyone”: Chris Welch, “Amazon just surprised everyone with a crazy speaker that talks to you,” The Verge, November 6, 2014, https://goo.gl/sVgsPi. 45 “Don’t laugh at or ignore”: Mike Elgan, “Why Amazon Echo is the future of every home,” Computerworld, November 8, 2014, https://goo.gl/wriJXE. 45 “the happiest person in the world”: this and other quotes from Adam Cheyer, unless otherwise indicated, come from interviews with author, April 19 and 23, 2018. 45 “Apple’s digital assistant was delivered”: Farhad Manjoo, “Siri Is a Gimmick and a Tease,” Slate, November 15, 2012, https://goo.gl/2cSoK. 46 Steve Wozniak, one of the original cofounders of Apple: Bryan Fitzgerald, “‘Woz’ gallops in to a horse’s rescue,” Albany Times Union, June 13, 2012, https://goo.gl/dPdHso. 46 Even Jack in the Box ran an ad: Yukari Iwatani Kane, Haunted Empire: Apple After Steve Jobs (New York: HarperCollins, 2014), 154. 46 Years later, some people who had worked: Aaron Tilley and Kevin McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch: How Apple’s Marriage to Siri Turned Sour,” The Information, March 14, 2018, https://goo.gl/6e7BxM. 48 “artificially-intelligent orphan”: Bosker, “Siri Rising.” 48 “Siri’s various teams morphed”: Tilley and McLaughlin, “The Seven-Year Itch.” 48 John Burkey, who was part: John Burkey, interview with author, June 19, 2018. 49 “it’s really the first time in history”: Megan Garber, “Sorry, Siri: How Google Is Planning to Be Your New Personal Assistant,” The Atlantic, April 29, 2013, https://goo.gl/XFLPDP. 49 “We are not shipping”: Dan Farber, “Microsoft’s Bing seeks enlightenment with Satori,” CNET, July 30, 2013, https://goo.gl/fnLVmb. 50 CNN Tech ran an emblematic headline: Adrian Covert, “Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri,” CNN Tech, April 2, 2014, https://goo.gl/pyoW4v. 50 “feels like a potent mashup of Google Now’s worldliness”: Chris Velazco, “Living with Cortana, Windows 10’s thoughtful, flaky assistant,” Engadget, July 30, 2015, https://goo.gl/mbZpon. 50 “arrogant disdain followed by panic”: Burkey, interview with author. 51 “I’ll start teaching it”: Mark Zuckerberg, “Building Jarvis,” Facebook blog, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/DyQSBN. 51 Zuckerberg might have to say a command: Daniel Terdiman, “At Home With Mark Zuckerberg And Jarvis, The AI Assistant He Built For His Family,” Fast Company, December 19, 2016, https://goo.gl/qJNIxW. 51 One lucky user who tested M: Alex Kantrowitz, “Facebook Reveals The Secrets Behind ‘M,’ Its Artificial Intelligence Bot,” BuzzFeed, November 19, 2015, https://goo.gl/bwmFyN. 52 “an experiment to see what people would ask”: Kemal El Moujahid, interview with author, September 29, 2017. 54 “just the tip of the iceberg”: Mark Bergen, “Jeff Bezos says more than 1,000 people are working on Amazon Echo and Alexa,” Recode, May 31, 2016, https://goo.gl/hhSQXc. 59 “When you speak”: Robert Hoffer, interview with author, April 30, 2018. 4.

But the world of technology is not one that lets people rest on their laurels. In the years following the launch, Apple in some ways became more of a prison than a candy store to Siri. And the virtual assistant, as we will see next, would not have the stage all to herself for long. 3 Titans Decades before he founded Amazon and became the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos was a fourth-grader who couldn’t get enough of Star Trek. Bezos watched all of the television show’s episodes multiple times; he and two neighborhood friends fashioned phasers out of paper and explored imaginary galaxies. One day, he hoped, he would get to voyage through space for real. It was more than the typical childhood fantasy.

People can use spoken commands to select topics, hear news summaries, and navigate to podcasts. Users can tell Anderson Cooper to pause his report, then resume it later; they can select which stories get presented rather than being stuck with the broadcast-determined order. AI scribes are even penning content. The Washington Post, which is now owned by Jeff Bezos, uses in-house software called Heliograf that takes pure data—local election results or high school football box scores—and transforms the information into short articles that sound human written. The Associated Press uses a company called Automated Insights to automatically produce thousands of financial stories.


pages: 361 words: 107,461

How I Built This: The Unexpected Paths to Success From the World's Most Inspiring Entrepreneurs by Guy Raz

Airbnb, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, business logic, call centre, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, East Village, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fear of failure, glass ceiling, growth hacking, housing crisis, imposter syndrome, inventory management, It's morning again in America, iterative process, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, low cost airline, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side hustle, Silicon Valley, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tony Hsieh, Uber for X, uber lyft, Y Combinator, Zipcar

left Tinder in early 2014: Stuart Dredge, “Dating App Tinder Facing Sexual Harassment Lawsuit from Co-founder,” The Guardian, July 1, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/01/tinder-sexual-harassment-lawsuit-whitney-wolfe. 8. Fund the Business, Part 2: Other People’s Money A year later: “Jeff Bezos Convinced 22 Investors to Back His New Company Amazon in 1994. Their Returns? Mind-Boggling,” South China Morning Post, April 26, 2018, https://www.scmp.com/news/world/united-states-canada/article/2143375/1994-he-convinced-22-family-and-friends-each-pay. each has been made a billionaire: Bloomberg, “Runs in the Family: Jeff Bezos’s Parents Might Also Be Ridiculously Rich,” Fortune, July 31, 2018, https://fortune.com/2018/07/31/jeff-bezos-family-investment-amazon/. 10. Go In Through the Side Door invest in the company: A month to the day before Jeff Raikes sent his email to Warren Buffett, Microsoft announced record annual revenue of $11.36 billion for fiscal year 1997.

In 1993, Steve Ells took money from his father, as part loan and part investment, to open the first Chipotle in an old, dilapidated Dolly Madison ice cream store near the University of Denver campus. “It was 850 square feet, the rent was $800 a month, and it was in terrible condition and . . . needed a lot of work,” Steve recalled. “So I convinced my father to lend me the money, which ended up being $80,000.” A year later and 1,300 miles to the northwest, in Seattle, Jeff Bezos went to sixty different people in his personal network asking for $50,000 from each of them to help him start an online bookstore. Nearly two-thirds of them said no, primarily because they didn’t get the idea behind what would become Amazon, the largest online retailer the world has ever known.

Indeed, access to other people’s money—especially big money—is not the same for everyone and is often connected to individual or societal privilege, which can be anything ranging from family wealth to geographic location to race to business school ties to professional connections. Ron Shaich went to Harvard Business School. Gordon Segal’s family had a retail background, so he had the benefit of their experience as well as a little bit of their money. Adam Lowry and Eric Ryan grew up in one of the most affluent suburbs in America. Jeff Bezos’s grandfather was a prominent figure in the early years of the US Atomic Energy Commission and the agency that would eventually become DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). He had helped to cultivate Bezos’s interest in technology from a young age during Jeff’s summer visits to the family ranch about ninety minutes south of San Antonio, Texas.


Reset by Ronald J. Deibert

23andMe, active measures, air gap, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, augmented reality, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blood diamond, Brexit referendum, Buckminster Fuller, business intelligence, Cal Newport, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, cashless society, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, confounding variable, contact tracing, contact tracing app, content marketing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Future Shock, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, income inequality, information retrieval, information security, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, license plate recognition, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megastructure, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, New Journalism, NSO Group, off-the-grid, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, post-truth, proprietary trading, QAnon, ransomware, Robert Mercer, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, sorting algorithm, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, techlash, technological solutionism, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, TSMC, undersea cable, unit 8200, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero day, zero-sum game

Yale Law Journal, 126(3), 710; Moore, M., & Tambini, D. (Eds.). (2018). Digital dominance: the power of Google, Amazon, Facebook, and Apple. Oxford University Press. Bezos was named … the “richest man in modern history”: Au-Yeung, A. (2018, October 3). How Jeff Bezos became the richest person in America and the world. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/angelauyeung/2018/10/03/how-jeff-bezos-became-the-richest-person-in-the-world-2018-forbes-400/ Amazon, Facebook, and Google spent nearly half a billion dollars on lobbying efforts in Washington: Romm, T. (2020, January 22). Amazon, Facebook spent record sums on lobbying in 2019 as tech industry ramped up Washington presence.

Thanks to investigations undertaken in their aftermath, shady data analytics companies like Cambridge Analytica have been flushed out from the shadows to show a glimpse of social media’s seamy underworld.2 Then there’s the real dark side to it all. You’ve read about high-tech mercenary companies selling powerful “cyberwarfare” services to dictators who use them to hack into their adversaries’ devices and social networks, often with lethal consequences. First it was Jamal Khashoggi’s inner circle, then (allegedly) Jeff Bezos’s device. Maybe I’ve been hacked too? you wonder to yourself, suddenly suspicious of that unsolicited text or email with an attachment. The world you’re connecting to with that device increasingly feels like a major source of personal risk. But it’s also become your lifeline, now more than ever.

A 2007 United States Agency for International Development study found that around four thousand children worked at mining sites in the southern DRC city of Kolwezi alone.322 Children were paid on average about one dollar per day. One author put this wage in perspective: “A child working in a mine in the Congo would need more than 700,000 years of non-stop work to earn the same amount as a single day of [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos’ income.”323 All this for the mere five to ten grams of cobalt in the smartphone you hold in your hand. The same dynamic plays out around the globe, wherever the mining operations for the elements integral to our devices are located. For example, tin is an essential component of the soldering necessary for electronic circuitry, and about one-third of the world’s tin supply comes from mostly artisanal mining operations in Indonesia.


pages: 415 words: 102,982

Who’s Raising the Kids?: Big Tech, Big Business, and the Lives of Children by Susan Linn

Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, cashless society, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, delayed gratification, digital divide, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, gamification, George Floyd, Howard Zinn, impulse control, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, language acquisition, late fees, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, new economy, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, plant based meat, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, techlash, theory of mind, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple

When you reduce friction, make something easy, people will want to do more of it. —JEFF BEZOS, CEO, Amazon Last year at an industry conference on marketing to kids, I listened to a tech executive advise attendees to “reduce friction.” Since the friction-reducing I’m familiar with involves either WD-40 or family therapy, I was momentarily bewildered. Then I got it. When marketers talk about reducing friction, they mean removing any barriers or hurdles between the products companies offer and the consumers who purchase them. Amazon’s innovations like one-click buying and increasingly short delivery times brought Jeff Bezos’s goal of frictionless commerce to the forefront of e-commerce today.

Adam Alter, Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked (New York: Penguin, 2017), 8.   1.  “Real Time Billionaires,” Forbes, www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires. These are updated every five minutes daily when the stock markets are open. When I first checked in November 2020, Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates ranked number 1 and 2 respectively and Mark Zuckerberg ranked number 4. By March 2022, Mark Zuckerberg dropped down to the teens and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates were 1, 2, and 4 respectively.   2.  See for instance, American Heritage Medical Dictionary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007), medical-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/technophobe; Cambridge English Dictionary, Cambridge University Press, dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/nstagr/technophobe; Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/technophobia.   3.  

Georgia Wells and Jeff Horwitz, “Facebook’s Effort to Attract Preteens Goes Beyond Instagram Kids, Documents Show,” Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2021, www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-instagram-kids-tweens-attract-11632849667. 82.  Kevin Roose, “Facebook Is Weaker Than We Knew,” New York Times, October 4, 2021. CHAPTER 4: BROWSE! CLICK! BUY! REPEAT! “Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos Tip #37: ‘Reduce Friction,’” YouTube, March 10, 2013, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUtQv8YWCGE.   1.  Tim Kasser, The High Price of Materialism (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).   2.  My favorite discussion of this phenomenon is by Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Basic Books, 1971).   3.  


pages: 935 words: 197,338

The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future by Sebastian Mallaby

"Susan Fowler" uber, 23andMe, 90 percent rule, Adam Neumann (WeWork), adjacent possible, Airbnb, Apple II, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, Bob Noyce, book value, business process, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Didi Chuxing, digital map, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Dutch auction, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, family office, financial engineering, future of work, game design, George Gilder, Greyball, guns versus butter model, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Masayoshi Son, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, microdosing, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, mortgage debt, move fast and break things, Network effects, oil shock, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, plutocrats, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Metcalfe, ROLM, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, super pumped, superconnector, survivorship bias, tech worker, Teledyne, the long tail, the new new thing, the strength of weak ties, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, two and twenty, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban decay, UUNET, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Vision Fund, wealth creators, WeWork, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Y Combinator, Zenefits

In a normal distribution, moreover, you can remove the biggest outlier from a sample without affecting the average: if a seven-foot NBA star walks out of a cinema, the average height of the remaining ninety-nine movie-watching men falls from five feet 10 inches to five feet 9.9 inches. In a non-normal, skewed distribution, in contrast, the outliers can have a dramatic effect. If Jeff Bezos walks out of the cinema, the average wealth of those who stay behind will plummet. Power Law Distribution This sort of skewed distribution is sometimes referred to as the 80/20 rule: the idea that 80 percent of the wealth is held by 20 percent of the people, that 80 percent of the people live in 20 percent of the cities, or that 20 percent of all scientific papers earn 80 percent of the citations.

In reality, there is nothing magical about the numbers 80 or 20: it could be that just 10 percent of the people hold 80 percent of the wealth, or perhaps 90 percent of it. But whatever the precise numbers, all these distributions are examples of the power law, so called because the winners advance at an accelerating, exponential rate, so that they explode upward far more rapidly than in a linear progression. Once Jeff Bezos achieves great riches, his opportunities for further enrichment multiply; the more a scientific paper is cited, the better known it is and the more likely it is to attract further citations. Anytime you have outliers whose success multiplies success, you switch from the domain of the normal distribution to the land ruled by the power law—from a world in which things vary slightly to one of extreme contrasts.

Then, when no decent offer materialized, Shriram offered to back the two grad students if they could find other angels to come in with him. Pretty soon, Brin and Page recruited Bechtolsheim and his co-founder at Granite Systems, a Stanford professor named David Cheriton. A few months later, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, visited the Bay Area for a camping trip and met Brin and Page at Shriram’s house. After that, he wanted in. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” he said later.[12] By the end of 1998, Brin and Page had raised a bit over $1 million from the four angels—more than Yahoo had raised from Sequoia.[13] But they had done so without speaking with a venture capitalist, without giving away more than a tenth of their equity, and without signing up for the performance targets and oversight on which venture capitalists insisted.[14] Angel investors like Bezos and Bechtolsheim were too focused on their own companies to worry about how Brin and Page were getting on.


pages: 864 words: 272,918

Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris

2021 United States Capitol attack, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, back-to-the-land, bank run, Bear Stearns, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Black Lives Matter, Bob Noyce, book scanning, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, Cambridge Analytica, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, company town, computer age, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, digital map, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, estate planning, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global value chain, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, hydraulic fracturing, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, immigration reform, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, John Markoff, joint-stock company, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, legacy carrier, life extension, longitudinal study, low-wage service sector, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral panic, mortgage tax deduction, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, PageRank, PalmPilot, passive income, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, phenotype, pill mill, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, popular electronics, power law, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, semantic web, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech worker, Teledyne, telemarketer, the long tail, the new new thing, thinkpad, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban renewal, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Wargames Reagan, Washington Consensus, white picket fence, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

“We want to empower the doctors and the patients and get all the other assholes out of the way,” Clark told Lewis, “except for us. One asshole in the middle.”52 Healtheon used the land-grab metaphor explicitly; the bankers couldn’t afford not to buy. The model for using the internet to disrupt a brick-and-mortar industry was Amazon. An internet bookstore in Seattle founded by a young hedge-fund hotshot named Jeff Bezos, Amazon was among the most Gen X things in existence. Books were an arbitrary choice, a cheap, nonperishable commodity that seemed suited for the web. Thanks to early investment from his stepfather, an oil engineer for Exxon who left Cuba as a teenager after Castro nationalized his father’s lumber mill, Bezos built and scaled the concept so fast that even a responsive, well-heeled competitor like Barnes & Noble couldn’t keep up.

For Pets.com, and other start-ups like it, the only way forward in the medium term was by the grace of the capital markets. If investors supported their plan, they could keep buying customers, but a waver in confidence was a gust of wind through a house of cards. The $50 million that Pets.com raised from Jeff Bezos and friends in 1999 wasn’t enough to finance a build-out of the physical shipping infrastructure, nor was it enough to cover the transactional losses, the advertising, and buyouts of competitors at the same time. And it’s not like the firm could, as the old joke goes, make it up in volume. It was one thing for a web company to pour tens of millions of dollars out of its financial arteries onto the sidewalk with little to show for it but a ledger of losses; it was another to do all that while everyone watched a giant balloon of your stupid advertising puppet marching around Central Park like a capitalist kaiju in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

In classic class-war terms, it was a good time to be the bad guy, and the new tech overlords reveled in their status without bothering to change out of their T-shirts. They had ample cause to celebrate; by a society’s own standards, few people have ever risen so high so fast. The reader is already familiar with the other two firms rounding out the tech top five; it’s virtually impossible not to be. Compared to his few peers, Jeff Bezos was experienced in business when he launched Amazon. Despite being centrally implicated in the dot-com bust and taking a hit of over 90 percent on its stock price, the “relentless” company (as it was almost called) built back. The financially experienced Amazon management team sold more than $600 million in bonds to European investors right before the crash, a move redolent of Huntington’s international railroad security shenanigans.


pages: 292 words: 85,151

Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Are Ten Times Better, Faster, and Cheaper Than Yours (And What to Do About It) by Salim Ismail, Yuri van Geest

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, anti-fragile, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Burning Man, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Wanstrath, circular economy, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, corporate social responsibility, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fail fast, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, hiring and firing, holacracy, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, Internet of things, Iridium satellite, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, lifelogging, loose coupling, loss aversion, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Max Levchin, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, NetJets, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, prediction markets, profit motive, publish or perish, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, software is eating the world, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, the long tail, Tony Hsieh, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, X Prize, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

One of the more intriguing organizational innovations to come out of the company is what CEO Jeff Bezos and CTO Werner Vogels call “The Institutional Yes.” Here’s how it works: If you’re a manager at Amazon and a subordinate comes to you with a great idea, your default answer must be YES. If you want to say no, you are required to write a two-page thesis explaining why it’s a bad idea. In other words, Amazon has increased the friction entailed in saying no, resulting in more ideas being tested (and hence implemented) throughout the company. Jeff Bezos is perhaps the most underrated CEO of the last couple decades. Not only has he made that rare transition from founder to large-company CEO, but he has also consistently avoided the short-term thinking that so often comes with running a public company—what Joi Ito calls “nowism.”

It allows a machine to discover new patterns without being exposed to any historical or training data. Leading startups in this space are DeepMind, bought by Google in early 2014 for $500 million, back when DeepMind had just thirteen employees, and Vicarious, funded with investment from Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg. Twitter, Baidu, Microsoft and Facebook are also heavily invested in this area. Deep Learning algorithms rely on discovery and self-indexing, and operate in much the same way that a baby learns first sounds, then words, then sentences and even languages. As an example: In June 2012, a team at Google X built a neural network of 16,000 computer processors with one billion connections.

It has also demonstrated just how big the payoff can be. In 2012, for example, an astounding 80 percent of Apple’s revenues came from products that were fewer than five years old. Those new revenues helped to make Apple the most valuable company in the world. Amazon represents another archetype of this philosophy. Jeff Bezos has repeatedly shown the courage to proactively cannibalize his own businesses (e.g., the Kindle at the expense of physical books), launch edge ExOs (Amazon Web Services), buy companies that disrupt his own (Zappos) and pursue transformative technologies (delivery drones). Such bold leadership is critical in the age of the ExO.


pages: 304 words: 82,395

Big Data: A Revolution That Will Transform How We Live, Work, and Think by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, Kenneth Cukier

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Swan, book scanning, book value, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, computer age, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, data science, double entry bookkeeping, Eratosthenes, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, hype cycle, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, lifelogging, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, obamacare, optical character recognition, PageRank, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, post-materialism, random walk, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Turing test, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

They were responsible for what was called “the Amazon voice”—considered one of the company’s crown jewels and a source of its competitive advantage. An article in the Wall Street Journal around that time feted them as the nation’s most influential book critics, since they drove so many sales. Then Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO, began to experiment with a potent idea: What if the company could recommend specific books to customers based on their individual shopping preferences? From its start, Amazon had captured reams of data on all its customers: what they purchased, what books they only looked at but didn’t buy, and how long they looked at them.

Many companies are now vying to crack the e-book market. Amazon, with its Kindle e-book readers, seems to have a big early lead. But this is an area where Amazon’s and Google’s strategies differ greatly. Amazon, too, has datafied books—but unlike Google, it has failed to exploit possible new uses of the text as data. Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and chief executive, convinced hundreds of publishers to release their books on the Kindle format. Kindle books are not made up of page images. If they were, one wouldn’t be able to change the font size or display a page on color as well as black-and-white screens. The text is datafied, not just digital.

The notion of the big-data mindset, and the role of a creative outsider with a brilliant idea, are not unlike what happened at the dawn of e-commerce in the mid-1990s, when the pioneers were unencumbered by the entrenched thinking or institutional restraints of older industries. Thus a hedge-fund quant, not Barnes & Noble, founded an online bookstore (Amazon’s Jeff Bezos). A software developer, not Sotheby’s, built an auction site (eBay’s Pierre Omidyar). Today the entrepreneurs with the big-data mindset often don’t have the data when they start. But because of this, they also don’t have the vested interests or financial disincentives that might prevent them from unleashing their ideas.


pages: 403 words: 87,035

The New Geography of Jobs by Enrico Moretti

assortative mating, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, business climate, call centre, classic study, clean tech, cloud computing, corporate raider, creative destruction, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, gentrification, global village, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, medical residency, Menlo Park, new economy, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, Recombinant DNA, Richard Florida, Sand Hill Road, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, special economic zone, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, thinkpad, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Wall-E, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

First, when Microsoft moved to Seattle, the city increased its attractiveness to other high-tech companies. Microsoft effectively serves as the anchor of the local high-tech sector and a magnet for other software companies. The history of Amazon is interesting in this respect. In 1994, Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, lived in New York and was vice president of a large and successful Wall Street firm. Although he had a job that paid what most people only dream of, he felt there was even more he could achieve. It was the beginning of the Internet era, and he wanted a piece of the action. Bezos eventually quit his job and started an Internet book retailer.

Bezos eventually quit his job and started an Internet book retailer. He decided to name it after the earth’s longest river, the Amazon, and to locate it in Seattle. Why Seattle? When Bill Gates made his choice, Seattle was an unattractive place to start a high-tech company, but he had personal reasons to be there. By contrast, Jeff Bezos had no personal reason to be in Seattle. He was not born there (in fact, he was born in Albuquerque!). But by the time he started his company, fifteen years after Gates’s move, Seattle had become a magnet for high-tech activity. Because Microsoft was in the city, software engineers and programmers had concentrated there in large numbers and venture capital firms had opened offices there.

The first nonfamily investor in Amazon was a Seattle-based venture capitalist named Nick Hanauer, whose $40,000 funding played a crucial role in helping the company survive its delicate early phase. Shortly after, another Seattle-based venture capitalist provided $100,000 to make the new website more user-friendly, which gave the nascent company a key competitive advantage.4 Microsoft did not directly help Jeff Bezos start his company, but its presence triggered the creation of an entire high-tech cluster in the region. This highlights a remarkable feature of the high-tech world: success generates more success. It is a feature that has enormous implications for the future of many cities, and it is the main theme of this chapter and the next one.


pages: 306 words: 82,909

A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend Them Back by Bruce Schneier

4chan, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Automated Insights, banking crisis, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, Brian Krebs, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computerized trading, coronavirus, corporate personhood, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, dark pattern, deepfake, defense in depth, disinformation, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, driverless car, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, fake news, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, first-past-the-post, Flash crash, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Greensill Capital, high net worth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, late capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, payday loans, Peter Thiel, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Skype, smart cities, SoftBank, supply chain finance, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, TikTok, too big to fail, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ubercab, UNCLOS, union organizing, web application, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, WikiLeaks, zero day

DEFENDING AGAINST COGNITIVE HACKS 199Foreknowledge only goes so far: Leah Savion (Jan 2009), “Clinging to discredited beliefs: The larger cognitive story,” Journal of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 9, no. 1, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ854880.pdf. 49. A HIERARCHY OF HACKING 201Jeff Bezos had no problem: Sam Dangremond (4 Apr 2019), “Jeff Bezos is renovating the biggest house in Washington, D.C.,” Town and Country, https://www.townandcountrymag.com/leisure/real-estate/news/a9234/jeff-bezos-house-washington-dc. 201Ghostwriter, a collective: Lee Foster et al. (28 Jul 2020), “ ‘Ghostwriter’ influence campaign: Unknown actors leverage website compromises and fabricated content to push narratives aligned with Russian security interests,” Mandiant, https://www.fireeye.com/blog/threat-research/2020/07/ghostwriter-influence-campaign.html. 50.

The fact that Microsoft Windows has vulnerabilities doesn’t guarantee that someone can hack the Microsoft Corporation’s hiring process to put himself in a position to insert more vulnerabilities into the operating system. In social systems, it’s easier, especially for those with money and influence. Jeff Bezos had no problem buying the largest home in DC to entertain and influence lawmakers. Or buying the Washington Post, one of the most respected news sources in the US. He can also easily hire programmers to write any sort of software he wants. Some hacks work at multiple levels simultaneously. In 2020, we learned about Ghostwriter, a collective—probably Russian in origin—that breached the content management systems of several Eastern European news sites and posted fake stories.

The audience laughed, but how would a computer program know that causing an airplane computer malfunction is not an appropriate response to someone who wants to get out of dinner? Perhaps it learned its lesson from reports of airline passengers who engaged in similar behavior. (Internet joke from 2017: Jeff Bezos: “Alexa, buy me something at Whole Foods.” Alexa: “Okay, buying Whole Foods.”) In 2015, Volkswagen was caught cheating on emissions control tests. The company didn’t forge test results; instead, it designed its cars’ onboard computers to do the cheating for it. Engineers programmed the software to detect when the car was undergoing an emissions test.


System Error by Rob Reich

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, deplatforming, digital rights, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, fulfillment center, future of work, gentrification, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Goodhart's law, GPT-3, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, jimmy wales, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Lean Startup, linear programming, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Philippa Foot, premature optimization, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, scientific management, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, spectrum auction, speech recognition, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, trolley problem, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, union organizing, universal basic income, washing machines reduced drudgery, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, When a measure becomes a target, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, you are the product

Within a year after Navigator’s release, Netscape held its massively successful IPO, giving Andreessen, at the age of twenty-four, a net worth of over $50 million. A few months later he would grace the cover of Time magazine, sitting barefoot on a throne next to the headline “The Golden Geeks: They invent. They start companies. And the stock market has made them instantaires.” In New York during that same period, a thirty-year-old named Jeff Bezos began to realize the commercial possibilities of the internet. Bezos, who had graduated from Princeton University in 1986 with degrees in electrical engineering and computer science, had originally gone to Wall Street to use his analytical skill at quantitative hedge funds such as D. E. Shaw & Co., where he quickly rose to the position of vice president.

It’s also worth noting that while funding in the VC world continues to grow, how that money is distributed often reflects a narrow view of what a successful entrepreneur looks like. John Doerr, speaking at the National Venture Capital Association in 2008, famously described how being a male nerd “correlates more with any other success factor that I’ve seen in the world’s greatest entrepreneurs. If you look at [Amazon founder Jeff] Bezos, or [Netscape founder Marc] Andreessen, [Yahoo cofounder] David Filo, the founders of Google, they all seem to be white, male, nerds who’ve dropped out of Harvard or Stanford and they absolutely have no social life.” But looking for patterns like this in who to fund also leads to inequities in how entrepreneurs might be evaluated by the VCs they are pitching to.

The questioners demonstrated a well-informed understanding of the companies’ underlying business models and evinced an eagerness to push for new forms of regulation. One can imagine that the CEOs gathered their best and brightest in the C-suite to figure out how to counter the incoming criticisms. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, went for the personal approach—leading with their own inspiring stories of having risen from humble beginnings. Apple CEO Tim Cook continued his effort to differentiate Apple from the other companies, claiming that it doesn’t have a “dominant market share in any market where we do business.”


pages: 554 words: 149,489

The Content Trap: A Strategist's Guide to Digital Change by Bharat Anand

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, AOL-Time Warner, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, electricity market, Eyjafjallajökull, fulfillment center, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, late fees, managed futures, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Minecraft, multi-sided market, Network effects, post-work, price discrimination, publish or perish, QR code, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social web, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, two-sided market, ubercab, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game

was the Internet giant of the era, with its home page drawing the most traffic on the Web, and that’s where it promoted the new and impressively designed site Yahoo! Auctions. Amazon was the largest e-commerce player, and its auction service would let buyers and sellers transact for free (in contrast, eBay charged commissions). Cook sat on the board of both eBay and Amazon. He told me about the events: [Amazon CEO] Jeff Bezos called me and [venture capitalist] John Doerr and flew in to Aspen to have dinner with us. He described how he was going to launch Amazon Auctions. He wanted me to know this because he was sure I would drop being on the eBay board—eBay was clearly going to be history. And that’s probably what would happen in any other industry where the largest competitors in the world copied your product, made it technically better, promoted it aggressively, and made it free.

It may be intoxicating to look to crowds as a new way to create content, but without ensuring the right conditions, you’ll fall into the same old trap. 8 COST-BASED CONNECTIONS KINDLING THE PUBLISHERS Few events shook the book publishing industry as much as the launch of Amazon’s Kindle, in 2007. When Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, introduced the product on November 19, he invited representatives from the publishing industry to witness the occasion. Madeline McIntosh, a senior executive at Random House—the world’s largest trade publisher (now Penguin Random House, and the publisher of this book)—was among them.

To download an e-book on prior devices, one had to first connect the e-reader to that computer with a cable, buy the e-book through the computer, and transfer the file. With Amazon’s wireless device and free access to its “Whispernet” wireless network, a reader could download an e-book directly onto the Kindle anywhere and at any time, with one click. That’s the reason Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, excitedly underscored in his remarks at the Kindle’s launch, “ This isn’t a device, it’s a service.” In 2009 Tata Motors, the car division of India’s largest business house, launched the Nano—priced at about $2,500, half as much as the world’s next-cheapest car. The Nano received enthusiastic reviews from many of the industry’s most prestigious trade magazines not just for its low cost but for its design, quality, and road-sturdiness.


pages: 208 words: 57,602

Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation by Kevin Roose

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, automated trading system, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, business process, call centre, choice architecture, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, fake news, fault tolerance, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Freestyle chess, future of work, Future Shock, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Google Hangouts, GPT-3, hiring and firing, hustle culture, hype cycle, income inequality, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, lockdown, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, off-the-grid, OpenAI, pattern recognition, planetary scale, plutocrats, Productivity paradox, QAnon, recommendation engine, remote working, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture

Amazon engineer Brent Smith Brent Smith and Greg Linden, “Two Decades of Recommender Systems at Amazon.com,” IEEE Computer Society (2017). Brenden Mulligan, a tech entrepreneur Brenden Mulligan, “Reduce Friction, Increase Happiness,” TechCrunch, October 16, 2011. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Brittany Darwell, “Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing Mistake,” Adweek, January 22, 2013. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos, “2018 Letter to Shareholders,” Amazon.com, 2018. Uber drivers lost out on millions of dollars Arik Jenkins, “Why Uber Doesn’t Want a Built-In Tipping Option,” Fortune, April 18, 2017. the technology critic Tim Wu calls Tim Wu, “The Tyranny of Convenience,” New York Times, February 16, 2018.

The feature—which allowed certain apps, like Netflix and Spotify, to post directly to users’ feeds, rather than having to ask for permission each time—was a failure, and Facebook killed it fairly quickly. But the idea of a “frictionless” product captured Silicon Valley’s imagination. Uber, Square, and other tech companies committed themselves to frictionless design. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, articulated the strategic benefits of reducing friction in a 2011 letter to investors. “When you reduce friction, make something easy, people do more of it,” Bezos wrote. Many types of friction-reducing design are unequivocally good. We don’t want friction at the doctor’s office or the DMV.


pages: 321 words: 92,828

Late Bloomers: The Power of Patience in a World Obsessed With Early Achievement by Rich Karlgaard

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, book value, Brownian motion, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial independence, follow your passion, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Goodhart's law, hiring and firing, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, move fast and break things, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, power law, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, science of happiness, scientific management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sunk-cost fallacy, tech worker, TED Talk, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor

(Alphabet, Google’s parent company, now goes to great lengths to say it no longer does this. But the reality is that Google still uses various puzzles, riddles, and other means to evaluate a job applicant’s fast-twitch cognitive giftedness.) Amazon’s founder and CEO, and the world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, also scored 800 on his math SAT. According to reporter Brad Stone, Bezos “felt that hiring only the best and brightest was key to Amazon’s success. Early on, he conducted job interviews himself; and he too asked candidates for their SAT scores. Bezos said: ‘Every time we hire someone, he or she should raise the bar for the next hire, so that the overall talent pool is always improving.’ ” Bezos jokingly told a reporter that his wife’s high SAT scores made the pair compatible.

Diane Greene, who cofounded and ran software giant VMware, constructed a pot that was family friendly, certainly by the workaholic standards of Silicon Valley. Until January 2019, the CEO of Google Cloud, she encouraged parents at Google to get home and have dinner with their families. Google Cloud’s fierce competitor in the market is Amazon Web Services, run by Andy Jassy, who reports to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, one of the most demanding bosses in the world. Amazon is a tough culture, especially for those reporting to Bezos. Certain kinds of people will bloom in Amazon’s pot, but many will not. No one should be surprised by the shape and soil of a company’s pot if they’ve done their research on Glassdoor and other free Web sources.

Callahan, Education and the Cult of Efficiency (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964). we all learn in different ways: Rose, End of Average; Scott Barry Kaufman, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (New York: Basic Books, 2013). “felt that hiring only the best”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Random House, 2013). claims there is a mismatch: Rich Karlgaard, “Atoms Versus Bits: Where to Find Innovation,” Forbes, January 23, 2013. “bits” companies: Nicholas P. Negroponte, “Products and Services for Computer Networks,” Scientific American 265, no. 3 (1991): 106–15.


pages: 347 words: 91,318

Netflixed: The Epic Battle for America's Eyeballs by Gina Keating

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, business intelligence, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, company town, corporate raider, digital rights, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Netflix Prize, new economy, out of africa, performance metric, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, price stability, recommendation engine, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Superbowl ad, tech worker, telemarketer, warehouse automation, X Prize

Craft Blockbuster Online, vice president of strategic planning Rick Ellis Blockbuster Online, operations consultant Shane Evangelist Blockbuster Online, senior vice president and general manager Gary Fernandes Board member Bill Fields Chairman/chief executive before Antioco Sarah Gustafson Blockbuster Online, senior director, customer analytics Jules Haimovitz Board member Lillian Hessel Blockbuster Online, vice president, customer marketing Jim Keyes Chairman/chief executive Karen Raskopf Corporate Communications, senior vice president, Nick Shepherd Chief operating officer Michael Siftar Blockbuster Online, director, applications development Nigel Travis President Strauss Zelnick Board member Larry Zine Chief financial officer COSTARS (ALPHABETICAL) Robert Bell AT&T Laboratory, Statistics Division, researcher Jeff Bezos Amazon.com founder/chief executive Martin Chabbert Netflix Prize winner, ­French-­Canadian programmer Tom Dooley Viacom, senior vice president Roger Enrico PepsiCo, chairman John Fleming Walmart, chief executive Brett Icahn Carl Icahn’s son Carl Icahn Blockbuster investor/board member Michael Jahrer Netflix Prize winner, Big Chaos team, machine learning researcher Mike Kaltschnee HackingNetflix, founder/blogger Gregg Kaplan Redbox, chief executive Mel Karmazin Viacom, chief operating officer Yehuda Koren Netflix Prize winner, AT&T Laboratory, scientist Warren Lieberfarb Warner Home Video, president Joe Malugen Movie Gallery, chairman/chief executive Dave Novak Yum!

Hastings made it clear to Netflix’s executive team that they were pulling out of DVD sales even though it was providing the company’s only profit. They were on notice that they had to find a way to make rental work, or the company would go down. Randolph and Hastings flew to Seattle and met with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who had indicated that he wanted to explore a partnership with Netflix. The two CEOs were willing to trade their DVD sell-through business for a crack at pitching online DVD rental to Amazon’s customers. Hastings also wanted to discuss selling Netflix to Amazon, if the price was right. While Randolph and Bezos hit it off immediately, trading launch-day stories, Hastings was less than impressed with Amazon’s $12 million offer.

To finalize a cross-promotion deal with AOL, which owned online movie information and theater ticket purveyor Moviefone, teams from the two companies spent a week in the Paramount Building on separate floors sending the contract back and forth to keep it out of the hands of Stead’s and AOL’s legal departments. But Internet companies for the most part were wary of Blockbuster Online, because of its parent company’s poor track record in technology, and deals were hard to come by. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos clearly wanted an online DVD rental offering as a bridge to digital delivery, but his terms proved too onerous for Blockbuster Online, which already faced a steep path to profitability and worried about violating the federal Video Privacy Protection Act by sharing its subscribers’ rental history data with the online retailer.


pages: 290 words: 90,057

Billion Dollar Brand Club: How Dollar Shave Club, Warby Parker, and Other Disruptors Are Remaking What We Buy by Lawrence Ingrassia

air freight, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, barriers to entry, call centre, commoditize, computer vision, data science, fake news, fulfillment center, global supply chain, Hacker News, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, rolodex, San Francisco homelessness, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork

In search of an alternative, Welty flew around the world to visit companies developing robots. But even as he did, he and Johnson worried: What if Amazon ended up buying the company whose new robots Quiet Logistics decided use to replace the Kiva robots? Wouldn’t they find themselves in the same bind again? * * * Behind Amazon’s purchase of Kiva was Jeff Bezos’s maniacal obsession with logistics. To get online shoppers to change lifelong habits and buy anything and everything from Amazon, the company had to make the experience just as easy as going to a store—or, better, even easier than going to a store, and cheaper, too. What is easier or cheaper than having something you order delivered free to your home in a day or two?

“They’re just utilizing the massive reach that Amazon itself has. [The coat is] receiving the same attention as DTC brands would, but all of it is happening on Amazon. It’s the golden dream of everyone doing this, of course. Funny enough, it’s more successful than any clothing brand that Amazon has built.” Even Amazon founder Jeff Bezos conceded in his 2018 letter to shareholders that “third-party sellers” (jargon for entrepreneurs and others that sell their products on Amazon) “are kicking our first party butt. Badly.” But it is far too early to dismiss Amazon’s brand-creation machine. That’s what skeptics did after Amazon’s Fire Phone failed miserably in 2014, but late that same year, Amazon began selling its Echo smart speaker, powered by the Alexa voice-recognition personal assistant, and it quickly became one of the fastest-growing new electronics brands ever.

Ask This Guy,” Bloomberg News, May 20, 2018, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-05-20/amazon-helps-shenzhen-ex-googler-turn-mom-s-money-into-a-billion. “substantial doubt about our ability to continue”: Mohawk Group Form S-1 filing with U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, p. 18, May 10, 2019, https://www.sec.gov/archives/edgar/data/1757715/000119312519144273/d639806ds1.htm. staggering volume of overall sales on Amazon.com: Jeff Bezos, “2018 Letter to Shareholders,” April 11, 2019, https://blog.aboutamazon.com/company-news/2018-letter-to-shareholders. they sold Titan to Google for about $150 million: Author interview with Asher Delug, investor and director of Titan Aerospace, April 29, 2019. bringing total investment to $72.6 million: Mohawk Group Form S-1 filing with U.S.


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Are Chief Executives Overpaid? by Deborah Hargreaves

banking crisis, benefit corporation, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bonus culture, business climate, corporate governance, Donald Trump, G4S, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, loadsamoney, long term incentive plan, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, performance metric, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Snapchat, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, wealth creators

Time has featured five businessmen on its cover as person of the year since it began the practice in 1927 and all of them are representative of the era in which they were chosen. Walter Chrysler, who founded the eponymous car company, was profiled in 1928, and Harlow Curtice, president of General Motors, in 1955 – the year after GM became the first US company to post profits of more than $1 billion. After that was Ted Turner, who founded the TV channel CNN in 1991, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, featured in 1999, and Mark Zuckerberg who started Facebook, in 2010. Mr Chrysler was paid $1 million in 1920 and 1921 – a huge amount at the time – when weekly wages at the firm were $31. Mr Chrysler’s annual income was 620 times that of his employees. By the 1950s, remuneration for top bosses had levelled off somewhat, with Mr Curtice earning $800,000 at his peak; with average pay at $3,301, he was taking home 242 times the norm.

Ted Turner, who founded CNN, the first 24-hour cable channel in 1990, took home a salary of just over $1 million in 1995 with a bonus of $680,000. That year average wages were $24,705, so Mr Turner was taking home 68 times the norm. In 2013, Fortune magazine estimated his net worth at $2.2 billion. These riches are dwarfed by the personal fortunes of today’s technology entrepreneurs, however. In 2018, Jeff Bezos was the richest man in the world with net wealth of $115 billion, since he remains the largest shareholder in Amazon. Mark Zuckerberg takes a salary of only $1 from Facebook, but his shareholding in the social-networking company means he has a net worth of $73 billion. This is in the context of the stagnation in wages for the average American at just over $37,500 a year.


pages: 523 words: 61,179

Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI by Paul R. Daugherty, H. James Wilson

3D printing, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, business process, call centre, carbon footprint, circular economy, cloud computing, computer vision, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital twin, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, friendly AI, fulfillment center, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, knowledge worker, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Benioff, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, personalized medicine, precision agriculture, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, software as a service, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, telepresence, telepresence robot, text mining, the scientific method, uber lyft, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

Chapter 7 1.Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work and Power (New York: Basic Books, 1989), 13. 2.Autoline Network, “The ART of Audi,” YouTube video, 1:04:45, August 22, 2014, https://youtu.be/Y6ymjyPryRo. 3.Sharon Gaudin, “New Markets Push Strong Growth in Robotics Industry,” ComputerWorld, February 26, 2016, http://www.computerworld.com/article/3038721/robotics/new-markets-push-strong-growth-in-robotics-industry.html. 4.Spencer Soper and Olivia Zaleski, “Inside Amazon’s Battle to Break into the $800 Billion Grocery Market,” Bloomberg, March 20, 2017, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-20/inside-amazon-s-battle-to-break-into-the-800-billion-grocery-market. 5.Izzie Lapowski, “Jeff Bezos Defends the Fire Phone’s Flop and Amazon’s Dismal Earnings,” Wired, December 2, 2014, https://www.wired.com/2014/12/jeff-bezos-ignition-conference/. 6.Ben Fox Rubin, “Amazon’s Store of the Future Is Delayed. Now What?” CNET, June 20, 2017, www.cnet.com/news/amazon-go-so-far-is-a-no-show-now-what/. 7.Steven Overly, “The Big Moral Dilemma Facing Self-Driving Cars,” Washington Post, February 20, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2017/02/20/the-big-moral-dilemma-facing-self-driving-cars/?

The store is called Amazon Go, and by the spring of 2017, it was serving a limited number of people—Amazon employees, mostly—as a way to prove the concept that it’s possible to make shopping in physical stores almost as easy as clicking the Buy Now option on the Amazon website.4 Amazon Go is clearly an example of a bold retail experiment, and it also highlights something else: Amazon fosters a culture of experimentation. It allows crazy ideas to flourish. It designs, funds, and runs tests. Many of those will fail, but that’s not the point. “I’ve made billions of dollars of failures at Amazon.com. Literally,” Jeff Bezos says. “What matters is companies that don’t continue to experiment or embrace failure eventually get in the position where the only thing they can do is make a Hail Mary bet at the end of their corporate existence. I don’t believe in bet-the-company bets.”5 Instead, Bezos firmly believes in the incredible power of experimentation.


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Free to Focus: A Total Productivity System to Achieve More by Doing Less by Michael Hyatt

Atul Gawande, Cal Newport, Checklist Manifesto, death from overwork, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lock screen, microdosing, Parkinson's law, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, side hustle, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, zero-sum game

On these and related points, see Shawn Stevenson, Sleep Smarter (New York: Rodale, 2016); David K. Randall, Dreamland (New York: Norton, 2012); and Penelope A. Lewis, The Secret World of Sleep (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 14. Lewis, The Secret World of Sleep, 18. 15. Jeff Bezos, “Why Getting 8 Hours of Sleep Is Good for Amazon Shareholders,” Thrive Global, November 30, 2016, https://www.thriveglobal.com/stories/7624-jeff-bezos-why-getting-8-hours-of-sleep-is-good-for-amazon-shareholders. 16. Matthew J. Belvedere, “Why Aetna’s CEO Pays Workers Up to $500 to Sleep,” CNBC, April 5, 2016, https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/05/why-aetnas-ceo-pays-workers-up-to-500-to-sleep.html. 17.

Meanwhile, going without sleep makes it harder to stay focused, solve problems, make good decisions, or even play nice with others.13 As neuroscientist Penelope A. Lewis explains, “Sleep-deprived people come up with fewer original ideas and also tend to stick with old strategies that may not continue to be effective.”14 That’s precisely why effective leaders and entrepreneurs stress getting adequate sleep. Consider Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. “Eight hours of sleep makes a big difference for me,” he told Thrive Global. “That’s the needed amount to feel energized and excited.”15 Aetna chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini actually offers cash incentives for employees to prioritize their sleep. “You can’t be prepared if you’re half-asleep,” he explained in an interview.


Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

., https://www.defense.gov/about/. 214leveraged business model: Brett Bivens, “Business Model Leverage: Spotify, the Audio Market, and the Negative Churn Consumer SaaS Company,” Venture Desktop (blog), December 10, 2019, https://venturedesktop.substack.com/p/business-model-leverage. 214“Well, it needs lots of data”: Nand Mulchandani, interview by author, May 12, 2020. 214“hitting the infrastructure wall”: Will Roper, interview by author, August 6, 2021. 215Jim Mattis flew out to the West Coast: Alan Boyle, “Pentagon Chief James Mattis Meets With Amazon Chief Jeff Bezos During Tech Tour,” GeekWire, August 10, 2017, https://www.geekwire.com/2017/pentagon-chief-james-mattis-meets-amazons-jeff-bezos-west-coast-tech-sub-tour/; Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos), “A pleasure to host #SecDef James Mattis at Amazon HQ in Seattle today,” Twitter, August 10, 2017, https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/895714205822730241. 215Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure: “About JEDI Cloud,” Enterprise Cloud, U.S.

Department of Defense, Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud Procurement, 1–2. 215Amazon’s protest was considered: Jared Serbu, “Court Temporarily Blocks Work on DoD’s JEDI Cloud Contract,” Federal News Network, February 13, 2020, https://federalnewsnetwork.com/defense-main/2020/02/court-temporarily-blocks-work-on-dods-jedi-cloud-contract/. 215sweeping investigation: Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense, Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud Procurement, 5–6. 216Trump’s antipathy toward Amazon: Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump’s Long and Dramatic History with Jeff Bezos,” The Point with Chris Cillizza, February 8, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/08/politics/donald-trump-jeff-bezos-amazon-affair-national-enquirer. 216“DoD personnel who evaluated the contract proposals”: Inspector General, U.S. Department of Defense, Report on the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) Cloud Procurement, 8. 216no “swampy dealings”: Blitzer, “Amazon, Pentagon Accused of Swampy Dealings.” 216a “comprehensive re-evaluation”: U.S.

The JAIC and other DoD organizations were working to improve data practices across the department, but their access to large-scale compute resources was stymied by delays, protests, and lawsuits. In 2017, a few weeks after then–Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis flew out to the West Coast to meet with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and other tech company execs, DoD launched an effort to accelerate adoption of cloud computing. The result was the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure (JEDI) cloud project. In mid-2018, DoD released a request for proposals (RFP), an offer for companies to solicit bids, for a single-award (winner take all) contract for JEDI.


pages: 474 words: 130,575

Surveillance Valley: The Rise of the Military-Digital Complex by Yasha Levine

23andMe, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Californian Ideology, call centre, Charles Babbage, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, collaborative editing, colonial rule, company town, computer age, computerized markets, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, digital map, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, fault tolerance, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global village, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Hangouts, Greyball, Hacker Conference 1984, Howard Zinn, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, index card, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, life extension, Lyft, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, private military company, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, SoftBank, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Hackers Conference, Tony Fadell, uber lyft, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks

“Nine Questions for Andy Jassy, Head of Amazon Web Services,” All Things Digital, November 8, 2013, https://web.archive.org/web/20170528161820/http://allthingsd.com/20131108 /nine-questions-for-andy-jassy-head-of-amazon-web-services/comment-page-1/. 136. Adi Robertson, “Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin Partners with Boeing and Lockheed Martin to Reduce Dependence on Russian Rockets,” The Verge, September 17, 2014, https://www.theverge.com/2014/9/17/6328961/jeff-bezos-blue-origin-partners-with-united-launch-alliance-for-new-rocket. 137. Andy Greenberg, “How a ‘Deviant’ Philosopher Built Palantir, a CIA-Funded Data-Mining Juggernaut,” Forbes, August 14, 2013. 138. “The genre of people that Cyber Command are working to recruit are fresh out of high school and college.

In its promotional materials, it touted this as a kind of digital personal assistant that could “make proactive suggestions for where you’re likely to go.” Pierre Omidyar’s eBay, the world’s biggest online auction site, deployed specialized software that monitored user data and matched them with information available online to unmask fraudulent sellers.81 Jeff Bezos dreamed of building his online retailer Amazon into the “everything store,” a global sales platform that would anticipate users’ every need and desire and deliver products without being asked.82 To do that, Amazon deployed a system for monitoring and profiling. It recorded people’s shopping habits, their movie preferences, the books they were interested in, how fast they read books on their Kindles, and the highlights and margin notes they made.

It is staffed by over a thousand private investigators, who work closely with intelligence and law enforcement agencies in every country where it operates.131 The company runs seminars and training sessions and offers travel junkets to cops around the world.132 eBay is proud of its relationship with law enforcement and boasts that its efforts have led to the arrests of three thousand people around the world—roughly three per day since the division started.133 Amazon runs cloud computing and storage services for the CIA.134 The initial contract, signed in 2013, was worth $600 million and was later expanded to include the NSA and a dozen other US intelligence agencies.135 Amazon founder Jeff Bezos used his wealth to launch Blue Origin, a missile company that partners with Lockheed Martin and Boeing.136 Blue Origin is a direct competitor of SpaceX, a space company started by another Internet mogul: PayPal cofounder Elon Musk. Meanwhile, another PayPal founder, Peter Thiel, spun off PayPal’s sophisticated fraud-detection algorithm into Palantir Technologies, a major military contractor that provides sophisticated data-mining services for the NSA and CIA.137 Facebook, too, is cozy with the military.


pages: 359 words: 96,019

How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars: The Snapchat Story by Billy Gallagher

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Swan, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, computer vision, data science, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Frank Gehry, gamification, gentrification, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Justin.tv, Kevin Roose, Lean Startup, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, Oculus Rift, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, QR code, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TechCrunch disrupt, too big to fail, value engineering, Y Combinator, young professional

For the venture capitalists, this was great—they got to buy more stock in a red-hot company, and it aligned the founders’ incentives with the VCs; venture capital firms see their returns follow a power law, where one investment makes them the majority of their money while most of their investments fail. If the founders have $10 million sitting in their pockets, they will be more likely to aim the company for the bigger, longer-run exits or IPOs rather than selling for less. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos summed up this idea in a letter to his shareholders, writing, “We all know that if you swing for the fences, you’re going to strike out a lot, but you’re also going to hit some home runs. The difference between baseball and business, however, is that baseball has a truncated outcome distribution.

Evan had a team build a Snapchat music product that combined Snapchat’s penchant for communicating through media with Evan’s vision for how music should work digitally. However, it was never released, likely because the rights to the music were too complex and expensive. Employees were happy to work tirelessly on Evan’s experiments, music or otherwise. Evan’s benevolent dictatorship is not uncommon in tech. Many visionaries like Jobs, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos have been described in similar, and even more draconian, ways. But Jobs, Musk, and Bezos have accomplished such spectacular achievements that employees will follow them no matter what. Evan seemed to be following right in their footsteps, but we have only seen him at the helm when Snapchat is thriving and growing spectacularly well.

Snapchat investors and advisors, afraid of irritating Evan, have often been unwilling to speak publicly about even basic things like how the company differentiates itself and what its mission is. Evan is hardly the first tech founder to be secretive. Some of the industry’s most revered leaders like Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos are known for their intense corporate secrecy. As much as Evan has had a rivalry with Mark Zuckerberg, he has also been empowered by Zuckerberg, who blazed the trail for him. Steve Jobs was not the CEO of Apple until his second stint with the company; Google’s investors demanded they bring in Eric Schmidt as a more professional CEO than cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.


pages: 253 words: 65,834

Mastering the VC Game: A Venture Capital Insider Reveals How to Get From Start-Up to IPO on Your Terms by Jeffrey Bussgang

business cycle, business process, carried interest, deal flow, digital map, discounted cash flows, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pets.com, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, selection bias, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds

It comes down to an essential character trait that I observed in myself: the entrepreneurial itch. When you have it, you just have to scratch it. You really can’t help yourself. Being an entrepreneur may be something deep in the genes. John Doerr, the venture capitalist, described some of the greatest entrepreneurs he had invested in—including Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), Jeff Bezos (Amazon.com), and Steve Jobs (Apple)—as “geeks who couldn’t get dates.” Although I don’t know if that is actually true about those four guys, the spirit of the comment resonates. The world of the entrepreneur, even when they are teenagers, is typically not defined by being cool and fitting in but rather by their passion for technology, innovation, change, and a particular idea.

I made my first major VC pitch during my second week on the job at Upromise. My partner, Michael Bronner, and I flew out to California to meet with John Doerr and his partners at Kleiner Perkins Caulfield & Byers, generally known as Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr is one of the most famous VCs in history and considered the “center of gravity in the Internet,” according to Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. After graduating from Harvard Business School, John went to work for Intel in 1974, just as the company was bringing out the 8080 Microprocessor (essentially the first microchip). He went on to become an amazingly successful VC, investing at an early stage in Amazon, Google, Sun, and Intuit, among others.

Thomas Edison continued in this great tradition throughout the nineteenth century and, to this day, is the holder of more patents than any individual in U.S. history (although, now in the number two spot with over 750 and counting, MIT professor Bob Langer might someday surpass him). Modern iconic entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, and others, continue to inspire young entrepreneurs around the globe to pursue the art of the possible. In the last few decades, the venture capital industry has worked to accelerate entrepreneurship and, as much as possible, improve the odds for success. By working with entrepreneurs in a range of industries across a number of business cycles, VCs try to figure out the formula for entrepreneurial success and impart those lessons to the next generation of would-be Franklins and Edisons.


pages: 271 words: 62,538

The Best Interface Is No Interface: The Simple Path to Brilliant Technology (Voices That Matter) by Golden Krishna

Airbnb, Bear Stearns, computer vision, crossover SUV, data science, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, impulse control, Inbox Zero, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, lock screen, Mark Zuckerberg, microdosing, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, QR code, RFID, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator, Y2K

Ante, “H-P CEO Meg Whitman: We Are Doubling Down on Hardware” Wall Street Journal - Digits, February 21, 2014. http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2014/02/21/h-p-ceo-meg-whitman-we-are-doubling-down-on-hardware/ 2 “‘We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards,’ he says. ‘That becomes the touchstone for how we invent.’” Adam Lashinsky, “Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: The Ultimate Disrupter,” Fortune, November 16, 2012. http://fortune.com/2012/11/16/amazons-jeff-bezos-the-ultimate-disrupter/ 3 “Cook: It’s never been stronger. Innovation is so deeply embedded in Apple’s culture. The boldness, ambition, belief there aren’t limits, a desire to make the very best products in the world. It’s the strongest ever. It’s in the DNA of the company.”

It likely lies near the root of the commonly pervasive and disturbingly screen-obsessed approach to design. The result is that much of our lives today is dominated by digital interfaces asking us to tap, touch, swipe, click, and hover because that’s what people were hired to create. HP CEO Meg Whitman says, “We’ve got to continue the innovation engine.”1 Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says, “We innovate by starting with the customer and working backwards.”2 Apple CEO Tim Cook says, “Innovation is so deeply embedded in Apple’s culture.”3 But when you specifically hire someone to generate UI, you won’t get new, innovative solutions. You’ll get more UI, not better UX. This is UI: Navigation, subnavigation, menus, drop-downs, buttons, links, windows, rounded corners, shadowing, error messages, alerts, updates, checkboxes, password fields, search fields, text inputs, radio selections, text areas, hover states, selection states, pressed states, tooltips, banner ads, embedded videos, swipe animations, scrolling, clicking, iconography, colors, lists, slideshows, alt text, badges, notifications, gradients, pop-ups, carousels, OK/Cancel, etc. etc. etc.


Kindle Fire: The Missing Manual by Peter Meyers

computer age, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, Jeff Bezos, lock screen, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex

A single tap launches whatever the icon represents. What’s here is whatever’s in the Fire’s recent memory. In other words, the system decides what’s on this shelf, not you. First time Fire starters will see an Amazon-penned user’s guide (helpful, but containing none of the gems you get in a, um, real guidebook), a welcome note from Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and a list of any ebooks you’ve bought from his ebook shop, the Kindle Store. Move through this carousel by holding down and tracing your finger right to left. A light touch is all it takes; you can also flick, just as you’d do when spinning a Lazy Susan: The touchscreen plays along and delivers more or less momentum, depending on how fast you flick.

Tip To keep tabs on how much room you’ve got left, check out Quick Settings→Device→Internal Storage. So there you have it: a short version of Cloud 101. Ready to go have some fun with your Fire? Reading books is a great place to start, which is what the next chapter covers in detail. Chapter 2. Reading Books AMAZON CEO JEFF BEZOS has always had one big design goal for the Kindle: to make it “disappear in your hands so you can enjoy your reading.” Even though the Fire’s the heaviest, most feature-packed model in the family, it meets its dad’s main objective. Whether you’re a Kindle veteran, an occasional smartphone reader, or even a hardcover lover, you’ll find it easy to read on the Fire.

Watching and Listening Chapter 5 Chapter 6 Chapter 7 Chapter 5. Watching TV and Movies IF YOU’VE GOT A kid or commute in your life, you’ll love the Fire’s talents as a video jukebox. With its growing lineup of mainstream TV shows and movies, Amazon is giving Netflix and Apple a reason to look over their shoulders. It’s all part of Jeff Bezos’s master plan to turn what began as his online bookselling site into something much bigger. He’s also fixing to put the competitive scare into your local cable company. Consider, for example, what’s playing on your local Fireplex: TV shows. Networks big and small have signed on—everyone from ABC to VH1, and most of the alphabet in between.


pages: 246 words: 68,392

Gigged: The End of the Job and the Future of Work by Sarah Kessler

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, do what you love, Donald Trump, East Village, Elon Musk, financial independence, future of work, game design, gig economy, Hacker News, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, law of one price, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, post-work, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, TaskRabbit, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator

“When you have something that is not humanized, like your refrigerator, you have no empathy for it,” Kristy said. “You don’t care if you slam the door. You don’t care if you leave moldy food in it. It doesn’t matter. You don’t care about the refrigerator.” Her solution to being treated as less than human by clients on Mechanical Turk was simple: Ask Turkers to explain the problem in letters to Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon. The bullet points on Kristy’s campaign memo, below a “WHAT WE WANT TO SAY” headline, read as follows: 1: Turkers are human beings, not algorithmsb, and should be marketed accordingly. 2: Turkers should not be sold as cheap labour, but instead skilled, flexible labour which needs to be respected. 3: Turkers need to have a method of representing themselves to Requesters [people who hire Mechanical Turk workers] and the world via Amazon.

It did not create a minimum wage or a new worker rating system. Nor did it create a system in which workers could better communicate with Amazon. However, The Guardian, The Atlantic, Fast Company Magazine, and Wired all covered the campaign. “The goals of the campaign, which hopes to eventually beam hundreds of letters into Jeff Bezos’s inbox, are as varied as the Turkers themselves,” wrote The Guardian. “Some just want to celebrate Mechanical Turk’s flexibility and bite-size tasks. Others are demanding a more modern website that allows them to market themselves to employers and, in return, rate companies as good or bad to work for.”24 Amazon responded to at least one letter, in which a Turker in India had written to say that his paper checks often got lost in the mail.25 Soon after, the company enabled bank transfers to India.

October 2015. http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c31c5ce4b053fc7d131b18/t/56405d98e4b07bcd9d9704a1/1447058840358/Portner+-+compensating+wage+differentials.pdf. 23   Salehi et al. We Are Dynamo. 24   Harris, Mark. Amazon Mechanical Turk Workers Protest: “I Am a Human Being, Not an Algorithm.” The Guardian. December 3, 2014. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/dec/03/amazon-mechanical-turk-workers-protest-jeff-bezos. 25   Katz, Miranda. Amazon’s Turker Crowd Has Had Enough. Wired. August 23, 2017. https://www.wired.com/story/amazons-turker-crowd-has-had-enough/. 26   The traditional unions that once helped create the American middle class have nowhere near as much influence today as they once did. Only about 11% of the workforce (and just 6.6% of the non-government workforce) belonged to a union in 2016, compared to about 20% in 1983 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics.


pages: 252 words: 70,424

The Self-Made Billionaire Effect: How Extreme Producers Create Massive Value by John Sviokla, Mitch Cohen

Bear Stearns, Blue Ocean Strategy, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Colonization of Mars, corporate raider, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, driverless car, eat what you kill, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, global supply chain, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Jony Ive, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, megaproject, old-boy network, paper trading, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, smart meter, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Virgin Galactic, young professional

As second in command, he accumulated significant equity in the company that made him a billionaire. Ballmer became Microsoft’s CEO in 2000, when Gates stepped down, and held that position until retiring in 2014. Today, Ballmer is the owner of the Los Angeles Clippers basketball team. Jeff Bezos b. 1964, United States Amazon.com After graduating from Princeton, Jeff Bezos worked on Wall Street. While at D. E. Shaw & Co., he became the youngest vice president in the investment firm’s history. At age twenty-nine, he left to found Internet retailer Amazon.com. The company started off selling books because the international standard book number (ISBN) system made them suitable for Web search and order fulfillment.

Mergers and Acquisitions Acquirers are clearly motivated by the desire to acquire resources, positioning in a new market, or the potential for scale. Sometimes, mergers are overtly about the people running the operation and their ability to pursue ideas. The acquisition of Zappos by Amazon is an example of the Producer Jeff Bezos recognizing another Producer in CEO Tony Hsieh, and buying not only the business asset but the skills and vision of its leader. Warren Buffett, in contrast, could be said to be a Producer who has made his billions by acquiring cash flow in established, unchanging Performer industries. And the acquisition of Climate Corporation by the agricultural science firm Monsanto reads to us as an effort by a diversified agrigiant to grow Producer capability in an area with enormous potential.


pages: 233 words: 69,745

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

Despite having trained intensively to get about the house unnoticed as a child, I do occasionally breathe or rustle. Having zeroed in on my existence, Dad calls me into his domain, the front room – as hot as Saudi Arabia but with stricter rules about what’s on television. I enter braced for instructions. Coming in here is like Bond being summoned by M. You leave with a mission. ‘Jeff Bezos,’ announces Dad admiringly, ‘richest man in the world!’ He leans forward from the chair in which he will spend the rest of the day and perhaps his life and offers me the paper. I refuse it, saying, ‘I know,’ and immediately dislike myself for doing so. Dad seems hurt that I don’t want to read about Bezos and his money, but it’s because I am beginning to get a sense of just how much of Bezos’s money was once my father’s.

When he hovers over his next purchase with his special screen-stabbing stick, I sense that down the thread of history our common ancestor took similar aim against a mammoth. Every pointless purchase is primal in its way. When he is gone, if there is still money, perhaps I will journey to the actual Amazon and throw the special stick into the river in case Jeff Bezos’s hand should rise from the waters to reclaim it. With Mum upstairs, if I’m not in, Dad must attend to Jeff’s legions. This is entirely fair enough since what arrives are mostly things he has summoned, and which will benefit him alone. Assuming, of course, that he has ordered what he thinks he has.

If Dad imagines something vital has arrived, drugs perhaps, or a DVD of a movie he already has a DVD of and which is freely available online, then he will do some Lazarus/Lourdes manoeuvre, rise from his chair and do his stooped best to make it to the door on time. This, then, is how I have come to square this daily madness in my soul: Jeff Bezos is Dad’s physio. At least until the real one calls. Lounge Lizards 8 November 2017 The telephone is a kind of door in miniature in so far as it can shatter the sacred semi-silence, but also deliver the high bounty of decrepitude the Old Man craves. Doctors, children, chemists, restaurants (when sufficiently mobile), we all respond to him this way.


Amazing Stories of the Space Age by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, built by the lowest bidder, centre right, desegregation, Elon Musk, Gene Kranz, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Ronald Reagan, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Strategic Defense Initiative, Virgin Galactic

Brilliant as it was, MOOSE would have been a risky, last-ditch option and was never developed beyond very basic ground testing. These ideas have been mothballed for decades, just another set of wild space-age designs that never made it off the drawing board or beyond limited prototyping. But there is new life in some of these old concepts. With Richard Branson's Virgin Galactic and Amazon's Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin looking to haul tourists into space, a handful of companies have begun investigating high-tech space suits that would allow an adrenaline-fueled few to exit a spacecraft and descend to Earth protected by nothing more than the suit. In 2013, a high-altitude suit called the RL Mark VI Space Diving Ensemble was announced by a pair of companies working together out of Baltimore, Maryland.

All this had its appeal, but was by no measure as popular as the early lunar expeditions had been with kids or grown-ups. And what of the future? Will public fascination with spaceflight be rekindled as NASA and SpaceX reach for Mars, as Virgin Galactic sends tourists into space, and orbital hotels are regularly visited by Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin rockets? Will a new line of space toys and electronic games focus on Martian expeditions and space colonies? The private ventures mentioned are moving ahead as quickly as they can, and NASA continues to refine its plan to get astronauts to Mars by the mid-2030s. Roscosmos, the Russian space agency, is planning similar ventures closer to Earth.

The upper limit for liquid engines on NASA rockets has to date been the Saturn V with five engines on the first stage; SpaceX's Falcon 9 uses nine engines, and the Falcon Heavy rocket will use twenty-seven on the first stage alone.3 The Falcon Heavy is poised to become a new leader in heavy-lift capability for the US when it flies in 2017 or 2018 (followed by NASA's SLS heavy booster soon thereafter). And SpaceX's rockets are designed to fly back to their launch points (or nearby sea-going barges) for refurbishment and reuse, which should finally fulfill the vision of the early space shuttle designs for economical and frequent spaceflight on a budget. Jeff Bezos of Amazon fame has followed a somewhat similar path, but is serving both a higher and lower (no pun intended) segment of the marketplace. His Blue Origin rockets have flown numerous times to suborbital altitudes, testing both reusable boosters and capsules similar to SpaceX's. These are the core of his tourist-driven suborbital rocket business.


pages: 334 words: 102,899

That Will Never Work: The Birth of Netflix and the Amazing Life of an Idea by Marc Randolph

Airbnb, Apollo 13, crowdsourcing, digital rights, high net worth, inventory management, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, late fees, loose coupling, Mason jar, pets.com, recommendation engine, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech worker, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, Travis Kalanick

At Borland International, where I worked in the eighties, the very architecture of the corporate campus—engineers on the top floor, in the window offices, and everyone else on the floors below them—enforced a sense of hierarchy: engineers were on top, and everyone else worked for them. Along with that hierarchy was a certain staidness. Change happened logically, according to plan. By the mid-nineties, things had changed. Jeff Bezos’s success at Amazon had shown us that it wasn’t just more powerful hardware or more innovative software that would lead to future progress—it was the internet itself. You could leverage it to sell things. It was the future. The internet was not predictable. Its innovations were not centralized on a corporate campus.

If I cupped my hands around my eyes, I could just see into the dimly lit lobby. On the wall, behind a faded wood desk, was a large sign reading AMAZON.COM. Reed had gotten the call a few days earlier from Joy Covey, Amazon’s CFO. She wondered if we would be interested in coming up to Seattle to meet with her and Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and CEO. She didn’t say why she wanted to meet, but she didn’t need to. It was obvious. Although Amazon was only a few years old, and still strictly a place to buy books, Bezos had decided early in 1998 that his site wouldn’t just be a bookstore. It was going to be an everything store, and we knew that music and video were going to be his next two targets.

There were multiple people per cubicle, desks under the stairs, desks pushed to the edges of hallways. Almost every horizontal surface was covered: by books; by gaping Amazon boxes; by papers, printouts, coffee cups, plates, and pizza boxes. It made the green carpeting and beach chairs of the Netflix offices seem like the executive suite at IBM. We could hear Jeff Bezos before we saw him. He-huh-huh-huh-huh. Jeff has a…distinctive laugh. If you’ve seen any video of him speaking, you’ll have heard a version of it—but not the true, untamed thing. In the same way that he’s definitely hired a personal trainer since the late nineties, I think he’s also worked with someone to tame his laugh.


pages: 356 words: 106,161

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

For others like Pinker, the problem of inequality needs to be placed in the context of other, more important, human needs. “Economic inequality”, he writes, “is not itself a dimension of human well-being, and it should not be confused with unfairness or with poverty”.43 It is certainly the case that in the face of abject poverty, the wealth of Jeff Bezos is meaningless: what matters is getting a chance to eat any part of the pie before demanding a greater share of it. Under such circumstances, inequality becomes an acceptable tradeoff. In fact, an old economics theory known as the Kuznets Curve assumed that market forces would widen inequality in the incipient stages of economic development only to narrow it when an economy became more mature.

For starters, what matters is not the wealth of the super-rich but the mechanisms that made them so wealthy. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, who he uses as an example of someone who became a billionaire by making other people “better off” through their enjoyment of her books, has certainly deserved her success and has not exploited anyone’s labor in the process. It’s not clear that Jeff Bezos, whose hundreds of thousands of Amazon warehouse workers toil in conditions more akin to beasts of burden, cannot claim the same and it’s worth pointing out that the great majority of billionaires have more in common with Bezos than Rowling in terms of how they made their money. Pinker also places too much emphasis on the admittedly weak links between inequality and happiness and well-being (with all the caveats that were described in Chapter Four), while discounting the very strong links found within a plethora of quantifiable social ills such as mental illness, diseases of despair, crime, incarceration rates, teen pregnancies, and so on.

US political philosopher John Rawls famously described the original position as a thought experiment of how such a just society should be conceived.49 In this original position outside a “veil of ignorance”, no citizen would know what life they would be born into within society. You could just as easily end up being Jeff Bezos as you could one of his warehouse workers. Under the logic of loss aversion, it would appear that it is preferable to avoid being the warehouse worker than hoping to be Bezos, which suggests that people would prefer to live under more egalitarian societies. Being the poorest Swede is far better than being the poorest American or Briton, even if the possibility of amassing stupefying levels of wealth is much higher in the latter two countries.


pages: 666 words: 181,495

In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives by Steven Levy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Anne Wojcicki, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business process, clean water, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dean Kamen, discounted cash flows, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, El Camino Real, Evgeny Morozov, fault tolerance, Firefox, General Magic , Gerard Salton, Gerard Salton, Google bus, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, high-speed rail, HyperCard, hypertext link, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, large language model, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, one-China policy, optical character recognition, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Potemkin village, prediction markets, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, search inside the book, second-price auction, selection bias, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, The future is already here, the long tail, trade route, traveling salesman, turn-by-turn navigation, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, web application, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

The subject would stand Page in good stead in the future with respect to product development, even though it was not in the HCI domain to figure out a new model of information retrieval. On his desk and permeating his conversations was Apple interface guru Donald Norman’s classic tome The Psychology of Everyday Things, the bible of a religion whose first, and arguably only, commandment is “The user is always right.” (Other Norman disciples, such as Jeff Bezos at Amazon.com, were adopting this creed on the web.) Another influential book was a biography of Nikola Tesla, the brilliant Serb scientist; though Tesla’s contributions arguably matched Thomas Edison’s—and his ambitions were grand enough to impress even Page—he died in obscurity. “I felt like he was a great inventor and it was a sad story,” says Page.

One was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur named Ram Shriram, whose own company had recently been purchased by Amazon.com. Shriram had met Brin and Page in February 1998; although he had been skeptical about a business model for search engines, he was so impressed with Google that he had been advising them. After the Bechtolsheim meeting, Shriram invited them to his house to meet his boss Jeff Bezos, who was enthralled with their passion and “healthy stubbornness,” as they explained why they would never put display ads on their home page. Bezos joined Bechtolsheim, Cheriton, and Shriram as investors, making for a total of a million dollars of angel money. On September 4, 1998, Page and Brin filed for incorporation and finally moved off campus.

Manber loved telling visitors to the library which books they might enjoy and which ones might answer their questions. He studied information retrieval and eventually wound up at Yahoo where he brokered the Google deal, until he quit in disgust in 2002. His next job was as the leader of A9, a search start-up funded by Jeff Bezos. In February 2006, he accepted an offer from Google to become the czar of search engineering. It was like someone who worked on space science all his life finally arriving at NASA. “Suddenly I’m in charge of everybody asking questions in the whole world,” he says. “I thought I had a reasonable idea of the main problems facing search—what was minor and major.


pages: 256 words: 79,075

Hired: Six Months Undercover in Low-Wage Britain by James Bloodworth

Airbnb, algorithmic management, Berlin Wall, call centre, clockwatching, collective bargaining, congestion charging, credit crunch, deindustrialization, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, Greyball, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, low skilled workers, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, post-truth, post-work, profit motive, race to the bottom, reshoring, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, working poor, working-age population

Over the course of a single morning the average picker could earn around £29 carting totes back and forth along the dimly lit aisles of the warehouse. Meanwhile Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, who at the time of writing is worth around $60.7 billion, once increased his wealth by a cool £1.4 billion over the course of a similar amount of time. Calling everyone ‘associates’ was, it seemed, a ruse designed to foster the illusion that you were all one big happy family. ‘Jeff Bezos is an associate and so are all of you,’ an Amazon supervisor cheerily informed us on the very first day.7 Which is fine as far as it goes; though the vernacular seemed purposely designed to blur the distinction between the life of a seven-pound-an-hour picker and the sort of life you can lead with £1.4 billion in the bank.

‘Jeff Bezos is an associate and so are all of you,’ an Amazon supervisor cheerily informed us on the very first day.7 Which is fine as far as it goes; though the vernacular seemed purposely designed to blur the distinction between the life of a seven-pound-an-hour picker and the sort of life you can lead with £1.4 billion in the bank. The ‘associates’ who walked home at midnight, heavy legs supporting suppurating feet which over the course of the day had puffed up half a size bigger, were treated at every juncture as lesser human beings than men like Jeff Bezos. This was all the more reason, perhaps, for those who do so well out of such a state of affairs to create a rhetorical universe distinct from the flesh and blood reality. Amazon’s recruitment process ran strictly through two agencies – PMP Recruitment and Transline Group. I landed the job at Amazon through Transline.


pages: 293 words: 78,439

Dual Transformation: How to Reposition Today's Business While Creating the Future by Scott D. Anthony, Mark W. Johnson

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, Apollo 13, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Internet of things, invention of hypertext, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, long term incentive plan, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, obamacare, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, pez dispenser, recommendation engine, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, the long tail, the market place, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, transfer pricing, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Creation of Amazon Web Services: Charles O’Reilly and Michael Tushman, Lead and Disrupt: How to Solve the Innovator’s Dilemma (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013). AWS market share: “AWS, Google, Microsoft and IBM pull away from pack in race for cloud market share,” Business Cloud News, April, 29, 2016, www.businesscloudnews.com/2016/04/29/aws-google-microsoft-and-ibm-pull-away-from-pack-in-race-for-cloud-market-share/. Jeff Bezos quote: Scott Anthony, “Constant Transformation Is the New Normal,” Harvard Business Review Online, October 27, 2009, https://hbr.org/2009/10/constant-change-is-the-new-nor/.

He promised to bring greater transparency while continuing SingPost’s transformation, which he called “strategically sound.” Amazon: From Retailer to Cloud Computing Leader In Seizing the White Space, coauthor Mark Johnson describes how Amazon.com is built to transform. The company’s innovation efforts, spearheaded by founder Jeff Bezos, are relentless. In Lead and Disrupt, academics Charles O’Reilly III and Michael Tushman detail how Amazon’s first twenty-one years of existence (from 1994 to 2015) featured twenty-five significant innovations. Many of these, such as Amazon Prime (free shipping for members) and customer reviews, fit within the rubric of transformation A, part of Amazon’s continual transformation from a retailer of books to achieve its vision of the world’s most customer-centered retailer.


pages: 280 words: 71,268

Measure What Matters: How Google, Bono, and the Gates Foundation Rock the World With OKRs by John Doerr

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, Big Tech, Bob Noyce, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Haight Ashbury, hockey-stick growth, intentional community, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, Salesforce, scientific management, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, web application, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

But when you know your company objectives like you know your last name, it’s very calming. OKRs help me to be that focused, clear-headed leader. No matter how crazy things get, I can always default back to what matters. 18 Culture You need a culture that high-fives small and innovative ideas. —Jeff Bezos Culture, as the saying goes, eats strategy for breakfast. It’s our stake in the ground; it’s what makes meaning of work. Leaders are rightly obsessed with culture. Founders ask how they can protect their companies’ cultural values as they grow. Chiefs of large companies are turning to OKRs and CFRs as tools for culture change.

So it’s only fitting that he graces our close. On that clear April morning in Atherton, California, it took a big tent to hold Bill’s funeral mass on the Sacred Heart playing fields, the place he’d spent so many Saturdays coaching eighth-graders in flag football or softball. More than three thousand mourners turned out, from Larry Page and Jeff Bezos to generations of the (once) young people who’d played for him. Bill had embraced every one of us with his unabashed bear hugs and selfless guidance. And every one of us believed that Bill was our best friend. His life was the biggest tent of all. The son of a gym teacher who worked nights at the steel mill in Homestead, Pennsylvania, Bill first earned his sobriquet in the 1970s as varsity football coach at his adored alma mater, Columbia University. * But Coach became the Coach when he traded the gridiron for an even more competitive arena, namely the boardrooms and executive suites of Silicon Valley.

Thanks especially to CEO Doug Dennerline and the goal-oriented crew at BetterWorks, who are advancing OKRs and CFRs like no one else while working better themselves every day. Not least, I’d like to thank some special individuals with whom I’ve been privileged to work over the years, and whose lives are exemplars of excellence. Notable among them: Jim Barksdale, Andy Bechtolsheim, Jeff Bezos, Scott Cook, John Chambers, Bill Joy, and KR Sridhar. And Andy Grove, Bill Campbell, and Steve Jobs, gone but never to be forgotten. I sincerely thank Jeff Coplon, who was at the center of the team that made this happen—and who proved, once again, that execution is everything. Long before I encountered OKRs, my father and hero, Lou Doerr, taught me the value of focus, commitment, high standards, and higher aspirations (and RMA—the Right Mental Attitude).


pages: 268 words: 75,850

The Formula: How Algorithms Solve All Our Problems-And Create More by Luke Dormehl

3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, computer age, death of newspapers, deferred acceptance, disruptive innovation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, Ford Model T, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, Google Earth, Google Glasses, High speed trading, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kodak vs Instagram, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine readable, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paradox of Choice, pattern recognition, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, scientific management, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Slavoj Žižek, social graph, speech recognition, stable marriage problem, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, upwardly mobile, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator

“It took Netflix six months.”29 Netflix’s success has seen it followed by online retailer Amazon, which also has access to a vast bank of customer information, revealing the kind of detailed “likes” and “dislikes” data that traditional studio bosses could only dream of. “It’s a completely new way of making movies,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos told Wired magazine. “Some would say our approach is unworkable—we disagree.”30 In Soviet Russia, Films Watch You In a previous life, Alexis Kirke worked as a quantitative analyst on Wall Street, one of the so-called rocket scientists whose job concerns a heady blend of mathematics, high finance and computer skills.

USA Today, February 1, 2013. usatoday.com/story/life/tv/2013/01/31/bianco-review-house-of-cards/1880835/. 28 Blakely, Rhys. “Emmy Awards Brings the Computer Algorithm to Hollywood.” Times, September 20, 2013. thetimes.co.uk/tto/arts/tv-radio/article3874137.ece. 29 nytimes.com/2013/07/22/business/media/tv-foresees-its-future-netflix-is-there.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0. 30 Levy, Steven. “In Conversation with Jeff Bezos: CEO of the Internet.” Wired, December 12, 2011. wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2012/01/features/ceo-of-the-internet/page/2. 31 Dormehl, Luke. “Can Alternate Endings Save the Hollywood Blockbuster?” Fast Company, July 30, 2013. fastcolabs.com/3015037/open-company/can-alternate-endings-save-the-hollywood-blockbuster. 32 This idea is backed up by Wired editor Chris Anderson’s concept of the “98 Percent Rule,” described in his 2006 book The Long Tail.

Nine Algorithms That Changed the Future: The Ingenious Ideas That Drive Today’s Computers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012). 6 Levy, Frank, and Richard Murnane. The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market (New York: Russell Sage Foundation; Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 7 Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013). 8 Bellos, David. Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011). 9 Lanier, Jaron. Who Owns the Future? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013). 10 jay.law.ou.edu/faculty/Jmaute/Lawyering_21st_Century/Spring%202012%20files/TheFutureofLaw_DarkClouds.pdf. 11 Brynjolfsson, Erik, and Andrew McAfee.


pages: 292 words: 76,185

Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One by Jenny Blake

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Cal Newport, cloud computing, content marketing, data is the new oil, diversified portfolio, do what you love, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fear of failure, future of work, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge worker, Lao Tzu, Lean Startup, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, passive income, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, solopreneur, Startup school, stem cell, TED Talk, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, white picket fence, young professional, zero-sum game

the average attention span: Statistic Brain Research Institute, “Attention Span Statistics,” last modified April 2, 2105, www.statisticbrain.com/attention-span-statistics/. Chapter 11: Flip Failure regret minimization framework: Zach Bulygo, “12 Business Lessons You Can Learn from Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos,” KISSmetrics Blog, January 19, 2013, blog.kissmetrics.com/lessons-from-jeff-bezos/. Post-it Notes: “Post-it note,” Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-it_note. STAGE FIVE: LEAD Chapter 12: Are You Listening? You have done all this work: Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg, How Google Works (New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2014).

When I dig deeper with people who say they are afraid to fail in terms of losing money, or having to find steady work again even if they do not love it, their true definition of failure is regret. That is certainly mine. Though declining income or a dwindling bank account would certainly point to business blind spots and growth areas, these quantitative measures are not how I define myself. For me, the biggest failure is not trying. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, shares similar sentiments, and applies what he calls a regret minimization framework to big decisions: I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, “OK, I’m looking back on my life. I want to minimize the number of regrets I have.” And I knew that when I was 80, I was not going to regret having tried this.


pages: 240 words: 78,436

Open for Business Harnessing the Power of Platform Ecosystems by Lauren Turner Claire, Laure Claire Reillier, Benoit Reillier

Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, blockchain, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, commoditize, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, Diane Coyle, Didi Chuxing, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, fake news, fulfillment center, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, multi-sided market, Network effects, Paradox of Choice, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, performance metric, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, price discrimination, price elasticity of demand, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Altman, search costs, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, the long tail, The Market for Lemons, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, Y Combinator

Deciding to let third-party sellers compete with the retail business was a very controversial decision internally. Jeff Bezos recalls: 58 Platform-powered ecosystems So our buyers were extremely concerned – and rightly. They were saying, ‘Let me just make sure I understand this. I might get stuck with inventory of 10,000 units of this camera that I just loaded up on, and you’re going to let just anybody come in and take Amazon traffic on what is our primary retail real estate, which is the detail page, and I’m going to lose the buy box to this other person because they have a lower price than me?’ And we said, ‘Yeah, we are.’5 After difficult discussions, Jeff Bezos eventually took the bet to focus on what was best for customers, and opened its original distribution business on the producer side.

Amazon’s ecosystem Today, Amazon is the largest e-commerce retailer in the US, as well as the world’s largest provider of cloud computing services.1 For the past 10 years, Amazon’s growth rate has exceeded 20%2 year after year, recently surpassing Walmart in market capitalization.3 Somebody who bought $1,000 of Amazon stocks when it floated in May 1997 would now have approximately $552,700, equivalent to a yearly return of 38.6%.4 A bit of history Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 as an online bookstore. So Amazon started as a traditional business model but online. The business expanded rapidly from books to new categories such as CDs, DVDs, electronics, etc. and floated three years later. In 1999, Amazon launched a separate Web auctions site to compete with eBay’s fast-growing marketplace.


pages: 244 words: 73,700

Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism by Amanda Montell

barriers to entry, behavioural economics, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, classic study, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, fake news, financial independence, Girl Boss, growth hacking, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Keith Raniere, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lockdown, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, multilevel marketing, off-the-grid, passive income, Peoples Temple, Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, sunk-cost fallacy, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Y2K

Indeed, while we’re distracted by the Manson Family’s peculiar outfits* and other flashy “cult” iconography, what we wind up missing is the fact that one of the biggest factors in getting people to a point of extreme devotion, and keeping them there, is something we cannot see. Though “cult language” comes in different varieties, all charismatic leaders—from Jim Jones to Jeff Bezos to SoulCycle instructors—use the same basic linguistic tools. This is a book about the language of fanaticism in its many forms: a language I’m calling Cultish (like English, Spanish, or Swedish). Part 1 of this book will investigate the language we use to talk about cultish groups, busting some widely believed myths about what the word “cult” even means.

“All companies have special terms, and sometimes they make sense, but sometimes they’re nonsense,” said Kets de Vries. “As a consultant, sometimes I enter an organization where people use code names and acronyms, but they don’t actually know what they’re talking about. They’re just imitating what top management says.” At Amazon, for instance, Jeff Bezos’s ideals are strikingly similar to those of MLM leaders: disdain for bureaucracy, fixation on hierarchies, incentives to rise to the top no matter who gets thrown under the bus, and a juxtaposition of lofty motivational-speak with metaphors of defeat. Bezos created his own version of the Ten Commandments called the Leadership Principles.

Called Leadership Dynamics, it took place in a crappy Bay Area motel and cost a thousand bucks to attend. For two days straight, Patrick had recruits engage in a series of freaky power games: He made them climb inside coffins and strung them up on gigantic wooden crosses, where they’d dangle all afternoon. Like Jim Jones, Chuck Dietrich, and (to a lesser degree) Jeff Bezos, he also forced them into “group therapy” sessions where they verbally tormented each other for hours on end. Patrick’s behavior was unhinged from all angles, but when the FTC brought him to court, their most compelling argument against him, and what eventually allowed them to shut down Holiday Magic, was their points about his speech.


Fortunes of Change: The Rise of the Liberal Rich and the Remaking of America by David Callahan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, automated trading system, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, carried interest, clean water, corporate social responsibility, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Thorp, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial independence, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, medical malpractice, mega-rich, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, NetJets, new economy, offshore financial centre, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, power law, profit maximization, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Florida, Robert Bork, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, short selling, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, systems thinking, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, working poor, World Values Survey

Brad Kelley, who became a billionaire through selling discount cigarette brands, is doing much the same thing that Turner is—buying up land and preserving it for conservation. The little-known Kelley now owns 1.7 million acres, and he is buying more all the time. Among other holdings, he owns hundreds of thousands of acres in West Texas, where Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has also bought a reported 300,000 acres. Roxanne Quimby, the founder of Burt’s Bees, has bought up thousands of acres in northern Maine, the largest virgin wilderness east of the Mississippi. Quimby first came to Maine in a Volkswagen microbus as a back-to-nature hippie in the 1970s and started making candles out of leftover beeswax.

Chances are, that philanthropy will reflect his countercultural roots and Democratic sympathies. The great technology fortunes of the United States remain very new, and many are in the hands of relatively young people. Steve Jobs was born in 1955. Bill Gates is the same age, as is Eric Schmidt, the “grown-up” in Google’s high command. Jeff Bezos of Amazon was born in 1964. The eBay billionaires Jeff Skoll and Pierre Omidyar were born in 1965 and 1967, respectively. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were both born in 1973. Marc Andreessen made a fortune on Netscape in the 1990s and would seem to be a senior statesman in Silicon Valley; he was born in 1971.

The bulk of William Hewlett’s fortune, amassed through the Hewlett-Packard computer giant, wasn’t made available for philanthropy until after Hewlett’s death in 2001. The William Flora Hewlett Foundation is now among the top c08.indd 193 5/11/10 6:24:56 AM 194 fortunes of change five foundations in the United States and supports a wide array of progressive organizations. Steve Jobs isn’t alone in his lack of philanthropy. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos hasn’t gotten around to giving away large chunks of his wealth, either. Nor has Larry Ellison of Oracle, the third-richest man in the United States, or Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer, who was worth $14.5 billion in 2010. Inevitably, though, these and other giant tech fortunes will one day be harnessed to some kind of public purpose, as they are too big to be disposed of privately.


pages: 381 words: 112,674

eBoys by Randall E. Stross

Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, business cycle, call centre, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, deal flow, digital rights, disintermediation, drop ship, edge city, Fairchild Semiconductor, General Magic , high net worth, hiring and firing, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job-hopping, knowledge worker, late capitalism, market bubble, Mary Meeker, megaproject, Menlo Park, new economy, old-boy network, PalmPilot, passive investing, performance metric, pez dispenser, railway mania, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Y2K

Amazon was another potential entrant, and eBay had sought to avert competition from that quarter, too. In August eBay had proposed to Amazon that the two companies jointly offer links to used-book auctions, cobranded on both sites. The Amazon board had been receptive and invited a delegation from eBay to come up to Seattle and present a proposal to Amazon chief Jeff Bezos and senior executives. EBay executives flew up and thought a deal could be hammered out. Kagle told his partners what eBay said to Amazon: Your customers win, our customers win, we’ll do it 50/50, but the traffic is higher on your site, and you’ll get more customers out of it than we will. Let’s go do this!

Most of the eBay executive staff members were glad to hear of it: another distraction from auctions. Every day Amazon seemed to enter an entirely new business: Investments in pet supplies and an online drugstore had been the most recent moves. But there was another view within eBay that held that the price war in books showed that once again Jeff Bezos was unpredictable, and he could bring woe to eBay without warning. “Should we be spending any time trying to figure out what Amazon’s next move is?” Meg Whitman wondered aloud. “If I was making the case,” Steve Westly said, pretending he was Bezos, “I’d say I’m not expecting much yet from auctions.

EBay was the company that all were most proud of, as it was that rarity, a profitable Internet company. Even when investors treated eBay’s shares no differently from money-losing Amazon’s—and on August 4 eBay’s stock was off 68 percent from its fifty-two-week high—eBay remained the brightest star among the many Benchmark successes for that reason. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos defiantly told the world that Amazon would be “unprofitable for a long time”; his bravado in pursuing growth above all else served to reassure investors that Amazon was on course. Webvan’s Louis Borders, however, did not subscribe to the Bezos line. Borders publicly stated, “I don’t see any reason why an Internet company should take five to ten years to be profitable,” and in this way Webvan was philosophically linked to eBay.


pages: 185 words: 43,609

Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future by Peter Thiel, Blake Masters

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Andy Kessler, Berlin Wall, clean tech, cloud computing, crony capitalism, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, heat death of the universe, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, life extension, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, minimum viable product, Nate Silver, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, power law, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, software is eating the world, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Suez canal 1869, tech worker, Ted Kaczynski, Tesla Model S, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, working poor

And even if you do succeed in gaining a small foothold, you’ll have to be satisfied with keeping the lights on: cutthroat competition means your profits will be zero. Scaling Up Once you create and dominate a niche market, then you should gradually expand into related and slightly broader markets. Amazon shows how it can be done. Jeff Bezos’s founding vision was to dominate all of online retail, but he very deliberately started with books. There were millions of books to catalog, but they all had roughly the same shape, they were easy to ship, and some of the most rarely sold books—those least profitable for any retail store to keep in stock—also drew the most enthusiastic customers.

What do successful people say? Malcolm Gladwell, a successful author who writes about successful people, declares in Outliers that success results from a “patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages.” Warren Buffett famously considers himself a “member of the lucky sperm club” and a winner of the “ovarian lottery.” Jeff Bezos attributes Amazon’s success to an “incredible planetary alignment” and jokes that it was “half luck, half good timing, and the rest brains.” Bill Gates even goes so far as to claim that he “was lucky to be born with certain skills,” though it’s not clear whether that’s actually possible. Perhaps these guys are being strategically humble.


pages: 280 words: 82,355

Extreme Teams: Why Pixar, Netflix, AirBnB, and Other Cutting-Edge Companies Succeed Where Most Fail by Robert Bruce Shaw, James Foster, Brilliance Audio

Airbnb, augmented reality, benefit corporation, Blitzscaling, call centre, cloud computing, data science, deliberate practice, Elon Musk, emotional labour, financial engineering, future of work, holacracy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Jony Ive, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, loose coupling, meta-analysis, nuclear winter, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, work culture

Nov. 12, 2015. 19Grossman, “Tough Love at Netflix.” 20Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 15, 2015. 21The New York Times is a competitor of the Washington Post, which was acquired by Jeff Bezos several years ago. Some of those supporting Amazon suggest that the Times article is biased as a result. 22John Cook, “Facebook, Amazon Staffers Are the Most Stressed: Google, Microsoft Are the Best Paid,” Geekwire, June 6, 2001. 23Amazon is not alone in this practice as other firms, such as Walmart, use similar technologies to eliminate what some refer to as “time theft.” 24Joe Nocera, “Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Way,” New York Times, August 21, 2015. 25Amazon corporate site, “Our Leadership Principles,” www.amazon.jobs/principles. 26Spencer Soper, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Complain of Harsh Conditions,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2011. 27The Times did not indicate how often this occurs, but Amazon, in responding to the article, suggested that the large majority of the comments in its feedback process are positive (by a ratio of five positive comments to every one negative comment). 28Amazon grew from $6.92B in revenue in 2004 to $88.99 billion in 2014. 29Those who invested $1,000 in Amazon at the time of its public offering now have stock worth over $350,000, based on an initial IPO price of $18 in 1997 and a price of $531 in 2015 (post stock splits).

Some of those supporting Amazon suggest that the Times article is biased as a result. 22John Cook, “Facebook, Amazon Staffers Are the Most Stressed: Google, Microsoft Are the Best Paid,” Geekwire, June 6, 2001. 23Amazon is not alone in this practice as other firms, such as Walmart, use similar technologies to eliminate what some refer to as “time theft.” 24Joe Nocera, “Jeff Bezos and the Amazon Way,” New York Times, August 21, 2015. 25Amazon corporate site, “Our Leadership Principles,” www.amazon.jobs/principles. 26Spencer Soper, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Complain of Harsh Conditions,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 2011. 27The Times did not indicate how often this occurs, but Amazon, in responding to the article, suggested that the large majority of the comments in its feedback process are positive (by a ratio of five positive comments to every one negative comment). 28Amazon grew from $6.92B in revenue in 2004 to $88.99 billion in 2014. 29Those who invested $1,000 in Amazon at the time of its public offering now have stock worth over $350,000, based on an initial IPO price of $18 in 1997 and a price of $531 in 2015 (post stock splits). This stock as of September 2016 is trading even higher, approaching $800 per share. 30Jeff Bezos in Amazon’s 1997 shareholder letter, media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/97/97664/reports/Shareholderletter97.pdf. 31Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2013), 131. 32There are various definitions of what constitutes a team and also various types of teams. Susan Cohen, a team’s researcher, suggests the following as the most general definition: “Team is a collection of individuals who are interdependent in the their tasks, who share responsibility for outcomes, who see themselves and are seen by others an intact social entity embed in one or more larger social systems and who manage their relationships across organizational boundaries.”


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

A handful of subscriptions were sold to people who believed in the enterprise, but that has brought in only a trickle measurable in hundreds of dollars. While wealthy individuals from the technology sector have recently been investing in high profile journalism outlets (Facebook’s Chris Hughes with the New Republic, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post, and ebay’s Pierre Omidyar with his online start-up) capital has not been flowing to small- and medium-sized efforts, which are sinking. Many now argue that foundation funding is the only option if we want investigative reporting to survive. Nationwide there are a few shining examples of Web-based nonprofits that are held up as the saviors of the industry and hailed by new-media thinkers as emblematic of journalism’s bright digital-first future—Voice of San Diego, MinnPost, and ProPublica, to name a few.

The most straightforward method may be to force leading technology firms to pay their taxes, which they have been diligently dodging through cunning accounting schemes, loopholes, and shelters. These machinations have allowed Google to effectively pay an overseas tax rate of as little as 2.4 percent, Apple to shield approximately $74 billion from the Internal Revenue Service between 2009 and 2012, and Amazon to spend years refusing to collect sales tax, starving states of revenue (Jeff Bezos is said to have considered establishing Amazon on an Indian reservation to avoid paying taxes).25 A portion of these funds could be earmarked to underwrite and promote art, culture, and journalism. The fruits of such investment could be made widely available, free of copyright restrictions, much the way a dedicated community of academics working under the banner of “open access” is making publicly funded research readily available to anyone who wants to learn regardless of income or institutional affiliation.

The $1 trillion figure is from the Consumer Electronics Association. 24. Jesse Drucker, “Google 2.4% rate shows how $60 billion lost to tax loopholes,” Bloomberg News, October 21, 2010; Nelson D. Schwartz and Charles Duhigg, “Apple’s Web of Tax Shelters Saved It Billions, Panel Finds,” New York Times, May 21, 2013, A1; and Brian Faler, “Jeff Bezos Plays Active Role in Tax Fights,” Politico.com, August 6, 2013. 25. The extension of copyright also incentivizes the production of films with licensing potential, such as sequels and prequels and toys and video games. Please find the complete index at www.randomhouse.ca/thepeoplesplatform ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thanks to friends and family, movement comrades, and writing and film colleagues for insightful conversations and endless patience and encouragement as I worked on this book.


pages: 362 words: 83,464

The New Class Conflict by Joel Kotkin

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, back-to-the-city movement, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, California gold rush, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, classic study, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Graeber, degrowth, deindustrialization, do what you love, don't be evil, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, energy security, falling living standards, future of work, Future Shock, Gini coefficient, Google bus, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, mass affluent, McJob, McMansion, medical bankruptcy, microapartment, Nate Silver, National Debt Clock, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Buchheit, payday loans, Peter Calthorpe, plutocrats, post-industrial society, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Richard Florida, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional

Besides GE, a classic conglomerate, the largest cash hordes now belong to Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Oracle, and Google, all of whom sometimes have more dollars on hand than the U.S. government. Seven of the eight biggest individual winners from stock gains in 2013 were tech entrepreneurs, led by Jeff Bezos, who added $12 billion to his paper wealth; Mark Zuckerberg, who raked in an additional $11.9 billion; and Sergey Brin and Larry Page, who saw their wallets expand by roughly $9 billion.23 Of course, these numbers can rise and fall with market shifts, but the long-term impact of this accumulation of wealth will be profound.

Although headquartered in Los Angeles, the traditional center of the aerospace industry, Space X, the largest of the space startups, was founded by Tesla’s Musk, with some 1500 employees at a former Boeing plant in Hawthorne, California.78 Musk is not the only Oligarch with interests in space. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos founded his own private space exploration company, Blue Origin, which has launched two vehicles into space, Charon and Goddard. It intends to build orbital space stations, and it has contracted for NASA. Critically, these two firms, as well as a third new player, Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic, are the pet projects of billionaires fascinated by space, both for travel and business purposes.

Since 2001, for example, book, periodical, and newspaper publishing—all traditionally concentrated in the New York area—have lost some 250,000 jobs, while Internet publishing and portals generated some 70,000 new positions, many of them in the Bay Area or Seattle.83 To the new Oligarchs, older industries are holdovers from what one venture capitalist derisively called “the paper economy” that is destined soon to be swept away by the new digital aristocracy.84 As relatively young people—even Bill Gates is barely sixty—they will have the money, and the time, to disseminate their views to the public, both the mass market and the influential higher echelons.85 Another new $250 million venture, First Look Media, with a specific mission to support largely left-of-center investigative reporting, is being backed by another Oligarch, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.86 One way to consolidate such influence—previously used by Gilded Age moguls like William Randolph Hearst—has been to buy up the former bastions of the old media. Facebook billionaire and Obama tech guru Chris Hughes87 has bought the venerable New Republic. Perhaps more importantly, the purchase of the Washington Post by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has brought not only resources to that struggling, still influential paper but also technical savvy and a certain entrepreneurial aura. Moreover, it places the tech Oligarchy at the center of the media in the nation’s capital.88 Yet over time the purchase of existing media may prove to be just a sideshow.


pages: 282 words: 81,873

Live Work Work Work Die: A Journey Into the Savage Heart of Silicon Valley by Corey Pein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anne Wojcicki, artificial general intelligence, bank run, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Build a better mousetrap, California gold rush, cashless society, colonial rule, computer age, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, deep learning, digital nomad, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Extropian, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fake news, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, growth hacking, hacker house, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, intentional community, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, life extension, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, obamacare, Parker Conrad, passive income, patent troll, Patri Friedman, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, platform as a service, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-work, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, RFID, Robert Mercer, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, self-driving car, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social software, software as a service, source of truth, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, technoutopianism, telepresence, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, X Prize, Y Combinator, Zenefits

* * * There was no place more appropriate to begin my conquest of the new gig economy than in the proverbial basement—from there, after all, I had nowhere to go but up. The contemporary equivalent of an entry-level job in the corporate mailroom was a work-from-home service called Mechanical Turk, operated by Amazon, the $136 billion online retailer controlled by Jeff Bezos. The idea with Mechanical Turk was to create a digitized assembly line featuring thousands of discrete “Human Intelligence Tasks,” designed to be completed within seconds and commensurately paying pennies. Academic surveys found that many Turkers worked more than thirty hours per week for average wages of under $2 per hour.

Amazon’s salaried cubicle jockeys got it almost as bad as the warehouse temps, who were so overworked and toiled in such miserable conditions, that the company notoriously hired private paramedics to park their ambulances outside one of its facilities waiting to treat the next batch of employees who collapsed as a result of heat exhaustion. In Germany, Amazon hired menacing black-clad security guards employed by an outfit with neo-Nazi ties as modern-day Pinkertons to police its warehouse workers. And until the spring of 2017, founder Jeff Bezos refused to collect hundreds of millions of dollars in sales taxes in many jurisdictions, thus starving state and local governments while furnishing extra cash to crush the competition. The pattern continued with eBay, the grifters’ paradise; Craigslist, which profited from the promotion of prostitution and discriminatory housing arrangements (although a judge found Craigslist not liable); and PayPal, which partnered with offshore gambling operations, fought attempts to regulate it as a bank, and settled various money laundering charges.

secret behavioral experiments Susie Cagle, “Facebook Wants to Redline Your Friends List,” August 24, 2015, psmag.com; James Grimmelmann, “As Flies to Wanton Boys,” June 28, 2014, laboratorium.net; Charles Arthur, “Facebook Emotion Study Breached Ethical Guidelines, Researchers Say,” June 30, 2014, theguardian.com. abuse of employment laws Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013); Nathaniel Mott, “Amazon Faces Lawsuit Alleging Unfair Labor Policies,” April 9, 2015, pando.com; Spencer Soper, “Inside Amazon’s Warehouse,” September 18, 2011, articles.mcall.com. starving state and local governments Chris Isidore, “Amazon to Start Collecting State Sales Taxes Everywhere,” March 29, 2017, money.cnn.com.


pages: 340 words: 81,110

How Democracies Die by Steven Levitsky, Daniel Ziblatt

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Ayatollah Khomeini, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, centre right, Charles Lindbergh, clean water, David Brooks, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gunnar Myrdal, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Nate Silver, Norman Mailer, old-boy network, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, single-payer health, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, universal basic income

Donald Trump displayed such a readiness in 2016. He said he planned to arrange for a special prosecutor to investigate Hillary Clinton after the election and declared that Clinton should be imprisoned. Trump also repeatedly threatened to punish unfriendly media. At a rally in Fort Worth, Texas, for example, he attacked Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, declaring, “If I become president, oh, do they have problems. They are going to have such problems.” Describing the media as “among the most dishonest groups of people I’ve ever met,” Trump declared: I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money….So that when the New York Times writes a hit piece, which is a total disgrace—or when the Washington Post…writes a hit piece, we can sue them….

In July, he retweeted an altered video clip made from old WWE footage of him tackling and then punching someone with a CNN logo superimposed on his face. President Trump also considered using government regulatory agencies against unfriendly media companies. During the 2016 campaign, he had threatened Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, with antitrust action, tweeting: “If I become president, oh do they have problems.” He also threatened to block the pending merger of Time Warner (CNN’s parent company) and AT&T, and during the first months of his presidency, there were reports that White House advisors considered using the administration’s antitrust authority as a source of leverage against CNN.

multimillion-dollar defamation suits: “Confrontation, Repression in Correa’s Ecuador,” Committee to Protect Journalists, September 1, 2011, https://cpj.org/​reports/​2011/​09/​confrontation-repression-correa-ecuador.php. “If I become president”: Conor Gaffey, “Donald Trump Versus Amazon: All the Times the President and Jeff Bezos Have Called Each Other Out,” Newsweek, July 25, 2017. He also threatened to block: Philip Bump, “Would the Trump Administration Block a Merger Just to Punish CNN?,” Washington Post, July 6, 2017. President Trump signed an executive order: “President Trump Vows to Take Aggressive Steps on Immigration,” Boston Globe, January 25, 2017.


pages: 266 words: 87,411

The Slow Fix: Solve Problems, Work Smarter, and Live Better in a World Addicted to Speed by Carl Honore

Albert Einstein, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 13, Atul Gawande, Broken windows theory, call centre, carbon credits, Checklist Manifesto, clean water, clockwatching, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, Dava Sobel, delayed gratification, drone strike, Enrique Peñalosa, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, Exxon Valdez, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, game design, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index card, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, lateral thinking, lone genius, medical malpractice, microcredit, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, retail therapy, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty

“There was no near-term thing. It always was this many-decades thing where there were no shortcuts and we’d sort of put one foot in front of the other.” Amazon has evolved into a global behemoth by embracing a similar creed. Looking beyond the next board meeting is an article of faith for its founder, Jeff Bezos. “It’s all about the long term,” he wrote in his first letter to shareholders in 1997. Since then, Bezos has irked investors by sacrificing short-term profits in order to back new technologies that might only pay off down the line. Critics scoffed when Amazon started selling cloud-computing services to high-tech firms in 2006, but today the company is a leading player in the field.

“I deliberately try not to work out the financial cost of any damage caused by a mistake,” she says. “If you do that, then people would go back to the blame culture. You know, pointing the finger and saying, ‘You’ve cost us half a million pounds,’ and that’s very much not where we want to go with this.” Yet the tyranny of short-termism is hard to resist. Jeff Bezos warns that taking the long view often means being “willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time.” And this is a vital point. When you dare to apply a Slow Fix, the brickbats are never far behind – too indulgent, too expensive, too slow, the skeptics will cry. To weather the storm, make the case that fixing problems thoroughly is never an indulgence or a luxury; it is a wise and essential investment in the future.

With global membership nearing 1 billion, co-ops now own half the renewable energy in Germany and are driving the push towards solar panels and other green initiatives in parts of the United States. Soon we will even have a monument to the wisdom of thinking beyond the here and now. Inside a remote mountain in western Texas, activists are building a huge clock that is designed to tick for 10,000 years. Every so often its chimes will ring out a completely new melody. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, is helping bankroll the project to give the world what he calls “an icon for long-term thinking.” Against that backdrop, a Slow Movement is gaining momentum as more and more people challenge the canard that faster is always better. To take part, you don’t have to ditch your career, toss the iPhone and join a commune.


pages: 288 words: 86,995

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Employee protests eventually led Google to take itself out of the running, and the company withdrew just three days before bids on the JEDI contract were due.9 Eventually, the Pentagon awarded the project to Microsoft Azure, but Amazon, which because of its leadership in the sector was seen as the most likely winner, immediately claimed the decision was politically motivated. Amazon filed a lawsuit in December 2019 claiming the decision was improperly biased because of President Donald Trump’s overt animosity toward Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Bezos also owns the Washington Post, which has been highly critical of the Trump Administration. In February 2020, a federal judge issued an injunction temporarily blocking award of the contract to Microsoft.10 A month later, the Department of Defense said it would reconsider its decision.11 All this offers a pretty vivid illustration of just how ferocious, and in some cases politically fraught, the battle for the cloud computing market is certain to be going forward.

Amazon has clearly demonstrated a keen interest in achieving this milestone; the company has organized a number of highly touted annual contests in which engineering teams from universities around the world have competed to build robots that can perform the tasks now undertaken by the workers who pick items from the shelves in its warehouses.16 While building a robotic hand capable of reliably grasping thousands of different items—all of different sizes, weights, shapes, textures and packaging configurations—has proven to be a daunting challenge, progress along this path is inevitable. Speaking at a conference in June 2019, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said, “I think grasping is going to be a solved problem in the next 10 years,” in spite of the fact that “it’s turned out to be an incredibly difficult problem, probably in part because we’re starting to solve it with machine vision, so machine vision did have to come first.”17 In other words, the thousands of people currently engaged as inventory stowers and pickers—a majority of the company’s warehouse workforce—are arguably on a pretty clear glide path toward being made redundant within a decade or so.

Vicarious’s robots have a remarkable ability to improve at their assigned tasks—getting measurably better within hours of their initial operation.25 The objective is to create robots capable of not just picking items from inventory shelves or bins, but to go beyond that and design machines with genuinely versatile manipulative ability, including functions such as sorting and packing items, replacing the workers who tend factory machines by feeding parts in and out and performing detailed assembly work. Vicarious has raised at least $150 million in venture funding and is backed by some of most prominent names in Silicon Valley, including Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel and—as you might have expected—Jeff Bezos. In parallel with its progress in artificial intelligence, Vicarious is also pursuing an innovative “robots as a service” business model, which may eventually prove to be disruptive across a range of industries. Rather than building or selling its own robots, Vicarious instead acquires industrial robots from companies like ABB, integrates them with its proprietary artificial intelligence software and then rents the robots out to companies in a way that’s roughly comparable to the way a temporary employment agency might place human workers.


pages: 402 words: 126,835

The Job: The Future of Work in the Modern Era by Ellen Ruppel Shell

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, big-box store, blue-collar work, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, company town, computer vision, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, follow your passion, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, game design, gamification, gentrification, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, hiring and firing, human-factors engineering, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, move fast and break things, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, precariat, Quicken Loans, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban renewal, Wayback Machine, WeWork, white picket fence, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game

The employees are seen in silhouettes, stamped with the words “Terminated” or “Arrested.” “announcing a fitness initiative” Helaine Olen, “President Obama’s Amazon Jobs Pitch Is Hard to Buy with One Click,” Guardian, August 6, 2013, https://www.thegua­rdian.com/​money/​us-money-blog/2013/​aug/​06/​obama-amazon-jobs-hard-to-buy. Jeff Bezos regularly offers workers While Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claimed the “pay to quit” option was instituted to rid the company of less-engaged employees, this explanation lacks credibility. The offer was extended only to low-wage warehouse employees, who could easily be replaced by even lower-wage temporary workers hired by a staffing agency.

Amazon Handmade is poised to challenge Etsy, and Amazon Business is aiming a death blow at Staples and other independent office suppliers. Analysts generally prefer to hedge their bets, but on one thing they seem to agree: Amazon is on the glide path toward becoming the world’s first trillion-dollar company. Whether or not Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is, as some claim, a “people person,” it’s clear that one of his business missions is having as few people as possible on the payroll. To be fair, the company is so efficient that it needs relatively few people, reaping roughly $400,000 in revenue for every employee, nearly twice the revenue per employee of Walmart, the nation’s most efficient big-box retailer.

One commentator likened the president’s Amazon warehouse speech to “announcing a fitness initiative in a grocery store’s snack aisle, and nodding approvingly as unhealthy-looking Americans toss giant bags of potato chips into their carts.” Amazon itself may not object to this critic’s characterization. After all, Jeff Bezos regularly offers workers throughout the company money to quit, and makes no secret of his robot fixation. Worldwide, his company has installed over one hundred thousand robots to labor in “perfect symbiosis” with humans in its warehouses and has plans to install many thousands more. While it’s not clear what constitutes a perfect symbiosis, the robots are said to save the company $22 million annually, per warehouse.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

In this instance, “everything” is to be explained by a fixed set of concerns—in Wu’s case, concerns over openness and innovation—that have come to dominate our thinking about “the Internet.” First of all, Wu conveniently leaves aside those information industries—like book publishing—in which no dominant information emperor has emerged. The Cycle doesn’t go there; it’s too crowded. Curiously, one such emperor might emerge very soon—his name is Jeff Bezos, and he runs a small start-up called Amazon—but Wu himself seems to be enamored of Amazon and the price efficiencies it brings. Second, by limiting his history only to America—and why would “the Cycle,” if it were real, unfold in America only?—he misses many foreign cases in which information emperors have done much good.

“The Internet,” say the hopeful, will liberate the memes from the oppression of the creative elites—the very elites who dare claim that not all memes are created equal and some are so bad that they should perhaps not be created at all. No one is more enamored of this highly democratizing development than Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. He likes to boast that he’s dedicated himself to eliminating the gatekeepers, for they “slow innovation” and stand in the way of “self-service platforms”—where everyone can publish a book in minutes—that Amazon itself has been so keen to promote. Bezos’s populist rage against institutions—in the best traditions of Martin Luther’s fulminations against the church—is on full display when he boasts that the Kindle best-seller list “is chock-full of books from small presses and self-published authors, while the New York Times list is dominated by successful and established authors.”

Thus, innovations that fail or lead to disastrous results are naturally not considered part of the innovation vocabulary; technologies are innovative only if they are successful and risk-free. Moreover, the consequences of innovation that are considered tend to be rather linear and direct. When Jeff Bezos writes of “innovation” associated with the Kindle, he knows that his intended audience is not likely to consider any consequences that may not be direct, anticipated, or desirable; most of us suffer from some form of “pro-innovation bias” as well. It wasn’t always like this. According to Benoit Godin, the Canadian scholar who has traced the intellectual history of “innovation” as a concept, for over 2,500 years, the word had negative connotations.


pages: 505 words: 161,581

The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Ada Lovelace, AltaVista, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, book value, business logic, butterfly effect, call centre, Carl Icahn, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate governance, COVID-19, crack epidemic, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, digital map, disinformation, disintermediation, drop ship, dumpster diving, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, fixed income, General Magic , general-purpose programming language, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global pandemic, income inequality, index card, index fund, information security, intangible asset, Internet Archive, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, John Markoff, Kwajalein Atoll, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, mobile money, money market fund, multilevel marketing, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Potemkin village, public intellectual, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, rolodex, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, SoftBank, software as a service, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, technoutopianism, the payments system, transaction costs, Turing test, uber lyft, Vanguard fund, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Y2K

These weren’t wholly new ideas, of course, and industry analysts argued that incumbents would be able to sink X.com by simply building copycat products. But Musk had seen the big banks’ unwillingness to innovate from within—he wasn’t losing sleep over possible competition from the JP Morgans and Goldman Sachs of the world. There was also a recent, powerful precedent for Musk’s agglomerated approach to internet business. Jeff Bezos’s similar put-it-all-in-one-place strategy was driving breakneck expansion for Amazon.com—and gaining notice. Bezos had pushed the company to sell CDs while it was still struggling to fulfill its customers’ book orders. Both Bezos and Musk knew that one site offering everything trumped five sites offering one thing apiece.

“Somebody pointed me at a brand-new website, which turned out to be eBay, and I was amazed to discover a broken laser pointer that was listed,” Fraser later shared in a video testimonial for eBay’s twentieth anniversary. “And I thought, ‘Hey, I could probably make that work.’ ” III. eBay had responded, in part, to Amazon’s acquisition of accept.com. eBay had been in talks with accept.com when Amazon’s Jeff Bezos came in with a steep offer. Having lost their chance to acquire accept.com, eBay quickly purchased Billpoint, which had recently closed its Series A financing—with Sequoia Capital as the lead backer. Ironically, Billpoint’s earliest ambitions mirrored some of Confinity’s. Jason May, Billpoint’s technical head, had pored through the literature on micropayments and explored the trajectories of digital currencies like Millicent and Flooz. 9 THE WIDGET WARS X.com and Confinity spent the turn of the twenty-first century locked in a tense battle for customer growth.

This belief would emerge as a start-up truism later, but at the time, the team’s sense defied received wisdom. Standard operating procedure saw boards installing a seasoned CEO to steer dot-coms once they found their footing: eBay’s Meg Whitman, Yahoo’s Tim Koogle, and Google’s Eric Schmidt stood as but a few high-profile examples. Even at Amazon, under the vise grip of Jeff Bezos, there had been a brief flirtation with a COO named Joseph Galli in 1999, who was supposed to step in as “adult supervision.” Galli lasted a grand total of thirteen months, and Amazon hasn’t had a COO since. X.com’s leaders took Bill Harris’s rocky tenure as evidence that such “supervision” was not only unnecessary, but counterproductive.


pages: 506 words: 133,134

The Lonely Century: How Isolation Imperils Our Future by Noreena Hertz

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Broken windows theory, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, Cass Sunstein, centre right, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, dark matter, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greta Thunberg, happiness index / gross national happiness, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, RFID, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, the long tail, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, Wall-E, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, WeWork, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

., GDP: A Brief But Affectionate History (Princeton University Press, 2014). 22 ‘Business Roundtable Members’, Business Roundtable, https://www.businessroundtable.org/about-us/members. 23 Milton Friedman, ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits,’ New York Times magazine, 13 September 1970. 24 ‘Business Roundtable Redefines the Purpose of a Corporation to Promote “An Economy That Serves All Americans”’, Business Roundtable, 19 August 2019, https://www.businessroundtable.org/business-roundtable-redefines-the-purpose-of-a-corporation-to-promote-an-economy-that-serves-all-americans. 25 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’, Guardian, 3 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2020/apr/02/amazon-chris-smalls-smart-articulate-leaked-memo. 26 Chris Smalls, ‘Dear Jeff Bezos, instead of firing me, protect your workers from coronavirus’, Guardian, 2 April 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/02/dear-jeff-bezos-amazon-instead-of-firing-me-protect-your-workers-from-coronavirus. 27 Julia Carrie Wong, ‘Amazon execs labeled fired worker “not smart or articulate” in leaked PR notes’. 28 ‘AG James’ Statement on Firing of Amazon Worker Who Organized Walkout’, Office of the New York State Attorney General, https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2020/ag-james-statement-firing-amazon-worker-who-organized-walkout. 29 Brad Smith, ‘As we work to protect public health, we also need to protect the income of hourly workers who support our campus’, Microsoft, 5 March 2020, https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2020/03/05/covid-19-microsoft-hourly-workers/. 30 See for example Republican Senator Josh Hawley’s bill in July 2019 to curb smartphone addiction by banning the ‘infinite scroll’ of social media feeds, and limiting an individual’s social media usage to thirty minutes a day across all devices, Emily Stewart, ‘Josh Hawley’s bill to limit your Twitter time to 30 minutes a day, explained’, Vox, 31 July 2019, https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/7/31/20748732/josh-hawley-smart-act-social-media-addiction); or EU industry chief Thierry Breton’s warnings in February 2020 that should major tech platforms fail to adequately curb hate speech and disinformation, tougher rules and penalties would be forthcoming (‘EU threatens tougher hate-speech rules after Facebook meeting’, DW, 17 February 2020, https://www.dw.com/en/eu-threatens-tougher-hate-speech-rules-after-facebook-meeting/a-52410851). 31 ‘Camden Council tackles the climate crisis’, see video at: https://youtu.be/JzzWc5wMQ6s.

Neoliberal capitalism, with its ‘minimum state, maximum markets’ approach, has never provided assurances on either. And this isn’t just a project for government – businesses and their leaders also need to step up. Indeed, it was partly in recognition of this that in August 2019 the Business Roundtable, a group of influential chief executives of leading US corporations including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Apple’s Tim Cook and Citigroup’s Michael Corbat,22 jettisoned Milton Friedman’s longstanding principle that the only business of business was to serve its shareholders,23 pledging instead to serve all its stakeholders – shareholders, yes, but also suppliers, communities and employees who it promised to ‘compensat[e] fairly and provid[e] important benefits’, as well as foster ‘diversity and inclusion, dignity and respect’.24 Whilst I welcome this sentiment and hope that such rhetoric will translate into meaningful action, the reality is that unless the pressure on companies to generate short-term financial returns is alleviated and their executives’ incentives not tied to this, the focus on narrowly defined ‘return to shareholders’ will likely continue to dominate, especially in the case of publicly traded companies.

CHAPTER FIVE: The Contactless Age 1 Andrea Cheng, ‘Amazon Go Looks to Expand As Checkout-Free Shopping Starts to Catch On Across the Retail Landscape’, Forbes, 21 November 2019, https://www.forbes.com/sites/andriacheng/2019/11/21/thanks-to-amazon-go-checkout-free-shopping-may-become-a-real-trend/#753d0285792b. Other major companies starting to get in on the act include Walmart in the US, Alibaba in China and Tesco in the UK. All have been testing automated grocery stores to rival those set up by the Jeff Bezos behemoth; Nick Wingfield, Paul Mozur and Michael Corkery, ‘Retailers Race Against Amazon to Automate Stores’, New York Times, 1 April 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/01/technology/retailer-stores-automation-amazon.html. 2 Melissa Gonzalez, M.J. Munsell and Justin Hill, ‘The New Norm: Rewriting the Future of Purchasing Behaviour’, Advertising Week 360, https://www.advertisingweek360.com/the-new-norm-rewriting-the-future-of-purchasing-behavior/. 3 Ulrike Malmendier and Stefan Nagel, ‘Depression Babies: Do Macroeconomic Experiences Affect Risk Taking?’


pages: 491 words: 141,690

The Controlled Demolition of the American Empire by Jeff Berwick, Charlie Robinson

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, airport security, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, Corrections Corporation of America, COVID-19, crack epidemic, crisis actor, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy transition, epigenetics, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, illegal immigration, Indoor air pollution, information security, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, megacity, microapartment, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, new economy, no-fly zone, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pill mill, planetary scale, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, private military company, Project for a New American Century, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reserve currency, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, South China Sea, stock buybacks, surveillance capitalism, too big to fail, unpaid internship, urban decay, WikiLeaks, working poor

Amazon’s strategy was so well executed that not only did they crush all of the other online bookstores, they put most of the traditional bookstores out of business as well. Free shipping costs Amazon over $7 billion a year, but are any of their investors really going to stand up in a shareholder’s meeting and tell Jeff Bezos he is doing it wrong?88 Customers will have to pay for shipping at some point, once all other competitors are out of business, but by then everyone will be so accustomed to shopping on Amazon that shopping any other way will be unusual. After almost a quarter of a century in business, Amazon has only shown very small profits, but would anyone question their retail dominance?

Members of the Permanent State would be people like Henry Kissinger, Bill Gates, Sheldon Adelson, George Soros, The Bush & Clinton families, John Brennan, James Comey, Rupert Murdoch, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Barack Obama, Richard Perle, Bill Kristol, Paul Wolfowitz, Eric Schmidt, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more names that most people would never recognize. A new generation of Permanent State swamp monsters is stealing the headlines these days as they work to take control of industries, like Jeff Bezos, who owns the bulk of Amazon. His ownership stake in Amazon is worth well over $100 billion, part of which he used to purchase the Washington Post. He has a $600 million dollar contract with the CIA to provide cloud services for them through Amazon, plus he sits on the Board of Advisors for the Pentagon.210 It does not get more Permanent State than being one of the wealthiest people on the planet and owning a massive media organization while simultaneously doing almost a billion dollars’ worth of business with the CIA and the Pentagon.

• In America, the top 1% retain about 35.5% of the wealth, with the top 20% of the population accounting for 87%.220 • The lower half of the American population combined to hold only 1.1% of the wealth of the country.221 • As of 2018, the average net worth for the 1% household is $14 million.222 • A new billionaire is created every other day in the United States, while the median lower-income family has a net worth of just under $11,000, according to Pew Research. • Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett have a combined net worth of about $400 billion, or about the same as the lower 60% of the American population. • The gap between upper-income families and median low-income families jumped from 40 times larger in 2007, to 75 times larger in just nine years due to stock market gains and real estate appreciation.


pages: 339 words: 88,732

The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies by Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, combinatorial explosion, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, congestion pricing, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, digital map, driverless car, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, falling living standards, Filter Bubble, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, full employment, G4S, game design, general purpose technology, global village, GPS: selective availability, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jimmy wales, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, law of one price, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, mass immigration, means of production, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, post-work, power law, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, telepresence, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vernor Vinge, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Y2K

In the early years of the twentieth century, the Italian physician and researcher Maria Montessori developed the primary educational system that still bears her name. Montessori classrooms emphasize self-directed learning, hands-on engagement with a wide variety of materials (including plants and animals), and a largely unstructured school day. And in recent years they’ve produced alumni including the founders of Google (Larry Page and Sergey Brin), Amazon (Jeff Bezos), and Wikipedia (Jimmy Wales). These examples appear to be part of a broader trend. Management researchers Jeffrey Dyer and Hal Gregersen interviewed five hundred prominent innovators and found that a disproportionate number of them also went to Montessori schools, where “they learned to follow their curiosity.”

Examples include data scientists, writers of mobile phone apps, and genetic counselors, who have come into demand as more people have their genes sequenced. Bill Gates has said that he chose to go into software when he saw how cheap and ubiquitous computers, especially microcomputers, were becoming. Jeff Bezos systematically analyzed the bottlenecks and opportunities created by low-cost online commerce, particularly the ability to index large numbers of products, before he set up Amazon. Today, the cognitive skills of college graduates—including not only science, technology, engineering, and math, the so-called STEM disciplines, but also humanities, arts, and social sciences—are often complements to low-cost data and cheap computer power.

The software was originally intended only for internal use, but in November of 2005 Amazon released it to the public under the name Mechanical Turk, in honor of a famous eighteenth-century chess-playing ‘robot’ that turned out to have a human inside it.25 The Mechanical Turk software was similar to this automaton in that it too appeared to accomplish tasks automatically, but in reality made use of human labor. It was an example of what Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos called “artificial artificial intelligence,” and another way for people to race with machines, although not one with particularly high wages.26 Mechanical Turk, which quickly became popular, was an early instance of what came to be called crowdsourcing, defined by communications scholar Daren Brabham as “an online, distributed problem-solving and production model.”27 This model is interesting because instead of using technology to automate a process, crowdsourcing makes it deliberately labor intensive.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

This might be search costs as traditionally understood in economics, the time and effort to find another interesting site (see chapter 3). Alternatively, we might conceive of these costs through the lens of cognitive psychology, which has found that it takes effort for people to switch tasks.37 The “don’t make me think” school of web design,38 or Jeff Bezos’s focus on reducing “cognitive overhead” in digital media,39 similarly suggest that decision-making is costly for users. Any of these explanations are consistent with our model. With perfect information, consuming digital content resembles the task of deciding which stores to shop at. An all-knowing consumer could visit The Economic Geography of Cyberspace • 73 numerous boutiques to purchase exactly the variety and quality of goods he wants, or instead save time and gas by going to a department store.

Making News Stickier • 147 News sites today still load more slowly than any other type of content.38 When Google ceo Eric Schmidt visited the Newspaper Association of America convention in 2009, his first complaint about digital newspapers was that “the sites are slow. They literally are not fast. They’re actually slower than reading the paper.”39 In recent years, though, some newspapers have gotten the message. Upon buying the Washington Post, Amazon.com ceo Jeff Bezos immediately insisted on reducing load times by 40 percent.40 Since 2013 the New York Times has revamped its entire web architecture, everything from hardware to server configuration to its massive code base, to meet new speed targets.41 The Guardian has dropped page loads from 12.1 seconds to 3.2 seconds.42 The Guardian now aims to load core page elements—layout, headline, and article text—in no more than a second, even for mobile users.

Smith, A. (2010). Home broadband 2010. Retrieved from http://www.pewinternet.org /2010/08/11/home-broadband-2010/. Somaiya, R. (2014, November). Washington Post releases free app for Kindle, in first collaboration with Amazon. New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes .com/2014/11/20/business/media/jeff-bezos-makes-his-mark-on-washington-post -with-new-kindle-app.html. Sonderman, J. (2011, August). News sites using Facebook comments see higher quality discussion, more referrals. Poynter. Blog post. Retrieved from http://www.poynter .org/latest-news/media-lab/social-media/143192/news-sites-using-facebook-com ments-see-higher-quality-discussion-more-referrals/. ———. (2012, October).


pages: 304 words: 89,879

Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX by Eric Berger

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Apollo 11, Boeing 747, Colonization of Mars, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, inflight wifi, intermodal, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, low earth orbit, Mercator projection, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, Palm Treo, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, side project, Silicon Valley, SpaceShipOne, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Strategic Defense Initiative, subprime mortgage crisis, Tesla Model S, Virgin Galactic

Mueller and his wife had planned a party, and he wanted to show off the new television to his friends. But Musk got his way, as he, Garvey, and a few other propulsion specialists joined the football festivities at Mueller’s house in Long Beach. “I think I maybe watched one play,” Mueller recalls. Three months later he would join Musk at SpaceX. * * * In the spring of 2016, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos invited a handful of reporters into his rocket factory in Kent, Washington. No media had been allowed inside before, but Bezos’s secretive, fifteen-year-old space company named Blue Origin was finally beginning to reveal the full scope of its plans. Like Musk, Bezos had identified low-cost access to space as the key hurdle standing between humans and moving out into the Solar System.

A well groomed and mannered Havanese, he adored his master. With Marvin at Musk’s feet, we had gathered around a table at the back of the plane, for the interview. Clad in a black “Nuke Mars” T-shirt and black jeans, Musk wanted the boys to hear Dad’s stories about the old days. Musk laughed when told about Jeff Bezos’s timeline for engine development. “Bezos is not great at engineering, to be frank,” he said. “So the thing is, my ability to tell if someone is a good engineer or not is very good. And then I am very good at optimizing the engineering efficiency of a team. I’m generally supergood at engineering, personally.

Firefly was founded in January 2014, and as of Fall 2020 had not reached orbit or even attempted a launch. Virgin Orbit began to get serious about building a small orbital rocket in December 2012, and it, too, had not reached orbit by late 2020. Blue Origin, SpaceX’s most prominent new space competitor, was actually founded earlier, in 2000. It has taken a more stepwise approach, but for all of Jeff Bezos’s money has yet to launch a rocket into orbit after twenty years. Chinnery said she believes companies today are more cautious due to the changing market. When Shotwell began selling the Falcon 1 rocket, customers were desperate for cheaper small-launch service. Today, there are half a dozen well-capitalized companies with strong technical plans.


pages: 282 words: 93,783

The Future Is Analog: How to Create a More Human World by David Sax

Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, bread and circuses, Buckminster Fuller, Cal Newport, call centre, clean water, cognitive load, commoditize, contact tracing, contact tracing app, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, digital capitalism, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Minecraft, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, retail therapy, RFID, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Saturday Night Live, Shoshana Zuboff, side hustle, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Superbowl ad, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, urban planning, walkable city, Y2K, zero-sum game

There are other big players in e-commerce, from foreign competitors like China’s Pinduoduo to national retailers like Walmart and Tesco; global brands such as GAP and Apple; marketplaces including eBay, Craigslist, and Mercado Libre; and individual stores and direct-to-consumer brands ranging from home-based side hustles to billion-dollar corporations, like Allbirds and Warby Parker. But none of them dominates the market and imagination around digital commerce in a way that comes remotely close to Jeff Bezos’s one-click powerhouse. True to Bezos’s vision of the digital future of commerce, Amazon is the ultimate everything store, a one-stop shop for anything you could possibly buy, from soup to nuts, to the pot to make that soup in and even to a tractor to harvest the nuts. If you can buy it, Amazon will sell it to you at the lowest possible price, as quick and easy as possible.

“It’s a rediscovery of the thing we had,” Kondrat said. “You’re going to take the retail environments that are already there. You don’t need to add a bunch of crap to them. Just have really great service and products and people will buy them.” Even still, Amazon is not going to stop. Its success has made Jeff Bezos the world’s wealthiest man. When he flew into space in July 2021 on his own Blue Origin rocket, he jokingly thanked Amazon customers for paying for his ride. Back on Earth, it wasn’t clear whom the joke was on. Perhaps the thousands of retail businesses that were struggling to stay afloat or had already closed up shop in the face of Amazon’s relentless decimation of the retail landscape.

At one point, health officials had to close one of the biggest Amazon warehouses outside Toronto because the spread of the virus by its workers was devastating the surrounding community. The human cost of Amazon’s singular vision of commerce’s digital future does not come from some sadistic desire of Jeff Bezos to inflict pain on workers, suppliers, and others for his own pleasure. It is, rather, the necessary consequence of his libertarian worldview and the particular form of digital capitalism it justifies, which is that commerce is a zero-sum game. In that game there are either winners or losers. There is no sharing.


Moon Rush: The New Space Race by Leonard David

agricultural Revolution, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Colonization of Mars, cuban missile crisis, dark pattern, data acquisition, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, financial engineering, Google X / Alphabet X, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mars Society, multiplanetary species, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, telepresence, telerobotics, Virgin Galactic

Over the past few years since the study was published, the situation has improved, says Miller, pointing to space tech luminaries like Elon Musk with SpaceX and Jeff Bezos with Blue Origin. Both space entrepreneurs are pushing forward with plans to develop boosters capable of reaching the Moon. “We went to the Moon in the 1960s as a race between nations,” Miller says. “The best way to go back to the Moon is to set up a race between billionaires.” * * * JEFF BEZOS, the retail billionaire of Amazon.com fame and fortune, is also head of Blue Origin, a company with big plans to pioneer the space frontier. At the age of five, Bezos watched Armstrong, Aldrin, and Collins carry out the Apollo 11 mission.


pages: 360 words: 101,038

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

This wasn’t just a bookstore opening up. It was a symbol of hope, a lone flower poking up from the spring frost after a long, brutal winter for bookstores. Along with record stores, bookstores were among the first brick-and-mortar retail segments challenged by digital technology, starting when Jeff Bezos launched his online bookstore Amazon out of a Seattle garage in 1995. Amazon grew to define the limitless power and speed of online retailing, devouring books, then other products, until it became the Internet’s largest retailer. Amazon began an e-commerce revolution that seemed to upend the world of retail in every sector, from eBay and auctions, to Craigslist and classified ads, to Fresh Direct and groceries.

These were quickly surpassed by the big-box chains—Barnes and Noble and Borders in the United States, Indigo and Chapters in Canada, and Waterstones and WHSmith in the United Kingdom—which erected warehouses filled with books that they sold at the lowest price possible, extracting the best terms from publishers beholden to their market share. Long before Jeff Bezos registered Amazon’s domain name, the big-box chains, as well as other discount retailers such as Costco and Walmart, greatly reduced the ranks of independent bookstores. Amazon was the final blow, not just for smaller independent bookstores, but more dramatically for the big-box chains, which could not compete in the two areas (price and selection) where they once held an unassailable advantage.

Meetings are shorter and more useful.” Other technology companies have adopted different techniques to achieve the same results. Orpilla had heard about a semiconductor firm in Silicon Valley that actually created a meeting room with signal-blocking technology. Amazon, on the other hand, opted for a more analog solution. When Jeff Bezos gathers his executive team in Seattle, the entire meeting is structured around a six-page narrative memo that executives are responsible to write. Every person who enters the meeting spends the first half-hour quietly reading, and the discussion begins only once everyone has finished the memo. In an interview Bezos likened the experience to study hall, but he believed that making executives compose their ideas into a narrative format forced them to articulate those ideas more clearly than they would with PowerPoint slides.


pages: 319 words: 100,984

The Moon: A History for the Future by Oliver Morton

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, commoditize, Dava Sobel, Donald Trump, Easter island, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, gravity well, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, Late Heavy Bombardment, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, private spaceflight, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Nordhaus, UNCLOS, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize

Billionaires matter too—particularly, though not exclusively, billionaires with Silicon Valley in their background. The path down which computer technology and software have travelled since the 1970s has concentrated a great deal of wealth into the hands of men now entering—Mark Zuckerberg, 35 in May 2019—enjoying—Jeff Bezos, 55 in January 2019—or leaving—Bill Gates, 64 in October 2019—middle age. A fair few of them still cherish the dream of spaceflight that Apollo, “Star Trek” or both lit in their hearts. Following that dream offers a way to spend money amassed from technologies closer to home on self-gratification, inspiration, ego jousting, the denting of the universe, preserving and enhancing the future of humankind, having fun, showing off and experiencing the sublime.

A simple moonbase could probably be had for less than has been spent on the SLS to date. No one should bet on #dearMoon actually taking off in 2023. But even a slower-than-promised Moon programme from SpaceX would probably bring about the Return before a programme based on the SLS, and before the Chinese, too. AND SPACEX IS NOT THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN. JEFF BEZOS, THE founder of Amazon, one of the world’s first trillion-dollar companies, is at the time of writing the richest person in the world. Since 2000 he has been regularly investing slivers of his wealth in Blue Origin, a company that builds rockets. Its first, New Shepard, is a small reusable rocket not unlike the first stage of a Falcon 9, though with only one engine it is considerably less capable.

It is reminiscent of the crisis of the unclosed circle foreseen by Commoner, and in the Club of Rome’s “Limits to Growth”, a soft apocalypse hardly any less scary, and infinitely more widely worried about, than the sudden sharp impact of an asteroid one in which the Earth runs out of new stuff to use and new places to dispose of that which has already been used. But there is a distinct difference. Seen in Club-of-Rome terms, the crisis could be put off by the bounty of the sky, promised in the 1970s and 1980s by Gerard O’Neill and the L5-ers, promised now by Jeff Bezos. Space technology operating outside the environment but within the economy could reduce the impact of affluence, rather than multiply it, thus allowing economic growth to continue. If, like Mr Moore, you read economic history not as the winning of inanimate resources but as the appropriation of processes which are part human, part natural—of the pasture and farmland where the carbon cycle is turned into food, of the ways of life that turn sunlight into surplus labour—things look less cheerful.


pages: 193 words: 98,671

The Inmates Are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper

Albert Einstein, Apple Newton, Bill Atkinson, business cycle, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, Gary Kildall, General Magic , Howard Rheingold, informal economy, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, natural language processing, new economy, PalmPilot, pets.com, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, urban planning

At Pearson, Brad Jones supported this project throughout, but the most credit goes to Chris Webb, whose tenacity, focus, and hard work really made The Inmates happen. I really appreciate the many people who provided moral support, anecdotes, advice, and time. Thanks very much to Daniel Appleman, Todd Basche, Chris Bauer, Jeff Bezos, Alice Blair, Michel Bourque, Po Bronson, Steve Calde, David Carlick, Jeff Carlick, Carol Christie, Clay Collier, Kendall Cosby, Dan Crane, Robert X. Cringely, Troy Daniels, Lisa Powers, Philip Englehardt, Karen Evensen, Ridgely Evers, Royal Farros, Pat Fleck, David Fore, Ed Forman, Ed Fredkin, Jean-Louis Gassee, Jim Gay, Russ Goldin, Vlad Gorelik, Marcia Gregory, Garrett Gruener, Chuck Hartledge, Ted Harwood, Will Hearst, Tamra Heathershaw-Hart, J.D.

This comes naturally, coupled with programmers' tendency towards conservatism. For example, most programs have lots of confirmation screens, virtually all of which are unnecessary. Many of them exist because they existed in reused code, but many of them exist because programmers are simply habituated to putting them in. For example, I ran into Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, at a conference and told him how much I like the "1-Click" interface on his Web site. This interface allows you to purchase a product with—big surprise—one click. The interface is really well designed, because it pushes all of the annoying details out of the interface and lets the user merely click one button without reentering shipping and billing information.

Rather, the interface he gets is one designed to please only the authors: people with atypical training, personality, and aptitude. This highlights another key point regarding the culture of software development. Although it is founded on the particular nature of programmers, it is propagated by their managers, many of whom—it must be said—are former programmers. Jeff Bezos says that the most vociferous defense of the two-click interface came from the product manager! The reverence for technical skill has another effect. Most people assume that programming is more technical than design. I won't dispute that, but I strongly disagree with the conclusion typically drawn from it that programming should therefore come before design in the development process.


pages: 417 words: 97,577

The Myth of Capitalism: Monopolies and the Death of Competition by Jonathan Tepper

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, bank run, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Bob Noyce, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, diversification, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, eurozone crisis, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, full employment, gentrification, German hyperinflation, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google bus, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Maslow's hierarchy, means of production, merger arbitrage, Metcalfe's law, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive investing, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, prediction markets, prisoner's dilemma, proprietary trading, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Chicago School, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, undersea cable, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, very high income, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, you are the product, zero-sum game

Claims that workers have been insufficiently paid have quadrupled over the past decade. A 2009 survey of over 4,000 low-wage workers in three major US cities found that 76% of full-time workers had been unpaid or underpaid for overtime hours, and 26% were paid less than minimum wage.26 In Seattle, home to two of the world's richest men – Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos – some companies can't be bothered to pay their employees minimum wage. SkyChefs, a company that puts together airplane food trays, was fined $335,000 in 2017 for violating Washington State's $13.50/hour minimum wage laws.27 The city later settled privately with the company for 40% less than the original fine at $190,000.

Amazon has a clear conflict of interest when it comes to policing counterfeits and competing with its own partners. As a platform, it wants the maximum number of people selling on its site, much like Facebook and Google want the maximum number of eyeballs to sell ads against. Whether that comes from pirated content or not, the tech giants simply don't care. Jeff Bezos, Amazon's founder, has been known to put an empty chair in meetings to remind employees of the need to focus on the customer. But Amazon puts itself first, when it comes to customer searches. A recent study by ProPublica found that the company is “using its market power and proprietary algorithm to advantage itself at the expense of sellers and many customers.”57 When they searched for hundreds of items on the site, about three-quarters of the time, Amazon put its own products above third-party products using its platform, even when competing products were cheaper.

Ibid. 3. http://www.thebuffett.com/quotes/How-to-Think-About-Businesses.html. 4. Roger Lowenstein, Buffett: The Making of an American Capitalist (Random House, 2008). 5. https://businessmanagement.news/2017/05/05/warren-buffet-would-rather-invest-in-your-idiot-nephew-than-with-mark-zuckerberg-or-jeff-bezos/. 6. https://www.ft.com/content/fd27245a-9790-11e7-a652-cde3f882dd7b. 7. https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musks-uncontested-3-pointers-1519595032. 8. http://gawker.com/322852/is-peter-thiel-silicon-valleys-godfather. 9. https://www.wsj.com/articles/peter-thiel-competition-is-for-losers-1410535536. 10.


pages: 375 words: 102,166

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Killingsworth, “Experienced Well-Being Rises with Income, Even above $75,000 per Year,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, no. 4 (January 26, 2021): e2016976118, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2016976118. 19. Jack Pitcher, “Jeff Bezos Adds Record $13 Billion in Single Day to His Fortune,” Bloomberg Quint, July 21, 2020, https://www.bloombergquint.com/markets/jeff-bezos-adds-record-13-billion-in-single-day-to-his-fortune. 20. Alicia Adamczyk, “32% of U.S. Households Missed Their July Housing Payments,” CNBC, July 8, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/08/32-percent-of-us-households-missed-their-july-housing-payments.html. 21.

If we can understand why some people go further in school than others do, it will illuminate our understanding of multiple inequalities in people’s lives. Two Lotteries of Birth People end up with very different levels of education and wealth and health and happiness and life itself. Are these inequalities fair? In the pandemic summer of 2020, Jeff Bezos added $13 billion to his fortune in a single day,19 while 32 percent of US households were unable to make their housing payment.20 Looking at the juxtaposition, I feel a bubbling disgust; the inequality seems obscene. But opinions differ. When discussing whether inequalities are fair or unfair, one of the few ideological commitments that Americans broadly claim to share (or at least pay lip service to) is a commitment to the idea of “equality of opportunity.”


pages: 289 words: 95,046

Chaos Kings: How Wall Street Traders Make Billions in the New Age of Crisis by Scott Patterson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Bitcoin "FTX", Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black Swan Protection Protocol, Black-Scholes formula, blockchain, Bob Litterman, Boris Johnson, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, centre right, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, commodity super cycle, complexity theory, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, disinformation, diversification, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, effective altruism, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, energy transition, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Extinction Rebellion, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Flash crash, Gail Bradbrook, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Greta Thunberg, hindsight bias, index fund, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Joan Didion, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Just-in-time delivery, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, money market fund, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, panic early, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Singer: altruism, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, proprietary trading, public intellectual, QAnon, quantitative easing, quantitative hedge fund, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ralph Nader, Ralph Nelson Elliott, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, rewilding, Richard Thaler, risk/return, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rory Sutherland, Rupert Read, Sam Bankman-Fried, Silicon Valley, six sigma, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systematic trading, tail risk, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, University of East Anglia, value at risk, Vanguard fund, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

The physical world of stars, planets, and bodies—these were the residents of Mediocristan, dominated by the Law of Large Numbers (the more times you flip a coin, the greater the odds that the outcome approaches fifty-fifty; so as any sample size grows, the results bunch toward the middle of the curve). The world of finance, and much else, operated in Extremistan, the land of power laws, big jumps, fat tails, bubbles, and crashes. If the world’s tallest man joins a lineup of one hundred people, he’s not going to move the average height in a meaningful way—that’s Mediocristan. But if Jeff Bezos walked into a room full of a thousand people, the average income would swing dramatically. It would be as if a one-hundred-foot-tall man walked (awkwardly) into the room. That’s Extremistan. Put a thousand authors in a room and average their sales. Then Stephen King strolls in. It’s the land of extreme winner-take-all concentration.

his literary agent and the organizer of the proceedings, John Brockman, had written: Here’s some specifics re: the agenda: FRIDAY NIGHT 6pm Cocktails—Mezzanine Level 7pm Dinner—Mezzanine Level—Studio 5 SATURDAY MORNING 7:30 Breakfast Mezzanine Level—Studio 4 8:30 Depart by bus to Space X (about 20–30 minutes) To accommodate Craig Venter who can only arrive at Space X in the afternoon, if possible, I will move Elon Musk’s talk and tour of the facility to 4pm, instead of during the lunch break. 7:30 Dinner—Spago 176 N Canon Dr Beverly Hills, CA 90210 With the blockbuster success of The Black Swan, Taleb had gained entry into one of the most elite intellectual salons in America, Brockman’s Edge Foundation, an informal collection of (mostly male) scientists and thinkers that included Richard Dawkins, Steven Pinker, Danny Kahneman, and Murray Gell-Mann (discoverer of the quark) as well as tycoons such as Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Microsoft’s Bill Gates, and future disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein. The idea behind the salon was simple: put a bunch of smart people together in a room, have them talk, and see what comes out on the other end. Sprinkle on some billionaire cash and maybe something big could actually germinate.

Rather than a career in medicine or chemistry, EAs sought jobs on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley—or in crypto. By the early 2020s, longtermism had become a powerful force among America’s tech goliaths. Backers—the computer whizzes that use complex formulas to create more and more bitcoin—included Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos. It had its roots in the work of Swedish philosopher Nick Bostrom, founder of Oxford University’s Future of Humanity Institute, which studies extreme risks to humanity (Musk had donated $1.5 million to the sibling organization of FHI called the Future of Life Institute). The core idea behind the belief system is that humanity’s future, if it plays its cards right, is virtually unbounded and that the number of future humans—think over a period of millions or even billions of years—far outdistances the number of humans alive on Planet Earth today, or that have ever lived.


pages: 173 words: 53,564

Fair Shot: Rethinking Inequality and How We Earn by Chris Hughes

"World Economic Forum" Davos, basic income, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, end world poverty, full employment, future of journalism, gig economy, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, new economy, oil rush, payday loans, Peter Singer: altruism, Potemkin village, precariat, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

A collection of economic and political decisions over the past four decades has given rise to unprecedented wealth for a small number of fortunate people, collectively called the one percent. America has created and supported powerful economic forces—specifically globalization, rapid technological development, and the growth of finance—that have made the rise of Larry Page, Jeff Bezos, and other new billionaires possible. The companies we built went from dorm room ideas to assets worth hundreds of billions of dollars because America provided the companies with a fertile environment for explosive growth. Google, Amazon, and Facebook may be extreme examples, but the massive wealth they create for a select few isn’t as rare as you might think.

These investments took The New Republic’s annual losses from around $2 million a year up to $6 million nearly overnight. Everyone on the outside assumed I intended to transform The New Republic into a personal megaphone, or at the very least to use it to advance my own political agenda. But over four years, I wrote only one piece for the website, on the rise of big data, and a short note reflecting on Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post. The journalists and academics who wrote for us were some of the smartest, most sophisticated minds in media, and whatever I happened to think about the Iraqi surge or Mitt Romney’s tax policies felt superficial in comparison. Close friends marveled at how much I talked about the business side of things and how little I had to say about what Frank was planning to put on the cover.


pages: 209 words: 53,175

The Psychology of Money: Timeless Lessons on Wealth, Greed, and Happiness by Morgan Housel

airport security, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, discounted cash flows, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, Hans Rosling, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, Paul Graham, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, stocks for the long run, tech worker, the scientific method, traffic fines, Vanguard fund, WeWork, working-age population

And the hedge fund manager who makes $340 million per year compares himself to the top five hedge fund managers, who earned at least $770 million in 2018. Those top managers can look ahead to people like Warren Buffett, whose personal fortune increased by $3.5 billion in 2018. And someone like Buffett could look ahead to Jeff Bezos, whose net worth increased by $24 billion in 2018—a sum that equates to more per hour than the “rich” baseball player made in a full year. The point is that the ceiling of social comparison is so high that virtually no one will ever hit it. Which means it’s a battle that can never be won, or that the only way to win is to not fight to begin with—to accept that you might have enough, even if it’s less than those around you.

Something I’ve learned from both investors and entrepreneurs is that no one makes good decisions all the time. The most impressive people are packed full of horrendous ideas that are often acted upon. Take Amazon. It’s not intuitive to think a failed product launch at a major company would be normal and fine. Intuitively, you’d think the CEO should apologize to shareholders. But CEO Jeff Bezos said shortly after the disastrous launch of the company’s Fire Phone: If you think that’s a big failure, we’re working on much bigger failures right now. I am not kidding. Some of them are going to make the Fire Phone look like a tiny little blip. It’s OK for Amazon to lose a lot of money on the Fire Phone because it will be offset by something like Amazon Web Services that earns tens of billions of dollars.


pages: 173 words: 55,328

Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal by George Packer

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-bias training, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, British Empire, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, fulfillment center, full employment, George Floyd, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, liberal capitalism, lockdown, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, new economy, Norman Mailer, obamacare, off-the-grid, postindustrial economy, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, QAnon, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, too big to fail, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, white flight, working poor, young professional

An assistant manager at an infected Amazon warehouse on Staten Island was fired for leading a walkout after symptomatic colleagues had to keep working in order to be paid. “They’re in this building, getting sick,” he said. “And the people making all the money are comfortable off the grid somewhere, and they’re getting on TV and they’re saying everything is fine while we’re in the trenches. Jeff Bezos can kiss my ass.” An essential worker was a worker who would be fired for staying home with symptoms of the virus. Think about it enough and you realize that the miraculous price and speed of a delivery of organic microgreens from Amazon Fresh to your doorstep depends on the fact that the people who grow, sort, pack, and deliver it have to work while sick.

At the same moment unemployment rose to near-Depression levels, the stock market reached a record high. The work economy and the investor economy occupied separate realities. The very rich became much richer—the country’s six-hundred-odd billionaires increased their wealth by nearly 50 percent. The richest of them all, Jeff Bezos, added around $70 billion to his net worth, while 20,000 of his employees came down with the virus. Even the relief bills increased inequality, by giving large tax breaks to business owners who might have felt no impact from the pandemic. The social safety net kept ripping, forcing the sick to continue working and mothers to choose between their job and their children, throwing people off health insurance and onto hollowed-out state unemployment systems, whose ancient websites crashed and phones went unanswered under the immense demand.


pages: 482 words: 149,351

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

, Brookings.edu, 12 April 2018 30. On Amazon, see Lina Khan, ‘Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox’, Yale Law Journal, Vol. 126, January 2017. On the Gazelle Project, the New York Times speculated that Amazon’s owner Jeff Bezos had described it thus as ‘a joke, perhaps, but such an aggressive one that Amazon’s lawyers demanded the Gazelle Project be renamed the Small Publishers Negotiation Program’. On Amazon admitting its strategy, Jeff Bezos’s first letter to shareholders stated, ‘We believe that a fundamental measure of our success will be the shareholder value we create over the long term. This value will be a direct result of our ability to extend and solidify our current market leadership position … At this stage, we choose to prioritise growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model.’ 31.

It owns and sells books, toys, patents, cloud computing space and endless other stuff, but it also owns much of the infrastructure for selling these things. Imagine a single trucking company owning most of Britain’s roads and being allowed to charge drivers to use them. This is a vertical, horizontal, everything monopoly. Amazon once had a Gazelle Project to approach and buy competitors, ‘the way a cheetah would a sickly gazelle’ as Amazon’s boss Jeff Bezos described it. Amazon’s policy isn’t so much buying its competitors as eating them whole. It is massacring competing bookshops, replacing good jobs with smaller numbers of poorer, more menial, windowless shelf-stacking ones, as it spreads relentlessly into new markets. Its prices seem low, but it has such power that it can also influence its competitors’ prices, in the process weakening them so it can then pick them off.30 But prices aren’t the real killer.

The finance curse analysis will be anathema to many billionaires because it transforms them from wealth creators to wealth extractors, no longer advancing the patriotic cause of their nations, but potentially dragging them backwards. If you look at the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, nearly all of those at the top are wealth extractors and more specifically monopolists, whose corporate and sometimes personal financial affairs are typically spread across tax havens. At the top of the 2018 list sits Jeff Bezos, the head of Amazon, the everything-monopoly. Next comes Bill Gates, who created the Windows quasi-monopoly, followed by Warren Buffett, the portfolio monopolist who openly admits that he only tends to invest in businesses that have little competition. There’s Mark Zuckerberg, the social network monopolist of Facebook, in fifth position, and Mexico’s uber-monopolist Carlos Slim, now pushed down to seventh place by the new giants of technology.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

In 2006 sales totaled more than $10 billion.9 Once again, this store had advantages very similar to the advantages of Netflix. Rather than browsing a Barnes & Noble superstore, the customer used his computer to see what books there were to buy. And rather than the customer using his car to collect the books he wanted, Amazon used the U.S. Postal Service. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s bet was that the convenience of browsing would outweigh the delay in receipt. More important, Amazon could far surpass any bricks-and-mortar store in the size of its inventory. Amazon’s success, however, didn’t come naturally. The company has been relentless in building innovation to drive sales.

Three Keys to These Three Successes These familiar stories of Internet success reveal three keys to success in this digital economy. L ong Ta ils The first of these three is also perhaps the most famous. Each of these three Internet successes takes advantage of a principle that 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 128 8/12/08 1:55:16 AM T W O EC O NO MIE S: C O MMERC I A L A ND SH A RING 129 Amazon’s Jeff Bezos recognized in 1995, and that Wired’s editor in chief, Chris Anderson, formalized in 2005 in his book The Long Tail.14 The Long Tail principle (LTP) says that as the cost of inventory falls, the efficient range of inventory rises. And as transaction costs generally fall to zero, the efficient inventory rises to infinity.

Professor Jeff Rosen once described the terror and outrage he felt at knowing Amazon was “watching” what books he bought in order to recommend new books to him. When I heard his description, I realized that one of us was from a different planet. No doubt Amazon might abuse the data it collects. But also, no doubt, it has a huge incentive not to. (Unlike the U.S. government, if Amazon screws up, I can take my business elsewhere.) Anyway, it’s not as if Jeff Bezos is reading my (almost daily) orders. Some computer somewhere is simply responding to input collected from me. And while I might care lots about what my neighbors, or students, or friends think about me, I don’t care a whit about what some computer thinks about my tastes. This is not to say we shouldn’t be concerned with how these data might be used.


pages: 382 words: 105,819

Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe by Roger McNamee

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Atkinson, Black Lives Matter, Boycotts of Israel, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, carbon credits, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, computer age, cross-subsidies, dark pattern, data is the new oil, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, game design, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, It's morning again in America, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, laissez-faire capitalism, Lean Startup, light touch regulation, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, messenger bag, Metcalfe’s law, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, by Katie Hafner and John Markoff (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991), picks up the story of Hackers and carries it forward. * * * — I RECOMMEND LEARNING ABOUT the origin stories of the other internet platforms. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, by Brad Stone (New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2013), blew my mind. I remember the day Jeff Bezos first presented to my partners, the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. There is a very strong argument that the success of Amazon represents the greatest accomplishment of any startup since 1990. Bezos is amazing.

Our investors were the people who know us best, the founders and executives of the leading tech companies of that era. Integral had a charmed run. Being inside the offices of Kleiner Perkins during the nineties meant we were at ground zero for the internet revolution. I was there the day that Marc Andreessen made his presentation for the company that became Netscape, when Jeff Bezos did the same for Amazon, and when Larry Page and Sergey Brin pitched Google. I did not imagine then how big the internet would become, but it did not take long to grasp its transformational nature. The internet would democratize access to information, with benefits to all. Idealism ruled. In 1997, Martha Stewart came in with her home-decorating business, which, thanks to an investment by Kleiner Perkins, soon went public as an internet stock, which seemed insane to me.


pages: 334 words: 104,382

Brotopia: Breaking Up the Boys' Club of Silicon Valley by Emily Chang

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, California gold rush, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean tech, company town, data science, David Brooks, deal flow, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, equal pay for equal work, fail fast, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, gender pay gap, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Hacker News, high net worth, Hyperloop, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Khan Academy, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microservices, Parker Conrad, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, pull request, reality distortion field, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, subscription business, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, women in the workforce, Zenefits

Yet his contrarian bet on an unlikely political candidate now gave Thiel more power than ever, even among the people who say they hated him. Not long after the polls closed, Thiel brokered a meeting between the president-elect and tech leaders, including Facebook’s COO, Sheryl Sandberg, Alphabet executive chairman Eric Schmidt, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, all of whom had openly supported Hillary Clinton. These tech lords had little choice but to pay fealty (to Trump, and Thiel). Now the contrarian “misfit,” who once called the value of diversity a myth, was whispering into the ear of the man holding the most powerful office in the world. 3 GOOGLE: WHEN GOOD INTENTIONS AREN’T ENOUGH IN 1998, WHEN TWO quirky and very academic Stanford students named Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to start a search engine business, they needed an office.

While high-tech pregnancy perks may make these companies look good, there’s substantial evidence that trendy perks like egg and sperm freezing are not solving the problem at hand. Getting pregnant is just the beginning of parenting after all. What workers want, particularly women, is a culture that is friendly to working parenthood over the decades that the commitment demands. WORKING LONG, HARD, AND SMART In 1997, in a letter to his shareholders, Jeff Bezos succinctly expressed a core belief about what it takes to succeed in tech when he wrote, “You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three.” This belief—that for companies to be successful, tech employees must work long, hard, and smart every single day—is one reason it’s so hard for women who become mothers.

When Google increased its paid maternity: Susan Wojcicki, “Paid Maternity Leave Is Good for Business,” Wall Street Journal, Dec. 16, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/susan-wojcicki-paid-maternity-leave-is-good-for-business-1418773756. Facebook offers four months: Mark Zuckerberg, “When Max was born, I took two months of paternity leave . . .” Facebook post, Aug. 18, 2017, https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fdib=10103974023786271 &set=a.612287952871.2204760.4&type=3&theater. “You can work long”: Jeff Bezos, “Amazon.com Exhibit 99.1,” U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Archives, 1998, https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312517120198/d373368dex991.htm. “When I first got into tech”: Blake Robbins (@blakeir), “When I first got into tech. I thought it was ‘cool’ to work on the weekends or holidays.


pages: 371 words: 109,320

News and How to Use It: What to Believe in a Fake News World by Alan Rusbridger

airport security, basic income, Bellingcat, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, crisis actor, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Google Earth, green new deal, hive mind, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Murray Gell-Mann, Narrative Science, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, post-truth, profit motive, public intellectual, publication bias, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech baron, the scientific method, TikTok, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, yellow journalism

It is generally customary among the billionaires to profess no involvement in editorial decision-making. Sometimes that may even have been true. It appears as if (Lord) Jonathan Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail, did not necessarily much admire the Middle-to-Little Englishness that his newspaper often embodied, but his instinct was, admirably enough, not to meddle. From all accounts Jeff Bezos, the astonishingly rich founder of Amazon, does not interfere in the editorial decisions of the Washington Post. Black had no such reticence. Hastings said he used to dread the nocturnal phone calls as Black would ring up, often from the other side of the world, to give his editor the benefit of his views on the great issues of the day.

The Sulzbergers and Grahams – respective majority owners of the New York Times and Washington Post – were, by and large, altruistic and benevolent custodians of their titles. The same could be said of any number of family-owned city titles before the debt-fuelled age of mergers and acquisitions in the early part of the twenty-first century. Jeff Bezos, as above, appears to exert no editorial influence over the Washington Post – while bringing much-needed cash and technological acumen. And then there were characters like Roy Thomson (Lord Thomson, 1894–1976), who owned many Canadian newspapers and then acquired the Times and Sunday Times. Harold Evans’s memoir, Good Times, Bad Times, draws a stark contrast between Thomson’s stewardship of Times newspapers and the man who eventually bought the titles, Rupert Murdoch.

Some news organisations in the US have also applied for tax reliefs under the 501(c)(3) non-profit provisions available to, for instance, educational organisations (SEE: PHILANTHROPY). And then there are billionaire subsidies. The Intercept could not have started – and may not survive – without Pierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay. Jeff Bezos, the richest person in the world after giving life to Amazon, came to the rescue of the Washington Post, as have assorted French businessmen to Le Monde (SEE: PROPRIETORS). There may be forms of cross-subsidy within organisations. The Guardian would have been a sickly animal at various points in its history without being supported by, first, the Manchester Evening News and then a secondhand car magazine/website, Auto Trader.


pages: 339 words: 103,546

Blood and Oil: Mohammed Bin Salman's Ruthless Quest for Global Power by Bradley Hope, Justin Scheck

"World Economic Forum" Davos, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boston Dynamics, clean water, coronavirus, distributed generation, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Exxon Valdez, financial engineering, Google Earth, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, megaproject, MITM: man-in-the-middle, new economy, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, urban planning, Virgin Galactic, Vision Fund, WeWork, women in the workforce, young professional, zero day

Cast of Characters The Al Saud King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, son of the kingdom’s founder and father of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman Al Saud Prince Khalid bin Salman Al Saud, Mohammed’s younger brother and former ambassador to the United States Sultana bint Turki Al Sudairi, King Salman’s first wife Fahdah bint Falah al-Hithlain, King Salman’s third wife and mother of Mohammed bin Salman Crown Prince Muqrin bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and briefly heir apparent Crown Prince Mohammed bin Nayef Al Saud, King Salman’s nephew and a longtime antiterrorism official close to the US government King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, King Salman’s half brother and predecessor Prince Miteb bin Abdullah Al Saud, King Abdullah’s son and former chief of the Saudi Arabia National Guard Prince Turki bin Abdullah Al Saud, the seventh son of King Abdullah Prince Badr bin Farhan Al Saud, a prince from a distant branch of the family, minister of culture, and a longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman Prince Abdullah bin Bandar Al Saud, another prince and longtime friend of Mohammed bin Salman and head of the National Guard Prince Sultan bin Turki Al Saud, the son of one of King Salman’s brothers, and an outspoken prince whose criticisms got him into trouble with more powerful members of the family The Palace Khalid al-Tuwaijri, the head of King Abdullah’s Royal Court Mohammed al-Tobaishi, King Abdullah’s chief of protocol Rakan bin Mohammed al-Tobaishi, Mohammed bin Salman’s protocol chief and the son of Mohammed al-Tobaishi The MBS Entourage Bader al-Asaker, a longtime associate of Mohammed who runs his private foundation Saud al-Qahtani, an advisor to Mohammed who specializes in quashing dissent Turki Al Sheikh, a longtime companion of Mohammed who has brought foreign sports and entertainment events to Saudi Arabia The Region Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan, crown prince of Abu Dhabi Tahnoon bin Zayed, Abu Dhabi national security advisor Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, emir of Qatar Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, former emir of Qatar Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, president of Egypt Saad Hariri, prime minister of Lebanon Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, president of Turkey Residents of the Ritz Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud, a cousin of Mohammed and Saudi Arabia’s most prominent international businessman Adel Fakeih, a Saudi businessman who became minister of economy and planning Hani Khoja, a Saudi management consultant Mohammed Hussein Al Amoudi, a Saudi businessman with holdings in Ethiopia Ali al-Qahtani, a general Bakr bin Laden, scion of the bin Laden construction family The Critics Jamal Khashoggi, newspaper columnist with a long history of working for and sometimes criticizing the Saudi government Omar Abdulaziz, Canada-based dissident who criticizes Saudi leadership in online videos Loujain al-Hathloul, women’s rights activist who violated Saudi law by trying to drive into the kingdom from the United Arab Emirates The US Government President Donald Trump Jared Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s husband and an advisor to the president Steve Bannon, former Trump advisor Rex Tillerson, ex-CEO of ExxonMobil, later US secretary of state The Businessmen Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com David Pecker, CEO of American Media, which publishes the National Enquirer Ari Emanuel, Hollywood agent and cofounder of Endeavor talent agency Masayoshi Son, CEO of Japanese tech investor SoftBank Rajeev Misra, head of SoftBank’s Vision Fund Nizar al-Bassam, Saudi deal maker and a former international banker Kacy Grine, independent banker and confidant of Alwaleed bin Talal A note on naming: In the Saudi convention, a man is identified through a patrilineal naming system.

Pecker’s relationship to Trump, rather than the grand plans of the prince, became the focal point for many US pundits. Grine, who preferred to operate on the fringes, was now in the center of an embarrassing uproar that brought lots of publicity and no money. Mohammed continued his visit, meeting executives like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and Apple’s Tim Cook. He ate dinner with Jeff Bezos and was photographed with Google founder Sergey Brin wearing his Silicon Valley best: a blazer, dress shoes, and a button-down shirt tucked into dark jeans belted across his broad belly. He sat with Oprah Winfrey, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, and the CEOs of Disney, Uber, and Lockheed. To Jeffrey Goldberg, the Atlantic editor whose interview with Barack Obama years earlier led Mohammed to believe that the former president was supporting Iran over Saudi Arabia, the prince made a surprising pronouncement: He asserted that Israel had the right to exist, a first for a senior Saudi royal, and a huge shift for a kingdom that, as recently as 2012, published middle school textbooks that called Jews apes.

But he’d made a big splash as an investor, committing more than $20 billion in Saudi cash for weapons, petrochemicals projects, and investments in technology and entertainment companies, including $400 million in Ari Emanuel’s firm Endeavor and some $2 billion in Tesla. He returned to the kingdom emboldened to carry through even more ambitious domestic reforms. And he pushed even harder to make it seem as if big, innovative Western companies were going to make investments in Saudi Arabia. He targeted Jeff Bezos. After the prince and the Amazon founder had dinner together in LA, they traded contact numbers and began a long WhatsApp exchange over a project that would see Amazon spend $2 billion or more on a facility that would host computers processing data for Mideast customers. For Bezos, the deal could be an important entry into the competitive Mideast market.


The Deepest Map by Laura Trethewey

9 dash line, airport security, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, circular economy, clean tech, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, digital map, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hive mind, Jeff Bezos, job automation, low earth orbit, Marc Benioff, microplastics / micro fibres, Neil Armstrong, Salesforce, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, space junk, sparse data, TED Talk, UNCLOS, UNCLOS

Throughout the twentieth century, national governments typically funded scientific or military operations to reach extreme unexplored terrain, but more recently, the world’s wealthiest individuals—most of them white men—have been outpacing government investment by forming their own private exploration companies. Critics argue that companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin are not a step forward but rather a slide backward, throwing up barriers that only the rich and connected can hope to overcome. By privatizing exploration, such companies make exploration in the twenty-first century look a lot like exploration in the nineteenth century, when the brutal inequalities of England’s Industrial Revolution provided enough “gentlemen explorers” with the time and money to pursue a new hobby: striking out for unknown terrain.7 Over the coming four years, Victor would sink millions into chasing the five deepest dives that Branson had abandoned.

The ship had just gone through a refit that had been budgeted at $2.5 million and eventually topped out at more than $12 million.19 During the refit, a worker claimed to have fallen through an open hatch and settled with Victor for a damage award in the high six figures. Now the team was asking Victor to sink another million or more into a multibeam sonar, plus the cost of hiring an ocean mapper. Victor was wealthy, for sure, but not a Jeff Bezos–level billionaire with unlimited resources or even a James Cameron, who claims to direct some of the most profitable movies of all time in order to fund his deep-sea-diving habit.20 “I sold it to Victor as ‘You don’t want to spend all this money, frankly, and go ’round the world, diving arbitrary points where somebody could come ’round in the coming years who has surveyed these places properly and [say], ‘You’ve dived in the wrong place,’” said Heather Stewart.

His ambitions appeared to be running headlong into a historical pattern in exploration: as more pioneers flood over a frontier, the terrain becomes crowded, exploration becomes more complicated, and the frontier is no longer frontier. Explorers then tend to seek out new, unrestrained frontiers. In June 2022, Victor joined the fifth paid flight to space with Blue Origin,35 the space tourism company founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos—a ride he called “ten minutes of pure unfettered joy.” A few months later, in November 2022, he sold Triton Submarines’ Hadal Exploration System to the American video game billionaire Gabe Newell and his ocean exploration research organization, Inkfish. In the future, Victor planned to shift his interest in the ocean to areas that would require less permitting, such as investing in autonomous ocean technology or diving shipwrecks.


pages: 669 words: 210,153

Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers by Timothy Ferriss

Abraham Maslow, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Beryl Markham, billion-dollar mistake, Black Swan, Blue Bottle Coffee, Blue Ocean Strategy, blue-collar work, book value, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, business process, Cal Newport, call centre, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, Columbine, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, David Brooks, David Graeber, deal flow, digital rights, diversification, diversified portfolio, do what you love, Donald Trump, effective altruism, Elon Musk, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fault tolerance, fear of failure, Firefox, follow your passion, fulfillment center, future of work, Future Shock, Girl Boss, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, Howard Zinn, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Menlo Park, microdosing, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, passive income, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, phenotype, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, post scarcity, post-work, power law, premature optimization, private spaceflight, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, selection bias, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, software is eating the world, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, vertical integration, Wall-E, Washington Consensus, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

The motto of the Shin Bet is “Magen veLo Yera’e,” literally “the unseen shield,” or “defender who shall not be seen.” Jeff Bezos on Questioning Assumptions “Basically, every time I talk to Bezos [Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com], it changes my life. . . . [For example,] I’ve spent my entire life thinking that I want to go to Mars . . . it was on The Brady Bunch. I thought this was the best thing ever. “At some point, if I structure my life correctly, maybe I’ll get to go. I think it’s just so important for humanity to be able to do that . . . and I talked to Elon [Musk] a couple of times and was vastly inspired by everything that he and SpaceX are doing. . . . “I ran into Jeff Bezos a bit later and was saying I just got to talk with Elon, and I’m superexcited about Mars.

Spirit animal: Sponge * * * Cal Fussman Cal Fussman (TW: @calfussman, calfussman.com) is a New York Times best-selling author and a writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known for being a primary writer of the What I’ve Learned feature. The Austin Chronicle has described Cal’s interviewing skills as “peerless.” He has transformed oral history into an art form, conducting probing interviews with icons who have shaped the last 50 years of world history: Mikhail Gorbachev, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Jack Welch, Robert De Niro, Clint Eastwood, Al Pacino, George Clooney, Leonardo DiCaprio, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Dr. Dre, Quincy Jones, Woody Allen, Barbara Walters, Pelé, Yao Ming, Serena Williams, John Wooden, Muhammad Ali, and countless others. Born in Brooklyn, Cal spent 10 straight years traveling the world, swimming over 18-foot tiger sharks, rolling around with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and searching for gold in the Amazon.

Blanchard) Diamandis, Peter: The Spirit of St. Louis (Charles Lindbergh), The Man Who Sold the Moon (Robert A. Heinlein), The Singularity Is Near (Ray Kurzweil), Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand), Stone Soup story DiNunzio, Tracy: Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t (Jim Collins), The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Brad Stone) Dubner, Stephen: For adults: Levels of the Game (John McPhee); for kids: The Empty Pot (Demi) Eisen, Jonathan: National Geographic Field Guide to the Birds of North America (Jon L. Dunn and Jonathan Alderfer) Engle, Dan: Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (Esther Perel), The Cosmic Serpent (Jeremy Narby), Autobiography of a Yogi (Paramahansa Yogananda) Fadiman, James: Pihkal: A Chemical Love Story; Tihkal: The Continuation (Alexander Shulgin and Ann Shulgin) Favreau, Jon: The Writer’s Journey (Christopher Vogler and Michele Montez), It Would Be So Nice If You Weren’t Here (Charles Grodin), The 4-Hour Body (Tim Ferriss), The Hobbit (J.R.R.


100 Baggers: Stocks That Return 100-To-1 and How to Find Them by Christopher W Mayer

Alan Greenspan, asset light, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, business cycle, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, dumpster diving, Edward Thorp, Henry Singleton, hindsight bias, housing crisis, index fund, Jeff Bezos, market bubble, Network effects, new economy, oil shock, passive investing, peak oil, Pershing Square Capital Management, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, survivorship bias, Teledyne, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, tontine

“Amazon was, as you might imagine, not spared by the dot-com bust,” Thompson points out. “Shares fell back to earth, touching single digits by the middle of 2001.” Looked at through the lens of our study, Amazon took about 13 years to turn into a 100-bagger. And by May of 2015, you were sitting on gains of 28,300 percent, or a 283-bagger. So, how did Amazon do it? Let’s start with Jeff Bezos because this is a case where you had one of the great owner-operators at the helm. Bezos is currently 51 years old and owns 18 percent of the company, of which he is both CEO and chairman of the board. “There are no signs he’s leaving, either,” Thompson writes. “In a 2014 Business Insider interview, Bezos, perhaps channeling Mr.

Not a necessity (remember, smaller companies “preferred”), but staying below such a deck will make for a more fruitful search than staying above it. #6 Owner-Operators Preferred We spent a whole chapter on this idea. Many of the greatest businesses of the last 50 years had a human face behind them—an owner with vision and tenacity and skill: Sam Walton at Walmart. Steve Jobs at Apple. Jeff Bezos at Amazon. Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. The list is fairly long and we’ve mentioned several of them in prior chapters. Having a great owner-operator also adds to your conviction. I find it easier to hold onto a stock through the rough patches knowing I have a talented owner-operator with skin in the game at the helm. 182 100-BAGGERS I would also remind you of something you should never forget: No one creates a stock so you can make money.


pages: 195 words: 60,471

Hello, Habits by Fumio Sasaki

behavioural economics, bounce rate, Jeff Bezos, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Richard Thaler, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Walter Mischel

We wouldn’t have to go to the trouble of physical exertion, like running, if we only needed to release dopamine to experience euphoria. That’s because there are plenty of other ways to release dopamine, like eating tasty foods. But when we’re talking about a truly powerful sense of satisfaction, what’s necessary is an appropriate amount of pain, not to mention stress. The reasons why Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos work Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos shouldn’t have to work—they have enough wealth to lie on the beach at a resort until they die, and yet they don’t choose to do that. Perhaps it’s because they can’t feel a powerful sense of satisfaction if they’re only doing fun things. I was once jilted by a girlfriend who said, “Hey, we only seem to be doing things that are fun!”


pages: 558 words: 175,965

When the Heavens Went on Sale: The Misfits and Geniuses Racing to Put Space Within Reach by Ashlee Vance

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", 3D printing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Biosphere 2, bitcoin, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Colonization of Mars, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, fake it until you make it, Google Earth, hacker house, Hyperloop, intentional community, Iridium satellite, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kwajalein Atoll, lockdown, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, off-the-grid, overview effect, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, private spaceflight, Rainbow Mansion, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, TikTok, Virgin Galactic

“I used to despair that if you didn’t throw in with the big contractors, you were done. Then Elon showed that you could break through. He showed you could do something different. I think that caught everyone’s imagination.” In the popular press, the increase in private space activity has tended to focus on Musk and his peers, such as Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, and the late Paul Allen of Microsoft. Those men have all funded ventures varying from rocket companies to space planes. The fascination largely revolves around billionaires who are hoping to fire up space tourism businesses or, like Musk, setting off to colonize the moon or Mars.

He took it all in and savored the experience in a way that should make most of us jealous. “Culture is culture!” he said on the drive back, twenty-four-beer variety pack in hand. In all likelihood, you have not heard of Max Polyakov until now, which is both surprising and not. After Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Polyakov has risked more of his personal fortune on the grand gamble that is space than any other human: he has plowed $200 million of his own money into the rocket start-up Firefly Aerospace. For good reason, then, he had come to Texas to see how the money was being spent at Firefly’s vast rocket engine test site and manufacturing facilities (located about a half mile from the Beer Barn) and to make his presence felt at the company’s office headquarters in nearby Cedar Park.

To keep that going, there needed to be more SpaceXs, and I could help make that happen.” Markusic dropped a couple of emails to friends, putting out feelers to let them know he would consider new opportunities. In minutes, emails came back offering him jobs. Tom and Christa soon found themselves in a meeting with Jeff Bezos at Blue Origin’s offices in Kent, Washington. The trappings of Blue Origin’s office dazzled the couple. Bezos had collected space artifacts such as cosmonaut suits, a model of the Star Trek Enterprise, and mailboxes that had been dinged by asteroids. Right in the center of the office stood a giant bullet-looking thing—a steampunk-styled spaceship that recalled Jules Verne.


Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models by Gabriel Weinberg, Lauren McCann

Abraham Maslow, Abraham Wald, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, anti-pattern, Anton Chekhov, Apollo 13, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Swan, Broken windows theory, business process, butterfly effect, Cal Newport, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark pattern, David Attenborough, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, fake news, fear of failure, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Goodhart's law, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, housing crisis, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, incognito mode, income inequality, information asymmetry, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, lateral thinking, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, LuLaRoe, Lyft, mail merge, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, Milgram experiment, minimum viable product, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, nocebo, nuclear winter, offshore financial centre, p-value, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Paul Graham, peak oil, Peter Thiel, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, Potemkin village, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, premature optimization, price anchoring, principal–agent problem, publication bias, recommendation engine, remote working, replication crisis, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, school choice, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The future is already here, The last Blockbuster video rental store is in Bend, Oregon, The Present Situation in Quantum Mechanics, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, uber lyft, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse robotics, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, When a measure becomes a target, wikimedia commons

However, there is likely a good reason that no one is betting on that horse. As Jeff Bezos said at Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit on October 20, 2016, “You just have to remember that contrarians are usually wrong.” A contrarian bet is therefore most likely to be successful when you know something that almost everyone else doesn’t. In other words, you know that the chance of being right is much greater than the crowd realizes, such as when you know a particular bet has a 10 percent chance of success, but the crowd thinks it’s 1 percent. Jeff Bezos again, in a 1997 letter to shareholders: Given a ten percent chance of a 100 times payoff, you should take that bet every time.

Irreversible decisions are hard if not impossible to unwind. And they tend to be really important. Think of selling your business or having a kid. This model holds that these decisions require a different decision-making process than their reversible counterparts, which should be treated much more fluidly. In a letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos stressed the importance of this model: Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation. If you walk through and don’t like what you see on the other side, you can’t get back to where you were before. . . .


pages: 412 words: 116,685

The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything by Matthew Ball

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Apple Newton, augmented reality, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, business process, call centre, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, deepfake, digital divide, digital twin, disintermediation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, game design, gig economy, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, hype cycle, intermodal, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, non-fungible token, open economy, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Planet Labs, pre–internet, QR code, recommendation engine, rent control, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, satellite internet, self-driving car, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, skeuomorphism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, TSMC, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, Y2K

Per usual, the imagined technology, like Bush’s Memex, took longer to arrive than was originally anticipated. iPads appeared in stores four and half decades after Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film was released, and more than a decade after the futuristic film was set. By 2021, tablets had become commonplace and spacefaring had begun to feel within reach. Throughout that summer, competing efforts from billionaires Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Jeff Bezos were under way to bring civilian travel to lower orbit and usher in an era of space elevators and interplanetary colonization. However, it was another decades-old science fiction concept, the Metaverse, that seemed to indicate the future had truly arrived. In July 2021, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said: “In this next chapter of our company, I think we will effectively transition from people seeing us as primarily being a social media company to being a metaverse company.

It was a virtual place where a pizza deliverer in the “real world” could be a talented swords­man with inside access to the hottest clubs. But Stephenson’s novel was clear: in Snow Crash the Metaverse has made life in the real world worse. As with Vannevar Bush, Stephenson’s influence on modern technology only grows with time, even if he is mostly unknown to the public. Conversations with Stephenson helped inspire Jeff Bezos to found the private aerospace manufacturer and suborbital spaceflight company Blue Origin in 2000, with the author working there part-time until 2006, when he became a senior advisor to the company (a position he still holds). As of 2021, Blue Origin is considered the second most valuable company of its kind, ranked only behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

However, Amazon’s efforts to build Metaverse-specific content and services have been largely unsuccessful and arguably less of a priority compared to more traditional markets, such as music, podcasting, video, fast fashion, and digital assistants. According to various reports, Amazon has spent hundreds of millions each year on Amazon Game Studios, which focused on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s goal of making “computationally ridiculous games.” However, most of these titles ended up cancelled before release (though not until their development budgets exceeded the lifetime budgets of most hit games). New World, released in September 2021, received strong reviews and initial interest (incredibly, it ran out of available AWS servers), but its monthly player count is estimated in the low millions.


pages: 44 words: 12,675

Turning the Flywheel: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great by Jim Collins

Amazon Web Services, fulfillment center, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Socratic dialogue, Vanguard fund

Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Turning the Flywheel Appendix Notes About the Author Copyright About the Publisher Turning the Flywheel “Beauty does not come from decorative effects but from structural coherence.” — Pier Luigi Nervi1 In the autumn of 2001, just as Good to Great first hit the market, Amazon.com invited me to engage in a spirited dialogue with founder Jeff Bezos and a few members of his executive team. This was right in the middle of the dot-com bust, when some wondered how (or if) Amazon could recover and prevail as a great company. I taught them about “the flywheel effect” that we’d uncovered in our research. In creating a good-to-great transformation, there’s no single defining action, no grand program, no single killer innovation, no solitary lucky break, no miracle moment.


pages: 276 words: 64,903

Built for Growth: How Builder Personality Shapes Your Business, Your Team, and Your Ability to Win by Chris Kuenne, John Danner

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, asset light, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, business climate, business logic, call centre, cloud computing, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, pattern recognition, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, sugar pill, super pumped, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, work culture , zero-sum game

The Explorer: Curious, Systems-Centric, and Dispassionate Builders who are Explorers are not necessarily motivated to build a new business from scratch, but they are inveterate problem seekers and solvers. Whether the problem is designing better pantyhose (Sara Blakely of Spanx) or unlocking the potential of e-commerce (Jeff Bezos at Amazon), their solutions may focus on product or process, or both. These men and women become stand-alone entrepreneurs or builders of new ventures inside existing corporations because building new businesses seems the best way to solve and commercialize their solutions. Once hooked by the problem, they fixate on execution, at least until the next intriguing problem emerges in search of solution.

As an Explorer, he wondered whether there was a way to connect a distributed set of servers that could be deployed on demand, for any business customer, with unbounded expandability. But then, back in his home in South Africa, Pinkham and a like-minded engineer named Benjamin Black teamed up to write a white paper on their idea, which can be a particularly effective way for a corporate Explorer to obtain financial sponsorship within a large company. Jeff Bezos liked the idea and gave the green light to develop it further. First, Pinkham recruited and inspired a small team of engineers to develop EC2, the underlying technology that now enables AWS. By 2005, Pinkham was granted permission to engage with customers. When we asked Pinkham (who, by the way, refers to himself as a “situational” rather than serial entrepreneur) what he believed enabled him to explore and commercialize EC2, he told us, “The Bezos commitment to innovation inspires a level of inventiveness that does not occur in other companies.”


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The highest-profile campaigns, such as the 2014 ridesharing initiative in Seattle, operated side-by-side with well-funded efforts driven by Lyft and Uber themselves. Whatever the intent of the more community-focused Peers activists, the group functioned in part as a front for Silicon Valley lobbying. The funding behind the larger Sharing Economy companies highlights the contradictory currents that drive it. Billionaire and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has invested in both Airbnb and Uber; leading venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, and delivery service Instacart; Founders Fund, a firm set up and led by billionaire and ­PayPal founder Peter Thiel, has invested in Airbnb, Lyft, and TaskRabbit. ­Goldman Sachs is another investor in Uber as well as WeWork, which has also been funded by JP Morgan.

Uber’s expansion has been driven by an unprecedented succession of venture capital funding rounds: as of August 2015, the company has raised $7 billion, which is more than all other Sharing Economy companies in North America put together. The funding comes from a who’s who of Silicon Valley venture capital firms, as well as Google Ventures, Goldman Sachs, the Qatar Investment Authority, Chinese Internet company Baidu, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. Uber is still privately owned at the time of writing, but the investments correspond to a market capitalization of $50 billion: more valuable than the three leading car rental companies (Hertz, Avis, and Enterprise) combined, and about two-thirds the value of Ford Motor Company. Uber is ambitious: it has explored many variants on its driving services from carpooling to high-end luxury services, as well as delivery and ­logistics, but for now UberX makes up the bulk of its business.


pages: 244 words: 66,977

Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It by Tien Tzuo, Gabe Weisert

3D printing, Airbnb, airport security, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bike sharing, blockchain, Brexit referendum, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, call centre, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, connected car, data science, death of newspapers, digital nomad, digital rights, digital twin, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fiat currency, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, growth hacking, hockey-stick growth, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lean Startup, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mary Meeker, megaproject, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, nuclear winter, pets.com, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, profit maximization, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, smart meter, social graph, software as a service, spice trade, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, tech worker, TED Talk, Tim Cook: Apple, transport as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, Y2K, Zipcar

To be fair, things are changing for Walmart—it has invested heavily in ecommerce, payment apps, and pickup and delivery services. But for a long time, Walmart thought like a product company. Its stores existed to sell products. Its customers were simply there to buy products. And that’s just not how Amazon thinks. “We’ve had three big ideas at Amazon that we’ve stuck with over the years,” said Jeff Bezos. “Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient.” Another favorite Bezos quote: “I don’t know about you, but most of my exchanges with cashiers are not that meaningful.” The Amazon versus Walmart battle has been framed as ecommerce versus traditional retail, but that’s always been a false dichotomy.

We are not trying to maximize clicks and sell low-margin advertising against them. We are not trying to win a pageviews arms race. We believe that the sounder business strategy for the Times is to provide journalism so strong that several million people around the world are willing to pay for it.” I hear a lot of echoes of Jeff Bezos in that statement! And for that matter, why aren’t more big VC firms flocking to smart, established newspaper companies with a steady base of digital subscriptions instead of these digital journalism ventures that are trying to play ad dollar musical chairs against Google and Facebook? It’s a mystery to me.


pages: 226 words: 65,516

Kings of Crypto: One Startup's Quest to Take Cryptocurrency Out of Silicon Valley and Onto Wall Street by Jeff John Roberts

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Apple II, Bernie Sanders, Bertram Gilfoyle, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, Burning Man, buttonwood tree, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, democratizing finance, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elliott wave, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, forensic accounting, hacker house, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, index fund, information security, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joseph Schumpeter, litecoin, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Multics, Network effects, offshore financial centre, open borders, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, proprietary trading, radical decentralization, ransomware, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, software is eating the world, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Elon Musk, who runs both the electric car company Tesla and the rocket maker SpaceX, likes to share extravagant plans for living on Mars and building high-speed tunnels between US cities. In person and online, Musk is combative and outrageous—picking fights with the SEC on Twitter and smoking weed during live radio interviews. At least part of this is a calculated attempt to build up the Musk mystique. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos envisions people living in space colonies. Being of the Valley, it would not be unusual for Brian to think big and think big publicly. But Brian was nothing like Jobs or Musk or Bezos. He was a self-described introvert CEO. Every early Coinbase employee describes Brian as “awkward.” Several point, in particular, to his first attempt at delivering an inspirational speech during a company retreat in Napa Valley—summing it up as “painful” and “oh my God.”

The plan would unravel less than two years later when the island’s corrupt governor, a supporter of the scheme, resigned in disgrace. Even as its economic foundation crumbled in early 2018, crypto continued to garner attention in the media and popular culture. This included a profile of Vitalik Buterin in “Lunch with the FT”—the Financial Times column where typical subjects included the likes of Jeff Bezos, Angela Merkel, and Angelina Jolie. In the profile, the Ethereum founder recounts a recent tête-à-tête he had with Russian President Vladimir Putin about crypto and laments the greed that engulfed many ICOs. “There’s projects that never had a soul, that are just like, ‘ra-ra, price go up. Lambo, vrromm, buybuybuy now’!”


pages: 215 words: 69,370

Still Broke: Walmart's Remarkable Transformation and the Limits of Socially Conscious Capitalism by Rick Wartzman

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, basic income, Bernie Sanders, call centre, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, Donald Trump, employer provided health coverage, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, low skilled workers, Marc Benioff, old-boy network, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, shareholder value, supply-chain management, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor

The Everything Store details Amazon’s rise from a simple bookseller, when its site went live to the buying public in 1995, to an online giant whose sales would increase from less than $10 billion to more than $100 billion in only a decade. Not surprisingly, Walmart appears throughout. In late 2000, the companies even flirted, according to Stone. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and a couple of his executives flew to Bentonville to explore whether Amazon might handle Walmart’s e-commerce business, while Lee Scott gently floated the idea of Walmart acquiring Amazon. “The conversation between the two retailers remained a quirk of history,” Stone writes, “a tantalizing suggestion of what might have been.

New York: Macmillan, 1920. Shipler, David K. The Working Poor: Invisible in America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2004. Stern, Andy. Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream. New York: PublicAffairs, 2016. Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown, 2013. Ton, Zeynep. The Good Jobs Strategy: How the Smartest Companies Invest in Employees to Lower Costs and Boost Profits. Boston: New Harvest, 2014. Troy, Leo, and Neil Sheflin. Union Sourcebook: Membership, Finances, Structure, Directory. West Orange, NJ: Industrial Relations Data and Information Services, 1985.


pages: 400 words: 124,678

The Investment Checklist: The Art of In-Depth Research by Michael Shearn

accelerated depreciation, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, book value, business cycle, call centre, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, compound rate of return, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, do what you love, electricity market, estate planning, financial engineering, Henry Singleton, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, London Interbank Offered Rate, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, money market fund, Network effects, PalmPilot, pink-collar, risk tolerance, shareholder value, six sigma, Skype, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subscription business, supply-chain management, technology bubble, Teledyne, time value of money, transaction costs, urban planning, women in the workforce, young professional

Here’s another example: High employee productivity helps Southwest Airlines succeed, because that’s how it keeps fares low, which increases the value of the airline. Determine whether the management team understands what increases the value of the business and whether that shapes their actions. If management deviates from these, then it is likely that profits will decline. For example: Jeff Bezos, founder of online retailer Amazon.com, focuses on continually enhancing the customer experience by delivering orders in a timely manner and offering more products in order to enlarge the competitive advantage. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, founders of Internet search business Google, focus on “organizing the world’s information and making it accessible.”

However, when the financial crisis of 2009 put some of his competitors out of business, Dimon was one of few CEOs who managed to both weather the storm and strengthen his business during this time of distress. Shareholders will often attempt to influence managers to maximize short-term profits. The best managers always maintain a long-term focus, which means that they are often building for years before they see concrete results. For example, in 2009, Jeff Bezos, founder of online retailer Amazon.com, talked about the way that some investors congratulate Amazon.com on success in a single reporting period. “I always tell people, if we have a good quarter, it’s because of the work we did three, four, and five years ago. It’s not because we did a good job this quarter.”21 Another example of long-term thinking is how Howard Schultz runs Starbucks.

Reuters News, October 8, 2004. 19. Larsen, Peter Thal. “Griffin Mining.” Financial Times, February 21, 2006. 20. Howell, Martin. Predators and Profits: 100+ Ways for Investors to Protect Their Nest Eggs. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2003, pp. 44–45. 21. Lyons, Daniel. “The Interviews: Books (Jeff Bezos).” Newsweek, December 28, 2009. 22. Ignatius, “Mistakes.” 23. Barrett, Amy, and Peter Elstrom. “Making WorldCom Live Up to Its Name.” BusinessWeek, July 14, 1997. 24. Hansen, Morten T., Herminia Ibarra, and Urs Peyer. “The Best-Performing CEOs in the World.” Harvard Business Review, January–February 2010.


pages: 433 words: 125,031

Brazillionaires: The Godfathers of Modern Brazil by Alex Cuadros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Asian financial crisis, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, BRICs, buy the rumour, sell the news, cognitive dissonance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, facts on the ground, family office, financial engineering, high net worth, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, megaproject, NetJets, offshore financial centre, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, rent-seeking, risk/return, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, stock buybacks, tech billionaire, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, We are the 99%, William Langewiesche

And as the population of billionaires expands, so the price of superluxury apartments climbs, regardless of what’s happening in the economy of the masses. I heard them called “crisis proof.” Between a ten-digit billionaire and an eleven-digit billionaire is an order of magnitude. At those reaches, it’s impossible to spend all your money on beachfront villas and superyachts and such toys. That’s when you get into vanity projects, like when Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, put down a quarter-billion dollars for The Washington Post. That was still just one percent of his wealth. You can burn through far more with philanthropy. Bill Gates has the Gates Foundation, Warren Buffett has the Giving Pledge. Mike Bloomberg has given more than a billion dollars to Johns Hopkins University.

He sank thirty million dollars into that one. He sank another ten million into the cosmetics firm he started for Luma. Then there was a voice pagers venture. When the e-commerce craze hit, he bought up package delivery companies to compete against Brazil’s postal service. But he couldn’t make the logistics work. “Jeff Bezos did something like this,” he said later—implying that, if he hadn’t been thwarted by some unnamed local condition, he would have founded another Amazon.com. As a serial entrepreneur, Eike was unrepentant, displaying the zeal of the newly in love each time. In the late nineties, when he dipped into industrial water supply, he proclaimed, “Gold is a jurassic industry.

From “Mayhem Man,” cited in Gaspar, Tudo ou Nada, 24. 154He sank thirty million dollars … another ten million. Both numbers from Consuelo Dieguez, “Mais do que o marido da Luma,” Exame, October 15, 2002. 154voice pagers. “Eike Batista investirá em voice pagers na AL,” Estado, April 25, 1997. 154“Jeff Bezos did something like this.” The venture was called ebX Express. This quote is from his video interview with Exame, March 18, 2010. 154“Gold is a jurassic industry.” “Brazil’s AMX’s Batista on $55 Mln Sale to Azurix,” Bloomberg, September 14, 1999. 154“You’re all fucked.” Oliveira, “O enigma Eike.” 155the Marinho brothers talked him out of it.


pages: 411 words: 119,022

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell

air gap, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bike sharing, Bill Atkinson, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, follow your passion, General Magic , Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hiring and firing, HyperCard, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Kickstarter, Mary Meeker, microplastics / micro fibres, new economy, pets.com, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, rolodex, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, synthetic biology, TED Talk, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Y Combinator

You’re trying to change things, and change is scary, especially to people who think they’ve mastered their domain and who are completely unprepared for the ground to shift under their feet. All it takes to start a landslide is one big scary new thing. Maybe two. Just don’t overshoot. Don’t try to disrupt everything at once. Don’t make the Amazon Fire Phone. I remember when Jeff Bezos first mentioned the idea. We were having a breakfast meeting about me potentially joining Amazon’s board. Jeff hinted at plans for making a new line of Amazon-branded devices, in particular a phone. It would be spectacularly disruptive: everything would look 3-D, it would let you X-ray any media, you could scan anything in the world and then buy it on Amazon.

They generally oversee the growth of existing products that they inherited and don’t take risks that might scare executives or shareholders. This invariably leads to the stagnation and deterioration of companies. Most public company CEOs are babysitters. 2. Parent CEOs push the company to grow and evolve. They take big risks for larger rewards. Innovative founders—like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos—are always parent CEOs. But it’s also possible to be a parent CEO even if you didn’t start the business yourself—like Jamie Dimon at JPMorgan Chase or Satya Nadella at Microsoft. Pat Gelsinger, who recently took over the Intel CEO position, seems to be Intel’s first parent CEO since Andy Grove. 3.

When you have a great board that you respect, meetings are a great, almost external heartbeat that focuses the entire company and forces you to organize your thoughts and timelines and story. [See also: Figure 3.5.1, in Chapter 3.5.] It’s worth it. But that doesn’t make it any less work. For everyone. That’s why Jeff Bezos once told me never to join anyone else’s board. “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “I’m only going to be on the board of my company and my philanthropy. That’s it!” I think of him every time I decline another board seat. But I don’t decline them all. My first instinct is always “No,” but occasionally, rarely, that hard “No” turns into a “No.


pages: 533 words: 125,495

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, backpropagation, basic income, behavioural economics, belling the cat, Black Lives Matter, butterfly effect, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, Comet Ping Pong, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, defund the police, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Easter island, effective altruism, en.wikipedia.org, Erdős number, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, feminist movement, framing effect, George Akerlof, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, high batting average, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index card, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, libertarian paternalism, Linda problem, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, New Journalism, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Peter Singer: altruism, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, post-truth, power law, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, scientific worldview, selection bias, social discount rate, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Bayes, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, twin studies, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, Walter Mischel, yellow journalism, zero-sum game

., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/probability-interpret/. Hallsworth, M., & Kirkman, E. 2020. Behavioral insights. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hamilton, I. A. 2018. Jeff Bezos explains why his best decisions were based off intuition, not analysis. Inc., Sept. 14. https://www.inc.com/business-insider/amazon-ceo-jeff-bezos-says-his-best-decision-were-made-when-he-followed-his-gut.html. Harris, S. 2005. The end of faith: Religion, terror, and the future of reason. New York: W. W. Norton. Hastie, R., & Dawes, R. M. 2010. Rational choice in an uncertain world: The psychology of judgment and decision making (2nd ed.).

Though the finger-pointing in correlation-versus-causation blunders is usually directed at those who leap from the first to the second, often the problem is more basic: no correlation was established in the first place. Maybe Turkmens who chew more bones don’t even have stronger teeth (r = 0). It’s not just presidents of former Soviet republics who fall short of showing correlation, let alone causation. In 2020 Jeff Bezos bragged, “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts . . . not analysis,” implying that heart and guts lead to better decisions than analysis.5 But he did not tell us whether all of his worst decisions in business and life were also made with heart, intuition, and guts, nor whether the good gut decisions and bad analytic ones outnumbered the bad gut decisions and good analytic ones.


pages: 56 words: 16,788

The New Kingmakers by Stephen O'Grady

AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, David Heinemeier Hansson, DevOps, Hacker News, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Netflix Prize, Paul Graham, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, Skype, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, Y Combinator

Whatever a developer’s preference, Cloudera’s product is easily obtained and installed. With so many options, it’s unlikely that Cloudera will ever lose a developer because of issues around getting the software. If you’re making software, make sure that you can say the same thing. Get into the Game with APIs When history looks back on Jeff Bezos’s career, his greatest business innovation might not be the creation of the world’s largest online retailer, the creation of the world’s largest cloud business, or the transformation of the publishing industry. It might instead be a decision he laid out in a memo he sent out just after the turn of the century.


pages: 300 words: 76,638

The War on Normal People: The Truth About America's Disappearing Jobs and Why Universal Basic Income Is Our Future by Andrew Yang

3D printing, Airbnb, assortative mating, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, call centre, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, full employment, future of work, global reserve currency, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meritocracy, Narrative Science, new economy, passive income, performance metric, post-work, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, supercomputer in your pocket, tech worker, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unemployed young men, universal basic income, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, white flight, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator

This is because Amazon doesn’t have to invest in storefronts and can focus on building an efficient delivery system at the highest volumes. Here’s their other advantage—Amazon doesn’t even need to make money. In its 20 years as a public company, Amazon often has not turned a profit. A number of years ago, some financial types noticed and shorted the stock, saying, “Amazon doesn’t make money.” In response, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stopped investing in anything new for a year and ramped up profitability. The people betting against the stock were burned badly. Now, no one bets against Amazon, and its stock price is over $900 per share, making Jeff one of the richest people in the world. Jeff is dedicating $1 billion of his personal wealth to his space exploration company, Blue Origin, each year.

Amazon is known for its competitive—some might even say ruthless—practices. In 2009, they were trying to push Diapers.com to the negotiating table, so they discounted diapers to a point where no one was making money. It worked and they bought Diapers.com for $545 million a little while later. I don’t think Jeff Bezos has it out for local malls, per se. But there will nonetheless be hundreds of thousands of people who suffer from the demise of retail, driven by e-commerce giants like Amazon: the mall workers, the people who liked shopping at the mall, the county workers who needed the mall’s property tax to pay for their jobs, the property owners near the mall, and so on.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Though they may lack Bob’s cartoon face, they steer an increasing proportion of our online activity. In 1995 the race to provide personal relevance was just beginning. More than perhaps any other factor, it’s this quest that has shaped the Internet we know today. The John Irving Problem Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, was one of the first people to realize that you could harness the power of relevance to make a few billion dollars. Starting in 1994, his vision was to transport online bookselling “back to the days of the small bookseller who got to know you very well and would say things like, ‘I know you like John Irving, and guess what, here’s this new author, I think he’s a lot like John Irving,’” he told a biographer.

But as Lanier predicted, buying off algorithms is easy: Pay enough to Amazon, and your book can be promoted as if by an “objective” recommendation by Amazon’s software. For most customers, it’s impossible to tell which is which. Amazon proved that relevance could lead to industry dominance. But it would take two Stanford graduate students to apply the principles of machine learning to the whole world of online information. Click Signals As Jeff Bezos’s new company was getting off the ground, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, were busy doing their doctoral research at Stanford. They were aware of Amazon’s success—in 1997, the dot-com bubble was in full swing, and Amazon, on paper at least, was worth billions. Page and Brin were math whizzes; Page, especially, was obsessed with AI.


pages: 269 words: 77,876

Brilliant, Crazy, Cocky: How the Top 1% of Entrepreneurs Profit From Global Chaos by Sarah Lacy

Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, BRICs, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fear of failure, Firefox, Great Leap Forward, Huaqiangbei: the electronics market of Shenzhen, China, income per capita, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, McMansion, megacity, Network effects, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), paypal mafia, QWERTY keyboard, risk tolerance, Salesforce, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, urban planning, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, zero-sum game

Wal Street lives its life quarter to quarter, and the ability to closely track stocks and funds online, on CNBC, and even on your smart phone encourages this. There are a few public-company CEOs who have the credibility and confidence to stand up to this pressure, among them Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry El ison of Oracle, but the list is short. If startups continue to act like public companies, Silicon Val ey is in big trouble. Publicly held tech companies talk a good game about their investments in R&D, or research and development, and indeed the investment in company-based R&D has soared.

The Kauffman Foundation gave me a generous grant to help with the expenses of reporting this book, helping to make the project possible. INDEX A/B testing, defined Accel Partners Acher, Eric Ackerman, Bob Advanced Research Projects Agency. See ARPA Africa, chal enges of. See also Rwanda Agassi, Shai Airtel Alex. Brown investments Alibaba Group Almeida, Alberto Amazon.com: Jeff Bezos Kindle powerhouse Zappos purchase AmDocs Animation Lab AOL Apple: as competitor as innovator as technology icon vis-à-vis Tencent ARPA Asian financial crisis Asian Godfathers (Studwel ) Assis, Rogerio Assis, Zica Atlantic Monthly, The AT&T Baidu Bakshi, Naren Bakuramutsa, Nkubito Manzi Barnes & Noble, in China BBC Beleza Natural Bel Labs Benchmark Capital Better Place Bezos, Jeff Blonde 2.0 Boo-box Borgos dos Santos, Eliane Borgos dos Santos, Sidnei Brain Platinum Brazil: business opportunities crime and safety issues culture and economics entrepreneurship in exemplars of innovation Marco Gomes story Breslin, Abigail BRIC countries Brin, Sergey BS Construtora Buffett, Warren Bug Bureau of Labor Statistics BuscaPe Bush, George W.


pages: 280 words: 74,559

Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani

"Peter Beck" AND "Rocket Lab", Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boston Dynamics, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, capital controls, capitalist realism, cashless society, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, computer vision, CRISPR, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, dematerialisation, DIY culture, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, G4S, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gregor Mendel, housing crisis, income inequality, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, land reform, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, low earth orbit, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, market fundamentalism, means of production, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, new economy, off grid, pattern recognition, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, post scarcity, post-work, price mechanism, price stability, private spaceflight, Productivity paradox, profit motive, race to the bottom, rewilding, RFID, rising living standards, Robert Solow, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sensor fusion, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Slavoj Žižek, SoftBank, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, Travis Kalanick, universal basic income, V2 rocket, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, working-age population

Since then a glut of newcomers have emerged in the quest to push prices for space transport lower still. While they lack the means to conduct manned missions of their own, by providing cheap, weekly launch opportunities for low-Earth orbit, they will enter the slipstream of larger companies like SpaceX, Boeing and Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin. One such company is Rocket Lab. Founded in New Zealand in 2009, it was the first private company in the Southern Hemisphere to send a booster rocket into space. Now based in the United States, its stated mission is to remove the barriers to mass space commerce by providing frequent, low-cost launch opportunities on its Electron booster rocket.

To be clear, Psyche is a rarity. But it demonstrates a crucial point: mining space would create such outlandish supply as to collapse prices on Earth. In August 2017 Peter Diamandis, co-founder of Planetary Resources, asked Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner who would win in a fight between her boss, Jeff Bezos, and Elon Musk. ‘So, Peter, let me tell you about what we’re doing at Blue Origin,’ Wagner diplomatically replied. ‘We’re really looking towards a future of millions of people living and working in space. The thing I think is really fantastic … is that the universe is infinitely large, and so, we don’t need any fisticuffs … we’re all going to go out there and create this future together.’


pages: 238 words: 73,824

Makers by Chris Anderson

3D printing, Airbnb, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple II, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, business process, carbon tax, commoditize, company town, Computer Numeric Control, crowdsourcing, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deal flow, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, digital capitalism, DIY culture, drop ship, Elon Musk, factory automation, Firefox, Ford Model T, future of work, global supply chain, global village, hockey-stick growth, hype cycle, IKEA effect, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, planned obsolescence, private spaceflight, profit maximization, QR code, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, South of Market, San Francisco, SpaceShipOne, spinning jenny, Startup school, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Y Combinator

For example, the latest head delivers a resolution of 0.2 mm. Another head can hold a rotating cutter, turning the printer into a CNC router. Others have been scaled up to make objects twice as large as originally designed. To date, MakerBot has raised $10 million from investors, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, to fund its expansion. It will need all that and more—it is competing with a host of other low-cost 3-D printer makers, including Chinese ones. What is now designed to be a kit (although you can buy it preassembled) will soon be mass-manufactured and available even more cheaply, by MakerBot and others.

After the dot-com crash, business started to grow nicely, and by the mid-2000s there were thousands of requests and offers placed every day. A few of them were from a small, somewhat secret group in Kent, Washington, called Blue Origin, which wanted high-tolerance parts for what appeared to be a rocket. It was, in fact, a rocket, and Blue Origin turned out to be the stealth space company started by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. The Blue Origin engineers were so impressed by MFG.com that they brought it to Bezos’s attention, who started using the site under an assumed name to check it out. While Bezos was secretly browsing the site, Free was negotiating to sell it to Dasault Systems, a French manufacturing technology company.


pages: 286 words: 79,305

99%: Mass Impoverishment and How We Can End It by Mark Thomas

"there is no alternative" (TINA), "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, additive manufacturing, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, autonomous vehicles, bank run, banks create money, behavioural economics, bitcoin, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, circular economy, complexity theory, conceptual framework, creative destruction, credit crunch, CRISPR, declining real wages, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, gravity well, income inequality, inflation targeting, Internet of things, invisible hand, ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Kickstarter, labour market flexibility, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Own Your Own Home, Peter Thiel, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-truth, profit maximization, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tyler Cowen, warehouse automation, wealth creators, working-age population

There is power behind these ideas Some of my friends, on reading this, commented, ‘But nobody serious thinks like that.’ Unfortunately, they are wrong. There is a considerable free-market literature, from Hayek and Ayn Rand through Milton Friedman and Davidson and Rees-Mogg to Tyler Cowen. Distinguished followers of these writers include some of the wealthiest and most powerful people on the planet:20 Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon; Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the US Federal Reserve; Steve Jobs, former CEO of Apple; the Koch brothers, one the chairman and the other the EVP of Koch Industries, the second largest privately owned company in the US21; Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman of News Corp; Politicians Donald Trump,22 Rex Tillerson, Ron and Rand Paul, and Paul Ryan in the US, and Daniel Hannan and Sajid Javid in the UK; Pay-Pal co-founder, Peter Thiel and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales.

It was widely reported, for example, that the Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal Al Saud was deeply upset by Forbes’ ranking of his wealth in the 2013 billionaires list.7 He believed he should have been listed among the ten richest people in the world but Forbes disagreed.8 A quick glance at that list for 2016 shows the following: Figure 44: The ten richest people in the world in 2016 Rank Name Net Worth ($ billions) Increase needed to move up one place #1 Bill Gates 75 #2 Amancio Ortega 67 12% #3 Warren Buffett 60.8 10% #4 Carlos Slim Helú 50 22% #5 Jeff Bezos 45.2 11% #6 Mark Zuckerberg 44.6 1% #7 Larry Ellison 43.6 2% #8 Michael Bloomberg 40 9% #9= Charles Koch 39.6 1% #9= David Koch 39.6 1% Source: Forbes9 The average increase in wealth required to move up just one place is 8 per cent – a considerable undertaking against a moving target.


pages: 280 words: 76,638

Rebel Ideas: The Power of Diverse Thinking by Matthew Syed

adjacent possible, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, behavioural economics, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, cognitive load, computer age, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, deep learning, delayed gratification, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, invention of writing, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, market bubble, mass immigration, microbiome, Mitch Kapor, persistent metabolic adaptation, Peter Thiel, post-truth, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stuart Kauffman, tech worker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, traveling salesman, vertical integration

For more than a decade, meetings at the tech giant have started not with a PowerPoint presentation or banter, but total silence. For thirty minutes, the team read a six-page memo that summarises, in narrative form, the main agenda item. This has a number of effects. First, it means the proposer has to think deeply about their proposal. As Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, put it: ‘The reason writing a “good” . . . memo is harder than “writing” a 20-page PowerPoint is because the narrative structure of a good memo forces better thought and better understanding of what’s more important than what.’ And later: ‘It has real sentences, and topic sentences, and verbs, and nouns – it’s not just bullet points.’

Ahmed had arrived in London in the 1980s, having experienced first-hand the deep frustrations of receiving remittance. His early life, together with what he learned in his new home about digital solutions, led to the creation of a new venture: a company that makes sending money home as convenient as sending a text message. It is a classic example of recombination. Jeff Bezos made the same point in his 2018 letter to shareholders. He talked about the importance of incremental innovation, doubling down on existing ideas, exploiting their value. Yet he also recognised that, if you want to innovate in more profound ways, you have to step outside your existing framework.


pages: 232 words: 72,483

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

But the science mostly felt shallow, and there were still no big breakthroughs. None of these ventures had the financing of Calico or HLI, although interest in them was growing. Some efforts had the support of Aubrey de Grey’s SENS Research Foundation, the Buck Institute, or the occasional angel investor like Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos or PayPal’s Peter Thiel. But these fell into the categories of mere millions, not hundreds of millions. Nevertheless, the new enterprises happily set out to spread the word to the media. All except one: Calico. Since its inception in 2013, Calico seemed to have vanished. Sure, there was the obligatory press release now and then, and clearly the company existed.

Diamandis’s other venture is called Fountain, another partnership with Tony Robbins that involves a worldwide network of regenerative and longevity medical clinics linked to Celularity that sounded something like Venter’s old HNX idea. As of early 2019, though, there had been no formal announcements.26 In the midst of these endeavors, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, now the world’s richest human, had begun injecting tens of millions of dollars into longevity ventures—including Unity Biotechnology, the company backed by the Mayo Clinic that is working on ways to eliminate senescent cells in the body. Even Bill Gates—the man who once remarked, “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB, for rich people to fund things so they can live longer”—was jumping on the longevity bandwagon.


pages: 256 words: 73,068

12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next by Jeanette Winterson

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Apollo 11, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, digital rights, discovery of DNA, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, flying shuttle, friendly AI, gender pay gap, global village, Grace Hopper, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, housing crisis, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, microdosing, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, off grid, OpenAI, operation paperclip, packet switching, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, Plato's cave, public intellectual, QAnon, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, SpaceX Starlink, speech recognition, spinning jenny, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, surveillance capitalism, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, TikTok, trade route, Turing test, universal basic income, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

* * * Bloom points out that most humans are fixated on space without boundaries. Think about it: land-grab, colonisation, urban creep, loss of habitat, the current fad for seasteading (sea cities with vast oceans at their disposal). And space itself – the go-to fascination of rich men: Richard Branson, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos. When I think about artificial intelligence, and what is surely to follow – artificial general intelligence, or superintelligence – it seems to me that what this affects most, now and later, isn’t space but time. The brain uses chemicals to transmit information. A computer uses electricity. Signals travel at high speeds through the nervous system (neurons fire 200 times a second, or 200 hertz) but computer processors are measured in gigahertz – billions of cycles per second.

Matt Damon on the red planet in The Martian (2015) offers us the favourite figure of a lonely hero against the odds. Elon Musk has said he wants to die on Mars. When he gets there, I shouldn’t think that dying will be his biggest challenge. Rich men LOVE their rockets. Richard Branson has Virgin Galactic. Jeff Bezos stepped down as CEO of Amazon in 2020 to concentrate on his personal space programme – Blue Origin. Techno-king Musk is saying he will privately transport folks to Mars by 2050 (he’s betting on bio-enhancements to keep him alive and healthy till then). Once there, his neo-liberal neo-Martians can pay back the cost of their passage by working for Musk (in the Musk Mines?).


pages: 328 words: 77,877

API Marketplace Engineering: Design, Build, and Run a Platform for External Developers by Rennay Dorasamy

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, continuous integration, DevOps, digital divide, disintermediation, fault tolerance, if you build it, they will come, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, Lyft, market fragmentation, microservices, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, optical character recognition, platform as a service, pull request, ride hailing / ride sharing, speech recognition, the payments system, transaction costs, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, web application

In much the same way as it seems unfathomable today for an organization to not have a website or a mobile application, not having an API for consumption will be viewed the same way in the future. An API Manifesto APIs are not new. The concept has been around for years and has been used internally within enterprises to achieve integration between applications. In 2002, Jeff Bezos issued an API Mandate, sometimes referred to as the “API Manifesto,” which reads as follows: All teams will henceforth expose their data and functionality through service interfaces.Teams must communicate with each other through these interfaces. There will be no other form of inter-process communication allowed: no direct linking, no direct reads of another team’s data store, no shared-memory model, no backdoors whatsoever.

By leveraging economies of scale to service and support new customers with existing infrastructure and operational capability, the platform generates more revenue without incurring additional costs yielding higher margins. We have adopted a similar strategy to Amazon and have made a conscious decision to pass this benefit on to our customers by lowering costs. As Jeff Bezos wisely predicted, lowering costs results in increased traffic which invariably speeds up the momentum of the flywheel. An observation is that lower costs also reduce the barrier to entry and the platform has caught the attention of smaller consultancies who are building innovative solutions with our products.


pages: 370 words: 129,096

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future by Ashlee Vance

addicted to oil, Burning Man, clean tech, digital map, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, fail fast, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, industrial robot, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kwajalein Atoll, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Society, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, money market fund, multiplanetary species, off-the-grid, optical character recognition, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, PalmPilot, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, pneumatic tube, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, X Prize

Musk’s competitors in the auto industry might soon need to do the same because SpaceX has transferred some of the equipment and techniques to Tesla. The hope is that Tesla will be able to make lighter, stronger cars. The technology has proven so valuable that SpaceX’s competitors have started to copy it and have tried to poach some of the company’s experts in the field. Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos’s secretive rocket company, has been particularly aggressive, hiring away Ray Miryekta, one of the world’s foremost friction stir welding experts and igniting a major rift with Musk. “Blue Origin does these surgical strikes on specialized talent* offering like double their salaries. I think it’s unnecessary and a bit rude,” Musk said.

Musk has decided that man’s survival depends on setting up another colony on another planet and that he should dedicate his life to making this happen. Musk is now quite rich on paper. He was worth about $10 billion at the time of this writing. When he started SpaceX more than a decade ago, however, he had far less capital at his disposal. He didn’t have the fuck-you money of a Jeff Bezos, who handed his space company Blue Origin a kingly pile of cash and asked it to make Bezos’s dreams come true. If Musk wanted to get to Mars, he would have to earn it by building SpaceX into a real business. This all seems to have worked in Musk’s favor. SpaceX has learned to make cheap and effective rockets and to push the limits of aerospace technology.

Garver also ran across SpaceX competitors that tried to spread unfounded gossip about the company and Musk. “They claimed he was in violation of tax laws in South Africa and had another, secret family there. I said, ‘You’re making this stuff up.’ We’re lucky that people with such long-term visions as Elon, Jeff Bezos, and Robert Bigelow [founder of the aerospace company that bears his name] got rich. It’s nuts that people would want to vilify Elon. He might say some things that rub people the wrong way, but, at some point, the being nice to everyone thing doesn’t work.” *On this flight, SpaceX secretly placed a wheel of cheese inside the Dragon capsule.


pages: 439 words: 131,081

The Chaos Machine: The Inside Story of How Social Media Rewired Our Minds and Our World by Max Fisher

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Bellingcat, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, call centre, centre right, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, Computer Lib, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, deep learning, deliberate practice, desegregation, disinformation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, game design, gamification, George Floyd, growth hacking, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, hive mind, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, military-industrial complex, Oklahoma City bombing, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, profit maximization, public intellectual, QAnon, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, tech billionaire, tech worker, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, TikTok, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

A self-described lacrosse jock, then in his fifties, Gordon sported a frat-boy shag and laced his corporatespeak with “dude” and “awesome.” Before joining Kleiner as an investor, his CV had one bullet spanning 1982 to 2008: Electronic Arts, a video game company. “We’re making a blue-ocean bet that social is just beginning,” Gordon said at the unveiling, flanked, in a show of Kleiner’s power, by Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos. Gordon’s presence reflected a then-widespread belief: the social media industry would operate like the video game business. Gordon told an industry conference a few months later that there were “three themes that you CEOs need to master,” listing mobile, social, and, with a fist pump, “gamification.”

Focus everything, he instructed, on maximizing a few quantifiable metrics. Concentrate power in the hands of engineers who can do it. And shunt aside the rest. His followers included John Doerr, an Intel salesman turned kingmaking venture capitalist, who imparted Grove’s metrics-obsessed philosophy to dozens of early internet ventures. One was Amazon, whose founder, Jeff Bezos, wrote in a shareholder letter still circulated in the Valley, “There is a right answer or a wrong answer, a better answer or a worse answer, and math tells us which is which.” Another was Google, whose young founders Doerr personally instructed in the gospel of Grove. Wojcicki sat in. But as the Valley expanded its reach, this culture of optimization at all costs took on second-order effects.

Robertson, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 33, August 18, 2015. 11 “America’s next president could be eased”: “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Robert Epstein, Politico, August 19, 2015. 12 “There’s this epic struggle”: Pariser. 13 Facebook tweaked its algorithm: “How Facebook Shapes Your Feed,” Will Oremus, Chris Alcantara, Jeremy B. Merrill, and Artur Galocha, Washington Post, October 26, 2021. 14 lecturing women on their duty: “Teen Vine Stars Enrage Followers by Telling Girls How to Be More Attractive,” Aja Romano, Daily Dot, December 29, 2013. 15 “There is a right answer”: “Letter to Shareholders,” Jeff Bezos, Security and Exchange Commission filings, 1997. 16 “The billion daily hours”: Doerr: 166–167. 17 “Forget strategy”: Zucked: Waking Up to the Facebook Catastrophe, Roger McNamee, 2019: 41. 18 “the true scarce commodity”: The original memo, a fascinating snapshot of the industry’s shift to an attention economy, can be found in full at “Microsoft’s CEO Sent a 3,187-Word Memo and We Read It So You Don’t Have To,” Polly Mosendz, The Atlantic Wire, July 10, 2014. 19 “We are not going to meet”: Doerr. 20 “fundamental paradigm shift”: “Deep Neural Networks for YouTube Recommendations,” Paul Covington, Jay Adams, and Emre Sargin, Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems, September 2016. 21 “So, when YouTube claims”: “Reverse Engineering the YouTube Algorithm (Part 2),” Matt Gielen, Tubfilter.com, February 2017. 22 “Product tells us”: “YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant,” Mark Bergen, Bloomberg, April 2, 2019. 23 The company estimated that 70 percent: This is according to comments by Neel Mohan, YouTube’s chief product officer, at the industry Consumer Electronics Show in January 2018.


pages: 468 words: 233,091

Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days by Jessica Livingston

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 8-hour work day, Aaron Swartz, affirmative action, AltaVista, Apple II, Apple Newton, Bear Stearns, Boeing 747, Brewster Kahle, business cycle, business process, Byte Shop, Compatible Time-Sharing System, Danny Hillis, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, don't be evil, eat what you kill, fake news, fear of failure, financial independence, Firefox, full text search, game design, General Magic , Googley, Hacker News, HyperCard, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Larry Wall, Maui Hawaii, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, nuclear winter, PalmPilot, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, proprietary trading, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, software patent, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, The Soul of a New Machine, web application, Y Combinator

At the end of the day, my Morgan coworkers were pretty supportive, “You should go do this. Try it out and let us know how it goes.” 226 Founders at Work Livingston: Union Square Ventures was your VC, right? Schachter: They were Union Square and Amazon. Livingston: Did they come to you? Schachter: I had met Jeff Bezos at Foo Camp, and he was very interested. Livingston: How much did they put in? Schachter: We never announced the amount, but it was not a huge amount of capital. Livingston: And that’s because you didn’t want to take a huge amount of capital? Schachter: Well, there was a lot of risk. It was sort of hard to justify a large valuation and so on, so we sold a small chunk for enough money to work for a while and see if it turned into something.

At that point, when some folks from Amazon were looking around for data mining technology, they came and said, “Should we buy you for data mining technology?” And we said, “One, you shouldn’t buy us, and the other is that we’re doing something quite different from data mining. We have this toolbar we can get out there in front of people and things like that.” Brewster Kahle 277 In talks with Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, I said, “I tried being acquired, and it didn’t work. By AOL, a great company, but my company got dispersed, and I don’t know how to run a division; I know how to run a company.” He said, “If we’re going to buy you, why don’t you run it as a company? What does that mean to you?”

It just wasn’t something that I knew how to do. I really liked running something that I knew how to run. When I did the startup that was bought by Amazon, I said, “Leave us on our own. We’re smart and independent enough to be able to do good work that will inject things from the side into your other organization.” The thing that Jeff Bezos did that I thought was very smart was that he ran us through his organization and others through ours. He used us, at least for the first few years, as a think tank in some sense—a live and breathing example of how else they could do things. Alexa’s major value in the first year of its being acquired by Amazon was to take some of the lessons that we had learned of how to do things much cheaper than they had.


pages: 301 words: 89,076

The Globotics Upheaval: Globalisation, Robotics and the Future of Work by Richard Baldwin

agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bread and circuses, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer vision, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, future of work, George Gilder, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Hans Moravec, hiring and firing, hype cycle, impulse control, income inequality, industrial robot, intangible asset, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, laissez-faire capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Metcalfe’s law, mirror neurons, new economy, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, post-work, profit motive, remote working, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, standardized shipping container, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, telepresence, telepresence robot, telerobotics, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, universal basic income, warehouse automation

Here is how he phrases it: “What to do about mass unemployment? This is going to be a massive social challenge. There will be fewer and fewer jobs that a robot cannot do better. These are not things that I wish will happen. These are simply things that I think probably will happen.”2 The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos—another successful surfer of technology waves—says: “It’s probably hard to overstate how big of an impact it’s going to have on society over the next twenty years.”3 Devin Wenig, who is the CEO of eBay points out: “While the promise of AI has been known for years, the current pace of breakthrough is stunning.

Quote from Kevin Delaney, “The Robot That Takes Your Job Should Pay Taxes, Says Bill Gates,” Quartz, February 17, 2017. 2. Quote from Quincy Larson, “A Warning from Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Stephen Hawking,” freeCodeCamp.org, February 18, 2017. 3. Quoted in Walt Mossberg, “Five Things I Learned from Jeff Bezos at Code,” Recode (blog), June 8, 2016. 4. Stephen Hawking, “This Is the Most Dangerous Time for Our Planet,” The Guardian, December 1, 2016. 5. Quotes from Adam Lashinksy, “Yes, AI Will Kill Jobs. Humans Will Dream Up Better Ones,” Fortune, January 5, 2017. 6. Alastair Bathgate, “Blue Prism’s Software Robots on the Rise,” Blueprism (blog), July 14, 2016. 7.


pages: 297 words: 84,009

Big Business: A Love Letter to an American Anti-Hero by Tyler Cowen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Brooks, David Graeber, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, experimental economics, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, financial intermediation, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Google Glasses, income inequality, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, mobile money, money market fund, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, offshore financial centre, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, The Nature of the Firm, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, ultimatum game, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Consider Amazon, which has a stratospherically high share price, even though the quarterly earnings reports usually fail to show a sizable profit. Whether you think that valuation has been justified or not, it is a clear example of how markets can consider the broader, longer-term picture. Circa 2018, Jeff Bezos ended up as the richest man in the world, and he achieved that status by sticking with some long-run goals. Amazon does keep investing its profits in the future of the company. That suggests markets are striking a pretty decent balance between short-term and long-term considerations. There is even some research from two top finance researchers, Kenneth French and Nobel laureate Eugene Fama, suggesting that companies with high current cash flow are relatively undervalued by the market and subsequently earn above-par returns.

As noted, businesspeople like political predictability, and Trump has offered them anything but. Right after his election, a variety of corporations, from Carrier to Ford to Boeing, among others, were the targets of his needling tweets, in part for their outsourcing. Trump attacked Boeing for the high cost of Air Force One, his own presidential plane, and he has repeatedly gone after Jeff Bezos and Amazon on Twitter. Trump has also initiated a series of trade wars and opened up a rhetorical war against America’s trade agreements, neglected the details on health care reform, brought many of America’s most important foreign alliances into question, and called the media—a big business, of course—“the enemy of the people.”


pages: 283 words: 81,376

The Doomsday Calculation: How an Equation That Predicts the Future Is Transforming Everything We Know About Life and the Universe by William Poundstone

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, conceptual framework, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, DeepMind, digital map, discounted cash flows, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Eddington experiment, Elon Musk, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, Higgs boson, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, Peter Thiel, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Plato's cave, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sam Altman, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, strong AI, tech billionaire, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, time value of money, Turing test

The longer the think tanks are able to do that, the more likely they are to come up with conceptual frameworks, options, and solutions that would be useful when an intelligence explosion becomes imminent. Better that than for an isolated team of engineers to have to invent an ethical universe over the weekend that AI becomes all-powerful. As Yudkowsky said, “I don’t think we should ignore a problem we’ll predictably have to panic about later.” In 2018 Jeff Bezos and Amazon hosted a conference in Palm Springs where neuroscientist Sam Harris debated MIT roboticist Rodney Brooks (cofounder of iRobot, known for carpet-cleaning robots). Harris expressed concern that competitors in an AI arms race would ignore precautions. “This is something you made up,” Brooks objected.

However, the risks of an intelligence explosion seem to be a good deal greater than infinitesimal, and it is not necessary to assign infinite values to a posthuman heaven or hell in order to conclude that caution is in order. 25. “Would you not invent the telephone”: Ha 2018. 26. “The so-called control problem”: Stevenson 2017. 27. “I don’t think we should ignore a problem”: Horgan 2016. 28. Jeff Bezos and Palm Springs meeting: Metz 2018. 29. “This is something you made up”: Metz 2018. 30. “ruler of the world”: Fingas 2017. You Are Here 1. Weasel gnawed cable: Brumfiel 2016. Engineers found “the charred remains of a furry creature near a gnawed-through power cable.” Brumfiel wrote that “it is unclear whether the animals are trying to stop humanity from unlocking the secrets of the universe.” 2.


pages: 324 words: 80,217

The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success by Ross Douthat

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Apollo 13, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, charter city, crack epidemic, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, David Graeber, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, Donald Trump, driverless car, East Village, Easter island, Elon Musk, fake news, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, ghettoisation, gig economy, Golden age of television, green new deal, Haight Ashbury, helicopter parent, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Islamic Golden Age, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joan Didion, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, life extension, low interest rates, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megacity, meritocracy, microaggression, move fast and break things, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Oculus Rift, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paris climate accords, peak TV, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, pre–internet, private spaceflight, QAnon, quantitative easing, radical life extension, rent-seeking, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wage slave, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y2K

The Pikettian left and the libertarian center right differ in which kind of rentier they are most eager to indict: Piketty and his admirers are hardest on the superrich, blaming their political influence and essential selfishness for foiling necessary large-scale redistribution, while libertarian antirentiers are more likely to argue that the richest of the rich still generally rise on their own merits (think Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett), while it’s the mass upper class that’s really guilty of what the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves calls “dream hoarding”: the combined effects of inherited wealth, educational requirements, real estate prices, and tax breaks that essentially reproduce privilege from one generation to the next.

Maybe we have simply been in a kind of bottleneck for the last few generations, achieving important scientific breakthroughs that don’t (yet) translate into society-altering changes. At a certain point, we’ll clear the bottleneck, and it will become clear that our era was a necessary prelude to renewed acceleration—eventually giving us self-driving cars courtesy of a finally profitable Uber, a Mars colony courtesy of the Elon Musk–Jeff Bezos space race, and radical life extension courtesy of Google’s longevity lab or some other zillionaire who can’t imagine shuffling off this mortal coil. All of this could happen on a scale that would be world altering without having the truly utopian scenarios come to pass. Terraforming Mars and becoming a multiplanetary species may be unattainable for now—but just going to Mars would be a bigger leap for mankind than anything we’ve accomplished since Neil Armstrong.


pages: 245 words: 83,272

Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World by Meredith Broussard

"Susan Fowler" uber, 1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, Dennis Ritchie, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, fake news, Firefox, gamification, gig economy, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Greyball, Hacker Ethic, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, life extension, Lyft, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, paypal mafia, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ross Ulbricht, Saturday Night Live, school choice, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, TechCrunch disrupt, Tesla Model S, the High Line, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, work culture , yottabyte

Once, a computer scientist and former Minsky graduate student named Danny Hillis showed up to Minsky’s house with a radiation detector in his pocket. (Hillis, a supercomputer inventor, now runs the Long Now Foundation with Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand; the foundation is devoted to building a mechanical clock that will run for ten thousand years in a cave on a Texas ranch owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.) The radiation detector started going crazy. Hillis, who had lived with the family for a time, poked around the house to find the source of the radiation. The alarm seemed loudest next to a closet. Hillis opened it and found the closet stuffed full of chemicals. He removed each one, but nothing was the source.

The price was higher or lower based on the customer’s estimated zip code.19 Christo Wilson, David Lazer, and a team of other Northeastern University researchers found different prices were offered to customers on Homedepot.com and on travel sites depending on whether the users viewed the sites on mobile devices or desktops.20 Amazon admitted to experimenting with differential pricing in 2000. CEO Jeff Bezos apologized, calling it “a mistake.”21 In an unequal world, if we make pricing algorithms based on what the world looks like, women and poor and minority customers inevitably get charged more. Math people are often surprised by this; women and poor and minority people are not surprised by this.


pages: 355 words: 81,788

Monolith to Microservices: Evolutionary Patterns to Transform Your Monolith by Sam Newman

Airbnb, business logic, business process, continuous integration, Conway's law, database schema, DevOps, fail fast, fault tolerance, ghettoisation, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Kubernetes, loose coupling, microservices, MVC pattern, price anchoring, pull request, single page application, single source of truth, software as a service, source of truth, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, telepresence, two-pizza team, work culture

This allows us to better mitigate the cost of mistakes, but doesn’t remove the chance of mistakes entirely. We can—and will—make mistakes, and we should embrace that. What we should also do, though, is understand how best to mitigate the costs of those mistakes. Reversible and Irreversible Decisions Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO, provides interesting insights into how Amazon works in his yearly shareholder letters. The 2015 letter held this gem: Some decisions are consequential and irreversible or nearly irreversible—one-way doors—and these decisions must be made methodically, carefully, slowly, with great deliberation and consultation.

But most decisions aren’t like that—they are changeable, reversible—they’re two-way doors. If you’ve made a suboptimal Type 2 decision, you don’t have to live with the consequences for that long. You can reopen the door and go back through. Type 2 decisions can and should be made quickly by high judgment individuals or small groups. Jeff Bezos, Letter to Amazon Shareholders (2015) Bezos goes on to say that people who don’t make decisions often may fall into the trap of treating Type 2 decisions like Type 1 decisions. Everything becomes life or death; everything becomes a major undertaking. The problem is that adopting a microservice architecture brings with it loads of options regarding how you do things—which means you may need to make many more decisions than before.


The Buddha and the Badass: The Secret Spiritual Art of Succeeding at Work by Vishen Lakhiani

Abraham Maslow, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, call centre, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, data science, deliberate practice, do what you love, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, future of work, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, performance metric, Peter Thiel, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social bookmarking, social contagion, solopreneur, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, web application, white picket fence, work culture

Every year we see in our feedback someone saying that “we change too fast,” “we’re ‘always’ changing things,” etc. etc. But let me ask you this. Are we changing what’s working or what’s not working? Are we abandoning winning formulas? Or adjusting them while we toss our losing models. We’re not changing…we’re pivoting. Good companies do that. Jeff Bezos once wrote a blog post titled “The Smart People Change Their Minds.” He wrote: “The people who are right a lot more often change their minds.” Bezos went on to say he doesn’t think consistency of thought is a particularly positive trait: “It’s better, even healthier in fact, to have an idea that contradicts one you had before.

Google fails at 40 percent of everything they start: Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. Simon & Schuster, 2011. “The people who are right a lot more often change their minds”: Bezos, Jeff. “The Smart People Change Their Minds,” October 19, 2012. Blog post retrieved from https://techcrunch.com/2012/10/19/jeff-bezos-the-smart-people-change-their-minds/. CHAPTER 9 “The world doesn’t give you what you want or desire”: Mindvalley (producer), 2019. Michael Beckwith on True Manifesting from the Soul. Video retrieved from https://events.blinkwebinars.com/w/6246203867791360/watch-now?_ga=2.124996995.800747580.1575308463-1706431628.1574210435#5053427020988416.


pages: 283 words: 85,906

The Clock Mirage: Our Myth of Measured Time by Joseph Mazur

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, computer age, Credit Default Swap, Danny Hillis, Drosophila, Eratosthenes, Henri Poincaré, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Pepto Bismol, quantum entanglement, self-driving car, seminal paper, Stephen Hawking, time dilation, twin studies

“Every day, I put money—millions of dollars—on futures and credit-default swaps. It’s a legal crapshoot, but you gotta know what you’re doing. I can lose a bundle in one second, and make lots of money in the next.” I thought about what that trader meant by that last sentence, and then imagined the amounts Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffett gained or lost in just fifteen seconds. The digital clock on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange is somewhat precise, yet not connected to the trading bell. The opening bell of the exchange is rung by a human at almost precisely 9:29:45 a.m.

High-speed computers trade thousands of shares per second, and even relatively slow floor trading can result in a shift of tens of thousands of dollars in just fifteen seconds. Such high-frequency trades placed from locations all around the world account for almost 70 percent of the trade volume in the United States. According to Forbes, the net worth of Jeff Bezos and his family in 2019 was about $131 billion, of Bill Gates about $96.5 billion, Warren Buffett about $82.5 billion, Mark Zuckerberg about $62.3 billion, and Michael Bloomberg about $55.5 billion.1 These are staggering amounts of money. Just to give you an impression of how large these numbers are, consider how much money is gained or lost in just fifteen seconds of a normal day when the stock market is open.


pages: 297 words: 84,447

The Star Builders: Nuclear Fusion and the Race to Power the Planet by Arthur Turrell

Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, carbon tax, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, Donald Trump, Eddington experiment, energy security, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Extinction Rebellion, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Higgs boson, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), ITER tokamak, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, New Journalism, nuclear winter, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, precautionary principle, Project Plowshare, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tunguska event

By 2019, the new fusion start-ups had received funding in excess of $1 billion.12 “An energy miracle is coming, and it’s going to change the world,” says Bill Gates, who has sunk some of his cash into one fusion start-up. PayPal founder, billionaire, and member of former President Trump’s inner circle Peter Thiel has done the same, investing $1.5 million in 2014.13 Other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs involved in fusion include Jeff Bezos, executive chairman of Amazon, and, before his death in 2018, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.14 Goldman Sachs has plowed money into an effort, Lockheed Martin has its own initiative, and even fossil fuel firms like Chevron are hedging their bets by investing in fusion. In a sign of the times, one fusion scheme is backed by Brad Pitt; another by a reality TV star, Richard Dinan of the UK’s Made in Chelsea.

Jonathan’s mention of pistons appears to be a reference to General Fusion, a firm based in Canada that has been operating for almost twenty years. It was founded by Michel Laberge, who quit his job as a senior laser printing engineer to follow his fusion dream. In 2019, General Fusion announced that they’d raised a further $65 million, taking their total to at least $200 million. Microsoft, the Canadian government, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos are all said to have put money in.12 General Fusion plans to build a star by confining a ball of plasma with liquid metal walls that are themselves confined within a reactor chamber. The idea is that the liquid metal will be pushed by steam-driven pistons until it compresses the plasma to fusion conditions.


pages: 291 words: 80,068

Framers: Human Advantage in an Age of Technology and Turmoil by Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Francis de Véricourt

Albert Einstein, Andrew Wiles, Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, circular economy, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deep learning, DeepMind, defund the police, Demis Hassabis, discovery of DNA, Donald Trump, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, fiat currency, framing effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, game design, George Floyd, George Gilder, global pandemic, global village, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, informal economy, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microaggression, Mustafa Suleyman, Neil Armstrong, nudge unit, OpenAI, packet switching, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

For example, until the mid-2010s many senior executives in traditional companies cackled that Amazon’s business still showed no profits. They felt it was a low-margin activity propped up by a hyperinflated share price. And within their traditional way of understanding corporate performance, they were right. But seen through a different frame, they were utterly wrong. Jeff Bezos had reframed the idea of commercial growth, away from producing annual returns for shareholders (and handing about a third of the profits to governments in the form of tax) and toward reinvesting every penny of net income to establish adjacent business lines, from Kindle books to cloud services.

There is a risk, however, that just because someone has reframed successfully, they believe they can do it again and again. There can be a vainglory attached to reframers, who wear their achievement like a golden crown and reapply the new frame where it does not fit. The best innovators are aware of this and work to minimize it. Steve Jobs of Apple, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and Larry Page of Google all enjoyed reputations for stubbornness but at the same time actively sought out alternative views that contradicted their own. They understood the shortcoming of relying on a single frame and the value of being exposed to alternative ones. One of the most notorious examples of a successful reframer becoming too attached to a frame is Albert Einstein.


pages: 295 words: 87,204

The Capitalist Manifesto by Johan Norberg

AltaVista, anti-communist, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boris Johnson, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, computer age, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, degrowth, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, export processing zone, failed state, Filter Bubble, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Greta Thunberg, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, Indoor air pollution, industrial robot, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, low cost airline, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, Minecraft, multiplanetary species, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, open economy, passive income, Paul Graham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, planned obsolescence, precariat, profit motive, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, rent control, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sam Bankman-Fried, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, social distancing, social intelligence, South China Sea, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Virgin Galactic, Washington Consensus, working-age population, World Values Survey, X Prize, you are the product, zero-sum game

The amazing new things that have emerged since then you actually share with the super-rich. I would even dare to suggest that the supply of the most important goods, services and amenities is now more evenly distributed than at any other point in the history of mankind. Why is that the case? Because Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Sam Walton, Ingvar Kamprad, and many, many others have been allowed to become super-rich by developing all these goods, services and amenities and creating business models and processes that have reduced them in price so much that they became available to the general public. They have got lots of zeros after the dollar sign in their bank account, but the rest of us got a better, simpler, more comfortable life that would have made grandpa’s grandma’s grandpa’s grandma faint from rapture.

Nordhaus, ‘Schumpeterian profits in the American economy: Theory and measurement’, NBER Working Paper no.10433, 2004. 6. Compare with Frédéric Bastiat’s reasoning on the invention of the printing press, Bastiat 1964, pp.37f. 7. Donald Boudreaux, Globalization, Greenwood Press, 2008, p.32f. 8. Not Gates any more. Jeff Bezos beat him a few years back, then it was Elon Musk and now it is Bernard Arnault. It changes very fast depending on the temporary stock prices of the companies the super-rich founded, so I’ll continue to use Gates as an example for a while. 9. Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Belknap Press, 2014, p.444ff. 10.


pages: 304 words: 86,028

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Billionaires stashed away $434 billion during the hard times between mid-March and mid-May 2020. In 2021, the collective gain of the richest was a staggering $1.6 trillion, a swelling of 55 percent, while millions of Americans were at risk of losing their homes. After the debut of the annual Forbes billionaires list in April 2021, the Washington Post wrote, “Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, with an estimated fortune of $177 billion, topped the list for the fourth year running,” while Elon Musk, the Tesla chief executive, “came in at No. 2” at $151 billion and Zuckerberg, CEO and cofounder of Facebook, came in fifth with $97 billion. There was little guilt in evidence among those who were making out like bandits during the pandemic.

These are causes far from the problematically glamorous fundraising galas and rococo philanthropic conferences with chia pudding and passion fruit spritzers. While not a direct result, unless you were living under a screen-free rock, it was hard not to clock that the megarich like MacKenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos’s ex-wife and a billionaire, were by 2020 starting to give in a more similar fashion, distributing billions of dollars more democratically, including multimillion-dollar gifts to more obscure community organizations and historically Black colleges (most educational giving still goes to name-brand universities, while only 1.5 percent of those dollars go to two-year colleges, according to the Council for Aid to Education.)


pages: 70 words: 22,172

How We'll Live on Mars (TED Books) by Stephen Petranek

Apollo 11, California gold rush, Colonization of Mars, Dennis Tito, Elon Musk, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, Richard Feynman, TED Talk, trade route

No useable rocket yet exists that could perform the feat. (NASA’s Space Launch System, due in 2018, could lift a spaceship from Earth to Mars, but is unlikely to be loaned to the effort.) Tito says the backup plan is to launch in 2021 and slingshot around Venus into a trajectory for a Mars flyby. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Google cofounder Larry Page, Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, and entrepreneur and explorer Sir Richard Branson are also investing millions to get into the new private space race in one form or another. Most of the efforts so far are as chaotic as the Wild West, but this time the frontier is space.


pages: 82 words: 24,150

The Corona Crash: How the Pandemic Will Change Capitalism by Grace Blakeley

Anthropocene, asset-backed security, basic income, Big Tech, bond market vigilante , Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, debt deflation, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, don't be evil, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, global pandemic, global value chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, income inequality, informal economy, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, move fast and break things, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Philip Mirowski, post-war consensus, price mechanism, quantitative easing, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, reshoring, Rishi Sunak, savings glut, secular stagnation, shareholder value, social distancing, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, yield curve

Some use anti-competitive practices designed to penalise their rivals, most use various accounting mechanisms to avoid taxation in order to boost their profits, and almost all have cosy relationships with local and national governments, which often allow them to access preferential treatment denied to their competitors.15 States stood by as these companies became ever more powerful, often providing them with subsidies, turning a blind eye to regulatory arbitrage and competing with one another to attract their investment. As the coronavirus pandemic has deepened, the big tech companies have emerged as some of the greatest beneficiaries. Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet, Amazon and Facebook now make up a fifth of the entire value of the S&P 500 Index, and Jeff Bezos is on track to become the world’s first trillionaire.16 Part of the reason these companies’ stocks are doing so well is that their business models, to varying extents, render them immune from the impact of the virus-induced lockdown. Given that they provide many of their services and sell many of their products online, most have not seen a fall in sales.


pages: 538 words: 147,612

All the Money in the World by Peter W. Bernstein

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, book value, call centre, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, clean tech, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, currency peg, David Brooks, Donald Trump, estate planning, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, George Gilder, high net worth, invisible hand, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Marc Andreessen, Martin Wolf, Maui Hawaii, means of production, mega-rich, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Norman Mailer, PageRank, Peter Singer: altruism, pez dispenser, popular electronics, Quicken Loans, Renaissance Technologies, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, school vouchers, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, shareholder value, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, SoftBank, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech baron, tech billionaire, Teledyne, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, traveling salesman, urban planning, wealth creators, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

The Vegas Old Guard said it would never work. But it did. * * * How long it takes to make a billion… It took casino mogul Sheldon Adelson eleven years (counting from when he moved to Las Vegas and started taking bets) to make his first billion, almost four times as long as it took Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. …and what can happen next In the two years after Sheldon Adelson took his Las Vegas Sands public, he got rich faster than anyone else in history, according to Forbes—making just under $1 million an hour. Here’s a rough look at the moneymaking performance of some billionaires during the first two years their companies were publicly owned

At the end of the millennium, conservative author and commentator Dinesh D’Souza argued that the middle-class yearnings of the new rich were more than just a social pose—that they reflected a genuine conflict in their psyche. “Theirs is not old wealth85 that has marinated over the generations and has come to seem natural and inevitable to its possessors,” he wrote in Forbes. “Many like Gates, [Jeff] Bezos [founder of online retailer Amazon] and [Eric] Schmidt [CEO of Google], grew up in the middle class. Applying bourgeois values like ambition and hard work, they became wealthy. They want to enjoy their wealth, but they don’t want to lose their middle-class self-image. The new rich know they’re doing well, but they also want to feel like they’re doing good…and they desperately want to raise their children with the values that helped them get where they are.”

It’s hardly surprising that the number of American fortunes of staggering magnitude that have been diluted in the past twenty-five years far exceeds those whose heirs are still on the Forbes 400 list. * * * 2000 from the pages of Forbes Ted Turner, founder of CNN, advocates prairie dog rights and tours his extensive land holdings out West in a Chevy Suburban emblazoned with a SAVE THE HUMANS bumper sticker. (2000 net worth: $9.1 billion) Amazon’s Jeff Bezos reads the Declaration of Independence to himself every Fourth of July. (2000 net worth: $4.7 billion) William Cook, who made his fortune from medical devices such as catheters and stents, is a former Chicago cabbie and onetime tour-bus driver for John Mellencamp. (2000 net worth: $1.1 billion) Ernest Gallo of Gallo wine kayaked on a trip to Turkey with his family—at age ninety. (2000 net worth: $800 million) * * * Perhaps the most immediate question facing second and third generations of inherited wealth is this: How does an heir who will inherit such a vast sum of money keep his or her feet on the ground?


pages: 661 words: 156,009

Your Computer Is on Fire by Thomas S. Mullaney, Benjamin Peters, Mar Hicks, Kavita Philip

"Susan Fowler" uber, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, An Inconvenient Truth, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, British Empire, business cycle, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, dark matter, data science, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital divide, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, fake news, financial innovation, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, game design, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Grace Hopper, hiring and firing, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Landlord’s Game, Lewis Mumford, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Multics, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, off-the-grid, old-boy network, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, postindustrial economy, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Salesforce, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart cities, Snapchat, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, telepresence, the built environment, the map is not the territory, Thomas L Friedman, TikTok, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, Y2K

One of the rare dot-com-era startups that survived beyond its infancy, Amazon leveraged its early success in its intended market space (book sales) into broader dominance in electronic retail more generally. Amazon is not only the largest of the top tech firms in both revenue and market value, but it competes successfully with traditional retail giants like Walmart.1 On any given day, its founder and CEO Jeff Bezos stands as the richest man in America (on the other days he is second only to Bill Gates, who will no doubt also demand a chapter of his own in our imagined future history). The carefully cultivated story of both Bezos and the firm he created perfectly captures the dominant narrative of success in the digital economy (with the sole exception that Bezos actually managed to complete his Ivy League degree).

In 2017 alone, Amazon shipped more than five billion packages via its Prime subscription service.3 To accomplish this, Amazon has constructed more than 329 distribution centers in the United States, and another 380 worldwide.4 These include massive, million-square-foot warehouses like that in Tracy, California, as well as smaller, more specialized sorting and delivery stations.5 For delivery between its various facilities, Amazon relies on fleets of company-owned or leased vehicles.6 For the so-called last mile, it relies (for the moment, at least) on delivery services like UPS or FedEx and—on extraordinarily favorable terms—the United States Post Office.7 In order to further reduce its costs, Amazon has been developing an Uber-like system called Amazon Flex to further “disrupt” its dependence on third-party carriers.8 And famously (and prematurely, perhaps perpetually), Amazon has announced plans to implement entirely automated drone delivery.9 In its focus on the control and consolidation of transportation and distribution networks, Amazon resembles yet another of the early-twentieth-century corporate giants, namely Standard Oil (see fig. 1.1).10 Although Standard Oil’s dominance of the oil industry was due in part to its monopolistic consolidation of refineries, it was equally enabled by the firm’s secret manipulation of the railroad network. Like Jeff Bezos, John D. Rockefeller recognized the value of vertical integration and the necessity of access to and control over critical infrastructure. Such integration is only ever in part a technological accomplishment, and it requires social, political, and financial innovation. In this respect, the continuity between the industrial-era giants and the “Big Five” tech firms (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) is all the more apparent.

The deployment of these AI technologies has been brought to greater scrutiny by scholars like computer scientists Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru, whose research on facial-recognition software’s misidentification of women and people of color found that commercial technologies—from IBM to Microsoft or Face++—failed to recognize the faces of women of color, and have a statistically significant error rate in the recognition of brown skin tones.22 Buolamwini even raised her concerns about Amazon’s Rekognition and its inaccuracy in detecting women of color to CEO Jeff Bezos.23 Drones and other robotic devices are all embedded with these politics that are anything but neutral and objective. Their deployment in a host of social contexts where they are charged with predicting and reporting on human behavior raises important new questions about the degree to which we surrender aspects of our social organization to such devices.


pages: 366 words: 94,209

Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity by Douglas Rushkoff

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business process, buy and hold, buy low sell high, California gold rush, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, centralized clearinghouse, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate personhood, corporate raider, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, Firefox, Flash crash, full employment, future of work, gamification, Garrett Hardin, gentrification, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global village, Google bus, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, impulse control, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, loss aversion, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, medical bankruptcy, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, power law, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software patent, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, TaskRabbit, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Future of Employment, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transportation-network company, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, young professional, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Amazon’s patented recommendation engines attempt to drive our human selection process. Amazon Mechanical Turks gave computers the ability to mete out repetitive tasks to legions of human drones. The computers did the thinking and choosing; the people pointed and clicked as they were instructed or induced to do. Neither Amazon nor its founder, Jeff Bezos, is slipping to new lows here. The company is simply operating true to the core program of corporatism, expressed through new digital means. Amazingly, as of this writing, anyway, Amazon itself operates at a loss. Its share price is the only thing that’s going up, currently sustaining a market cap of over $150 billion.30 But in a deeper sense, this means the corporate program is working perfectly: all the value is being accumulated in the investors’ shares, which are still going up.

Making matters worse, remember, in a successful corporate environment total economic activity decreases as money is sucked up into share value. It’s as if the business world is morphing into a video game. We can only wonder who the eventual winner of the growth game will be as the Gini number creeps upward toward one. Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos . . . ? They’re playing in a winner-takes-all competition. Google is trying to leverage its platform monopoly to become a shopping platform, Facebook is leveraging its monopoly in social media to become an advertising service, and Amazon is leveraging its store to become a cloud service. In the corporate program, there’s only room for one.


pages: 345 words: 92,849

Equal Is Unfair: America's Misguided Fight Against Income Inequality by Don Watkins, Yaron Brook

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Apple II, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, blue-collar work, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial deregulation, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, inventory management, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, obamacare, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, profit motive, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Uber for X, urban renewal, War on Poverty, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

If you have a fulfilling productive purpose, however, and if you give careful thought to how best to use the money you earn to achieve your well-being, then the more money the better. This remains true even in cases in which people earn more than they could ever spend on their own personal consumption. Noting that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s estimated fortune amounted to $22 billion, columnist R. J. Eskow wrote, “That’s a lot of net worth for one individual. Granted, Bezos is much smarter than most of his peers. He’s got skills and he’s worked hard. Why shouldn’t he be rich? It’s the American way, after all. But does he need to be that rich?”

They assume that there are such things as economic classes, which are made up of essentially similar people with a coherent set of interests—interests that clash with those of other economic classes. But what did a visionary CEO like Steve Jobs have in common with a con man like Bernie Madoff besides the fact that both had a lot of money? What do the right-leaning Koch brothers have in common with the left-leaning George Soros? What does an innovator like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos have in common with the political favor-seeking CEO of GE, Jeffrey Immelt? How do the interests of a young, ambitious, and poor Sam Walton clash with the interests of an older, ambitious, and successful Sam Walton? The highest-earning Americans are a diverse group of men and women with different beliefs, motives, virtues, faults, and achievements.


pages: 299 words: 91,839

What Would Google Do? by Jeff Jarvis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, business process, call centre, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, clean water, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, different worldview, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, don't be evil, Dunbar number, fake news, fear of failure, Firefox, future of journalism, G4S, Golden age of television, Google Earth, Googley, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, old-boy network, PageRank, peer-to-peer lending, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, search inside the book, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Zipcar

That is why they are so successful and powerful, running what The Times of London dubbed “the fastest growing company in the history of the world.” The same is true of a few disruptive capitalists and quasi-capitalists such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook; Craig Newmark, who calls himself founder and customer service representative—no joke—at craigslist; Jimmy Wales, cofounder of Wikipedia; Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon; and Kevin Rose, creator of Digg. They see a different world than the rest of us and make different decisions as a result, decisions that make no sense under old rules of old industries that are now blown apart thanks to these new ways and new thinkers. That is why the smart response to all this change is to ask what these disrupters—what Mark, Craig, Jimmy, Jeff, Kevin, and, of course, Google—would do.

It is one-size-fits-all and can’t be adapted to the needs of each customer. It comes with no ability to click for more. It can’t be searched or forwarded. It has no archive. It kills trees. It uses energy. And you really should recycle it, though that’s a pain. Print sucks. Stuff sucks. So who wants stuff? Not Amazon. Yes, Jeff Bezos built a great company around selling things: books, gadgets, hardware, almost anything that can be delivered to our door. Just as Craig Newmark of craigslist is blamed (unfairly) for driving a stake through the heart of papers, Bezos is blamed for crippling bookstores, with independent outlets dying and even chains suffering.


pages: 323 words: 90,868

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Meanwhile, alongside the old businesses attempting to use new technology to make their existing practices more efficient, brand new businesses pop up and try to use newly available technology to try radical new approaches to old problems. While some legacy retailers adopt bar codes and software that can track inventory and keep tabs on consumer purchases, Jeff Bezos founds Amazon. As both sorts of firms experiment with new approaches, complementary businesses form or evolve in anticipation of retailers’ needs: logistics businesses focused on warehousing and freight, or product sellers keen to take advantage of online marketplaces. These repeated cycles of experimentation with new technologies, and of adaptation among firms, workers and consumers, generate the lag between the appearance of an innovation and observed gains in productivity or striking changes in lifestyles.

For one thing, early employees in a start-up are often paid in equity, which means that they have a direct ownership stake in the creation of social capital. For another, founders are building culture out of nothing, or nearly nothing, and often giving everything they have to do it. At the same time, cultures cannot be built by diktat, no matter how dedicated the founder. Jeff Bezos may be a single-minded, irresistible force, but Amazon culture cannot be sustained without the buy-in of the workers, and once the number of employees grows beyond a close inner circle, culture becomes open-source code, constantly rewritten and edited by the people who live within it. What is more, those who own equity in a firm are able to capture a share of the returns from social capital even after they leave the company, so long as they maintain their ownership stake.


pages: 374 words: 89,725

A More Beautiful Question: The Power of Inquiry to Spark Breakthrough Ideas by Warren Berger

Airbnb, carbon footprint, Clayton Christensen, clean water, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, food desert, Google X / Alphabet X, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Kickstarter, late fees, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, Thomas L Friedman, Toyota Production System, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y Combinator, Zipcar

Many businesspeople seemed to be aware, on some level, of a link between questioning and innovation. They understood that great products, companies, even industries, often begin with a question. It’s well-known that Google, as described by its chairman, is a company that “runs on questions,”2 and that business stars such as the late Steve Jobs of Apple and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos made their mark by questioning everything. Yet, as I began to explore this subject within the business sector, I found few companies that actually encouraged questioning in any substantive way. There were no departments or training programs focused on questioning; no policies, guidelines, best practices.

And what a track record Montessori has. Today, so many former students of this private-school system (which only teaches as high as eighth grade) are now running major companies in the tech sector that these alumni have become known as the Montessori Mafia.24 Their ranks include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and the cofounders of Google, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. (The former Google executive Marissa Mayer—now the head of Yahoo!25—has said that Brin’s and Page’s Montessori schooling, though long ago, remained a defining influence. “You can’t understand Google unless you know that Larry and Sergey were both Montessori kids,” according to Mayer.


Alpha Girls: The Women Upstarts Who Took on Silicon Valley's Male Culture and Made the Deals of a Lifetime by Julian Guthrie

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Bob Noyce, call centre, cloud computing, credit crunch, deal flow, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, game design, Gary Kildall, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, information security, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Louis Pasteur, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, new economy, PageRank, peer-to-peer, pets.com, phenotype, place-making, private spaceflight, retail therapy, ROLM, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Susan Wojcicki, TaskRabbit, Teledyne, Tim Cook: Apple, Timothy McVeigh, Travis Kalanick, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, UUNET, web application, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce

For Magdalena, singling out another woman in Silicon Valley would be like embracing a fellow Armenian on the beach in Istanbul just because she was Armenian. It was irrelevant. As the pitch ended, Magdalena realized that reluctance hung in the air. The VCs had more questions than answers. But she knew that everything about CyberCash was unique, and that usage of the World Wide Web was exploding. She had talked recently with a man named Jeff Bezos, who months earlier had quit his job on Wall Street to launch an online bookstore called Amazon out of his garage, thanks to funding from his parents. Magdalena made it clear to the Menlo group that she and Dan would be talking with other VCs, including Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers just up the road, and that they had interest from a number of companies, including Intel.

Uber enables point-to-point public transport using existing resources and creating jobs.” She was relentless this time in sharing her views of the importance of the company. Menlo succeeded in landing a deal with Uber and led the Series B investment with $26 million of the $39 million round. (Other Series B investors included Jeff Bezos and Goldman Sachs.) Around the same time, Sonja helped engineer the sale of one of her earlier investments, Q1 Labs, to IBM. Q1 had been preparing to go public when it was acquired, and it extracted a hefty purchase price. Sonja had been on Q1’s board since 2003. She had also made investments in Flurry, a mobile analytics company, and in Minted, an online marketplace for independent artists and designers, which was started by one of her favorite entrepreneurs, Mariam Naficy, who had co-founded Eve, the first major online cosmetics company.


Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump and the Erosion of America by Sarah Kendzior

4chan, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, Carl Icahn, Chelsea Manning, Columbine, corporate raider, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Golden arches theory, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, payday loans, plutocrats, public intellectual, QAnon, Robert Hanssen: Double agent, Ronald Reagan, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, unpaid internship, white flight, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero-sum game

In February 1999, the National Enquirer had been purchased by a new conglomerate which put longtime Trump lackey David Pecker at the helm. Pecker is now known for his “catch and kill” operation to prevent damning stories from reaching the public, a project he conducted with Trump lawyer Michael Cohen. He is also known for his threats toward US opponents of Trump, most notably Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who maintained that Pecker had targeted him in an extortion scheme in possible collaboration with the Saudi government after the murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi.65 The National Enquirer were very much Trump’s people—powerful elites who make threats and tell lies and market it as populism and hidden truths.

Says a Man at the Top,” New York Times, September 25, 1999, https://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/25/nyregion/president-why-not-says-a-man-at-the-top.html?. 65.   David Smith, “Trump, ‘Blackmail’ and a Pecker: Bezos Delivers Scandal with Something for Everyone,” The Guardian, February 9, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/feb/09/jeff-bezos-trump-national-enquirer-amazon-david-pecker. 66.   Sue Curry Jansen, “How Western PR Firms Quietly Push Putin’s Agenda,” Fast Company, July 1, 2017, https://www.fastcompany.com/40437170/russia-quiet-public-relations-war. 67.   Lachlan Markey, “Ex-Trump Aide Michael Caputo Scrambles to Scrub Russia from Bio,” Daily Beast, November 6, 2017, https://www.thedailybeast.com/ex-trump-aide-frantically-scrambles-to-scrub-russia-from-bio. 68.   


pages: 420 words: 94,064

The Revolution That Wasn't: GameStop, Reddit, and the Fleecing of Small Investors by Spencer Jakab

4chan, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Swan, book value, buy and hold, classic study, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, democratizing finance, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, fake news, family office, financial innovation, gamification, global macro, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Bogle, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, meme stock, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, passive investing, payment for order flow, Pershing Square Capital Management, pets.com, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Renaissance Technologies, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Saturday Night Live, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Vision Fund, WeWork, zero-sum game

Just as he was preparing to launch the venture with his partner, Cohen went to a pet store to find some healthful food for his poodle and had an epiphany—he was passionate about animals and the industry was huge. “So although we were only a week away from launching the jewelry business, we pivoted. We sold all the rings, necklaces, and bracelets—and the safe—and started learning everything we could about the pet industry,” wrote Cohen.[1] His inspirations were Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, and the late Tony Hsieh, who started the customer-obsessed online shoe retailer Zappos. Chewy matched prices found elsewhere, but it spent far more on support for “pet parents” than competitors, employing a whole team to send out cards expressing condolences when a pet died.

At the peak of the meme-stock frenzy, progressive New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, known as AOC, invited Palihapitiya to a conversation on the live streaming platform Twitch. It fell through because of scheduling issues, but one wonders whether the talk would have been friendly or icy. She has called out rich men, including JPMorgan Chase chief executive officer Jamie Dimon and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in the past. “No one ever makes a billion dollars. They take a billion dollars,” AOC said in a conversation with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in January 2020. A year earlier, also in a discussion with Coates, she said a society that “allows billionaires to exist” while others live in poverty is “immoral.”[9] Even seventy-one-year-old Wall Street hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio, clearly disturbed by the vitriol against the well-to-do, seemed to attempt to endear himself to the crowd.


pages: 301 words: 90,276

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

The knowledge capitalists among them are weaned on the dogma of problem-solving, so they are inclined to believe that their market innovations can produce solutions even to social challenges like the housing crisis. Yet the fledgling stabs at housing by California’s tech mavens are neither innovative nor effective, let alone “disruptive” in the sense lionized by Silicon Valley culture. The same goes for personal philanthropy, such as the Day One Fund created by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos in the wake of bad publicity generated by Amazon’s hostility to the Seattle head tax. Among other causes, the $2 billion fund donates to charities combating homelessness; one of its grants was a $5.25 million donation to the Homeless Services Network of Central Florida in November 2019. However, the funding came with strings attached.44 The money can only be used to help the “literally homeless,” those in shelters or on the streets.

But this arrangement typically gave the employer far too much control over employees’ lives (as would have been the case in the ur-EPCOT company town). So, too, the temptation to capture their wages at the company store proved irresistible. See Margaret Crawford, Building the Worker’s Paradise: The Design of American Company Towns (New York: Verso, 1995). 44.  William Feuer, “Jeff Bezos’ Day One Fund Gives $98.5 Million to 32 Groups Helping the Homeless,” CNBC, November 21, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/21/bezos-day-one-fund-gives-98point5-million-to-groups-helping-the-homeless.html. CHAPTER 6: WALL STREET COMES TO TOWN   1.  According to Richard Foglesong, the housing assistance funds benefited only seventy-seven people and only seven of them were low-income: Married to the Mouse: Walt Disney World and Orlando, p. 162.   2.  


pages: 94 words: 26,453

The End of Nice: How to Be Human in a World Run by Robots (Kindle Single) by Richard Newton

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Black Swan, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, crowdsourcing, deliberate practice, digital divide, disruptive innovation, fail fast, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, future of work, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Isaac Newton, James Dyson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, lolcat, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Paul Erdős, Paul Graham, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, social intelligence, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Tyler Cowen, Y Combinator

In some examples this signals enormous amounts of grit, and there seems to be a correlation between the disagreeableness of some legendary entrepreneurs and their success. Steve Jobs was famous for his prickliness, Bill Gates threw tantrums, Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer threw chairs, Andy Grove of Intel was so fierce that a subordinate fainted during a performance review, and Jeff Bezos is known for going into rages that his Amazon colleagues call “nutters”. According to a biography, Bezos’ notable put-downs include: “I’m sorry, did I forget to take my stupid pills today?”; “If I hear that idea again I’m gonna have to kill myself”; and the straightforward “Why are you wasting my life?”


pages: 102 words: 27,769

Rework by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

call centre, Clayton Christensen, Dean Kamen, Exxon Valdez, fault tolerance, fixed-gear, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, Steve Jobs, Tony Hsieh, Y Combinator

We also want to thank our families, our customers, and everyone at 37signals. And here’s a list of some of the people we know, and don’t know, who have inspired us in one way or another: Frank Lloyd Wright Seth Godin Warren Buffett Jamie Larson Clayton Christensen Ralph Nader Jim Coudal Benjamin Franklin Ernest Kim Jeff Bezos Scott Heiferman Antoni Gaudi Carlos Segura Larry David Steve Jobs Dean Kamen Bill Maher Thomas Jefferson Mies van der Rohe Ricardo Semler Christopher Alexander James Dyson Kent Beck Thomas Paine Gerald Weinberg Kathy Sierra Julia Child Marc Hedlund Nicholas Karavites Michael Jordan Richard Bird Jeffrey Zeldman Dieter Rams Judith Sheindlin Ron Paul Timothy Ferriss Copyright © 2010 by 37signals, LLC.


pages: 317 words: 100,414

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip Tetlock, Dan Gardner

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, availability heuristic, behavioural economics, Black Swan, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, cognitive load, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, drone strike, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, forward guidance, Freestyle chess, fundamental attribution error, germ theory of disease, hindsight bias, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, index fund, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, operational security, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, scientific worldview, Silicon Valley, Skype, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, tail risk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!

But—and it is a very big ‘but’—we do not tell them how to achieve those goals.”25 That is a near-perfect summary of “mission command.” The speaker is William Coyne, who was senior vice president of research and development at 3M, the famously innovative manufacturing conglomerate. “Have backbone; disagree and commit” is one of Jeff Bezos’s fourteen leadership principles drilled into every new employee at Amazon. It continues: “Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion.

Tetlock, “Social Functionalist Frameworks for Judgment and Choice: Intuitive Politicians, Theologians, and Prosecutors,” Psychological Review 109, no. 3 (2002): 451–471. 25. 3M Company, A Century of Innovation: The 3M Story (St. Paul, MN: 3M Company, 2002), p. 156. 26. Drake Baer, “5 Brilliant Strategies Jeff Bezos Used to Build the Amazon Empire,” Business Insider, March 17, 2014. 27. Andrew Hill, “Business Lessons from the Front Line,” Financial Times, October 8, 2012. 28. Maxine Boersma, “Interview: ‘Company Leaders Need Battlefield Values’,” Financial Times, April 10, 2013. 29. Stephen Ambrose, Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990), p. 267. 30.


pages: 326 words: 103,170

The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo

air gap, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, British Empire, cloud computing, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deep learning, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Firefox, Google Chrome, growth hacking, Herman Kahn, income inequality, information security, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joi Ito, Laura Poitras, machine translation, market bubble, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, Morris worm, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, packet switching, paperclip maximiser, Paul Graham, power law, price stability, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Sand Hill Road, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social web, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Vernor Vinge, zero day

That ten-millennium span was not accidentally chosen. Civilization, when Hillis began his work on the clock, had been around about that long already. We were, as he pictured it, at a midpoint on that twenty-thousand-year stretch of time. Hillis and the group of tinkerers, thinkers, and engineers who had backed the clock—people such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, spreadsheet inventor Mitch Kapor, and investor Esther Dyson—were planning on a project that would endure as close to eternity as they felt reasonable. The Clock of the Long Now, they called it. I remember pulling into Danny’s driveway in Encino one afternoon as he prepared to depart for the backcountry and being struck by the contrast between the lovely, inoffensive suburban blandness of Southern California and the tools he was taking with him to make an assault not merely on a mountain but on a whole conception of time.

He was waving the credentials of a man who had been living in the virtual cyber-neighborhood of Web connections from its very first days. He is as close to a native of the connected, fiber-optic, light-speed world as you can find. All the names supporting the clock smelled similarly of burning electrons: Jeff Bezos had built Amazon into a high-speed marketplace whose backbone is the Web itself. Another backer, Mitch Kapor, had cracked apart several centuries of slow accounting habits when, in 1983, he created Lotus 1-2-3, the first successful computer spreadsheet program. It helped executives to see and change their whole business one keystroke at a time—which they promptly did.


Interplanetary Robots by Rod Pyle

Apollo 11, autonomous vehicles, Elon Musk, independent contractor, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Pierre-Simon Laplace, Pluto: dwarf planet, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, X Prize

Team Hakuto recently signed a tentative agreement for SpaceX to launch their spacecraft in 2020 or 2021, for example.4 There are many other companies and organizations exploring the development of the moon beyond the finalists of the GLXP. Prominent among them is Blue Origin, the innovative private aerospace company created by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Blue Origin has been in existence since 2000, and has developed and flown its reusable New Shepard rocket eight times, with great success. In 2017, the company announced that it was exploring a new project it called Blue Moon, a planned robotic cargo lander that would fly to the moon aboard the company's much larger rocket, the New Glenn.

We still have a long way to go—including that elusive first sample to be returned from another planet—but that achievement may not be far off. Besides the armada of government spacecraft that have reconnoitered every corner of the solar system, private entrepreneurs are getting into the game. Elon Musk's company SpaceX has proven its ability to build and fly reusable rockets at a blistering pace, and Jeff Bezos, of Amazon fame, owns and operates Blue Origin, a company that is building a pair of rocket designs that will go into commercial operations in the next few years. Musk is currently building his Big Falcon Rocket, a massive machine—potentially more capable than even NASA's Saturn V moon rocket—with which he hopes to send people to the moon and Mars by the mid-2020s.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

Pages from Wikipedia dominate Google search results, making the operation, which dubs itself “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” a primary source of information for millions of people. (Do a Google search for “monkeys,” “Azerbaijan,” “mass spectrometry,” or “Jesus,” and the first hit will be from Wikipedia.) Although he insists he isn’t a “rich guy” and doesn’t have “rich guy hobbies,” when pressed Wales admits to hobnobbing with other geek elites, such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and hanging out on Virgin CEO Richard Branson’s private island. (The only available estimate of Wales’s net worth comes from a now-removed section of his own Wikipedia entry, pinning his fortune at less than $1 million.) Scruffy in a gray mock turtleneck and a closely cropped beard, the forty-year-old Wales plays it low-key.

Amazon and Wikia have not integrated their services, but Wales has not ruled out the possibility of cooperation at a later date, spurring not entirely tongue-in-cheek rumors of a joint Wikipedia-Amazon takeover of the Web. The site plans to make money by showing a few well-targeted, well-placed ads to massive numbers of community members and users. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (a supporter of Reason Foundation, the nonprofit that publishes this magazine) has spoken enviously of Wikipedia’s collaborative model, expressed his regret that Amazon’s user reviews aren’t more like wikis, and credited Wikipedia with having “cracked the code for user-generated content.” Bezos “really drove this deal personally,” Wales says, adding that he was in the enviable position of vetting potential investors.


pages: 349 words: 98,868

Nervous States: Democracy and the Decline of Reason by William Davies

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, Colonization of Mars, continuation of politics by other means, creative destruction, credit crunch, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, digital divide, discovery of penicillin, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, first-past-the-post, Frank Gehry, gig economy, government statistician, housing crisis, income inequality, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Johannes Kepler, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, post-industrial society, post-truth, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, the scientific method, Turing machine, Uber for X, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, W. E. B. Du Bois, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Once knowledge is valued for the competitive advantages it provides, the scientific ideal of public consensus on facts evaporates. Instead, truth and intelligence are things to be hoarded and exploited to the maximum. Business starts to take on the air of a military campaign, in which subterfuge and deception are key weapons, and the aim is to destroy rivals in the field. In Thiel’s eyes world-changing founders, such as Jeff Bezos of Amazon or Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, are willing to exploit their secret to its ultimate conclusion, to the point of destroying all competition. If monopoly seems unfair or threatening, as economists and regulators have traditionally argued, Thiel’s answer is brutal: “competition is for losers.”

These latter-day Napoleons have proved themselves stronger and more adaptable than the rest, and their vast wealth is testimony to that. By 2018, half of the world’s wealth was in the hands of just forty-two people, representing a degree of wealth concentration not seen since the early twentieth century.26 Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and the world’s richest man, now makes several times more every minute than the average American makes in a year. Today, private families and private companies (including hedge funds and private equity funds) control assets and money on a scale that, for most of the twentieth century, was only available to corporations listed on the stock market, which placed certain fiduciary duties and transparency upon the managers.


pages: 320 words: 95,629

Decoding the World: A Roadmap for the Questioner by Po Bronson

23andMe, 3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, altcoin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon tax, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Donald Trump, driverless car, dumpster diving, edge city, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, factory automation, fake news, financial independence, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, income inequality, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mars Rover, mass immigration, McMansion, means of production, microbiome, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, quantum entanglement, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, source of truth, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, sustainable-tourism, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, trade route, universal basic income, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

Nations were worried how they were going to feed themselves, or how they were going to compete with China’s scientific power. And so they came to IndieBio to learn, to look, perhaps to be inspired. IndieBio became one of the favorite stops on the corporate tourism itineraries. Pretty soon Bill Gates had invested, and Jeff Bezos had invested. Celebrities came for special, private visits—but were treated no differently. At first IndieBio was known for saving-the-planet stuff. But then they started moving into other industries, including ones close to the Valley’s pockets. One company got onstage and basically told the computer industry that they’d been doing it wrong for decades.

Aaron VanDevender, Adam D’Augelli, Adam Draper, Adam Reineck, Alaa Saleh Halawa, Alan Boehme, Alan Chang, Alexander Kamb, Alex Lorestani, Amy Muhl, Andrew Hessel, Armen Vidian, Asish Xavier, Augustin Ku, Bill Gates, Bob Nelson, Brian Cork, Brian Schreier, Bruce Freidrich, Bruce Jenett, Bryan Chang, Calvin Nguyen, Celestine Johnson, Charly Chalawan, Clem Fortman, Cooper Rinzler, Costa Yiannoulis, Dan Phillips, Dan Widmaier, Dana White, David Friedberg, David Helgason, Dariush Mozaffarian, Darrin Crisitello, David Aycan, David Eagleman, Drew Endy, Dror Berman, Dylan Morris, Ela Madej, Elad Gil, Elliot Waldron, Eric Scott, Erik Moga, Francisco Gimenez, George Church, Gopi Punukollu, Harsh Patel, Hemant Taneja, Howard Shultz, Ian Rountree, Isabella Maria Jonsdottir, Jim Collins, Jake Moritz, Jason Camm, Jason Okutake, Jenny Rooke, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Harbach, Jennifer Cochran, Jennifer Doudna, Jeremy Kranz, Jerry Zeldis, Joe Luttwak, John Cumbers, John Yu, Josko Bobanovic, Jude Gomila, Kevin Hartz, Khaled Alwaleed, Kinkead Reiling, Laura Smoliar, Leonardo Teixeira, Lior Susan, Lisa Rich, Maria Gotsch, Maria Mitchell, Maria Soloveychik, Mary Wheeler, Mark Goldstein, Matias Mosse, Matias Muchnik, Matías Peire, Matias Viel, Matt Ocko, Melinda Gates, Michael Moritz, Michael Aberman, Mira Chaurushiya, Nabeel Hyatt, Nick Rosa, Nico Berman, Oleg Nodelman, Paolo Riauto, Paul Graham, Peter Kim, Reid Hoffman, Ricardo Gomes, Richard Branson, Roger Wyse, Rohan and Taj, Rohit Sharma, Ron Shigeta, Rosie Wardle, Ryan Bethencourt, Scott Banister, Scott Nolan, Seth Bannon, Shahin Farshchi, Shirl Buss, Solina Chau, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Kim, Steinnun Hjartar, Steve Sanger, Taylor Sittler, Tim Brown, Tim Draper, Timothy Lu, Tom Aiello, Tom Baruch, Tom Chi, Tony Envin, Uma Valeti, Victoria Slivkoff, Vijay Pande, Vinod Khosla and Whitney Mortimer.


Forward: Notes on the Future of Our Democracy by Andrew Yang

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Amazon Web Services, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, basic income, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, blue-collar work, call centre, centre right, clean water, contact tracing, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, data is the new oil, data science, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, facts on the ground, fake news, forensic accounting, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, medical bankruptcy, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pez dispenser, QAnon, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, surveillance capitalism, systematic bias, tech billionaire, TED Talk, The Day the Music Died, the long tail, TikTok, universal basic income, winner-take-all economy, working poor

Because each company is responsible for paying taxes on the value it adds to a product, each company has an incentive to prevent other companies from cheating the system. You could dial down the VAT on consumer staples, like food and diapers, to avoid hurting middle-class consumers, and dial it up on luxury goods, like yachts and artificial intelligence. I said this to people on the trail: “Jeff Bezos is worth more than $150 billion. Let’s say I raised the income tax to something very high, like 75 percent. How much of his money do we see?” They think about it for a second. “Next to nothing. Because he’s not dumb enough to pay himself $10 billion in salary. Instead, most of his wealth is in Amazon stock, and Amazon currently pays zero in federal taxes.”

The CPB has zero editorial input to the hundreds of local PBS and NPR stations in terms of their programming. It’s possible to provide public financing to local news organizations from afar and let them manage programming independently. In the last decade, another trend in the media has emerged. Big legacy media organizations have been getting gobbled up by tech billionaires. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post. Marc Benioff owns Time magazine. Laurene Powell Jobs effectively owns The Atlantic through her foundation. Major legacy publications have become trophy acquisitions for technology titans who don’t like sports. Media ownership is changing whether the public likes it or not; it is better to understand and address it than to pretend that nothing has changed.


pages: 121 words: 31,813

The Art of Execution: How the World's Best Investors Get It Wrong and Still Make Millions by Lee Freeman-Shor

Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Black Swan, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, diversified portfolio, family office, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, index fund, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Pershing Square Capital Management, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Skype, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, tulip mania, world market for maybe five computers, zero-sum game

Clues from the Forbes rich list Having discovered that one half of the secret to making money, even if we are wrong most of the time, is to ride your winners in size, I now look at the Forbes rich list in a new light. Previously, I would look at it and think, “Why didn’t I think of that?” Or, “He must be a genius.” For example, at the time of writing, Jeff Bezos at a relatively youthful age of 49 is ranked as the 18th richest person on the planet, with a net worth of $25bn. That makes him richer than the entire economies of Paraguay and Jamaica. How did Jeff become so fabulously wealthy? The popular story told by mainstream media is that he became rich because he founded Amazon, which has grown from being a humble online book store to the world’s largest online retailer.


pages: 116 words: 31,356

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

This process pushes knowledge workers out and often enables the automation of their work as well. Data analysis, storage of customer information, maintenance of a company’s servers – all of this can be pushed to the cloud and provides the capitalist rationale for using these platforms. The logic behind them is akin to how utilities function. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive officer, compares it to electricity provision: whereas early factories had each its own power generator, eventually electricity generation became centralised and rented out on an ‘as needed’ basis. Today every area of the economy is increasingly integrated with a digital layer; therefore owning the infrastructure that is necessary to every other industry is an immensely powerful and profitable position to be in.


pages: 117 words: 30,538

It Doesn't Have to Be Crazy at Work by Jason Fried, David Heinemeier Hansson

8-hour work day, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Community Supported Agriculture, content marketing, David Heinemeier Hansson, Jeff Bezos, market design, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Silicon Valley, solopreneur, Stephen Hawking, web application

They’re always going to be the product of consultation, evidence, arguments, and debate. But the only sustainable method in business is to have them made by individuals. Someone in charge has to make the final call, even if others would prefer a different decision. Good decisions don’t so much need consensus as they need commitment. Jeff Bezos put it well in his 2017 letter to shareholders: I disagree and commit all the time. We recently greenlit a particular Amazon Studios original. I told the team my view: debatable whether it would be interesting enough, complicated to produce, the business terms aren’t that good, and we have lots of other opportunities.


pages: 120 words: 33,892

The Acquirer's Multiple: How the Billionaire Contrarians of Deep Value Beat the Market by Tobias E. Carlisle

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, corporate raider, Jeff Bezos, Mark Spitznagel, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Richard Thaler, shareholder value, stock buybacks, tail risk, Tim Cook: Apple

If you wait for 90 percent, in most cases, you’re probably being slow. Plus, either way, you need to be good at quickly recognizing and correcting bad decisions. If you’re good at course correcting, being wrong may be less costly than you think, whereas being slow is going to be expensive for sure.” —Jeff Bezos, “Shareholder Letter” (2017) How do we look past the falling stock prices, the losses, and the crisis? We know undervalued stocks beat the market. But we get stuck on the bad headlines. We want to follow the crowd far away from these stocks. Our gut fails us here. The issue is we struggle with uncertainty.


Saudi America: The Truth About Fracking and How It's Changing the World by Bethany McLean

addicted to oil, Alan Greenspan, American energy revolution, Asian financial crisis, Bear Stearns, buy and hold, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, corporate governance, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, family office, geopolitical risk, hydraulic fracturing, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, Michael Milken, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, Upton Sinclair, Yom Kippur War

In March 2011, Nucor, a big steelmaker, broke ground on a new $750 million iron plant in Louisiana. “We could change the entire manufacturing base in the U.S. if we just embrace what’s happening in natural gas,” Nucor’s then CEO, Dan DiMicco, told the Wall Street Journal. Fortunes were made. While the media focused its gaze on the high priests of technology like Amazon’s Jeff Bezos and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, unknown tycoons quietly raked in billions. A man named Terrence Pegula, who was born into a coal mining family in Pennsylvania and who majored in petroleum engineering on a scholarship, ran a struggling small time drilling operation called East Resources, which he’d started by borrowing $7,500 from family and friends.


pages: 326 words: 106,053

The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki

Alan Greenspan, AltaVista, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 13, asset allocation, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, classic study, congestion pricing, coronavirus, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, experimental economics, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Howard Rheingold, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, interchangeable parts, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, lone genius, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, market clearing, market design, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, prediction markets, profit maximization, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, tacit knowledge, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, vertical integration, world market for maybe five computers, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

American Marconi relied on investment banks to raise its capital from large private investors; NESCO was funded by two rich men from Pittsburgh; and De Forest Wireless Telegraphy was owned by small stockholders looking for a speculative gain. The variety of possible funding sources encouraged a variety of technological approaches. Of course, even with diverse sources of funding, most endeavors will end up as failures. This was nicely expressed by Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, when he compared the Internet boom to the Cambrian explosion, which was the period in evolutionary history that saw the birth and the extinction of more species than any other period. The point is that you cannot, or so at least it seems, have one without the other. It’s a familiar truism that governments can’t, and therefore shouldn’t try to, “pick winners.”

An excellent account of the waggle dance, and much else besides, can be found in Thomas Seeley, The Wisdom of the Hive (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1996). A book worth reading. Rajiv Kumar Sah and Joseph E. Stiglitz, “Human Fallibility and Economic Organization,” American Economic Review 75 (1985): 292–97. Sah and Stiglitz, “The Architecture of Economic Systems: Hierarchies and Polyarchies,” American Economic Review 76 (1986): 716–27. Jeff Bezos drew the analogy between the Cambrian explosion and the Internet in a number of places, including an interview in Business Week (September 16, 1999), http://www.businessweek.com/ebiz/9909/916bezos.htm. Scott Page describes this experiment in “Return to the Toolbox,” unpublished paper (2002). Also see Scott Page and Lu Hong, “Problem Solving by Heterogeneous Agents,” Journal of Economic Theory 97 (2001): 123–63.


pages: 416 words: 108,370

Hit Makers: The Science of Popularity in an Age of Distraction by Derek Thompson

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, always be closing, augmented reality, Clayton Christensen, data science, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Ford Model T, full employment, game design, Golden age of television, Gordon Gekko, hindsight bias, hype cycle, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, information trail, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Roose, Kodak vs Instagram, linear programming, lock screen, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, out of africa, planned obsolescence, power law, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, subscription business, TED Talk, telemarketer, the medium is the message, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Vilfredo Pareto, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, women in the workforce

Perhaps even more impressively, it holds another superlative that speaks to its global popularity: It is the most illegally downloaded show in the world. People often compare business to baseball. In both activities, one can mostly fail 70 percent of the time and still be an all-time great. But the difference between baseball and business is that baseball has what Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos cleverly called “a truncated outcome distribution.” Home runs can only be so big. In a letter to shareholders, he wrote: When you swing, no matter how well you connect with the ball, the most runs you can get is four. In business, every once in a while, when you step up to the plate, you can score 1,000 runs.

AMC didn’t need a blockbuster hit: Derek Thompson, “The Mad Men Effect: The Economics of TV’s Golden Age,” The Atlantic, April 3, 2015, www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/04/the-mad-men-effect-the-economics-of-tvs-golden-age/389504/. the most illegally downloaded show in the world: James Hibberd, “Game of Thrones Piracy Hits Record High Despite HBO’s Stand-Alone Service,” Entertainment Weekly, April 22, 2015, www.ew.com/article/2015/04/21/game-thrones-piracy-record. “When you swing”: Jeff Bezos, “Amazon Letter to Shareholders,” April 5, 2016, www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000119312516530910/d168744dex991.htm. increased subscriptions to the premium cable channel: David Zurawik and Chris Kaltenbach, “‘Sopranos’ Drives HBO Subscriber Numbers Up,” Baltimore Sun, January 19, 2000, articles.baltimoresun.com/2000-01-19/features/0001190248_1_hbo-sopranos-new-subscriptions.


pages: 375 words: 106,536

Lost at Sea by Jon Ronson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Columbine, computer age, credit crunch, Douglas Hofstadter, Downton Abbey, Dr. Strangelove, East Village, Easter island, Etonian, false memory syndrome, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, late fees, Louis Pasteur, obamacare, Peter Thiel, Saturday Night Live, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Skype, subprime mortgage crisis, telemarketer

His parents made good money from the pillow trade. After college he set up a few OK businesses, but then one day he met a girl who was dating a guy. She said, “You two are going to be friends.” The guy had a business idea. Nick loved the sound of it. He invested all the money he had in it—$45,000 cash. The guy was Jeff Bezos and the business was Amazon.com. Nick asks me about the woman beneath him on my income list. “Is Ellen a highly paid salary person?” he wonders. “Yes,” I say. “She has to go to work every day?” “Right.” “If she stops going to work, she’s out of business?” “She has a bit of money saved, but basically yes,” I say.

“While we sit here, during this charming conversation, I will make twenty-five thousand dollars,” he says. I look at Nick. “That’s terrible,” I say. Nick roars with laughter. “That’s the difference between me and her! Hahahaha!” Nick has just been holidaying in Cabo. His life is ceaselessly luxurious, and always will be, because of one insanely clever realization—that Jeff Bezos was onto something—and the smart, subsequent ways he invested his Amazon profits. “Ellen says she doesn’t want to be any richer because you’ve got problems,” I say. “People want to go on your plane. You fall asleep during conference calls.” “Hahahaha!” Nick literally slaps his thigh. “People do want to come on my plane, and my wife and I make every effort to bring everyone we can.”


pages: 370 words: 105,085

Joel on Software by Joel Spolsky

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Apple Newton, barriers to entry, Beos Apple "Steve Jobs" next macos , business logic, c2.com, commoditize, Dennis Ritchie, General Magic , George Gilder, index card, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, Mitch Kapor, Multics, Network effects, new economy, off-by-one error, PageRank, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, reality distortion field, Robert X Cringely, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, slashdot, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, thinkpad, VA Linux, web application

We had assumed that Bezos was just reinvesting the profits, that's why they weren't showing up on the bottom line. Last year, about this time, the first big dotcom failures started to hit the news. Boo.com. Toysmart.com. The Get Big Fast mentality was not working. Five hundred 31-year-olds in Dockers discovered that just copying Jeff Bezos wasn't a business plan. The past few weeks have felt oddly quiet at Fog Creek. We're finishing up CityDesk. I'd like to tell you all about CityDesk, but that will have to wait. I need to tell you about dog food. Dog food? Last month Sara Corbett told us about the Lost Boys,1 Sudanese refugees between 8 and 18 years old separated from their families and forced on a thousand-mile march from Sudan, to Ethiopia, to Sudan, to Kenya.

I'm going to call this the Ben & Jerry's model, because Ben & Jerry's fits this model pretty well. The other model, popularly called Get Big Fast (a.k.a. Land Grab), requires you to raise a lot of capital, and work as quickly as possible to get big fast without concern for profitability. I'm going to call this the Amazon model, because Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has practically become the celebrity spokesmodel for Get Big Fast. Let's look at some of the differences between these models. The first thing to ask is: Are you going into a business that has competition, or not? Ben & Jerry's Amazon Lots of established competitors New technology, no competition at first If you don't have any real competition, as with Amazon, there is a chance that you can succeed at a Land Grab—that is, get as many customers as quickly as possible so that later competitors will have a serious barrier to entry.


pages: 353 words: 104,146

European Founders at Work by Pedro Gairifo Santos

business intelligence, clean tech, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, deal flow, do what you love, fail fast, fear of failure, full text search, Hacker News, hockey-stick growth, information retrieval, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Joi Ito, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, Multics, natural language processing, pattern recognition, pre–internet, recommendation engine, Richard Stallman, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subscription business, technology bubble, TED Talk, web application, Y Combinator

People very often focus on the single or the dual founder story. The Steve Jobs/Steve Wozniak story, that then just becomes the Steve Jobs story. Or the Bill Gates/Paul Allen story that then becomes the Bill Gates story. Or the Larry Page and Sergey Brin story, which is still the Larry Page and Sergey Brin story. Or the Jeff Bezos story, which is just the Jeff Bezos story. Or the Reed Hastings story. But the reality is, before we got into the questions of how Video Island started, it's really important to understand that fundamentally no great company is ever just created by a founder. Whether it's people like your wife, your girlfriend, your boyfriend, your parents, or your sister who you bounce your initial ideas off of, or even your friends in the park, the journey between having an idea and starting a company and then building a company and selling a company is a journey that many people take together.


pages: 453 words: 111,010

Licence to be Bad by Jonathan Aldred

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, availability heuristic, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, clean water, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, Edward Snowden, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, feminist movement, framing effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, full employment, Gary Kildall, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, mandelbrot fractal, meta-analysis, Mont Pelerin Society, mutually assured destruction, Myron Scholes, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, nudge unit, obamacare, offshore financial centre, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, positional goods, power law, precautionary principle, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skinner box, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, spectrum auction, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Vilfredo Pareto, wealth creators, zero-sum game

And the further into the future some impact will occur, the more it is discounted, with a compounding effect of great power over long periods: in standard economic models with standard discount rates total global GDP in 200 years is discounted to be equivalent to around $4 billion dollars in current terms (the GDP of Togo, or just 2.5 per cent of the fortune of Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and world’s richest person in 2019). The upshot is that if we are trying to decide how much it is worth spending to prevent the destruction of the earth 200 years from now – on the basis of lost future GDP, which is just what economic models try to do – the answer would be no more than a minor dent in Jeff Bezos’s fortune. At least when applied over long time horizons, discounting seems absurd because it trivializes catastrophe in this way.


pages: 344 words: 104,522

Woke, Inc: Inside Corporate America's Social Justice Scam by Vivek Ramaswamy

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-bias training, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, critical race theory, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, defund the police, deplatforming, desegregation, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fudge factor, full employment, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, green new deal, hiring and firing, Hyperloop, impact investing, independent contractor, index fund, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Network effects, Parler "social media", plant based meat, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, random walk, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, single source of truth, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, source of truth, sovereign wealth fund, Susan Wojcicki, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Vanguard fund, Virgin Galactic, WeWork, zero-sum game

That’s exactly what allows a new class of corporate fraudsters to escape accountability from shareholders, competitors, customers, and the government all at once. The real con job on society wasn’t perpetrated by the lavish capitalists of the pre-2008 decade, but by the nouveau capitalists who got ahead by pretending to care about justice. In 2019, Amazon laudably challenged Walmart to set a $15 minimum wage for its employees. The trick? Jeff Bezos had not suddenly discovered a newfound generosity for workers; rather, he was co-opting a popular social value to undermine his longtime foe Walmart when its profitability was vulnerable. Amazon continued its act in 2020 when it pledged to donate $10 million to groups focused on aiding black communities.

Once the American public becomes “woke” to this new trend of self-interest masquerading as morality, our citizens and consumers will be able to see through the charade of corporate virtue-signaling. When Amazon issues a public challenge to Walmart to pay workers $15 per hour, we can simply chuckle to ourselves that Jeff Bezos is just doing what he does best: undermining his competitors when they’re most vulnerable. Most importantly, we can return the power to implement our social values back to American democracy where it belongs rather than allowing it to remain in the hands of corporate chieftains who are really just trying to make a buck and accrue more power.


pages: 338 words: 104,684

The Deficit Myth: Modern Monetary Theory and the Birth of the People's Economy by Stephanie Kelton

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, bond market vigilante , book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, central bank independence, collective bargaining, COVID-19, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, discrete time, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, floating exchange rates, Food sovereignty, full employment, gentrification, Gini coefficient, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, new economy, New Urbanism, Nixon shock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Phillips curve, Ponzi scheme, Post-Keynesian economics, price anchoring, price stability, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Tax Reform Act of 1986, trade liberalization, urban planning, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, zero-sum game

But we need to do it strategically, recognizing that the purpose of the tax is not to pay for government expenditures but to help us rebalance the distribution of wealth and income because the extreme concentrations that exist today are a threat to both our democracy and to the functioning of our economy. Think about it. Jeff Bezos, the richest man in America, has an estimated net worth of $110 billion. How many fewer cars, swimming pools, tennis courts, or luxury vacations will Bezos purchase after 2 percent of his wealth is taxed away? The answer is not many. A small, annual tax on a fraction of his net worth isn’t going to crowd out much of his spending.

By 2017, the average CEO at an S&P 500 corporation was making 361 times as much as the average worker.85 Since 1980, the global 1 percent has captured twice as much growth as the bottom 50 percent.86 Twenty-five people have as much wealth as 56 percent of the country’s population.87 Just three people—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffett—own more wealth than the bottom half of Americans, some 160 million people. Workers certainly created new wealth over the last four decades, but they did not get to share in it because the democracy deficit can be found within American companies as well. Many of our firms are now feudal economic fiefdoms, in which a small group of wealthy owners give orders to—and extract value from—the labor of vast numbers of everyday Americans.


pages: 363 words: 109,834

The Crux by Richard Rumelt

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, air gap, Airbnb, AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, biodiversity loss, Blue Ocean Strategy, Boeing 737 MAX, Boeing 747, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, creative destruction, crossover SUV, Crossrail, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, drop ship, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Herman Kahn, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Larry Ellison, linear programming, lockdown, low cost airline, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, meta-analysis, Myron Scholes, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, packet switching, PageRank, performance metric, precision agriculture, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, search costs, selection bias, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social distancing, SoftBank, software as a service, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Teledyne, telemarketer, TSMC, uber lyft, undersea cable, union organizing, vertical integration, WeWork

This jolt to the visual cortex means that the phrase “flash of insight” is not just a figure of speech.9 The flash of insight is the experience of creation, and we share it when we recognize a good strategy. It is Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Intel, realizing that photolithographic scaling would let him cram ever more transistors onto a square millimeter of silicon, now known as “Moore’s Law.” It is Jeff Bezos seeing, in 1994, that the Internet was the perfect medium for selling paper-and-ink books. It is Marc Benioff “dreaming” the design for a cloud-based customer-relationship management (CRM) system. It is Sam Walton seeing his discount stores as nodes in a logistics system rather than individual stores.

The signal is the message, and the noise is the corrupting static and error that make it hard to hear or understand the message. It is important that your clientele accept the “noisy” view of security prices—that the message of intrinsic value is often masked by random noise. Long-term managers like Warren Buffett and Jeff Bezos write annual letters to their investors stressing this fact. In his initial 1997 letter to shareholders, Bezos famously wrote: “When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP [generally accepted accounting principles] accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we’ll take the cash flows.”


pages: 383 words: 105,387

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

There’s usually a link between commercial outfits and the state – the East India Company comes to mind, which aligned its trading interests with those of the British Empire from the sixteenth century onwards, and at times acted almost as a governing body in some territories controlled by the British. Musk is leading the pack in commercial space companies but Jeff Bezos, the man behind Amazon, is trying to chase him down with his Blue Origin company. Its vision is ‘a future where millions of people are living and working in space. In order to preserve Earth, our home, for our grandchildren’s grandchildren, we must go to space to tap its unlimited resources and energy.’

Rushdie) 52 satellite technology/networks xv–xvi, 30–1, 132, 303, 304, 306, 313, 314, 315, 316–18 Saud, Crown Prince 84 Saud, King Abd Allah al 80 Saud, Muhammad ibn 74, 78, 79 Saudi Arabia xiii, xiv, 44, 47, 57, 58, 61, 69, 186 Al-Qaeda 88–90 anti-television protests 85 Covid-19 99 Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman 90–1, 92–7, 102–4 Crown Prince Saud 84 early Saud dynasty 74–5, 78–82 Eastern Province 77, 82, 97, 99, 104 employment 98–9, 101, 104 Empty Quarter 76 Fahd of Saudi Arabia 87 Faisal I of Saudi Arabia 84–5 First Saudi State 79–80 foreign population/workforce 98–9 geography 75–7 Ibn Saud 80–3 investment in the Sahel 219, 233–4 Islamist terrorism 88–90, 104 Jeddah 77, 99 Khalid of Saudi Arabia 85–7 land borders 76 Libyan Civil War 92 Mecca 77, 78, 79, 81, 84, 86, 99 Medina 77, 79, 81, 84 murder of Jamal Khashoggi 94–5 Najd 78–9, 80, 81 National Guard 87, 88, 96 Neom city project 99 oil supplies 75, 76, 77, 82–3, 84, 85, 93, 96, 97–8, 99–100, 101–2, 104 Osama Bin Laden 75, 87, 88–9, 104 population size 75, 83, 98–9 Rashidi dynasty 80–1 relationship with China 102 relationship with France 86 relationship with Iran 91–2, 93, 94, 103 relationship with Israel 102–3 relationship with Lebanon 93–4 relationship with post-war Iraq 91 relationship with Qatar 92, 258 relationship with Syria 91–2 relationship with United Kingdom 81–3 relationship with USA xiv, 75, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 religious extremism 75, 85, 88–90, 104 renewable energy 101 resignation of Saad al-Hariri 93–4 Riyadh 77, 80–1, 99, 177 Saud family arrests at the Ritz Carlton 96–7 Shia Islam 77, 79, 97, 99, 104 siege of the Grand Mosque 86–7 slavery 84 Sunni Islam 77, 79, 91 (see also Wahhabism) Vision 2030 98–9 Wahhabism 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 water supplies 100–1 Yemen Civil War 93 Saudi Aramco 83, 85, 98, 100 SAVAK 50 Schinas, Alexandros 151 Scotland Act of Union (1707) 116 alliance with France 117, 118 colony in Panama 117–18 independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7 Scotti tribe settlement 114 wars with England 115, 117 Second Balkan War 151–2 Second World War ix–x, 23–4, 49, 83, 84, 122–3, 126, 136, 153–4, 181, 249, 303 Serbia x, 151, 152, 185, 293–4 Shammar, emirate of 74, 79, 80 sharia law 88, 186, 213, 214 Shatt al-Arab waterway 39, 42 Shia Islam xi, xiv, 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 104 Iran 42, 46, 47, 51, 52, 53, 57–8, 59, 61, 68, 91, 94 Saudi Arabia 74–5, 77, 79, 93, 97, 99, 104 Sidi Yahya mosque 213–14 Sisi, General Abdel Fattah el- 92, 187, 261–2 SKY Perfect Corporation 318 slavery 84, 121, 208, 209, 249, 261 Society of Pathseekers of the Islamic Revolution 54 Soleimani, Qasem 62 Solomon Islands 28 Solomon, King 246 Somalia 242, 243, 244, 250, 251, 252, 258–9 South China Sea 26, 31–2 South Korea 31, 32 South Pacific 27–9 South Sudan 210, 242, 262 Southeastern Anatolia Project 192–3 Soviet Union 17, 25, 49, 50, 87, 123, 154, 161, 304 see also Russia space xv–xvi Artemis Accords 302–3, 309 asteroid 3554 Amun 324 astropolitical theory/space geography 311–14 Chinese exploration 314 colonizing the Moon 302 commercial companies 308 development of rocket technology 303–4 Earth boundaries 310 Earth Space/low Earth orbit 312–14 Elon Musk/SpaceX 308, 319–20 extraterrestrial life forms 322–3 first moon landing 303, 304, 305 governmental frameworks 302–3, 309–11, 324–5 imagining the future 319–25 International Space Station (ISS) 303, 306, 307–8 Jeff Bezos/Blue Origin 308 junk/debris 318 Laika the dog 304 meteor strikes 325 militarization of 314–19 mining the moon 302, 309 Moon ‘safety zones’ 309 Moon Treaty (1979) 310–11 Neil Armstrong 304, 305 Outer Space Treaty (1967) 309–11, 315 the Pioneer Plaque 323 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking (1975) 306, 325 Space Shuttle missions 305–6, 307 speed of travel 321–2 Sputnik satellites 304 travel to Mars 308, 313 water-recovery system 307 Yuri Gagarin 304–5 Spain xv, 118, 119, 210, 219, 234 attempted coup (1981) 288 attempted invasion of England 278–9 Basque Country 269, 279, 284, 289–90 Catalan referendums for independence 292–3, 294 Catalonia 269, 279–80, 282, 284, 287, 289, 291–6 Civil War 282–4 colonialism 277, 280–1 Columbus, Christopher 276–7 ETA (Euzkadi ta Askatasuna) 290–1 EU and NATO 289, 293–4, 297 Francisco Franco 282–7 geography 268, 270–2 historical invasions 273–4 hydroelectric power 272 Inquisition 275–6 internal tensions 268–9, 272 see also Basque Country; Catalonia Isabella and Ferdinand of Spain 275–6, 277 King Juan Carlos 287–9 King Philip II 278 Latin American gold 277 Latin American rebellions 280–1 La Guerra dels Segadors 279 maritime vulnerability 277–8 medieval fortresses 268 migrants and refugees 297 military force and conflicts 271, 274–5, 277–81 military support in the Sahel 297 Moors 271–2 Muslim invaders/settlement 273–4, 275, 276 naval defence 271, 296–7 population size 270, 280 Reconquista Iberia 274–5 relationship with France 279–80 relationship with the USA 286–7 Roman occupation 273 Visigoths 273 water supplies 271–2 Spartacus film 46 Sputnik satellites 304 Stafford, Thomas P. 306 Standard Oil Company of California (SOCAL) 83 Starshot/space sails project 322 Stolen Generation, Australian 12 Strait of Hormuz 43–4, 61 Suarez, Adolfo 288 Sudan 210, 242, 262 Suez Canal 120, 151, 180 Sunni Islam xi, 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64, 174, 187 Fulani 222 Iran 42, 47, 51, 57–8, 59, 64 Muslim Brotherhood 186 Salafists 223 Saudi Arabia/Wahhabism 75, 77, 79, 86, 87, 89–90, 91, 97 Sweden 126, 131, 218 Syria xii, 57, 61, 68, 69, 81, 85, 103, 143, 166, 192, 193, 195–6, 198 Civil War xi, 47, 58, 63, 91–2, 131, 173, 177, 187–8, 233 T Taiwan 28, 30, 231 takfiri ideology 223 Taliban 89, 232 Tamerlane 40 Tasmania 20 Taylor, Griffith 7–8 Tehran, Iran 42 Tejero, Lieutenant-Colonel 288 Temple of Jerusalem 45 Ten Pound Poms 17 Tesla 101 Tewodros II, Emperor 248 The Times 227 Thessalonika (Salonika) 151, 153, 154 Thiele, Heike 219 Thomas, Bertram 76 Those Who Sign in Blood 215 Thucydides 142 Timbuktu 213 Tomyris 45 Tonga 29 Torres Straight Islanders 13–14 Treaty of Lausanne (1923) 153, 189–90 Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) 277 Troy, siege of 158 Truman, Harry S. 286 Trump, Donald xii, 25, 61–2, 93, 315–16 Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin 303–4 Tuareg people 205, 211, 212, 213, 214, 219, 234–5 Tudors 115 Tunguska meteor 325 Turkey xiii, xv, 42, 48, 92, 94–5, 96 Aegean Sea 142, 143, 191 Anatolia 172, 173, 174, 175, 191–3, 197 Arab Uprisings (2011) 185–6 Armenian genocide 164, 180, 188 arms manufacture 198 attempted coup (2016) 188–9 Byzantium/Constantinople/Istanbul 148–9, 152, 174–5, 178, 179 dams and water supplies 192–3 defence 172, 175–7 General Kemal Atatürk 152–3, 179–81, 196, 199 geography 172, 173, 176 Hagia Sophia 196–7 industrialisation 180–1 languages 179–80 Lausanne Treaty (1923) 189–90 Mavi Vatan/Blue Homeland strategy 189–90, 198 Mediterranean gas fields 142, 162–3, 190 migrant/refugee crisis 157, 188 military coups 182 and NATO 163, 164–6, 181, 188–9, 191, 197–8, 199 Osman Ghazi 174 Recep Tayyip Erdoğan 183–9, 191, 194, 195–7, 198–9, 258 relationship with Cyprus 143, 161–2, 198 relationship with Egypt 186–7, 198, 258, 259 relationship with Ethiopia 259 relationship with France 164, 198 relationship with Greece 142, 143, 147, 152–3, 158–60, 161–3, 179, 190, 198 relationship with Israel 185–6 relationship with Russia 190–1 relationship with Somalia 259 relationship with Syria 187–8, 192, 193, 195–6 relationship with the Kurds 175, 181, 182, 187, 192, 193–5 relationship with UAE 258 sanctions 191 Second Balkan War 152 Second World War 181 Seljuk Empire 173–4 War of Independence 152–3, 179 Westernization 179–80 see also Ottoman Empire Turkmen, Iranian 42 U Ukraine xi, 175 unipolar decade (1990s) x United Arab Emirates (UAE) 44, 57, 76, 80, 92, 102–3, 186, 198, 219, 258–9, 262 United Kingdom xiii Acts of Union (1707) 109, 116, 117–18, 133 Anglo-Persian Oil Company 48, 49 Anglo-Saxons 110, 114 armed forces 131, 134–5, 136, 165, 218, 219, 249 (see also Royal Air Force; Royal Navy) Brexit xv, 108, 127, 136 British Empire 118–22, 123–4, 148, 150–1, 161, 210, 308 Catalonian independence 295–6 Celtic Britain 112–13 colonialism 108, 117, 121, 210 Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act (1900) 15 defeat the Spanish Armada 278 dialects 110–11 east–west divide 111, 113–14 education system 132–3 EEC and EU 125–7, 129, 131–2, 136, 164 EFTA membership 295 English language 132 geography 108, 109–10, 111 German invasion plans 122–3 historical invasions 113–15 industrial revolution 111 intelligence network 30, 129, 135 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Ireland 109–10 LEJOG cycle route 110 London 112, 113, 115, 249 Magna Carta 115 MI6 49 military support in the Sahel 218, 219, 235 Napoleonic wars 119–20 Norman invasion 114–15 nuclear submarines 134–5, 136 place names 110–11 population distribution 112 Reformation 116 relationship with Australia 22, 23 relationship with China 128, 130 relationship with France 130–1, 133 relationship with Germany 121–2, 133 relationship with Iran 40 relationship with Poland 130 relationship with Saudi Arabia 81–3, 84 relationship with Scotland 109 relationship with USA 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 Roman occupation 112–13 Scottish independence xv, 109, 118, 133, 134–7, 296 Second World War 122–3 terrain and infrastructure 111–12 trade deals 128–30 Tudors 115 Vikings 110–11, 114 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 United Nations 28, 53, 60, 68, 84, 132, 161–2, 204, 218, 219, 225, 231, 249, 285, 310, 311 United States of America x Apollo space missions 303, 305–6 armed forces 23, 24, 30, 31, 61–2 assassination of Qasem Soleimani 63 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 30–1, 49 commercial space travel 308 Constitution 115 embassies burnt 86 embassy siege, Iran 60–1 Greek Civil War 154 intelligence network 30–1, 61, 129 International Space Station 307 invasion of Iraq (2003) 57 Iranian military coup (1953) 49–50 Louisiana Purchase 119 militarization of space 314–19 military coup, Cyprus (1974) 161 National Space Policy 319 Pact of Madrid 286–7 Quadrilateral Security Dialogue 32 rare-earth supplies 229–30, 231 relationship with Australia 23, 24–5, 30 relationship with Ethiopia 249, 251, 261 relationship with Greece 154, 165–6 relationship with Iran 39, 44, 49, 60–2, 63, 68–9 relationship with Saudi Arabia xiv, 83–4, 85, 87–9, 93, 102, 104 relationship with the UK 121–2, 123–4, 126, 128–9, 130 relationship with Turkey 189, 191 resignation of Lebanese prime minister 94 Russian ‘stalking’ satellites 316–17 Sahel Alliance commitments 219, 220–1, 232 satellite-killer systems 317–18 Second World War 23 Skylab space station 306 Soyuz/Apollo docking 306 Space Force 303, 314–16 stock-market crash (1929) 181 Strategic Petroleum Reserves 22 in the West Pacific 24–5 uranium production 227–8, 230 V V-2 rockets 303 Van Allen radiation belts 314 Vanuatu 28 Velayat-e faqih 52 Versailles Treaty (1919) 303 Victoria, Queen 15, 150 Victory, HMS 119 Vienna 176–7 Vietnam 24, 30, 32 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ 17 Vikings 110–11, 114 Visigoths 273 Vision 2030 98–9 von Braun, Wernher 303 voting rights 12–13, 50 Voulet-Chanoine expedition (1898/99) 209–10 Voulet, Paul 209–10 W Wahhab clan 79, 86 Wahhab, Muhammad ibn Abd al- 79 Wahhabism 79, 81, 87, 89–90, 97, 104 Wales 112, 113, 115–16 ‘walkabout,’ Australia 6–7 Wall Street Journal 231 ‘White Australia’ Policy 16–17 Whitson, Peggy 307 William the Conqueror 114–15 Wilson, Edward 12 Witiza, King 273 women’s rights 52, 65, 97, 98, 283 World Bank 219, 225 Y Yemen 44, 57, 61, 68, 69, 76, 77 Civil War 47, 93, 258 Yugoslavia x, 154, 160 Yugoslav Wars 17, 182–3 Z Zagros Mountains 39, 42, 44–5, 53 Zayed, Prince Mohammed bin 102 Zenawi, Meles 252 Ziyad, Tariq ibn 273–4 Zoroastrianism 45, 46 First published 2021 by Elliott and Thompson Limited 2 John Street London WC1N 2ES www.eandtbooks.com ISBN: 978-1-78396-538-0 Copyright © Tim Marshall 2021 The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this Work.


pages: 371 words: 107,141

You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

Austin Wendt ran the first aid clinic at Amazon’s warehouse BF13 in DuPont, Washington, in 2016 and recalled warehouse leaders offering pizza parties as a reward for a streak of injury-free shifts, “so some pickers kept quiet about their injuries to avoid costing their coworkers pizza.”23 People of colour carry a disproportionate risk of injury because they made up 68 percent of Amazon’s warehouse workers in 2018.24 Perhaps aware that his company’s warehouses had a serious injury rate almost twice that of the rest of the industry in 2020, or stung by the criticism that “our employees are sometimes accused of being desperate souls and treated as robots,” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos announced in 2021 the company was “developing new automated staffing schedules that use sophisticated algorithms to rotate employees among jobs that use different muscle-tendon groups to decrease repetitive motion and help protect employees from [musculoskeletal disorder] risks.”25 This may improve matters, though it also illustrates the total control the company has over its workers’ very movements, as if they were, indeed, computer-controlled robots made of meat.

Jodi Kantor, Karen Weise, and Grace Ashford, “The Amazon That Customers Don’t See,” New York Times, June 15, 2021, www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-workers.html. 25. Jay Greene and Chris Alcantara, “Amazon Warehouse Workers Suffer Serious Injuries at Higher Rates than Other Firms,” Washington Post, June 1, 2021, www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/06/01/amazon-osha-injury-rate; Jeff Bezos, “2020 Letter to Shareholders,” Amazon, April 15, 2021, www.aboutamazon.com/news/company-news/2020-letter-to-shareholders. 26. u/spicytakoz, “Why do they do this to us,” r/AmazonFC, Reddit, May 7, 2021, www.reddit.com/r/AmazonFC/comments/n6xh1c/why_do_they_do_this_to_us. 27. Ian Bogost, “Persuasive Games: Exploitationware,” Game Developer, May 3, 2011, www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/134735/persuasive_games_exploitationware.php?


pages: 602 words: 177,874

Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations by Thomas L. Friedman

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Anthropocene, Apple Newton, autonomous vehicles, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, blockchain, Bob Noyce, business cycle, business process, call centre, carbon tax, centre right, Chris Wanstrath, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, demand response, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Flash crash, fulfillment center, game design, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of the steam engine, inventory management, Irwin Jacobs: Qualcomm, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, linear programming, Live Aid, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, ocean acidification, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, planetary scale, power law, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Solyndra, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Transnistria, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban decay, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y2K, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Irwin: The Cell Phone Guy It was wonderful for consumers for all these networking breakthroughs to occur, but someone had to pack them into a phone you could carry in your pocket to get the full frontal revolution—and no individual was more responsible for this mobile phone revolution than Irwin Jacobs. In the pantheon of the great innovators who launched the Internet age—Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Gordon Moore, Bob Noyce, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Andy Grove, Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg—save a few lines for Irwin Jacobs, and add Qualcomm to the list of important companies you’ve barely heard of. Qualcomm is to mobile phones what Intel and Microsoft together were to desktops and laptops—the primary inventor, designer, and manufacturer of the microchips and software that run handheld smartphones and tablets.

Ten years ago neither company would have listed Amazon as a competitor. But Amazon needed more cloud computing power to run its own business and then decided that cloud computing was a business! And now Amazon is also a Hollywood studio. On January 12, 2016, CNNMoney.com ran a story about the Golden Globes award ceremony that began: “I want to thank Amazon, Jeff Bezos…” Those words were spoken at a Hollywood awards show [by the director Jill Soloway] for the first time on Sunday as Amazon’s comedic television series Transparent picked up two Golden Globe awards, beating shows from HBO, Netflix, and the CW. The awards were an affirmation of the widening television landscape, as streaming services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Instant Video are beginning to play host to award-worthy programs just like television networks … A little while later, the star of Transparent, Jeffrey Tambor, won the award for best actor in a television comedy.

Alan Cohen never tires of tutoring me on the cutting edges of technology, and Moshe Halbertal does the same when it comes to the Middle East. In addition, I had many rich conversations over the past two years, from which I benefited enormously, with Larry Diamond, Eric Beinhocker, Leon Wieseltier, Lin Wells, Robert Walker, K. R. Sridhar, Sadik Yildiz, P. V. Kannan, Kayvon Beykpour, Joel Hyatt, Jeff Bezos, Wael Ghonim, Nandan Nilekani, Gautam Mukunda, Rabbi Tzvi Marx, Rabbi Jonathan Maltzman, Russ Mittermeier, Glenn Prickett, Dennis Ross, Tom Lovejoy, Richard K. Miller, Jeffrey Garten, Moises Naim, Carla Dirlikov Canales, David Rothkopf, Jonathan Taplin, David Kennedy, Zach Sims, Jeff Weiner, Laura Blumenfeld, Kofi Annan, Peter Schwartz, Mark Madden, Phil Bucksbaum, Bill Galstos, Craig Charney, Adam Sweidan, and James H.


pages: 124 words: 36,360

Kitten Clone: Inside Alcatel-Lucent by Douglas Coupland

"World Economic Forum" Davos, British Empire, cable laying ship, Claude Shannon: information theory, cosmic microwave background, Downton Abbey, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, Hibernia Atlantic: Project Express, hiring and firing, industrial research laboratory, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marshall McLuhan, messenger bag, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, oil shale / tar sands, pre–internet, quantum entanglement, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, Turing machine, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, urban planning, UUNET, Wall-E

A century ago, electricity went from being something sinister, administered by that walrus-mustached guy from the Monopoly board, to being something invisible yet benign. Likewise, computing power is transitioning from being a grossly overpriced and overpackaged set of cables, software, and bulky hardware, overlorded by a combination of Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos and Sailor Moon, to being a vapory blankness that’s “out there somewhere”: Computing is all too rapidly becoming a utility—complex, surprisingly mundane, and blank—best administered by engineers, who probably pity your inability to program your microwave oven’s time feature. Can you imagine opening a newspaper and reading an article in the business section titled “Improve Your Productivity with 105-Volt AC Power”?


pages: 161 words: 39,526

Applied Artificial Intelligence: A Handbook for Business Leaders by Mariya Yao, Adelyn Zhou, Marlene Jia

Airbnb, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cognitive load, computer vision, conceptual framework, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, natural language processing, new economy, OpenAI, pattern recognition, performance metric, price discrimination, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, robotic process automation, Salesforce, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, skunkworks, software is eating the world, source of truth, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, strong AI, subscription business, technological singularity, The future is already here

One pattern stands out clearly: in every single tech firm that currently leads in AI, the CEO has come out strongly in favor of prioritizing AI company-wide. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella describes AI as being “at the intersection of our ambitions. We want to democratize AI just like we brought information to your fingertips.”(42) Sundar Pichai, CEO at Google, boldly stated that “we will move from mobile first to an AI first world.”(43) Amazon’s Jeff Bezos calls our modern times the “golden age” of AI, stating that “we are now solving problems with machine learning and artificial intelligence that were in the realm of science fiction for the last several decades.”(44) CEO, CTO, CIO, CDO, or CAO? Finding the right stakeholder to champion a high-risk, high-reward technology initiative is half the battle.


pages: 387 words: 112,868

Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money by Nathaniel Popper

4chan, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, banking crisis, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Burning Man, buy and hold, capital controls, Colonization of Mars, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, Dogecoin, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Extropian, fiat currency, Fractional reserve banking, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, life extension, litecoin, lone genius, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Neal Stephenson, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, QR code, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Startup school, stealth mode startup, the payments system, transaction costs, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Virgin Galactic, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks

Belle and the three children met him and they stayed at a house near the beach in Rio and caught all the World Cup games they could. But even before the World Cup was over, Wences and the family were up in Utah for the latest exclusive conference held by Allen & Co., this one an even higher-profile event than the one in the spring, drawing Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Rupert Murdoch. There had been lots of good news for Bitcoin in the weeks since he had been in Argentina. The United States Marshals Service had auctioned off the 29,655 Bitcoins it had seized from Ross Ulbricht, and the winner was a major venture capitalist, Tim Draper, who was working with the startup that employed Nick Szabo.

The day before the Allen & Co. conference began, Wences officially announced the $20 million he had raised from Reid Hoffman, Max Levchin, and several other investors, making him the best-funded Bitcoin company in the world, according to publicly released data. At the Allen & Co. conference, Wences was given one of the speaking slots before Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett took the stage. Wences gave what was becoming a standard talk, beginning with the history of money, and going on to discuss the potential for Bitcoin to provide financial services to poor people who had long been shut out. He touched on Xapo only briefly, at the end. After Wences came down and took a seat with Belle, Bezos said from the stage that it was the kind of talk that kept him coming to these events.


Mbs: The Rise to Power of Mohammed Bin Salman by Ben Hubbard

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, bitcoin, Citizen Lab, Donald Trump, fake news, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, megacity, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War

He met with former Secretary of State John Kerry, the secretary general of the United Nations, reporters and editors at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, and had coffee at Starbucks with former New York mayor and fellow billionaire Mike Bloomberg. He flew to Seattle to meet Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, two of the world’s richest men, then to Silicon Valley, where his entourage rented out the Four Seasons in Palo Alto and he visited Facebook, Apple, and Google. In Los Angeles, his entourage took over yet another Four Seasons while MBS slept at a mansion nearby. The kingdom sponsored a film festival in a theater owned by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, where guests sipped virgin cocktails and ate dates from the Saudi desert.

Mayor Eric Garcetti of Los Angeles expressed concerns over human rights and the humanitarian crisis in Yemen. But few others raised such matters with MBS. Richard Branson of the Virgin Group discussed space travel with MBS in the California desert. Movie and television producer Brian Grazer hosted a glitzy dinner in the prince’s honor attended by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Snapchat’s Evan Spiegel, and Disney’s Bob Iger. Another evening, Rupert Murdoch hosted him in Bel-Air with other film and TV executives, directors James Cameron and Ridley Scott, and actors Michael Douglas, Morgan Freeman, and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Johnson later wrote that it had been “a fun night and great to hear his deep rooted, yet modern views on the world and certainly the positive growth of his country.”


pages: 484 words: 114,613

No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram by Sarah Frier

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Benchmark Capital, blockchain, Blue Bottle Coffee, Cambridge Analytica, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, data science, disinformation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Frank Gehry, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, ubercab, Zipcar

Systrom and Krieger asked Rise a lot of questions about his beta-testing experience, and he started to sense that the founders didn’t know their potential. “This is going to be fucking huge,” Rise explained. In the tech industry, leaders rarely had any experience in the industry they were disrupting. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had never been in books and Tesla’s Elon Musk had never been in car manufacturing, but Instagram’s filters had clearly been made by a photographer. Earlybird was the best Rise had ever seen, he explained—far higher quality than anything on Hipstamatic. After a few drinks, the founders asked Rise if he would like to create some filters of his own, as a contract job.

Until that happened, he and Krieger decided, it was time for Instagram to execute on one of Zuckerberg’s other priorities. It was time to address a competitive threat. Systrom thought about his counterparts at other acquired companies. Tony Hsieh, the CEO of the online shoe business Zappos, hadn’t gotten to remain in Jeff Bezos’s orbit after Zappos was acquired by Amazon in 2009. YouTube’s founders weren’t even relevant to YouTube anymore—they’d left the company after the 2006 Google acquisition. He had no intention of being forgotten like that. DOMINATION “We’re looking to have a level of impact on the world that is unmatched by any other company, and in order to do that we can’t sit around and act like we’ve made it.


pages: 390 words: 115,303

Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators by Ronan Farrow

Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, business intelligence, Citizen Lab, crowdsourcing, David Strachan, Donald Trump, East Village, fake news, forensic accounting, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, Live Aid, messenger bag, NSO Group, Peter Thiel, Plato's cave, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype

They’d caught, and they’d killed, and the intention had been to swing a presidential election. As part of its agreement with prosecutors, AMI promised to “commit no crimes whatsoever” for three years. Within the year, the Enquirer was facing questions as to whether it had breached that clause. Howard threw the full weight of the publication into chasing a story about Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon, cheating on his wife. This time, Howard secured the dirty pictures he habitually sought. (Aside from Bezos’s wife and mistress, Dylan Howard appeared to have more interest in the man’s penis than any other person on the planet.) The familiar routine played out: AMI threatened to publish and pressed Bezos to cut a deal.

Shear, Matt Apuzzo, and Sharon LaFraniere, “Raids on Trump’s Lawyer Sought Records of Payments to Women,” New York Times, April 10, 2018. 4 “identifying such stories so they could be purchased and their publication avoided”: Letter from the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York to American Media Inc., September 20, 2018. 5 “Rather than capitulate”: Jeff Bezos, “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker.” Medium.com, February 7, 2019. 6 whether Howard had breached: Devlin Barrett, Matt Zapotosky, and Cleve R. Wootson Jr., “Federal Prosecutors Reviewing Bezos’s Extortion Claim Against National Enquirer, Sources Say,” Washington Post, February 8, 2019. 7 a $1 million bat mitzvah: Edmund Lee, “National Enquirer to Be Sold to James Cohen, Heir to Hudson News Founder,” New York Times, April 18, 2019. 8 “a big circle”: Keith J.


Border and Rule: Global Migration, Capitalism, and the Rise of Racist Nationalism by Harsha Walia

anti-communist, antiwork, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, California gold rush, clean water, climate change refugee, collective bargaining, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, dark matter, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, extractivism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, G4S, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, guest worker program, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land reform, late capitalism, lockdown, mandatory minimum, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, pension reform, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, social distancing, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce

Role,” New York Times, September 12, 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/09/12/world/europe/eu-ursula-von-der-leyen-migration.html. 9.Nicholas De Genova, “Introduction: The Borders of ‘Europe’ and the European Question,” in The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration, Tactics of Bordering, Nicholas De Genova, ed. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), 6. 10.Radhika Mongia, Indian Migration and Empire: A Colonial Genealogy of the Modern State (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 139. 11.Michael Liedtke, “Jeff Bezos Now Richest in World, as David Thomson Tops Canadian Billionaires,” Associated Press, March 7, 2018, www.bnnbloomberg.ca/jeff-bezos-now-richest-in-world-as-david-thomson-tops-canadian-billionaires-1.1019997; Casey Quackenbush, “The World’s Top 26 Billionaires Now Own as Much as the Poorest 3.8 Billion, Says Oxfam,” Time, January 21, 2019, https://time.com/5508393/global-wealth-inequality-widens-oxfam/. 12.Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 5. 13.Joseph Sterphone, “‘Mut Zu Deutschland!’


Human Frontiers: The Future of Big Ideas in an Age of Small Thinking by Michael Bhaskar

"Margaret Hamilton" Apollo, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, call centre, carbon tax, charter city, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, clean water, cognitive load, Columbian Exchange, coronavirus, cosmic microwave background, COVID-19, creative destruction, CRISPR, crony capitalism, cyber-physical system, dark matter, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, discovery of penicillin, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, Edward Jenner, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Ernest Rutherford, Eroom's law, fail fast, false flag, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, GPT-3, Haber-Bosch Process, hedonic treadmill, Herman Kahn, Higgs boson, hive mind, hype cycle, Hyperloop, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Innovator's Dilemma, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of agriculture, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, ITER tokamak, James Watt: steam engine, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, lockdown, lone genius, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megacity, megastructure, Menlo Park, Minecraft, minimum viable product, mittelstand, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Gell-Mann, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, nuclear winter, nudge unit, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, post-truth, precautionary principle, public intellectual, publish or perish, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Simon Kuznets, skunkworks, Slavoj Žižek, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, techlash, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, total factor productivity, transcontinental railway, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, When a measure becomes a target, X Prize, Y Combinator

Delivery drones like Amazon's Prime Air programme are at advanced stages of testing; startups in Germany, the US, China and New Zealand are trialling flying quadcopter cars; solar-powered planes circumnavigate the Earth, and prototype jetpacks are available to buy if you have enough money. Space is reopening thanks to a generation of buccaneering entrepreneurs like Elon Musk, Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos. In addition to the old heavyweights of NASA, Russia and the European Space Agency, China and India have booming space programmes. The Chinese Tiangong programme will soon have fully fledged space stations in orbit. Ambitious lunar and Martian missions are planned for the near future. NASA's Artemis mission is optimistically mandated to go back to the Moon by 2024.

Perhaps we could redesign curricula around discovery and experiment; move away from ticking boxes, and towards imagination and the free play of ideas. Look at the successes of Finnish education, now an exemplar, and its principles based on teaching things like transversal thinking. Schools could aim to incorporate more insights from Montessori Schools, which educated entrepreneurs including Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and Jimmy Wales.38 Their success hints at the potential in self- and peer-directed learning. In India a research programme showed how effectively school children learned on their own, unaided, when using and programming a computer. But the power of peer learning applies at university level as well.


pages: 239 words: 45,926

As the Future Catches You: How Genomics & Other Forces Are Changing Your Work, Health & Wealth by Juan Enriquez

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, borderless world, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, business cycle, creative destruction, digital divide, double helix, Ford Model T, global village, Gregor Mendel, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, Helicobacter pylori, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, new economy, personalized medicine, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, spice trade, stem cell, the new new thing, yottabyte

By the end of 2000, Microsoft’s share price fell from $120 to the mid-$40s, which meant the company was worth a mere $246 billion.) In a tech-driven economy … The speed with which fortunes appear and disappear … And waterfalls of data behind these new fortunes … Is staggering. On his thirty-fifth birthday, Jeff Bezos was worth close to $10,000,000,000. Five years earlier, he lived in a 500-square-foot apartment. He is primarily a bookseller … But he understood the power of a new medium and a new technology, the Internet, to change commerce. Which is why Amazon.com was touted as one of the world’s most successful companies … For a while.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Overall retail sales are pretty flat, so Amazon’s growth, and that of other online retailers, will come at the expense of the “physical shops,” as The Economist calls them.53 As U.S. e-commerce is expected to climb from $176 billion in 2010 to $279 billion in 2015, Amazon’s future looks bright. And the other empires are salivating to get a piece of the action.54 Amazon and its CEO, Jeff Bezos, understand the prerogatives of monopoly power as well as Jay Gould or John D. Rockefeller ever did; it uses its monopoly pricing power and market muscle to drive prospective competitors out of existence or into submission.55 Then, like Rockefeller, it can set prices at the level that generates maximum profit.56 “Amazon is a bully. Jeff Bezos is a bully,” the CEO of one of the largest American book publishing houses said in a 2012 interview. “Anybody who gets that powerful can push people around, and Amazon pushes people around.”57 This is nothing new; Joseph Stiglitz describes how Microsoft used its “monopoly power” to crush Netscape in the 1990s.58 Bill Keller writes about how Facebook disabled the game Critter Island in its system in 2010, and Critter Island went from 14 million users to zero in 48 hours.59 What’s the point of being a monopolist if you don’t let everyone know who’s boss?


pages: 410 words: 119,823

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

“Driverless” cars like those being developed by Google and Uber may dominate the mainstream media coverage, but the spare, highway-bound performance regime of long-haul trucking is far more amenable to automation than the stop-and-start, high-complexity environment of city and suburban driving, as Tesla’s July 2016 announcement of plans for an autonomous semi recognizes.19 Meanwhile, logistics has already shed most of the human labor force it once supported, with Jeff Bezos’s Amazon pioneering the development of robotic warehousing and fulfillment.20 Research has already moved on to attack the challenges of delivery by swarming drone as well as autonomous ground vehicle. So when a worthy body like the Pew Research Center convenes a panel of experts21 and just over half of them argue that automation will create more jobs than it displaces between now and 2025, I’m forced to wonder if anyone involved has spent much time contemplating the pastel contrasts of Quoctrung Bui’s map.22 What is now the most commonly held job in twenty-nine of the fifty states will surely number among the very first to be automated.

Through its flagship social network, Facebook leverages the social lives of its 1.71 billion monthly active users—just short of one out of every four people on Earth—and through Instagram, no small share of their memories as well; through controversial projects like Free Basics7 and its prototype fleet of solar-powered, autonomous Aquila drones, it is attempting to bring internet connectivity to “the last billion.”8 And that leaves Amazon, the Seattle-based titan founded by Jeff Bezos in 1994. Having utterly dominated online commerce just about everywhere outside mainland China, it has pushed deep into cloud-computing infrastructure and automated logistics, and now sets its sights on the networked home. Though Amazon’s innovation comes at punishing psychic and physical cost to its workers, it has obsessively pursued technical efficiencies in the unglamorous backstage areas of warehousing, distribution and fulfillment.


Stock Market Wizards: Interviews With America's Top Stock Traders by Jack D. Schwager

Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Black-Scholes formula, book value, commodity trading advisor, computer vision, East Village, Edward Thorp, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, implied volatility, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, junk bonds, locking in a profit, Long Term Capital Management, managed futures, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, money market fund, Myron Scholes, paper trading, passive investing, pattern recognition, proprietary trading, random walk, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, Teledyne, the scientific method, transaction costs, Y2K

Compared with most organizations, we tend to hire more on the basis of raw ability and less on the basis of experience. If we run across someone truly gifted, we try to make them an offer, even if we don't have an immediate position in mind for that person. The most famous example is probably Jeff Bezos. One of my partners approached me and said, "I've just interviewed this terrific candidate named Jeff Bezos. We don't really have a slot for him, but I think he's going to make someone a lot of money someday, and I think you should at least spend some time with him." I met with Jeff and was really impressed by his intellect, creativity, and entrepreneurial instincts.


pages: 413 words: 119,587

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Rodney Brooks rejected early artificial intelligence in favor of a new approach he described as “fast, cheap, and out of control.” Later he designed Baxter, an inexpensive manufacturing robot intended to work with, rather than replace, human workers. (Photo courtesy of Evan McGlinn/New York Times/Redux) It is perhaps telling that one of Rethink’s early venture investors was Jeff Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon. Amazon has increasingly had problems with its nonunionized warehouse workers, who frequently complain about poor working conditions and low wages. When Amazon acquired Kiva Systems, Bezos signaled that he was intent on displacing as much human labor from his warehouses as possible.

DARPA also hosted a robot fair with several dozen exhibitors during the two days of robot competition, which generated a modest crowd as well as a fairly hefty media contingent. Google underscored the growing impact of robotics on all aspects of society when it publicly announced Rubin’s robotics division just weeks before the Robotics Challenge. At the beginning of that month, 60 Minutes had aired a segment about Jeff Bezos and Amazon that included a scene in which Bezos led Charlie Rose into a laboratory and showed off an octocopter drone designed to deliver Amazon products autonomously “in 30 minutes.”12 The report sparked another flurry of discussions about the growing role of robots in society. The storage and distribution of commercial goods is already a vast business in the United States, and Amazon has quickly become a dominant low-cost competitor.


pages: 504 words: 126,835

The Innovation Illusion: How So Little Is Created by So Many Working So Hard by Fredrik Erixon, Bjorn Weigel

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American ideology, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, Blue Ocean Strategy, BRICs, Burning Man, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, classic study, Clayton Christensen, Colonization of Mars, commoditize, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, dark matter, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, discounted cash flows, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, fear of failure, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, general purpose technology, George Gilder, global supply chain, global value chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gordon Gekko, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, high net worth, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Martin Wolf, mass affluent, means of production, middle-income trap, Mont Pelerin Society, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Potemkin village, precautionary principle, price mechanism, principal–agent problem, Productivity paradox, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, Yogi Berra

Likewise, there are many successful investors and entrepreneurs whose thinking about innovation and business creation have inspired us. Innovation happens through entrepreneurship and it is impossible to grasp innovation without understanding the business motivations behind it. In reality, books like ours cannot substitute for studies of successful entrepreneurs like Warren Buffett, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Sam Walton, and the business environment they and others created in their respective firms. More people than we can mention have generously taken the time to talk through particular issues with us or showed us the power of new technology and innovative business ideas. We are particularly grateful to a group of friends who have read, commented, and in other ways helped us with various versions of the manuscript.

“Fear of creative destruction is often at the root of the opposition to inclusive economic and political institutions,” observe Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.16 Innovators may no longer be decapitated when they bring new technology to market, but rulers still have that spirit of resistance in them. When Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, for example, unveiled the company’s new “flying vehicle,” the new drone prototype for delivering packages, it took less than a week for US authorities to ground it because there was no commercial legislation covering drones. The Federal Aviation Administration had already begun working on rules for commercial drone aircraft, but they were behind schedule.


pages: 468 words: 124,573

How to Build a Billion Dollar App: Discover the Secrets of the Most Successful Entrepreneurs of Our Time by George Berkowski

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Rubin, barriers to entry, Black Swan, business intelligence, call centre, crowdsourcing, deal flow, Dennis Tito, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, Google X / Alphabet X, growth hacking, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Jony Ive, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, Paul Graham, QR code, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, TechCrunch disrupt, Travis Kalanick, two-pizza team, ubercab, Y Combinator

At the same time the opposite – a founder or CEO who is not at all involved in the team-building process – certainly doesn’t work, either. While I personally think the hands-on approach is correct for the beginning phases – by the $100 million stage and moving into the next stage it becomes impossible to sustain. A great solution is one that Amazon has put in place. Early on at Amazon, Jeff Bezos, the CEO, handpicked a team of people he thought particularly understood the culture of the company, and whom he trusted to make independent hiring decisions. For all future hires, no matter for what team, the final say would be made by a senior executive with this ‘power of hire’. This ensured that there was an incredibly high – and consistent – bar for hiring.

Two-Pizza Teams and Internal APIs Amazon’s business model is predicated on the thinnest of margins, and as a result the company has been able to innovate in amazing ways that don’t require massive capital investment. The principles therefore apply to startups looking to stay lean. Amazon is undoubtedly one of the most entrepreneurial companies in history. Two reasons Amazon is able to keep its momentum even with 97,000 employees are pizza teams and APIs.1 TWO-PIZZA TEAMS. Jeff Bezos structured Amazon as a decentralised company where small groups can innovate independently and are free from the inherent problems of groupthink. He introduced the principle of the two-pizza team. If two pizzas can’t feed a team, then the team is too large. That limits a task force to five to seven people, depending on their appetites.


pages: 801 words: 209,348

Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In America refinement was considered elitist a wholly impractical trait for the rugged job of selling, organizing, convincing, and doing. It was a remarkable sign of energy and dynamism that even after nearly a century as the world’s richest country, the scent of the next big thing could still cause men—upstarts and established men alike—to drop everything and chase gold. Employed at a New York hedge fund, Jeff Bezos was a well-paid twenty-nine-year-old with a computer science degree from Princeton. Through a newsletter, Bezos learned that the World Wide Web had grown by one thousand times over the previous year. Seeing the growth of the Web as a once-in-a-lifetime “revolutionizing event,” Bezos quit his job midyear, forgoing his year-end Wall Street bonus.

“I’m finished with all that”: Ibid., 42. “Well, we could always”: Ibid., 49. Clark put in $3 million: Ibid., 57. Through a newsletter: John S. Quarterman, “Internet Resource Discovery Services by Bytes,” Matrix News 4, no. 2 (February 1994). “revolutionizing event”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), 27. west in a Chevy Blazer: Ibid., 29. package of $65,000: Netscape Communications Corporation, Form S-1 Registration Statement (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1995). 20 percent of the company: David A. Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: Perennial, 2000), 243.

New York: Exposition, 1953. Stevens, Mark. King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist. New York: Penguin, 1993. Stewart, James B. Den of Thieves. New York: Touchstone, 1992. Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown, 2013. Stover, John F. History of the Illinois Central Railroad. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. 1852. Reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2001. Strouse, Jean. Morgan: American Financier.


Americana by Bhu Srinivasan

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, American ideology, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, California gold rush, Carl Icahn, Charles Lindbergh, collective bargaining, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate raider, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, diversified portfolio, Douglas Engelbart, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, information security, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, oil rush, peer-to-peer, pets.com, popular electronics, profit motive, punch-card reader, race to the bottom, refrigerator car, risk/return, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the new new thing, The Predators' Ball, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Upton Sinclair, Vannevar Bush, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

In America refinement was considered elitist a wholly impractical trait for the rugged job of selling, organizing, convincing, and doing. It was a remarkable sign of energy and dynamism that even after nearly a century as the world’s richest country, the scent of the next big thing could still cause men—upstarts and established men alike—to drop everything and chase gold. Employed at a New York hedge fund, Jeff Bezos was a well-paid twenty-nine-year-old with a computer science degree from Princeton. Through a newsletter, Bezos learned that the World Wide Web had grown by one thousand times over the previous year. Seeing the growth of the Web as a once-in-a-lifetime “revolutionizing event,” Bezos quit his job midyear, forgoing his year-end Wall Street bonus.

“I’m finished with all that”: Ibid., 42. “Well, we could always”: Ibid., 49. Clark put in $3 million: Ibid., 57. Through a newsletter: John S. Quarterman, “Internet Resource Discovery Services by Bytes,” Matrix News 4, no. 2 (February 1994). “revolutionizing event”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), 27. west in a Chevy Blazer: Ibid., 29. package of $65,000: Netscape Communications Corporation, Form S-1 Registration Statement (Washington DC: Securities and Exchange Commission, 1995). 20 percent of the company: David A. Kaplan, The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams (New York: Perennial, 2000), 243.

New York: Exposition, 1953. Stevens, Mark. King Icahn: The Biography of a Renegade Capitalist. New York: Penguin, 1993. Stewart, James B. Den of Thieves. New York: Touchstone, 1992. Stiles, T. J. The First Tycoon. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Stone, Brad. The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. New York: Little, Brown, 2013. Stover, John F. History of the Illinois Central Railroad. New York: Macmillan, 1975. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly. 1852. Reprint, New York: Modern Library, 2001. Strouse, Jean. Morgan: American Financier.


pages: 385 words: 48,143

The Monk and the Riddle: The Education of a Silicon Valley Entrepreneur by Randy Komisar

Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, belly landing, discounted cash flows, estate planning, Jeff Bezos, Network effects, new economy, Pepto Bismol, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs

No doubt about it. And I say, why not us? Why not us?" Lenny obviously didn't ask questions to get answers, and so I waited through his dramatic pause. "And I'm not alone in this." He flipped to a page of quotes from analysts and forecasters. He started to read the first aloud, from Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, something about "the migration of the $4 trillion global economy onto the Internet." I held up my hand so I could read in silence. In a world inhabited by people who think the Internet and the universe are converging, no shortage of proselytizers are willing to endorse any kind of cockamamie scheme as the next big thing.


pages: 199 words: 43,653

Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products by Nir Eyal

Airbnb, AltaVista, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, dark pattern, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, framing effect, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Ian Bogost, IKEA effect, Inbox Zero, invention of the telephone, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lean Startup, lock screen, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Oculus Rift, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social bookmarking, TaskRabbit, telemarketer, the new new thing, Toyota Production System, Y Combinator

Valerie Trifts and Gerald Häubl, “Information Availability and Consumer Preference: Can Online Retailers Benefit from Providing Access to Competitor Price Information?,” Journal of Consumer Psychology 2003, 149–59. 21. Nick Wingfield, “More Retailers at Risk of Amazon ‘Showrooming,’” Bits blog (accessed Dec. 16, 2013), http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/27/more-retailers-at-risk-of-amazon-showrooming/. 22. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 2013). 23. Phillipa Lally, Cornelia H. M. van Jaarsveld, Henry W. W. Potts, and Jane Wardle, “How Are Habits Formed: Modelling Habit Formation in the Real World,” European Journal of Social Psychology 40, no. 6 (2010): 998–1009, doi:10.1002/ejsp.674. 24.


pages: 153 words: 45,721

Making Work Visible: Exposing Time Theft to Optimize Workflow by Dominica Degrandis, Tonianne Demaria

cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, DevOps, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, loose coupling, microservices, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, sunk-cost fallacy, systems thinking, TED Talk, transaction costs, two-pizza team

When Elon Musk is faced with too much work-in- progress (WIP), he has the authority to delegate, deprioritize, or simply say no. When variation rears its head and a well-thought- out strategic plan no longer aligns with the organization’s needs, Sheryl Sandberg has the ability to switch gears. And when Jeff Bezos is confronted with conflicting priorities, it is likewise doubtful he needs to seek direction via a convoluted bureaucracy to gain clarity over which course to follow. When these things happen to us (and let’s face it, they often do), we’re faced with a very different set of repercussions than those of our billionaire counterparts.


pages: 190 words: 46,977

Elon Musk: A Mission to Save the World by Anna Crowley Redding

Albert Einstein, artificial general intelligence, Burning Man, California high-speed rail, Colonization of Mars, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, energy security, Ford Model T, gigafactory, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kwajalein Atoll, Large Hadron Collider, low earth orbit, Mars Society, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, OpenAI, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter Thiel, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Solyndra, SpaceX Starlink, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jurvetson, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Wayback Machine

YouTube video, 28:09. youtu.be/CnobWh5iloE. Erwin, Sandra. “SpaceX Wins $130 Million Military Launch Contract for Falcon Heavy Rocket.” Space.com, 24 June 2018. shar.es/a1NCjP. Etherington, Darrell. “Tesla Officially Acquires SolarCity.” TechCrunch, 21 Nov. 2016. tcrn.ch/ 2gaNhKW. Fernholz, Tim. Rocket Billionaires: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and the New Space Race. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. Friend, Tad. “Plugged In: Can Elon Musk Lead the Way to an Electric-Car Future?” New Yorker, 24 Aug. 2009. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/24/plugged-in. Gaiman, Neil. “What Was He Like, Douglas Adams?” Foreword to The Ultimate Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: Five Novels in One Outrageous Volume, by Douglas Adams.


pages: 419 words: 130,627

Last Man Standing: The Ascent of Jamie Dimon and JPMorgan Chase by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Bear Stearns, Blythe Masters, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, business logic, centralized clearinghouse, collateralized debt obligation, conceptual framework, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Exxon Valdez, financial innovation, fixed income, G4S, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, housing crisis, interest rate swap, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, moral hazard, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Northern Rock, profit motive, proprietary trading, Renaissance Technologies, risk/return, Rod Stewart played at Stephen Schwarzman birthday party, Saturday Night Live, sovereign wealth fund, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, The Chicago School, too big to fail, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

“I always thought that was funny, though,” Dimon recalls. “Because he did run, and he won.” The interest did not stop there. Starwood Hotels & Resorts was interested. Jeff Bezos tried to lure Dimon to Amazon.com, a tempting opportunity in early 1999, with the Internet frenzy still ongoing. “For a minute there, I had this fantasy of moving the family to Seattle. I was dreaming of being Tom Hanks on a big houseboat and I would never wear a suit again,” he recalls. “But it just wasn’t me. I like Jeff Bezos, but I’m a finance guy. It’s like taking someone who has played tennis their whole life and telling them from then on they had to play golf.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

CHANGING THE BOUNDARIES OF THE FIRM Throughout the first era of the Internet, management thinkers (Don included) talked up the networked enterprise, the flat corporation, open innovation, and business ecosystems as successors to the hierarchies of industrial power. However, the architecture of the early-twentieth-century corporation remains pretty much intact. Even the big dot-coms adopted a top-down structure with such decision makers as Jeff Bezos, Marissa Mayer, and Mark Zuckerberg. So why would any established firm—particularly ones that make their money off other people’s data, operate largely behind closed doors, and suffer surprisingly little in data breach after data breach—want to leverage blockchain technologies to distribute power, increase transparency, respect user privacy and anonymity, and include far more people who can afford far less than those already served?

We should consider how the Universal Declaration of Human Rights could be better served with blockchain.”75 How can we achieve this better future? Most of the people leading the revolution are still unknowns, except for veterans like Netscape’s progenitor Marc Andreessen. You’ve likely never heard of most of the people quoted in this book. Then again, who’d heard of Iranian immigrant Pierre Omidyar or Wall Street programmer Jeff Bezos in 1994? Much depends on how the leaders of the industry get on board. Is a blockchain alternative to Facebook or Twitter really achievable or will the incumbents respond by addressing user concerns about data ownership and privacy? Doesn’t matter. Consumers win either way. Will Visa wither or will it change its business model to embrace the power of blockchain?


pages: 409 words: 138,088

Moondust: In Search of the Men Who Fell to Earth by Andrew Smith

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, Dennis Tito, Dr. Strangelove, full employment, game design, Gene Kranz, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mark Shuttleworth, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, Neil Armstrong, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, overview effect, pensions crisis, Ronald Reagan

It struck me that Bowie included a tune called “Gemini Spacecraft” on his Heathen album of 2002 and that the sleeve to Led Zeppelin’s greatest hits CD depicts the group in Apollo space suits, reminding us that their portentous first four albums fell in those weird years from 1969 through 1972. It also struck me that in the year prior to this trip, characters as diverse as the Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, the actor Vincent Gallo and musician Moby all told me, with no prompting, that the first thing they could recall wanting to be was an astronaut. They all remembered where they were when the first landing happened, but Wayne Coyne, singer with the Flaming Lips – born in 1961, the same year as Apollo – had the best story.

A Note on the Author Andrew Smith is English, although he was born in New York and lived in California until he was in his early teens. He watched the Moon landings on TV in his San Francisco home. He has worked for the Melody Maker, The Face, the Sunday Times, and the Observer, where he has written on the KLF, death row, Damien Hirst, Jeff Bezos, Bianca Jagger and much, much more. He currently lives in Norfolk, in the east of England. Further praise for Moondust: ‘Wonderful … This is a fascinating book, often poignant but funny too’ Daily Mail ‘Smith navigates the contours of our love affair with space … Moondust is an inspired idea, immaculately executed: witty, affectionate, completely captivating’ Word ‘This book is something different … As an update on the nine surviving astronauts it is fascinating.


pages: 538 words: 138,544

The Story of Stuff: The Impact of Overconsumption on the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health-And How We Can Make It Better by Annie Leonard

air freight, banking crisis, big-box store, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business logic, California gold rush, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, cotton gin, dematerialisation, employer provided health coverage, energy security, European colonialism, export processing zone, Firefox, Food sovereignty, Ford paid five dollars a day, full employment, global supply chain, Global Witness, income inequality, independent contractor, Indoor air pollution, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, liberation theology, McMansion, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, new economy, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, planned obsolescence, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TED Talk, the built environment, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, Wall-E, Whole Earth Review, Zipcar

To broaden inventory even further, it partners with other vendors (even large ones like Target) and provides them with warehousing and distribution. Technology is Amazon’s strongest suit and greatest investment (dwarfing H&M’s logistics system by umpteen degrees). Not only for the customer interface—the programs that create a personalized shopping experience and recommend products to users (as founder and CEO Jeff Bezos says, with so many items to choose from, they had to create ways to not only “enable customers to find products, but also enable products to find customers”55)—but also for the logistics of “fulfillment,” or processing an order and getting it to a customer. Imagine tracking a couple of million different products, as opposed to a couple of thousand.

Keisha Lamothe, “Online retail spending surges in 2006,” CNNMoney.com, January 4, 2007 (money.cnn.com/2007/01/04/news/economy/ online_sales/?postversion=2007010410). 54. Stacy Mitchell, Big-Box Swindle: The True Cost of Mega-Retailers and the Fight for America’s Independent Businesses (Boston: Beacon Press, 2007), p. 12. 55. Speech by Jeff Bezos at MIT, November 25, 2002 (mitworld.mit.edu/video/1/). 56. Ibid. 57. Renee Wilmeth of Google Books and Literary Architects, quoted by Dave Taylor, Ask Dave Taylor (askdavetaylor.com/what_percentage_of_books _printed_end_up _destroyed.html). 58. H. Scott Matthews and Chris T. Hendricks, “Economic and Environmental Implications of Online Retailing in the United States,” dissertation, Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, August 2001. 59.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The United States has a very small elite, controlling an increasing share of the economy, and a large and increasing bottom, with almost no resources8—forty percent of Americans can’t cover a four-hundred-dollar calamity, whether it’s a child getting sick or a car breaking down.9 The three richest Americans, Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Warren Buffet (Berkshire Hathaway), are worth more than the bottom half of the US population combined, testimony to how much wealth there is at the top and how little there is at the bottom.10 Buffett, the legendary billionaire investor, got it right when he said, “There is a class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”11 He said it not belligerently; he said it because he thought it was an accurate description of the state of America.

As new data came in giving a deeper picture of the economy, it became increasingly clear that there were long-standing and deep-seated problems. The growth that had been championed turned out to be far slower than that of the decades after World War II. Most disturbing, what growth occurred went to a few people at the top. If GDP goes up because Jeff Bezos’s income goes up—but everyone else’s income stagnates—the economy is not really doing well. But that is close to the situation in which America finds itself today, and it’s the way things have been for four decades, a period over which the average income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans has hardly changed, while that of the top 1 percent has soared.


pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

The term should be long enough to give enough incentive, without being so long as to raise prices unnecessarily. But a patent isn't the only device that might protect the innovator against inefficient copying. Being first to market in a network economy creates a first-mover advantage without imposing the costs of a patent. And other incentives are often sufficient to induce innovation without a patent. Jeff Bezos, for example, said of the 1-Click patent that Amazon.com would have developed the 1-Click technology whether or not there was a patent system.97 The reason is obvious: The system helps sell more books, and the profit from those additional sales of books is enough of an incentive for the invention of new technology.

The ordinary response is a “negligence standard”: the applicant must file what he or she knows or should have known. This creates a strong incentive for the applicant to discover relevant prior art. And it would help the U.S. Patent Office make a judgment about whether a patent should be granted. If Congress determines that business method patents are justified, it should also consider the proposals of Jeff Bezos and Tim O'Reilly to grant patent protection for business methods for only a very short period. Bezos proposes five years, but an even shorter period may make sense.29 Network technologies move so quickly that a longer period of protection is never really needed; and whatever distortions this system might produce, they could be minimized by shorting the period of protection.


pages: 486 words: 139,713

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

They are seen as having little in common with the robber barons of old, men who in all too many instances scourged their territories and took from the land what they wanted, at will and with little regard for the future. One hopes and supposes the lands of such new masters as these will flourish, as will the animals and plants together, under their supervision. Not that the robber barons have entirely gone away. Jeff Bezos, the founder and owner of Amazon, uses his 400,000 acres in far western Texas as a launch site for his Blue Origin space rockets. And the press-shy “Silent Stan” Kroenke, who owns sports teams—Britain’s Arsenal football club among them—and stadiums, and who married into the immense Walmart fortune, recently bought the half-million-acre Waggoner Ranch in far northern Texas—said to be the largest ranch in the country that is surrounded by a single continuous fence.

He spoke of his acceptance of the settlers’ offer, but he did so with evident apprehension and regret. Sealth could never have imagined the great iron and glass towers that would eventually rise on his land, particularly in the city that would be named in his honor. Nor could he have supposed that men like Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates, men with such very different values to his own, would become the local tribal leaders of their times. “The President in Washington,” Sealth declared, The Suquamish leader Chief Sealth, after whom the City of Seattle is named, spoke with reportedly great eloquence of his regret and melancholy in handing over his lands for white settlement in 1854.


pages: 420 words: 135,569

Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Feel Ready for Anything―Even Things That Seem Impossible Today by Jane McGonigal

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, airport security, Alvin Toffler, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, basic income, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, circular economy, clean water, climate change refugee, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, Community Supported Agriculture, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data science, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, fake news, fiat currency, future of work, Future Shock, game design, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, index card, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, longitudinal study, Mason jar, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microbiome, Minecraft, moral hazard, open borders, pattern recognition, place-making, plant based meat, post-truth, QAnon, QR code, remote working, RFID, risk tolerance, School Strike for Climate, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social distancing, stem cell, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, The future is already here, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator

But if the first manned missions to Mars start in the 2030s, then at least someone will potentially be living in the future of sunsets relatively soon.11 And Mars is definitely a place where everything can be different—not just sunsets. To survive on the red planet, we would have to reinvent society: how we eat, how we organize, how we vote, how we live. Musk and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have both publicly stated that they are excited to rethink things like governance and laws on Mars, using the newly settled planet as a chance to experiment and redesign civilization. I can’t come up with a better reason for more of us, not just the space entrepreneurs, to start thinking seriously about life on Mars.

One article that instructed readers on “Amazon Alexa features you should turn off right now to protect your privacy” trended on social media.22 And within weeks of the project being announced, a consumer lawsuit was filed.23 I have no idea how far Amazon will get with this project. But I’m absolutely intrigued by the idea of a megacorporation using its smart devices to potentially counter internet shutdowns in the future. Can you imagine the great internet battles of the year 2033? A president shuts down the internet, declaring a cyber-emergency, only to have Jeff Bezos or another technology titan say, “Not so fast.” It’s a strange new possibility that I couldn’t have imagined until I spotted this latest signal of change. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. Future Scenario #8: Double Your Money A Tuesday afternoon, ten years from now The Federal Cash Buyback Program is all over the news today.


pages: 521 words: 136,802

Unscripted: The Epic Battle for a Media Empire and the Redstone Family Legacy by James B Stewart, Rachel Abrams

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Lives Matter, company town, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, Donald Trump, estate planning, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, Michael Milken, power law, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Tim Cook: Apple, vertical integration, éminence grise

“What it feels like to have someone hold you down—you can’t breathe, you can’t move,” Douglas emerged from Moonves’s office disheveled and crying. In the ensuing weeks CBS fired Douglas from Queens and withheld her pay. Her manager dropped her. Her agent—Patrick Whitesell, then at CAA, who became tabloid fodder much later, after his wife took up with Jeff Bezos—kissed her off by calling to “wish her well.” Farrow was amazed at Douglas’s pinpoint recollection, even though it had happened twenty years ago. But could he corroborate it? It couldn’t just be Douglas’s word against Moonves’s. Douglas said she’d told Craig Chester, an actor she was staying with at the time, that same day.

GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT “In a millisecond”: Farrow, “Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT disheveled and crying: Farrow, “Les Moonves and CBS Face Allegations.” GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT who became tabloid fodder: Chris Gardner, “Jeff Bezos Battle Begins to Rattle National Enquirer Insiders,” Hollywood Reporter, February 13, 2019. GO TO NOTE REFERENCE IN TEXT Season 3, Episode 1: “We All Did That” As Bing he’d published: Richard Sandomir, “Gil Schwartz, CBS Spokesman with Alter Ego Who Mocked Corporate Misdeeds, Dies at 68,” New York Times, May 8, 2020.


pages: 170 words: 49,193

The People vs Tech: How the Internet Is Killing Democracy (And How We Save It) by Jamie Bartlett

Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global village, Google bus, Hans Moravec, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, information retrieval, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Gilmore, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mittelstand, move fast and break things, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, off grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, Peter Thiel, post-truth, prediction markets, QR code, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ross Ulbricht, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, smart contracts, smart meter, Snapchat, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, strong AI, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, too big to fail, ultimatum game, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y Combinator, you are the product

And to whom do we look in order to solve our collective social problems? It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero. Space travel and climate change has fallen to Elon Musk. We look to Google to solve health problems and sort out ageing. Facebook gets to decide what free speech is and battle against fake news, while Amazon’s Jeff Bezos saves the Washington Post from bankruptcy and funds scholarships. One UK MP recently suggested we might run the National Health Service like Uber, while another pitched the idea of Airbnb-style room rentals for patients who needed to stay overnight. Heaven help us all. Total victory for the monopoly is not over economics or politics – it’s over assumptions, ideas and possible futures.


pages: 193 words: 51,445

On the Future: Prospects for Humanity by Martin J. Rees

23andMe, 3D printing, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, Asilomar, autonomous vehicles, Benoit Mandelbrot, biodiversity loss, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, carbon tax, circular economy, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, decarbonisation, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, Dennis Tito, distributed ledger, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Great Leap Forward, Higgs boson, Hyperloop, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Conway, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, quantitative hedge fund, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart grid, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, supervolcano, technological singularity, the scientific method, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Walter Mischel, William MacAskill, Yogi Berra

Leaving aside the Chinese, I think the future of manned spaceflight lies with privately funded adventurers, prepared to participate in a cut-price programme far riskier than western nations could impose on publicly supported civilians. SpaceX, led by Elon Musk (who also builds Tesla electric cars), or the rival effort, Blue Origin, bankrolled by Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, have berthed craft at the space station and will soon offer orbital flights to paying customers. These ventures—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—have shown it’s possible to recover and reuse the launch rocket’s first stage—presaging real cost savings.


pages: 183 words: 51,514

Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration by Buzz Aldrin, Leonard David

Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, gravity well, high net worth, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, low earth orbit, Mars Rover, Mars Society, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, private spaceflight, Ronald Reagan, Scaled Composites, Strategic Defense Initiative, systems thinking, telepresence, telerobotics, transcontinental railway, Tunguska event, Virgin Galactic, X Prize

The company is focused on vertical-takeoff, vertical-landing suborbital research and passenger flights, with an eye toward eventual paths to orbit. It has an impressive track record of several hundred flight tests spread over two dozen different vehicles. This space startup is demonstrating a number of technologies it plans to incorporate into a crewed suborbital reusable launch vehicle. • Blue Origin, backed by Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com fame and fortune, is developing the New Shepard system, a rocket-propelled vehicle designed to routinely fly multiple astronauts into suborbital space at competitive prices. The New Shepard system can provide frequent opportunities for researchers to fly experiments into space and a microgravity environment.


pages: 197 words: 49,296

The Future We Choose: Surviving the Climate Crisis by Christiana Figueres, Tom Rivett-Carnac

3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Anthropocene, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, biodiversity loss, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, F. W. de Klerk, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gail Bradbrook, General Motors Futurama, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high-speed rail, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mustafa Suleyman, Nelson Mandela, new economy, ocean acidification, plant based meat, post-truth, rewilding, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, the scientific method, trade route, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, Yogi Berra

This list is vast, and it would be impossible for us to mention everyone here, but we would like to pay special mention to Alejandro Agag, Lorena Aguilar, Fahad Al Attiya, Ken Alex, Ali Al-Naimi, Carlos Alvarado Quesada, Christiane Amanpour, Chris Anderson, Mats Andersson, Monica Araya, John Ashford, David Attenborough, AURORA, Mariana Awad, Peter Bakker, Vivian Balakrishnan, Ajay Banga, Greg Barker, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, Nicolette Bartlett, Oliver Bäte, Kevin Baumert, Marc Benioff, Jeff Bezos, Dean Bialek, Sue Biniaz, Fatih Birol, Michael Bloomberg, May Boeve, Gail Bradbrook, Piers Bradford, Richard Branson, Jesper Brodin, Tom Brookes, Jerry Brown, Sharan Burrow, Felipe Calderon, Kathy Calvin, Mark Campanale, Miguel Arias Cañete, Mark Carney, Clay Carnill, Andrea Correa do Lago, Anne-Sophie Cerisola, Robin Chase, Sagarika Chatterjee, Tomas Anker Christensen, Pilita Clark, Helen Clarkson, Jo Confino, Aron Cramer, David Crane, John Danilovich, Conyers Davis, Tony de Brum, Bernaditas de Castro Muller, Brian Deese, Claudio Descalzi, Leonardo DiCaprio, Paula DiPerna, Elliot Diringer, Sandrine Dixson Decleve, Ahmed Djoghlaf, Claudia Dobles Camargo, Alister Doyle, José Manuel Entrecanales, Hernani Escobar, Patricia Espinosa, Emmanuel Faber, Nathan Fabian, Laurent Fabius, Emily Farnworth, Daniel Firger, James Fletcher, Pope Francis, Gail Gallie, Grace Gelder, Kristalina Georgieva, Cody Gildart, Jane Goodall, Al Gore, Kimo Goree, Ellie Goulding, Mats Granryd, Jerry Greenfield, Ólafur Grímsson, Sally Grover Bingham, Emmanuel Guerin, Kaveh Guilanpour, Stuart Gulliver, Angel Gurria, Antonio Guterres, William Hague, Thomas Hale, Brad Hall, Winnie Hallwachs, Simon Hampel, Kate Hampton, Yuval Noah Harari, Jacob Heatley-Adams, Julian Hector, Hilda Heine, Ned Helme, Barbara Hendricks, Jamie Henn, Anne Hidalgo, François Hollande, Emma Howard Boyd, Stephen Howard, Arianna Huffington, Kara Hurst, Mo Ibrahim, Jay Inslee, Natalie Isaacs, Maria Ivanova, Lisa Jackson, Lisa Jacobson, Dan Janzen, Michel Jarraud, Sharon Johnson, Kelsey Juliana, Yolanda Kakabadse, Lila Karbassi, Iain Keith, Mark Kenber, John Kerry, Sean Kidney, Jim Kim, Ban Ki-moon, Lise Kingo, Richard Kinley, Sister Jayanti Kirpalani, Isabelle Kocher, Caio Koch-Weser, Marcin Korolec, Larry Kramer, Kalee Kreider, Kishan Kumarsingh, Rachel Kyte, Christine Lagarde, Philip Lambert, Dan Lashof, Penelope Lea, Guilherme Leal, Bernice Lee, Jeremy Leggett, Thomas Lingard, Andrew Liveris, Hunter Lovins, Mindy Lubber, Miguel Ángel Mancera Espinosa, Gina McCarthy, Stella McCartney, Bill McDonouh, Catherine McKenna, Sonia Medina, Bernadette Meehan, Johannes Meier, Maria Mendiluce, Antoine Michon, David Miliband, Ed Miliband, Amina Mohammed, Jennifer Morris, Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, Nozipho Mxakato-Diseko, Kumi Naidoo, Nicole Ng, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane, Indra Nooyi, Michael Northrop, Tim Nuthall, Bill Nye, Jean Oelwang, Rafe Offer, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Hindou Oumarou Ibrahim, Kevin O Hanlon, René Orellana, Ricken Patel, Jose Penido, Charlotte Pera, Jonathan Pershing, Stephen Petricone, Stephanie Pfeifer, Shannon Phillips, Bertrand Piccard, François-Henri Pinault, John Podesta, Paul Polman, Ian Ponce, Carl Pope, Jonathon Porritt, Patrick Pouyanne, Manuel Pulgar Vidal, Tracy Raczek, Jairam Ramesh, Curtis Ravenell, Robin Reck, Geeta Reddy, Dan Reifsnyder, Fiona Reynolds, Ben Rhodes, Alex Rivett-Carnac, Chris Rivett-Carnac, Nick Robins, Jim Robinson, Mary Robinson, Cristiam Rodriguez, Matthew Rodriguez, Kevin Rudd, Mark Ruffalo, Artur Runge-Metzger, Karsten Sach, Claudia Salerno Caldera, Fredric Samama, Richard Samans, M.


pages: 209 words: 53,236

The Scandal of Money by George Gilder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decentralized internet, Deng Xiaoping, disintermediation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, guns versus butter model, Home mortgage interest deduction, impact investing, index fund, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, informal economy, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Spitznagel, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage tax deduction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, obamacare, OSI model, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, secular stagnation, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, smart grid, Solyndra, South China Sea, special drawing rights, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, winner-take-all economy, yield curve, zero-sum game

Which means that the “greater fools” chiefly targeted by venture capitalists to buy their unicorns are not you and I and millions of others in a possibly hallucinogenic NASDAQ public market but rather a tiny elite of cagey bidders counseled by game theory quants. The oligopsonists include Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella, Google’s alphabetic Larry Page, Disney’s Robert Iger, Verizon’s Lowell McAdam, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Netflix’s Reed Hastings, and Apple’s Tim Cook. None seems a good bet for a gaggle of gulls. What is really going on is the displacement of the open and rabble-run IPO market by an exclusive game of horse trading among the most exalted elite of “qualified investors,” the owners of the leviathans of the last generation of IPOs.


pages: 234 words: 53,078

The Conservative Nanny State: How the Wealthy Use the Government to Stay Rich and Get Richer by Dean Baker

accelerated depreciation, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, business cycle, corporate governance, declining real wages, full employment, index fund, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, medical malpractice, medical residency, money market fund, offshore financial centre, price discrimination, public intellectual, risk tolerance, spread of share-ownership

In effect, most of the profits of an Internet retailer like Amazon.com can be seen as cashing in on their special tax status. If Amazon.com were suddenly forced to pay the same sales tax as the traditional stores with whom they compete, it would have to largely absorb this tax in the form of lower profits.9 Jeff Bezos, the billionaire CEO of Amazon.com, is yet another success story of the conservative nanny state. If Amazon.com were subject to the same tax rules as a corner grocery store, Mr. Bezos might be just another failed small business entrepreneur. What’s Wrong With Taxing Wall Street Wagers? If a bus driver in New Jersey spends a weekend gambling at Atlantic City, she will pay a tax of 7 percent on her gambling.


pages: 177 words: 54,421

Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Burning Man, delayed gratification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Paul Graham, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, side project, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Streisand effect, sunk-cost fallacy, TED Talk, Upton Sinclair

If anything, your ability to listen, to hear feedback, to improve and grow matter more now than ever before. Facts are better than stories and image. The twentieth-century financier Bernard Baruch had a great line: “Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top. This can’t be done—except by liars.” That is, people’s claims about what they’re doing in the market are rarely to be trusted. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, has talked about this temptation. He reminds himself that there was “no aha moment” for his billion-dollar behemoth, no matter what he might read in his own press clippings. The founding of a company, making money in the market, or the formation of an idea is messy. Reducing it to a narrative retroactively creates a clarity that never was and never will be there.


pages: 182 words: 55,234

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

Yes, it’s fun to be an outsider, but it’s not particularly remunerative. As the rising waters inundate the Fourth Estate, it is increasingly obvious that becoming an insider is the only way to hoist yourself above the deluge. Maybe that is one reason why the Washington Post attracted the fancy of the megabillionaire Jeff Bezos, and why the Post seems to be thriving, with a fancy new office building on K Street and a swelling cohort of young bloggers ravening to be the next George Will, the next Sid Blumenthal. It remains, however precariously, the cradle of the punditocracy. Meanwhile, between journalism’s insiders and its outsiders—between the ones who are rising and the ones who are sinking—there is no solidarity at all.


pages: 183 words: 54,731

Asteroid Mining 101: Wealth for the New Space Economy by John Lewis

3D printing, cosmic abundance, Elon Musk, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, zero-sum game

The rockets and space systems we thought reserved for the use of governments and soldiers have found new purposes, and new masters, people who want to use them to go beyond the purposes of science and state and turn them into tools that can be used for other goals, such as flying people and machines out to the frontier for fun and profit – oh, and to live. Weapons of mass destruction morph into both weapons of mass protection and heavenly chariots delivering untold wealth to Earth and Earth’s children. Well before the idea that an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos could build and own their own fleets of spaceships, in fact well before either of them had the idea they could own their own car, John Lewis was exploring the solar system from his office at MIT and then the University of Arizona, and coming to the realization that the solar system was not some neatly arranged set of planets with a well-placed band of asteroids in its middle, but was full of errant chunks of rock and ice flying in all directions and wreaking havoc on these celestial objects in often unpredictable and sometimes incredibly spectacular ways.


pages: 181 words: 53,257

Taming the To-Do List: How to Choose Your Best Work Every Day by Glynnis Whitwer

delayed gratification, en.wikipedia.org, fear of failure, Firefox, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, late fees, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Walter Mischel

Block out an hour and let others know you are booked and unavailable during that time. You don’t have to explain or apologize. We’re all used to people having appointments, and understand that a phone call or email will be returned later. Do you worry that people will need to reach you? Consider Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon. He knows the importance of unscheduled time and plans it into his week. In the early years of starting Amazon, Bezos tried to keep his schedule completely open on Mondays and Thursdays just to allow himself time to think or to explore an idea. If the founder of the biggest online shopping mall in the world can keep two full days to himself, we can probably find a few hours.


pages: 220

Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea Into a Global Business by Mikkel Svane, Carlye Adler

Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Burning Man, business process, call centre, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, credit crunch, David Heinemeier Hansson, Elon Musk, fail fast, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, remote working, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, subscription business, Tesla Model S, web application

Nevertheless, companies like Dropbox and Box suddenly made those tedious tasks very easy, social, interesting, and sexy. • Accepting a credit card in-store is probably the most mundane task in the world, but Square democratized the world of taking credit cards and made it sexy. • I doubt that it was super sexy selling books to nerds online when Jeff Bezos and Amazon started 24 Page 24 Svane c01.tex V3 - 10/24/2014 8:14 P.M. The Honeymoon their adventure back in 1994. But that “bookstore” is currently changing the world of commerce. • You can’t really call space rockets boring, but with the determined goal of making space flight affordable— democratizing it—suddenly Elon Musk is making the industry sexy again.


pages: 197 words: 53,831

Investing to Save the Planet: How Your Money Can Make a Difference by Alice Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, decarbonisation, diversification, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, family office, food miles, Future Shock, global pandemic, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, green transition, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, impact investing, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, off grid, oil shock, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, precision agriculture, risk tolerance, risk/return, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, TED Talk, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, William MacAskill

And family offices will often have influential younger members – those belonging to the millennial generation, or the generation beyond that, known as Gen Z, who typically care more about the environment. Their influence is helping family offices to be an important class of investors in climate change solutions, as they are in a position to back entrepreneurs. Titans of tech are also funnelling both philanthropic and investment money into climate change solutions. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, said in February 2020 that he would donate $10bn – about 8 per cent of his wealth at the time – via the newly created Bezos Earth Fund to fight climate change. (The move came shortly after hundreds of Amazon staff signed a letter attacking the company’s progress on reducing its carbon footprint.)


pages: 516 words: 157,437

Principles: Life and Work by Ray Dalio

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, backtesting, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, cognitive bias, currency risk, Deng Xiaoping, diversification, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, financial engineering, follow your passion, global macro, Greenspan put, hiring and firing, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Long Term Capital Management, margin call, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, microcredit, oil shock, performance metric, planetary scale, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, yield curve

A shaper is someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts and opposition of others. Jobs built the world’s largest and most successful company by revolutionizing computing, music, communications, animation, and photography with beautifully designed products. Elon Musk (of Tesla, SpaceX, and SolarCity), Jeff Bezos (of Amazon), and Reed Hastings (of Netflix) are other great shapers from the business world. In philanthropy, Muhammad Yunus (of Grameen), Geoffrey Canada (of Harlem Children’s Zone), and Wendy Kopp (of Teach for America) come to mind; and in government, Winston Churchill, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Lee Kuan Yew, and Deng Xiaoping.

But if you can’t tolerate being wrong, you won’t grow, you’ll make yourself and everyone around you miserable, and your work environment will be marked by petty backbiting and malevolent barbs rather than by a healthy, honest search for truth. You must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what’s true. Jeff Bezos described it well when he said, “You have to have a willingness to repeatedly fail. If you don’t have a willingness to fail, you’re going to have to be very careful not to invent.” a. Fail well. Everyone fails. Anyone you see succeeding is only succeeding at the things you’re paying attention to—I guarantee they are also failing at lots of other things.


pages: 523 words: 143,139

Algorithms to Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions by Brian Christian, Tom Griffiths

4chan, Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Charles Babbage, cognitive load, Community Supported Agriculture, complexity theory, constrained optimization, cosmological principle, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, David Sedaris, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, diversification, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, double helix, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, exponential backoff, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, first-price auction, Flash crash, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey Hinton, George Akerlof, global supply chain, Google Chrome, heat death of the universe, Henri Poincaré, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Lao Tzu, Leonard Kleinrock, level 1 cache, linear programming, martingale, multi-armed bandit, Nash equilibrium, natural language processing, NP-complete, P = NP, packet switching, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, RFC: Request For Comment, Robert X Cringely, Sam Altman, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, sorting algorithm, spectrum auction, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stochastic process, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, traveling salesman, Turing machine, urban planning, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, Walter Mischel, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

These regrets are often about the things we failed to do, the options we never tried. In the memorable words of management theorist Chester Barnard, “To try and fail is at least to learn; to fail to try is to suffer the inestimable loss of what might have been.” Regret can also be highly motivating. Before he decided to start Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos had a secure and well-paid position at the investment company D. E. Shaw & Co. in New York. Starting an online bookstore in Seattle was going to be a big leap—something that his boss (that’s D. E. Shaw) advised him to think about carefully. Says Bezos: The framework I found, which made the decision incredibly easy, was what I called—which only a nerd would call—a “regret minimization framework.”

“For myself I am an optimist”: Prime Minister Winston Churchill, speech, Lord Mayor’s Banquet, London, November 9, 1954. Printed in Churchill, Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches. “To try and fail is at least to learn”: Barnard, The Functions of the Executive. “wanted to project myself forward to age 80”: Jeff Bezos, interview with the Academy of Achievement, May 4, 2001, http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-3. several key points about regret: Lai and Robbins, “Asymptotically Efficient Adaptive Allocation Rules.” the guarantee of minimal regret: Ibid. offered the first such algorithms, which were refined by Katehakis and Robbins, “Sequential Choice from Several Populations”; Agrawal, “Sample Mean Based Index Policies”; and Auer, Cesa-Bianchi, and Fischer, “Finite-Time Analysis of the Multiarmed Bandit Problem,” among others.


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The Independent had a variety of sugar daddies. The FT would, at times, have struggled without Pearson and the Economist. Great swathes of the French press are now alive because of the profits of luxury goods, defence sales or finance deals.1 The Washington Post, which now has the support of Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, was, for many years, buoyed up by the Graham family’s investments in the Kaplan Educational publishing business. For decades, the Guardian had the Manchester Evening News. Now a new life raft for the Guardian developed in the most unlikely form: a second-hand car magazine. AutoTrader had been founded in 1975 by a man called John Medejski, who subsequently bought Reading Football Club.

Newspapers have long claimed their journalism was not influenced by the advertising they take. Nor was it clear that taking money from an NGO on transparent terms was less ‘ethical’ than native advertising, or being funded by a billionaire who might well have a hidden agenda and unspoken influence on the papers he was funding. Jeff Bezos appears, so far, to have been a model owner of the Washington Post. The same can be said of Pierre Omidyar, funder of the Intercept website.8 The same fastidious hands-off approach could hardly be said of generations of press barons from Hearst, Northcliffe and Beaverbrook through to Murdoch, Desmond, Maxwell, Berlusconi, Tiny Rowlands and the Barclay brothers.9 * There was no such thing as a steady state any more.


pages: 470 words: 148,730

Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Abhijit V. Banerjee, Esther Duflo

3D printing, accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, charter city, company town, congestion pricing, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental economics, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, fear of failure, financial innovation, flying shuttle, gentrification, George Akerlof, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, high net worth, immigration reform, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, industrial cluster, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, labor-force participation, land reform, Les Trente Glorieuses, loss aversion, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, middle-income trap, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, non-tariff barriers, obamacare, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open economy, Paul Samuelson, place-making, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, restrictive zoning, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, smart meter, social graph, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, systematic bias, Tax Reform Act of 1986, tech worker, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, Twitter Arab Spring, universal basic income, urban sprawl, very high income, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K

Moreover, immigrant-founded firms account for 52 percent of the top twenty-five firms, 57 percent of the top thirty-five firms, and nine of the top thirteen most valuable brands.36 Henry Ford was the son of an Irish immigrant. Steve Jobs’s biological father was from Syria, Sergey Brin was born in Russia. Jeff Bezos takes his name from his stepfather, the Cuban immigrant Mike Bezos. And even among those not so special to start with, the fact of being an immigrant, in a foreign location, without the social ties that make life richer but also impose limits on the single-minded pursuit of one’s career, can liberate one to try something new and different.

This idea has been floated. In December 2017, Steven Case, the billionaire co-founder of AOL, and J. D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a lament for America’s lost heartland, started the investment fund Rise of the Rest. It was funded by some of the best-known billionaires in America (from Jeff Bezos to Eric Schmidt), to invest in states traditionally overlooked by tech investors. A bus tour (the Comeback Cities Tour) took a group of Silicon Valley investors to places like Youngstown and Akron, Ohio; Detroit and Flint, Michigan; and South Bend, Indiana. The fund promoters were quick to point out this was not a social impact fund, but a traditional money-making venture.


We Are the Nerds: The Birth and Tumultuous Life of Reddit, the Internet's Culture Laboratory by Christine Lagorio-Chafkin

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Aaron Swartz, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, bitcoin, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, compensation consultant, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, East Village, eternal september, fake news, game design, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, Hacker News, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, Lean Startup, lolcat, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Palm Treo, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, QR code, r/findbostonbombers, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, uber lyft, Wayback Machine, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator

It was the ultimate, ridiculously mortifying crash course in public speaking. But he was getting paid. “So,” he said, “it was wonderful.” * * * If Ohanian’s early engagement with computers didn’t glorify startup life, Huffman’s sure did. Coding was Huffman’s primary hobby, and he loved reading accounts of startups, such as Jeff Bezos’s founding of Amazon. He thought eTrade was super cool. He watched the skyrocketing share price of eBay, which had gone public in September 1998, during his freshman year of high school. Why wasn’t he one of these kids getting rich in Silicon Valley? Huffman felt cloistered by the rigidity and routine of school.

By 2014, Burning Man had become a weeklong creative outlet for outsider artisans everywhere, but for Silicon Valley’s tech plutocrats it had become an almost mandatory annual social event, an opportunity to rub sunburned, sand-specked elbows with millionaire and billionaire attendees such as Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos. Kan’s friends, Huffman included, spent the end of August camping in Black Rock City and roaming it in their massive iceberg on wheels, which had been dubbed “Titanic’s End.” Huffman had embraced the Burning Man mantra of “radical self-reliance.” Like so many after the 2008 financial meltdown, he had become concerned about the stability of government and the risks associated with large-scale unrest.


pages: 807 words: 154,435

Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making for an Unknowable Future by Mervyn King, John Kay

Airbus A320, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, algorithmic trading, anti-fragile, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, Arthur Eddington, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Black Swan, Boeing 737 MAX, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brexit referendum, Brownian motion, business cycle, business process, capital asset pricing model, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, DeepMind, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, easy for humans, difficult for computers, eat what you kill, Eddington experiment, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Edward Thorp, Elon Musk, Ethereum, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, experimental economics, experimental subject, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial deregulation, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, Goodhart's law, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, high-speed rail, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Johannes Kepler, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Linda problem, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Monty Hall problem, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, nudge theory, oil shock, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, peak oil, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Phillips curve, Pierre-Simon Laplace, popular electronics, power law, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, railway mania, RAND corporation, reality distortion field, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, sealed-bid auction, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Socratic dialogue, South Sea Bubble, spectrum auction, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Suez crisis 1956, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, Thales and the olive presses, Thales of Miletus, The Chicago School, the map is not the territory, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Davenport, Thomas Malthus, Toyota Production System, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, value at risk, world market for maybe five computers, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

No rational individual would, in our judgement, trade their entire resources, or very much at all, for such a gamble. In general, the more you have of something, whether money, food or viewings of your favourite movie, the less is the pleasure you derive from an additional unit. Few people would imagine that Jeff Bezos 14 is a hundred times happier than an ordinary billionaire, or enjoys a hundred thousand times the pleasure of a common-or-garden dollar millionaire. If utility increases less rapidly than wealth – the relationship is non-linear – then gains will be valued less than losses of similar monetary amount are resented.

As we were completing this manuscript, Sears had entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, only for its creditors to learn that the bidder who took over the assets of the failed chain was a group of Mr Lampert’s funds. America’s least successful retailer’s opinion of narratives contrasts with the opinion of Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, and surely America’s most successful modern retailer. Before each meeting at Amazon, executives read a six- to seven-page memo one of them has prepared – silently, for half an hour – before embarking on a discussion of it. These memos are ‘narratively structured’, with some taking the form of a press release for a proposed product. 24 Bezos believes that narratives are important, and not just because he has become the world’s largest bookseller.


pages: 189 words: 57,632

Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow

AltaVista, AOL-Time Warner, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cognitive load, drop ship, en.wikipedia.org, general purpose technology, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine readable, Metcalfe's law, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, new economy, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, patent troll, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Sand Hill Road, Skype, slashdot, Snow Crash, social software, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, the long tail, Thomas Bayes, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine

Not only does Amazon have a set of superb recommendation tools that help me sell books, but it also has an affiliate program that lets me get up to 8.5 in commissions for sales of my books through the site - nearly doubling my royalty rate. As a consumer advocate and activist, I'm delighted by almost every public policy initiative from Amazon. When the Author's Guild tried to get Amazon to curtail its used-book market, the company refused to back down. Founder Jeff Bezos (who is a friend of mine) even wrote, "when someone buys a book, they are also buying the right to resell that book, to loan it out, or to even give it away if they want. Everyone understands this." More recently, Amazon stood up to the US government, who'd gone on an illegal fishing expedition for terrorists (TERRORISTS!


pages: 204 words: 58,565

Keeping Up With the Quants: Your Guide to Understanding and Using Analytics by Thomas H. Davenport, Jinho Kim

behavioural economics, Black-Scholes formula, business intelligence, business process, call centre, computer age, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, data science, en.wikipedia.org, feminist movement, Florence Nightingale: pie chart, forensic accounting, global supply chain, Gregor Mendel, Hans Rosling, hypertext link, invention of the telescope, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, longitudinal study, margin call, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Myron Scholes, Netflix Prize, p-value, performance metric, publish or perish, quantitative hedge fund, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Shiller, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, six sigma, Skype, statistical model, supply-chain management, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Thomas Davenport

Manufacturing, in which most machines already have one or more microprocessors, is increasingly a big-data environment. Consumer marketing, with myriad customer touchpoints and clickstreams, is already a big data problem. Google has even described its self-driving car as a big-data project. CEOs like Gary Loveman at Caesars Entertainment (he’s known for saying, “Do we think, or do we know?”), Jeff Bezos at Amazon (“We never throw away data”), and Reid Hoffman at LinkedIn (“Web 3.0 is about data”) are publicly on record that analytical thinking and decision making is a route to organizational success and personal fortune. All organizations in all industries will need to make sense of the onslaught of data.


pages: 243 words: 61,237

To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

always be closing, Atul Gawande, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, business cycle, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, complexity theory, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disintermediation, Elisha Otis, future of work, George Akerlof, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, out of africa, Richard Thaler, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, Upton Sinclair, Wall-E, zero-sum game

Again, the objective here isn’t to be false. It’s to be strategic—by being human. “Subtle mimicry comes across as a form of flattery, the physical dance of charm itself,” The New York Times has noted. “And if that kind of flattery doesn’t close a deal, it may just be that the customer isn’t buying.” Pull up a chair. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, has accomplished a great deal in his forty-eight years. He’s reshaped the retail business. He’s become one of the thirty wealthiest people on the planet. And with far less fanfare, he’s devised one of the best attunement practices I’ve encountered. Amazon, like most organizations, has lots of meetings.


pages: 202 words: 62,901

The People's Republic of Walmart: How the World's Biggest Corporations Are Laying the Foundation for Socialism by Leigh Phillips, Michal Rozworski

Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, call centre, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, Colonization of Mars, combinatorial explosion, company town, complexity theory, computer age, corporate raider, crewed spaceflight, data science, decarbonisation, digital rights, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, financial engineering, fulfillment center, G4S, Garrett Hardin, Georg Cantor, germ theory of disease, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kiva Systems, linear programming, liquidity trap, mass immigration, Mont Pelerin Society, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, post scarcity, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, recommendation engine, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, sovereign wealth fund, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing machine, union organizing, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, We are all Keynesians now

Meanwhile, integrating operations with producers ensures that products can be ready in sufficient quantities. Here too, given the sheer scale of this economy, we see the fits and starts of a more integrated model of production and distribution planning, however hierarchical and servile toward its bosses it may be. We might describe Jeff Bezos as the bald, moustache-less Stalin of online retail. Yet at heart, Amazon remains (for now) a giant distribution network for consumer goods. The internet age has enabled the rise of a new type of retail model for moving goods from producers to consumers, and Amazon took advantage of this opening better than any of its rivals did.


pages: 202 words: 62,199

Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKeown

90 percent rule, Albert Einstein, Clayton Christensen, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Sedaris, deliberate practice, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, impact investing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, loss aversion, low cost airline, Mahatma Gandhi, microcredit, minimum viable product, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Peter Thiel, power law, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Shai Danziger, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Vilfredo Pareto

While there continues to be a culture of machismo when it comes to going without sleep, luckily the stigma is fading, thanks in part to a few super–high performers—particularly in industries that typically celebrate burning the candle at both ends—who have publicly boasted about getting a full eight hours. These people—many of them true Essentialists—know their healthy sleep habits give them a huge competitive advantage, and they are right. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, is one of them. He says: “I’m more alert and I think more clearly. I just feel so much better all day long if I’ve had eight hours.” Mark Andreessen, cofounder of Netscape, and a reformed sleep restrictor who used to work till the early hours but still be up at 7:00 A.M., is another.


pages: 207 words: 63,071

My Start-Up Life: What A by Ben Casnocha, Marc Benioff

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Bonfire of the Vanities, business process, call centre, coherent worldview, creative destruction, David Brooks, David Sedaris, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, fear of failure, hiring and firing, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Marc Benioff, Menlo Park, open immigration, Paul Graham, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, superconnector, technology bubble, traffic fines, Tyler Cowen, Year of Magical Thinking

Despite mangled voicemail messages, I still established relationships with public works directors who grew accustomed to my contacts. Local papers continued to write articles about my free service. BayArea.com named us “Site of the Week,” driving a ton 10 MY START-UP LIFE of traffic and providing me a free T-shirt. The now-defunct Industry Standard featured me and Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos for the “quotes of the week.” (“America is complaining more than ever, so we feel like it’s a prime time to launch.”) Seeing titles like “boy wonder” and “whiz kid” surprised me. All I did was build a website. >> To accompany this growth, I had to add a little bit of infrastructure to my fledgling business, if only to stave off embarrassment.


pages: 199 words: 61,648

Having and Being Had by Eula Biss

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, David Graeber, Donald Trump, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job satisfaction, Landlord’s Game, means of production, moral hazard, new economy, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, precariat, Robert Shiller, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, wages for housework

Investment isn’t any more of a sin, I think, than gambling. But when shareholders profit at the expense of the workers who produce those profits, it’s a means of extraction. An economy of extraction is what we’re retiring on, those of us who get to retire. Amazon has stopped giving stock to hundreds of thousands of employees, while Jeff Bezos owns 16 percent of the company, making him the richest man in the world. His workers, who are tracked electronically to increase their efficiency in hot warehouses, have an injury rate higher than loggers. And the terms of their employment are worse than they would have been fifty years ago. “If Amazon’s 575,000 total employees owned the same proportion of their employer’s stock as the Sears workers did in the 1950s, they would each own shares worth $381,000,” write Nelson Schwartz and Michael Corkery.


pages: 192 words: 59,234

Winning: The Unforgiving Race to Greatness by Tim S. Grover, Shari Wenk

COVID-19, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, Jeff Bezos, TikTok

Winners engage their minds and experiences to create new levels of greatness. I’m not just talking about athletes here, I’m talking about innovators and groundbreakers in business, entertainment, science, technology, education, medicine, parenting… every walk of life. Bill Gates personally checking every line of code for the first five years of Microsoft’s existence. Jeff Bezos shipping books out of his garage. Sara Blakely cutting the feet off her pantyhose. Elon Musk gazing up at Mars. They weren’t afraid to think originally, they weren’t worried about what others would think about their “crazy” ideas. That whole BS about thinking outside the box is just that: BS. Winners don’t see the box.


pages: 210 words: 62,278

No One Succeeds Alone by Robert Reffkin

Albert Einstein, coronavirus, COVID-19, financial independence, George Floyd, global pandemic, hiring and firing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, market design, pattern recognition, Salesforce, Steve Jobs, young professional

If something might matter to the customer, it should be a matter of great importance to you. Be obsessive. Care more than it makes any sense to care. In a world where many people think “okay” is okay and “good enough” is good enough, actually caring is a huge competitive advantage. Every successful entrepreneur is obsessed about the opportunity in front of them. Try to imagine Jeff Bezos saying that Amazon’s delivery speed had gotten “fast enough.” Or Beyoncé only going through the motions on stage. Or Reed Hastings at Netflix saying that they already had a lot of great shows and didn’t need to try to make another breakout hit. It would never happen. Problems are opportunities.


pages: 287 words: 62,824

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

He says he has an apartment in Miami as well as New York. But he abjures most of the trappings. ‘If I bought a Ferrari, I’d be worried about it getting scratched,’ he jokes.”⁹⁹ As shocking as this sounds, I get where Blankfein is coming from. When you regularly hang out with people like Jeff Bezos and David Geffen and look at Ray Dalio and Ken Griffen as your peers, having only $1 billion doesn’t seem like much. However, on a completely objective basis, Blankfein is in the top 0.01% of U.S. households, or the 1% of the 1%. According to Saez and Zucman, the top 0.01% of U.S. households (~16,000 families) had a net worth of at least $111 million in 2012.¹⁰⁰ Even if you adjust for the increase in asset prices since 2012, Blankfein would easily be in the top 0.01%.


pages: 547 words: 172,226

Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty by Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, bread and circuses, BRICs, British Empire, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flying shuttle, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, household responsibility system, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, invention of movable type, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land reform, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum wage unemployment, Mohammed Bouazizi, Paul Samuelson, price stability, profit motive, Robert Solow, Rosa Parks, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, Simon Kuznets, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, working poor

Individual talent matters at every level of society, but even that needs an institutional framework to transform it into a positive force. Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But he ultimately responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers.

Today technological change requires education both for the innovator and the worker. And here we see the importance of economic institutions that create a level playing field. The United States could produce, or attract from foreign lands, the likes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Jeff Bezos, and the hundreds of scientists who made fundamental discoveries in information technology, nuclear power, biotech, and other fields upon which these entrepreneurs built their businesses. The supply of talent was there to be harnessed because most teenagers in the United States have access to as much schooling as they wish or are capable of attaining.


pages: 229 words: 64,697

The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need by Scott Pape

Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, financial independence, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Own Your Own Home, Paradox of Choice, retail therapy, Robert Shiller, Snapchat

My super does the same thing, but it's also got the 200 biggest Aussie companies — like the banks, Telstra and BHP. Pauline: Well, I just don't understand shares. You: Honestly, I don't know a balance sheet from a bedsheet, but I have faith that the world has amazing businesspeople like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon's Jeff Bezos. With my super I automatically become a part-owner in their businesses, and they share their profits with me. Pauline: I don't like it. You: Well, I have my plan on autopilot so I don't have to think about it. It just ticks over until the day I retire (and beyond). It's been created with an accurate understanding of historical rates of return, and it's designed to outpace inflation and ensure I'll never run out of money.


pages: 391 words: 71,600

Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft's Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone by Satya Nadella, Greg Shaw, Jill Tracie Nichols

3D printing, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, anti-globalists, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bretton Woods, business process, cashless society, charter city, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fault tolerance, fulfillment center, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, growth hacking, hype cycle, industrial robot, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Mars Rover, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, Neal Stephenson, NP-complete, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, place-making, Richard Feynman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Snow Crash, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, subscription business, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Soul of a New Machine, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, two-sided market, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, young professional, zero-sum game

Meanwhile, revenues from our cloud services could be counted in the millions, not the billions. Although Amazon did not report its AWS revenues in those days, they were the clear leader, building a huge business without any real challenge from Microsoft. In his annual letter to shareholders in April 2011, just as I was beginning my new role, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos gleefully offered a short course on the computer science and economics underlying their burgeoning cloud enterprise. He wrote about Bayesian estimators, machine learning, pattern recognition, and probabilistic decision making. “The advances in data management developed by Amazon engineers have been the starting point for the architectures underneath the cloud storage and data management services offered by Amazon Web Services (AWS),” he wrote.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In Average Is Over, the economist Tyler Cowen foresees a future in which a tiny “hyper meritocracy” would make millions while the rest of us struggle to survive on anywhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a year. It already works quite well in Mexico, Cowen quips. Carl B. Frey and Michael A. Osborne predict that 47 percent of all jobs are at risk of being automated over the next twenty years. And I have no doubt about the vision of platform owners like Travis Kalanick (Uber), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), or Lukas Biewald (CrowdFlower)—who, in the absence of government regulation and resistance from workers, will simply exploit their undervalued workers. I’m all on board for Paul Mason’s and Kathi Weeks’ visions for a post-capitalist, post-work future where universal basic income will rule the way we think about life opportunities.


Big Data at Work: Dispelling the Myths, Uncovering the Opportunities by Thomas H. Davenport

Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, bioinformatics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, cloud computing, commoditize, data acquisition, data science, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, New Journalism, recommendation engine, RFID, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, sorting algorithm, statistical model, Tesla Model S, text mining, Thomas Davenport, three-martini lunch

Part of taking an interest in experimentation is eliminating barriers to the implementation of innovative ideas and offerings. Leaders of big data–intensive organizations also need some degree of patience. A good deal of “mucking around in data” may be necessary before there is any sense of a payoff. It may even be necessary to keep data around for multiple years before its value is known. Jeff Bezos of Amazon is known for saying, “We never throw away data,” simply because it is difficult to know when it may become important for a product or service offering down the road. Leadership of big data firms may also require some new senior management roles. There are no examples—to my knowledge, ­anyway—of “Senior Vice Presidents of Big Data,” but there are some roles that include that function.


pages: 239 words: 56,531

The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine by Peter Lunenfeld

Albert Einstein, Andrew Keen, anti-globalists, Apple II, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, business cycle, business logic, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, East Village, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, folksonomy, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, gravity well, Guggenheim Bilbao, Herman Kahn, Honoré de Balzac, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, Mother of all demos, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, post-materialism, Potemkin village, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Schrödinger's Cat, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, social bookmarking, social software, spaced repetition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas L Friedman, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, walkable city, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

During and after the great Internet bubble of the 1990s, there were instant history machines for the so-called new economy—magazines like Business 2.0 and Fast Company—that reported on the ups and downs of the geek gods and their “wealth creation.” Here are the tales of Microsoft stock bought at twenty dollars and sold at two thousand, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard working in their rented Palo Alto garage, Ross Perot quitting IBM to found Computer Data Systems in Texas, Jeff Bezos opening an online bookstore, naming it after the largest river in the world, and then getting on the cover of Time magazine as the CEO of Amazon.com, and Mark Zuckerberg transforming the Harvard University first-year-student listing service into Facebook, the dominant and most valuable social media site in the world.


pages: 272 words: 64,626

Eat People: And Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs by Andy Kessler

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bob Noyce, bread and circuses, British Empire, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, carbon credits, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, Cornelius Vanderbilt, creative destruction, disintermediation, Douglas Engelbart, Dutch auction, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, income inequality, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Michael Milken, Money creation, Netflix Prize, packet switching, personalized medicine, pets.com, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social graph, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, transfer pricing, vertical integration, wealth creators, Yogi Berra

I met Mark Zuckerberg just as Facebook was crossing a few million users; he talked about lowering the cost of communications between groups of people. Today, a good chunk of the planet logs in to the site regularly to keep in touch with friends and family. I can go on. Meg Whitman when she was at eBay, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, even a few telecom folks who were billionaires for a moment in time. The cool thing about all these folks is that no one did them any favors. There was no government contract that guaranteed them success. No secret handshakes or sweetheart deals or smoky room concessions. For the most part, society didn’t do them any favors—each of them started small, but saw something big on the horizon and created a process to constantly improve, constantly innovate, and constantly sell exactly what was needed and then identify the next big thing on the new horizon.


Woolly: The True Story of the Quest to Revive History's Most Iconic Extinct Creature by Ben Mezrich

butterfly effect, CRISPR, Danny Hillis, double helix, Easter island, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, General Motors Futurama, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, life extension, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, microbiome, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, Recombinant DNA, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology

Instead of focusing on problems in the present, the idea was to see the world on a much longer time frame. One of the Long Now’s initiatives was to create a permanent database of the world’s seven thousand known languages. Another was “The Clock of The Long Now”—a three-hundred-foot-tall timepiece built in a mountain on Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Texas property, to keep exact track of the next ten thousand years. Conservationism taken to an extreme: spiders and birds and people, living together in the shadow of a clock that would tick on for millennia. Brand was currently focusing most of his time on Revive & Restore, a Long Now project with a mission to use genetic engineering to protect endangered species and to bring back extinct species.


pages: 213 words: 70,742

Notes From an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back by Mark O'Connell

Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, California gold rush, carbon footprint, Carrington event, clean water, Colonization of Mars, conceptual framework, cryptocurrency, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Donner party, Easter island, Elon Musk, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, Jeff Bezos, life extension, lock screen, low earth orbit, Marc Andreessen, Mars Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, New Urbanism, off grid, Peter Thiel, post-work, Sam Altman, Silicon Valley, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, the built environment, yield curve

Creative forces had been unleashed, he said, and it was now clear how we could get to Mars. It was Zubrin who had brought Musk into the Martian fold—before he started SpaceX, Musk had donated $100,000 to help fund the Utah station—and he was now a sort of John the Baptist with respect to the billionaire space entrepreneur. (Musk was one of a handful of tech billionaires, including Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson, who were investing large amounts of their fortunes in the prospect of privatized space travel, projects that were as often as not presented as a means of securing the future itself, as though the last hope for the species was the largesse of billionaires who possessed both the genius and heroism of spirit to save an imperiled humanity.)


pages: 254 words: 68,133

The Age of Illusions: How America Squandered Its Cold War Victory by Andrew J. Bacevich

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, clean water, Columbian Exchange, Credit Default Swap, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, mass incarceration, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, planetary scale, plutocrats, Potemkin village, price stability, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Saturday Night Live, school choice, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Steve Bannon, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, traumatic brain injury, trickle-down economics, We are all Keynesians now, WikiLeaks

Scott Fitzgerald’s pithy observation about the rich “being different from you and me” expressed an essential truth about American life.3 In 2016, according to Forbes magazine, there were 540 billionaires in the United States, with a combined net worth of $2.399 trillion.4 On the Forbes list of the four hundred wealthiest Americans, Donald Trump’s fortune, then estimated at $3.7 billion, was only good enough for a ranking of 156.5 Wealth is relative. In comparison with Bill Gates ($81 billion) or Jeff Bezos ($67 billion), he qualified as only moderately well to do. Even so, he fell comfortably within the top 1 percent of earners, a group controlling more than one-third of the nation’s entire wealth. In contrast, the bottom 50 percent of the population made do with a mere 1 percent of it. Since the earliest days of the republic, the United States had offered material abundance for some while condemning others to lives of want or outright squalor.


pages: 242 words: 71,943

Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity by Charles L. Marohn, Jr.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Pattern Language, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anti-fragile, bank run, big-box store, Black Swan, bread and circuses, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, Ferguson, Missouri, gentrification, global reserve currency, high-speed rail, housing crisis, index fund, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, low skilled workers, mass immigration, megaproject, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, reserve currency, restrictive zoning, Savings and loan crisis, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, urban renewal, walkable city, white flight, women in the workforce, yield curve, zero-sum game

Distinctions between city economies and the potpourris we call national economies are important not only for getting a grip on realities; they are of the essence where practical attempts to reshape economic life are concerned.8 A measurement of GDP tells us as much about American prosperity as a measurement of the average wealth of a hundred households when one of those households includes billionaire Jeff Bezos. How does a measurement like inflation have any credibility – or real meaning – when health care, college tuition, home prices, and construction costs have increased annually for decades at rates much greater? What is lost in all the centralization and efficiency is local nuance, or what most people would consider real meaning.


pages: 232 words: 63,803

Billion Dollar Burger: Inside Big Tech's Race for the Future of Food by Chase Purdy

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Big Tech, cognitive dissonance, corporate governance, Donald Trump, gig economy, global supply chain, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jeff Bezos, Marc Benioff, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plant based meat, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs

The milestone event ushered JUST into its next phase, making cell-cultured meat the priority. But is he up to the challenge? Tetrick, who hopes and pushes so hard to be the first to introduce this new meat to kitchen tables, is not the obvious pick to be the poster boy for it. He isn’t a Steve Jobs–style genius. He’s not a master of supply chains like Jeff Bezos. And he doesn’t have the vision of a Bill Gates. And even within his own sphere, he lacks the scientific know-how of Mark Post and many others. Is he capable? Yes. Tenacious? Sure. But the natural leader of this new movement? No. This is the curious thing about Tetrick, who founded and runs one of Silicon Valley’s most successful food technology start-ups, but whose expertise has never propelled it.


Working Hard, Hardly Working by Grace Beverley

Cal Newport, clockwatching, COVID-19, David Heinemeier Hansson, death from overwork, glass ceiling, global pandemic, hustle culture, Jeff Bezos, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, stop buying avocado toast, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship, work culture

We could see celebrities in magazines before, so how is seeing them on our phone screen any different? Well, with Beyoncé now framed in the same square box as your mate from school, you can seamlessly flick from your friend’s engagement photo to Kim Kardashian’s Halloween-decor triumphs, and know that in that time Jeff Bezos has made another billion. We’re no longer admiring a mythical child actor in a far-away city who has achieved stardom and bought a house all by the age of three. Instead, we’re turning on our phones and following the lives of people seemingly just like us, who are projecting a highlight reel that it is impossible not to compare ourselves to.


pages: 249 words: 66,492

The Rare Metals War by Guillaume Pitron

Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean tech, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, commodity super cycle, connected car, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, driverless car, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, energy transition, Fairphone, full employment, green new deal, green transition, industrial robot, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lyft, mittelstand, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Tesla Model S, Yom Kippur War

Max Mönch, Alexander Lahl, Ocean’s Monopoly, produced by Werwiewas, 2015. H.R.2262 — US Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act, 114th Congress (2015–2016). Refer to websites of Space Resources Australia, Platinoid Mines Corporation and Asteroid Mining Corporation. NewSpace entrepreneurs include Elon Musk of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, or Greg Wyler, the director of One Web Interviews with Olivier Sanguy, editor in chief of the website Enjoy Space, and MarieAnge Sanguy, editor in chief of the journal Espace & Exploration, 2016. Read the fascinating article written by the astronaut Thomas Pesquet, ‘Mines dans l’espace, la nouvelle frontière’ [‘Mines in Space: the new frontier’], Les Échos, 8 October 2017.


Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire: Everything I Know Now About Autism and Asperger's That I Wish I'd Known Then by David William Plummer

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, coronavirus, epigenetics, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mirror neurons, neurotypical, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), side project, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, wikimedia commons

Perhaps if a neurotypical person reading this is able to understand the characteristics, routines, and habits of high-functioning individuals with autism, they too will be able to increase their odds of success through learning new approaches for their own lives. There is no easy way to know if public figures such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are on the autism spectrum. If they are, none have publicly shared that information, and unless and until they do, it’s a private health matter that I won’t speculate on. We can, however, observe and identify certain traits and characteristics that they exhibit in common with people on the spectrum and note how they may have served to make those individuals so driven to success in their endeavors, regardless of whether they experience the disorder.


pages: 603 words: 182,781

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The key to Amazon’s continued success may not be adding more customers but convincing its current ones to buy more items, and more expensive ones at that. (The average Zappos order is six times greater than Amazon’s.) And the best lever for doing so would appear to be free shipping. What’s driving the growth of Amazon Prime, founder and CEO Jeff Bezos has told analysts, is the company’s third-party fulfillment service, which offers the same shipping options to its online partners and their customers. Or as one of his investors put it, “Amazon’s logistics is its secret sauce.” Prime’s higher sales velocity represents a significant shift in how Amazon does business.

Two billion boxes land on our doorsteps each year, three-fourths of which have been sent either overnight or second-day air. E-commerce (and why call it that? Isn’t it just “commerce” by now?) at present accounts for 7 percent of all retail spending. Half of all Americans are online shoppers, spending an average of $1,006 per year. Jeff Bezos’s original prediction that it would eventually account for 15 percent of a multitrillion-dollar industry is well within reach. What the Internet added to the retail equation wasn’t long tails and thoughtful comparison shopping, but the acceleration of impulse. Our increasing comfort with our digital selves—composed of Google searches, Facebook friends, YouTube clips, and tweets—awoke a belief in us that physical atoms should always move at the same light speed as our digital bits.


pages: 611 words: 188,732

Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) by Adam Fisher

adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, An Inconvenient Truth, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple Newton, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Byte Shop, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, Colossal Cave Adventure, Computer Lib, disintermediation, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, fake news, frictionless, General Magic , glass ceiling, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Henry Singleton, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Rulifson, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, life extension, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Mondo 2000, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, popular electronics, quantum entanglement, random walk, reality distortion field, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, social graph, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, The Hackers Conference, the long tail, the new new thing, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, tulip mania, V2 rocket, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, Y Combinator

Brad Templeton: In the early years Sergey would just actually sleep in whatever camp he found himself in at the end of the night. Google is incorporated immediately after the return from Burning Man. Heather Cairns: They handed me a folder full of checks for like $100,000, $200,000 from Andy Bechtolsheim, Jeff Bezos, David Cheriton. They sat in the back of my car for weeks because I couldn’t get out of work in time to even get a bank account opened. Ray Sidney: I had never worked at an early stage start-up before, and you know what? It was intense. My first week at Google I did two all-nighters. We saw this big opportunity and at the same time there was so much in doubt, so we wanted to do whatever we could to make it work, and so we worked hard.

Within five years he, along with a few others, had created Twitter. Brad Stone is the one journalist who knows the most about Amazon, Airbnb, and Uber, because he wrote the book—two of them, in fact: The Upstarts: How Uber, Airbnb, and the Killer Companies of the New Silicon Valley Are Changing the World and The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon. Stone’s day job? Running the technology coverage for Bloomberg, natch. Christopher Stringer was one of Apple’s powerful crew of in-house industrial designers. He left the company in 2017 after twenty-five years of service. Tony Stubblebine was the lead engineer of Odeo, a podcasting company.


pages: 579 words: 183,063

Tribe of Mentors: Short Life Advice From the Best in the World by Timothy Ferriss

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Bayesian statistics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, decentralized internet, dematerialisation, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, double helix, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, family office, fear of failure, Gary Taubes, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, global macro, Google Hangouts, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, helicopter parent, high net worth, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, index fund, information security, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, minimum viable product, move fast and break things, Mr. Money Mustache, Naomi Klein, Neal Stephenson, Nick Bostrom, non-fiction novel, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, sunk-cost fallacy, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, too big to fail, Turing machine, uber lyft, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator

When I came back to Silicon Valley, I didn’t get a general partner offer from the venture firms I cared most about, so I ended up starting one called Floodgate. Floodgate is doing awesome, and I am thankful every day that I didn’t get what I “wanted.” I love that Bill Campbell’s [called “the coach,” a famous mentor to tech icons like Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, and Larry Page] favorite song was “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” by the Rolling Stones. There is so much wisdom in that song. Sometimes . . . not getting what you want opens the door to getting what you need. If you could have a gigantic billboard anywhere with anything on it, what would it say?

Note from Tim: My friend Cal Fussman (TW: @calfussman, calfussman.com) is a New York Times best-selling author and writer-at-large for Esquire magazine, where he is best known as a primary writer of the “What I Learned” feature. He’s interviewed dozens of shapers of modern culture including Mikhail Gorbachev, Muhammad Ali, Jimmy Carter, Ted Kennedy, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson, among others. Cal also has breakfast with Larry King nearly every morning in L.A. Since Larry can be hard to nail down and I was dying to have him in this book, Cal was kind enough to interview him in my stead. We also wanted to focus on some of Larry’s stories, so you’ll notice that the format and questions are different.


pages: 619 words: 177,548

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

Although wealth taxes would not directly contribute to redirecting technological change, they would be helpful to reduce the wealth gaps that exist in many industrialized nations today. For example, a 3 percent wealth tax would, over time, significantly eat into the fortunes of tech tycoons such as Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. An important question is whether smaller wealth gaps would also reduce their persuasion power. This would depend on other broader social changes, not just their exact wealth. Wealth taxes are also difficult to estimate, and taxing in this fashion will multiply trickeries aimed at hiding wealth in trusts and other complex vehicles, sometimes offshore.

One specific proposal, popularized by Andrew Yang’s Democratic primary campaign in 2020, deserves discussion: universal basic income. UBI, which promises an unconditional dollar amount for every adult, has emerged as a popular policy idea in some left-wing circles, among more libertarian scholars such as Milton Friedman and Charles Murray, and with tech billionaires such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Support for the idea is rooted, in part, in the clear inadequacies of the safety net in many countries, including the United States. But it also receives a powerful boost from the narrative that robots and AI are pushing us toward a jobless future. And so, the narrative goes, we need the UBI in order to provide income to most people (and to prevent the pitchfork uprising that some tech billionaires are fearing).


pages: 829 words: 187,394

The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest by Edward Chancellor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, asset allocation, asset-backed security, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, bond market vigilante , bonus culture, book value, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, cashless society, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, commodity super cycle, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, cryptocurrency, currency peg, currency risk, David Graeber, debt deflation, deglobalization, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Elon Musk, equity risk premium, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Extinction Rebellion, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Goodhart's law, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Greenspan put, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, implied volatility, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, initial coin offering, intangible asset, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, land bank, large denomination, Les Trente Glorieuses, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, margin call, Mark Spitznagel, market bubble, market clearing, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, megaproject, meme stock, Michael Milken, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mohammed Bouazizi, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, pensions crisis, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, quantitative easing, railway mania, reality distortion field, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, tech billionaire, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Haywood, time value of money, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Walter Mischel, WeWork, When a measure becomes a target, yield curve

The fortunes of the robber barons, such as Rockefeller, were amassed in the late nineteenth century when falling interest rates boosted the ratio of American wealth to incomes.13 Prior to the Great War, the Standard Oil boss was worth 2.6 million times the average annual working American’s wage.14 When the banker Pierpont Morgan died in 1913, leaving an estate valued at $80 million, Rockefeller commented: ‘and to think he wasn’t even a rich man.’15 A little more than a century later, Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos outdid the mighty Rockefeller with a fortune estimated at more than $200 billion – some 3.5 million times the average American’s income at the time.16 On the day the internet tycoon achieved this milestone, the Fed funds rate was firmly stuck at zero. Boosted by the low prevailing discount rate, Amazon shares traded on a price-earnings ratio above 100 times, more than twice the peak valuation of Law’s Mississippi Company.

Williamson, Unequal Gains: American Growth and Inequality since 1700 (Princeton, 2017), pp. 138–9. 14. Scheidel, Great Leveler, p. 109. 15. Rachel Emma Silverman, ‘As Banks Join, the Morgans, Rockefellers aren’t On Board’, Wall Street Journal, 15 September 2000. 16. Jonathan Ponciano, ‘Jeff Bezos Becomes the First Person Ever Worth $200 billion’, Forbes, 26 August 2020. 17. Lindert and Williamson, Unequal Gains, p. 260. 18. Ibid., p. 139. 19. See Michael Kumhof, Romain Rancière and Pablo Winant, ‘Inequality, Leverage and Crises: The Case of Endogenous Default’, IMF Working Paper, November 2013, p. 12.


pages: 1,104 words: 302,176

The Rise and Fall of American Growth: The U.S. Standard of Living Since the Civil War (The Princeton Economic History of the Western World) by Robert J. Gordon

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, airport security, Apple II, barriers to entry, big-box store, blue-collar work, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, discovery of penicillin, Donner party, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, feminist movement, financial innovation, food desert, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Golden age of television, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflight wifi, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, invention of air conditioning, invention of the sewing machine, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, inventory management, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, Lewis Mumford, Loma Prieta earthquake, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market fragmentation, Mason jar, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, occupational segregation, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, payday loans, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, rent control, restrictive zoning, revenue passenger mile, Robert Solow, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, Skype, Southern State Parkway, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, streetcar suburb, The Market for Lemons, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism, yield management

Among the many foreigners who deserve credit for key elements of the Great Inventions are transplanted Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell for the telephone, Frenchmen Louis Pasteur for the germ theory of disease and Louis Lumière for the motion picture, Englishmen Joseph Lister for antiseptic surgery and David Hughes for early wireless experiments, and Germans Karl Benz for the internal combustion engine and Heinrich Hertz for key inventions that made possible the 1896 wireless patents of the recent Italian immigrant Guglielmo Marconi. The role of foreign inventors in the late nineteenth century was distinctly more important than it was one hundred years later, when the personal computer and Internet revolution was led almost uniformly by Americans, including Paul Allen, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg. Among the pioneering giants of the Internet age, Sergei Brin (co-founder of Google) is one of the few to have been born abroad. Organization. The book proper begins with chapter 2, on living conditions in 1870. Part I includes eight chapters (chapters 2–9) on the revolutionary advances in the standard of living through 1940, a dividing year chosen both because it is halfway between 1870 and 2010 and because 1940 marks the year of the first Census of Housing, with its detailed quantitative measures of housing and its equipment.

By 2003, my neighborhood highbrow specialized shop, Great Expectations, closed for good. And in 2011, the large nationwide chain Borders declared bankruptcy and closed all its stores, as had Waldenbooks several years earlier. If all it sold was books, Amazon would have changed retailing forever, but the imagination of its founder Jeff Bezos went far beyond that. He soon realized that he could sell anything. Today, Amazon sells 232 million products to a user base just in the United States of 244 million customers, defined as those who have purchased anything within the past twelve months. The basic concept of customer loyalty was not lost on Amazon, and it figured out how to build customer loyalty by providing a unique benefit.

The Third Industrial Revolution, which consists of the computer, digitalization, and communication inventions of the past fifty years, has been dominated by small companies founded by individual entrepreneurs, each of whom created organizations that soon became very large corporations. Allen and Gates were followed by Steve Jobs at Apple, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Sergei Brin and Larry Page at Google, Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook, and many others. The left side of the entrepreneurial U is well documented. The percentage of all U.S. patents granted to individuals (as contrasted with business firms) fell from 95 percent in 1880 to 73 percent in 1920, to 42 percent in 1940, and then gradually to 21 percent in 1970 and 15 percent in 2000.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Instead of hiring business school graduates, these funds recruited physicists, computer engineers, and mathematicians. Highly secretive, even paranoid, the quants ruthlessly protect their mathematical formulas.2 In corporate style they are closer to Silicon Valley tech companies than Wall Street firms, and in fact call themselves technology companies. Jeff Bezos and John Overdeck, a math prodigy with a Stanford PhD in statistics, passed through D. E. Shaw.3 Overdeck joined Bezos at his new start-up, Amazon, and is rumored to have been responsible for some of the very complicated—and very lucrative—algorithms that instantaneously told Amazon’s customers, “If you liked that, then you might also like this.”


pages: 278 words: 74,880

A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Carbon Emissions by Muhammad Yunus

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", active measures, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clean water, conceptual framework, crony capitalism, data science, distributed generation, Donald Trump, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Lean Startup, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microcredit, new economy, Occupy movement, profit maximization, Silicon Valley, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, urban sprawl, young professional

In January 2017, Oxfam announced that the ultraprivileged group that owns wealth exceeding that of the bottom half of the world’s population has shrunk to just eight people—even as the number of people in the bottom half has grown to about 3.6 billion.2 Newspapers published the pictures of these eight people. They are well-known, well-respected people—American business leaders like Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, and Jeff Bezos, as well as a few from other countries, such as Amancio Ortega of Spain and Carlos Slim Helú of Mexico. This information is so unbelievable that it takes time to absorb. We feel like asking many more questions. What happens to the social fabric in a country where a handful of people control the bulk of the national wealth?


pages: 302 words: 74,878

A Curious Mind: The Secret to a Bigger Life by Brian Grazer, Charles Fishman

4chan, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, Apple II, Asperger Syndrome, Bonfire of the Vanities, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, game design, Google Chrome, Howard Zinn, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Norman Mailer, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, out of africa, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple

Beck: business expert in mobile communications, author Yves Béhar: industrial designer, entrepreneur, sustainability advocate Harold Benjamin: director of the Wellness Community centers for cancer patients Steve Berra: professional skateboarder, cofounder of popular skateboarding website The Berrics Jeff Bewkes: CEO and chairman of Time Warner Jeff Bezos: founder and CEO of Amazon.com, owner of the Washington Post Jason Binn: founder of DuJour magazine, chief advisor to Gilt Groupe, editor of Getty WireImage Ian Birch: director of editorial development and special projects at Hearst Magazines, former editor of US magazine Peter Biskind: cultural critic, film historian, author, former executive editor of Premiere magazine Edwin Black: historian and journalist focusing on human rights and corporate abuse Keith Black: chairman of neurosurgery at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, specializing in the treatment of brain tumors David Blaine: magician, illusionist, endurance artist Keith Blanchard: founding editor of Maxim Alex Ben Block: journalist, former senior editor of the Hollywood Reporter Sherman Block: sheriff of Los Angeles County, 1982–1998 Michael Bloomberg: mayor of New York City, 2002–2013, founder of Bloomberg financial information service Tim Blum: cofounder of contemporary commercial art gallery Blum & Poe Adam Bly: creator of Seed magazine, which focused on the intersection of science and society Alex Bogusky: designer, advertising executive, marketer, author David Boies: attorney who represented U.S.


pages: 270 words: 75,803

Wall Street Meat by Andy Kessler

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Andy Kessler, automated trading system, banking crisis, Bob Noyce, George Gilder, index fund, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, market bubble, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, Pepto Bismol, pets.com, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, Steve Jobs, technology bubble, undersea cable, Y2K

Wall Street was happy to oblige, for a modest 7% fee. · · · One of the first high profile deals Frank won was Amazon.com, an online bookseller in Seattle. Morgan Stanley and Mary Meeker put on the big push to get the deal, which, like Netscape, was backed by Kleiner Perkins and venture capitalist John Doerr, who was as hot as a pistol. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, had an infectious spirit of doing something yourself the right way. He left New York for points west to pursue his dream. Perhaps he saw the same thing in Frankie. Plus, Frank was early in putting Bezos in front of investors, prominently promoting Amazon at his Technology Group’s conference in December of 1996.


pages: 256 words: 15,765

The New Elite: Inside the Minds of the Truly Wealthy by Dr. Jim Taylor

Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, Donald Trump, estate planning, full employment, glass ceiling, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Maui Hawaii, McMansion, means of production, passive income, performance metric, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, Ronald Reagan, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

He has the freedom to do that primarily because he’s worth hundreds of millions of dollars—and so, no matter what he sheds, he can buy again anything he wants or needs. When Jason was his early twenties, he had no thoughts of wealth. He was more focused on indulging his passion for alternative music. In 1993, a friend asked him if knew anything about creating 140 The New Elite an obscure and little-known thing called a Web site. (A year later, Jeff Bezos founded Amazon.com, and as he told colleagues about his idea to sell books on the Internet, the most common question he heard was, ‘‘What’s the Internet?’’) Jason was intrigued, and as always, followed his curiosity. He and his friend founded one of the first dot-coms, and with plenty of hard work and great timing, they built it into a thriving enterprise.


pages: 239 words: 73,178

The Narcissist You Know by Joseph Burgo

Albert Einstein, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, megaproject, Paul Graham, Peoples Temple, reality distortion field, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, traveling salesman, WikiLeaks

When Ian talked about his plan to launch an Internet start-up, his grandiosity became clear. In the future he envisioned, he saw himself as an innovator on the same level as Steve Jobs. He intended to build a new company and eventually launch an IPO that would earn him billions of dollars, placing him alongside Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos in the pantheon of Internet entrepreneurs. Nothing less would do. In our work together, we focused on the link between the grandiose imaginary self detached from reality, and the feeling of core shame that had always plagued him. Over time, Ian made some headway in developing a more realistic business plan.


pages: 252 words: 73,131

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us by Tim Sullivan

Abraham Wald, Airbnb, airport security, Al Roth, Alvin Roth, Andrei Shleifer, attribution theory, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Brownian motion, business cycle, buy and hold, centralized clearinghouse, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, classic study, clean water, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, constrained optimization, continuous double auction, creative destruction, data science, deferred acceptance, Donald Trump, Dutch auction, Edward Glaeser, experimental subject, first-price auction, framing effect, frictionless, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, helicopter parent, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, late fees, linear programming, Lyft, market clearing, market design, market friction, medical residency, multi-sided market, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Occupy movement, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pez dispenser, power law, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, proxy bid, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, school choice, school vouchers, scientific management, sealed-bid auction, second-price auction, second-price sealed-bid, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, techno-determinism, technoutopianism, telemarketer, The Market for Lemons, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade route, transaction costs, two-sided market, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Vickrey auction, Vilfredo Pareto, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, winner-take-all economy

A more skeptical academic reviewer called their proposals “seriously flawed.”3 Even as Future Shop went to press, there were already efforts to exploit the web’s global network of users and pages more directly as a selling platform. In 1992, the Cleveland-based bookseller Charles Stack became the first online retailer, beating Jeff Bezos to the internet book business by at least a couple of years. The aptly named Mr. Stack and his company, Book Stacks Unlimited, offered what amounted to a mash-up of a very rudimentary online library catalog—you could only enter a single keyword, for instance, in a book title search—and mail-order business that stocked hundreds of thousands of new book titles.


pages: 477 words: 75,408

The Economic Singularity: Artificial Intelligence and the Death of Capitalism by Calum Chace

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, Andy Rubin, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, bread and circuses, call centre, Chris Urmson, congestion charging, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fairchild Semiconductor, Flynn Effect, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, gender pay gap, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Moravec, Herman Kahn, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, lifelogging, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, McJob, means of production, Milgram experiment, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, PageRank, pattern recognition, post scarcity, post-industrial society, post-work, precariat, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, railway mania, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, SoftBank, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Malthus, transaction costs, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working-age population, Y Combinator, young professional

The brainchild of Rodney Brooks, an Australian roboticist who used to be the director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Baxter is much less dangerous to be around. By early 2015, Rethink had received over $100m in funding from venture capitalists, including the investment vehicle of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Baxter was intended to disrupt the industrial robots market by being cheaper, safer, and easier to programme. He is certainly cheaper, with a starting price of $22,000. He is safer because his arm and body movements are mediated by springs, and he carries an array of sensors to detect the presence nearby of squishy, fragile things like humans.


pages: 229 words: 72,431

Shadow Work: The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day by Craig Lambert

airline deregulation, Asperger Syndrome, banking crisis, Barry Marshall: ulcers, big-box store, business cycle, carbon footprint, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data science, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, emotional labour, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Galaxy Zoo, ghettoisation, gig economy, global village, helicopter parent, IKEA effect, industrial robot, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Mark Zuckerberg, new economy, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, recommendation engine, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, you are the product, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Having a brain also bestows a natural tendency to slip up at times—as well as a capacity to self-correct. Unfortunately (or perhaps luckily), to err is human. In some ways, the power of the Internet as a communications medium is also raising performance standards. Shortly after founding Amazon.com, CEO Jeff Bezos declared that in online retailing, impeccable service is crucial. The reason, he explained, is that the customer who gets poor service at the corner store tells five or ten friends, but the one who gets poor service on the Internet tells a million friends. The equation changes when there is a human connection rather than just a cybernetic one.


pages: 232 words: 76,830

Dreams of Leaving and Remaining by James Meek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, bank run, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Etonian, full employment, global supply chain, illegal immigration, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Leo Hollis, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, obamacare, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Shenzhen special economic zone , Skype, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Stephen Hawking, working-age population

But a Britain committed to the global economy – more so than ever, since the Brexit vote – is finding it hard to capture a share of Amazon’s productivity gains to spend on the health needs of Amazon’s British customers, because it’s so easy for Amazon to shift them elsewhere. Last year it emerged that Amazon paid £7.4 million in corporation tax despite having a UK turnover of £1.46 billion. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, says he sells a billion dollars’ worth of Amazon stock each year in order to fund his Blue Origin rocket firm. Bezos is engaged in a private race with another US tycoon, Elon Musk, to be the first to commercialise space travel. If Leicestershire wonders where the money for its NHS went, the answer is that some of it is on its way to Mars.


Just Listen: Discover the Secret to Getting Through to Absolutely Anyone by Mark Goulston M. D., Keith Ferrazzi

Abraham Maslow, do well by doing good, hiring and firing, index card, Jeff Bezos, Leonard Kleinrock, Mikhail Gorbachev, mirror neurons, Ronald Reagan, zero-sum game

You can’t market a Pet Rock. And you certainly can’t become a multimillionaire by selling books on-line. Why? Because everybody says so . . . or at least everybody used to. Of course, that was before somebody did each of these things. If you’re that somebody—the Thomas Edison, Wilbur Wright, Gary Dahl, or Jeff Bezos who’s trying to transform a vision into reality—your biggest problem isn’t realizing that your goal is possible. It’s talking other people into seeing that it’s possible. It’s getting your coworkers, your clients, your employees, your boss, your investors, or your family to go from “we can’t do it” to “maybe we can do it” to “let’s do it.”


pages: 326 words: 74,433

Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup by Brad Feld, David Cohen

An Inconvenient Truth, augmented reality, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, deal flow, disintermediation, fail fast, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, lolcat, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, risk tolerance, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, SoftBank, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business

With the help of Greg Gottesman, I then approached the entrepreneur and venture capital community in Seattle and asked them to collaborate with us in supporting the launch of TechStars Seattle in August 2010. What happened was amazing! We received huge support from an incredible list of experienced entrepreneurs willing to act as mentors. In addition, nearly all the venture capitalists in the city elected to materially support TechStars in Seattle! The list of investors includes: Jeff Bezos Investment Group Divergent Venture Partners Draper Associates Founders Co-op Foundry Group Ignition Partners Linden Rhoads (University of Washington Center for Technology Commercialization) Madrona Venture Fund Maveron Venture Capital Montlake Capital OVP Rolling Bay Ventures (Geoff Entress) Second Ave Partners Trilogy Equity Partners Voyager Capital Vulcan Capital (Paul Allen's group) WRF Capital The Seattle startup scene has totally embraced TechStars and I think that the Seattle entrepreneur community is the big winner.


pages: 244 words: 79,044

Money Mavericks: Confessions of a Hedge Fund Manager by Lars Kroijer

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, capital asset pricing model, corporate raider, diversification, diversified portfolio, equity risk premium, family office, fixed income, forensic accounting, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, implied volatility, index fund, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Just-in-time delivery, Long Term Capital Management, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, NetJets, new economy, Ponzi scheme, post-work, proprietary trading, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, statistical arbitrage, Vanguard fund, zero-coupon bond

Many students juggled four or five job offers. Others were planning to start their own internet-related businesses and it seemed everyone was scouring the campus for people willing to be number two in what would surely be the next Microsoft (this was pre-Google, of course). I remember sitting in a class where Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to speak to 70 students to discuss company strategy. The next year, his speech filled the largest auditorium on campus, with overflow screens in the adjacent building! With the number of students trying to become entrepreneurs right out of university it was as if the start-up risk was lower than usual.


pages: 273 words: 21,102

Branding Your Business: Promoting Your Business, Attracting Customers and Standing Out in the Market Place by James Hammond

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, intangible asset, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, market design, Nelson Mandela, Pepsi Challenge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Steve Jobs, the market place

What have you done in your life that’s worth telling others about? Many small business operators fail to acknowledge that even by starting their own companies they have achieved what for many is just a dream. Bill Gates, considered the world’s richest man, began his business in his garage, as did Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com. It took Sir James Dyson, another wealthy entrepreneur, 10 years and countless rejections from major manufacturers before he was able to launch his world-renowned cyclonic vacuum cleaners. The achievements of many business icons of this calibre have created great stories for the media, and most have gone on to feature in autobiographies, giving their brands even more ‘personal power’ (as well as extra revenue from book sales and royalties).


pages: 261 words: 71,349

The Introvert Entrepreneur: Amplify Your Strengths and Create Success on Your Own Terms by Beth Buelow

do what you love, fake it until you make it, fear of failure, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Skype, solopreneur, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh

What many people, including introverts themselves, may not know is that the strengths and traits of the typical introvert—curiosity, desire for depth over breadth, comfort with going solo, thoroughness and introspection, love of research—lend themselves well to entrepreneurship. Introvert entrepreneurs such as Bill Gates, Larry Page, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Tony Hsieh, Guy Kawasaki, and others have transformed our lives not by pretending to be extroverts but by applying their introvert strengths to their entrepreneurial endeavors. • • • An introvert trying to be a fake extrovert is just that: a fake extrovert. If you choose to approach your business with that mindset, you won’t solve your problem.


pages: 318 words: 77,223

The Only Game in Town: Central Banks, Instability, and Avoiding the Next Collapse by Mohamed A. El-Erian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, balance sheet recession, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, break the buck, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, currency peg, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, fear index, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, financial intermediation, financial repression, fixed income, Flash crash, forward guidance, friendly fire, full employment, future of work, geopolitical risk, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, income inequality, inflation targeting, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, liquidity trap, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Norman Mailer, oil shale / tar sands, price stability, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, risk/return, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, sovereign wealth fund, The Great Moderation, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, University of East Anglia, yield curve, zero-sum game

Others involve spin-offs from such platforms, motivated by the belief that they could not flourish otherwise (for example, VOX from The Washington Post). There is also the entrance into traditional platforms of those with strong and established technological prowess and virtually no classic media background (such as Amazon’s Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post). — Then there is the case of the financial service industry, where the phenomenon of disruption is at a much earlier stage. Again, it is being driven by the combination of individual empowerment on the one hand, and big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning on the other.


pages: 232 words: 71,965

Dead Companies Walking by Scott Fearon

Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book value, business cycle, Carl Icahn, corporate raider, cost per available seat-mile, creative destruction, crony capitalism, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear of failure, Golden Gate Park, hiring and firing, housing crisis, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Joseph Schumpeter, Larry Ellison, late fees, legacy carrier, McMansion, moral hazard, multilevel marketing, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, South of Market, San Francisco, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, young professional

Most shoppers, especially those with families, still want to inspect the food they buy, and they’re simply not going to trust a stranger in a distribution center to choose it for them. In Amazon’s case, its “Fresh” delivery service gives customers the added convenience of adding a couple boxes of cereal and some cans of tuna fish to their orders for other consumer items. But I doubt Jeff Bezos and other Amazon executives are seriously banking on it to bring in real money. Groceries have low margins to begin with, and Amazon is competing with major players like Walmart. If anything, Bezos might see grocery delivery as a loss leader, a way to drive users to Amazon’s platform so they’ll order more profitable products.


Buy Then Build: How Acquisition Entrepreneurs Outsmart the Startup Game by Walker Deibel

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, deal flow, deliberate practice, discounted cash flows, diversification, drop ship, Elon Musk, family office, financial engineering, financial independence, high net worth, intangible asset, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Network effects, new economy, Peter Thiel, risk tolerance, risk/return, rolodex, software as a service, Steve Jobs, subscription business, supply-chain management, Y Combinator

By combining an investment in the existing revenue, infrastructure, and earnings with the drive and innovation fueling the entrepreneur, acquisition provides a powerful recipe, allowing existing companies to go to new heights, having tremendous impact, and providing a platform for the entrepreneur’s art. 10 ACQUISITION ENTREPRENEURSHIP VERSES VENTURE CAPITAL Acquisition entrepreneurship is not right for every circumstance or everyone. After all, certain entrepreneurs have enjoyed such remarkable success that they have obtained celebrity, even legendary status. We’re all familiar with the titans of technology who dominate the business media: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk, to name a few. These 9 guys didn’t start by buying a company, so why should you? Lately, it’s been the startups able to get to the billion-dollar valuation, the “unicorn” companies, in the limelight. These companies are changing how we live and work, and they are not only creating tremendous value but are introducing new business models.


pages: 299 words: 79,739

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

British Empire, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, moral panic, Stewart Brand, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, wikimedia commons

Mostly it would be made by joint-stock corporations and their shareholders. Royal families barely make an appearance on the Forbes 100 these days; today the upper echelons of the super-wealthy are composed almost entirely of people who have participated in public or semipublic offerings of stock in corporations, either as founders (think Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos) or as investors (think Warren Buffett). As a representative of the East India Company and an emissary for King James, Hawkins was in the service of two masters. He swore loyalty to a British king who, in terms of the feudal economic model that sustained him, bore a meaningful resemblance to Jahangir.


pages: 268 words: 76,702

The System: Who Owns the Internet, and How It Owns Us by James Ball

"World Economic Forum" Davos, behavioural economics, Big Tech, Bill Duvall, bitcoin, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, cryptocurrency, digital divide, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, financial engineering, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Laura Poitras, Leonard Kleinrock, lock screen, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Network effects, Oculus Rift, packet switching, patent troll, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Crocker, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, The Chicago School, the long tail, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, yield management, zero day

But it’s these things that shape the real internet – the big four tech giants are products of all of these factors. Looking into the architecture of the internet – who built it, who governs it, how it works, and who funds it – becomes, then, a way of looking at the real power structure of a huge swathe of the modern world. While we might think of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Jeff Bezos or the other charismatic dotcom CEOs as the new rulers of the world, they’re just the tip of an iceberg. It’s time to see what lies beneath. I am at my very core a creature of the internet. My earliest childhood had computers hooked up via creaking modems to the bulletin boards that were the precursor of the popular web.


pages: 302 words: 74,350

I Hate the Internet: A Novel by Jarett Kobek

Alan Greenspan, Anne Wojcicki, Blue Ocean Strategy, Burning Man, disruptive innovation, do what you love, driverless car, East Village, Edward Snowden, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, immigration reform, indoor plumbing, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, liberation theology, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, packet switching, PageRank, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, technological singularity, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, V2 rocket, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, wage slave, Whole Earth Catalog

Vince Vaughn, a dough-faced actor who had starred in such hilarious comedies as The Watch, Couples Retreat, Four Christmases, The Internship, and Delivery Man. The Internship was a film about two adults who receive internships at Google’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal, a billionaire weapons profiteer and incompetent hedge fund manager who wanted to build independent nation states on floating ocean platforms. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, an unprofitable website dedicated to the destruction of the publishing industry. Ron Paul, a septuagenarian medical doctor and perennial Presidential protest candidate. Alan Greenspan, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve from 1986 to 2006. In his relative youth, Greenspan sat at the knee of Ayn Rand whilst she explained that poor people were garbage who deserved to die in the gutter.


pages: 246 words: 74,404

Do Nothing: How to Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving by Celeste Headlee

8-hour work day, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Atul Gawande, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, correlation does not imply causation, deliberate practice, Downton Abbey, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, estate planning, financial independence, Ford paid five dollars a day, gamification, hedonic treadmill, helicopter parent, Henri Poincaré, hive mind, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Lyft, new economy, Parkinson's law, performance metric, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, tech worker, TED Talk, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, trickle-down economics, uber lyft, women in the workforce, work culture

., he told Time, but that was after working for an hour or two at home. It seemed to the watching public that the most successful people were all slaving away on the computer from dawn until dusk, and sometimes longer. The entrepreneur Mark Cuban says he didn’t take a vacation for seven years when he was starting out. Jeff Bezos and his colleagues at Amazon say they logged twelve-hour days, seven days a week in the mid-1990s, and Marissa Mayer reportedly worked 130 hours every week while she was at Google. This list could go on and on. One of the most common adjectives used to describe the modern rock-star CEO is workaholic.


pages: 264 words: 74,785

Midnight in Vehicle City: General Motors, Flint, and the Strike That Created the Middle Class by Edward McClelland

collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, Ford Model T, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, Ted Nelson, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, union organizing, Upton Sinclair

The crisis was a radicalizing experience for many of those workers. It taught them that their labor is worth more than their employers have been paying them. Could it have been a step toward another sit-down strike? Amazon’s services are as essential to twenty-first-century life as the automobile was to life in the twentieth. The company’s founder, Jeff Bezos, is wealthier than Henry Ford was. If workers were to occupy Amazon fulfillment and delivery centers to demand greater safety and job security—the same causes that motivated GM workers in Flint in 1936—they could shut down American commerce. A sit-down strike is not an obsolete tactic. The blueprint for better working conditions, and for a revival of the middle class, is in this book.


pages: 245 words: 78,125

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness by Michelle Ogundehin

clean water, fake it until you make it, financial independence, Indoor air pollution, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lao Tzu, McMansion, microplastics / micro fibres, Own Your Own Home, placebo effect, sharing economy

As a final example, let’s consider the American multi-billionaire Warren Buffett, globally renowned as one of the most successful investors of all time in his capacity as chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, and accordingly cited as the third wealthiest person in the world (number one is the man behind Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and number two Buffett’s long-time friend and fellow philanthropist, Microsoft founder Bill Gates). Buffett famously lives in the same modestly sized, 6,570 square-foot (610 square-metre), five-bedroom house that he bought in Omaha, Nebraska, for $31,500 in 1958 (worth about $650,000 today; less than 0.001 per cent of his net worth), and has been known to take his own lunch of a McDonald’s quarter-pounder and fries to his annual general meetings.


pages: 245 words: 75,397

Fed Up!: Success, Excess and Crisis Through the Eyes of a Hedge Fund Macro Trader by Colin Lancaster

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, asset-backed security, beat the dealer, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, buy the rumour, sell the news, Carmen Reinhart, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, collateralized debt obligation, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deal flow, Donald Trump, Edward Thorp, family office, fear index, fiat currency, fixed income, Flash crash, George Floyd, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Growth in a Time of Debt, housing crisis, index arbitrage, inverted yield curve, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, liquidity trap, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, margin call, market bubble, Masayoshi Son, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minsky moment, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, National Debt Clock, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, oil shock, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, price stability, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Sharpe ratio, short selling, short squeeze, social distancing, SoftBank, statistical arbitrage, stock buybacks, The Great Moderation, TikTok, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, two and twenty, value at risk, Vision Fund, WeWork, yield curve, zero-sum game

The combination of quants and QE has changed the markets and been toxic for a lot of investors. Many of the best fundamental guys have taken their balls and gone home. Closed up shop. But that’s the game. Stay relevant or get replaced. I should know. And you know that the technology and data are just kicking into high gear. It will get more intense. You can just see Jeff Bezos using Alexa to listen in on guys such as Druckenmiller. I smile as I imagine a scenario. I have the ability to completely retreat into my own thoughts and totally tune out the world. It’s good entertainment. Druck: “I’m thinking of adding some more gold.” Alexa: “Hey, Jeff, Druck is buying some gold.”


pages: 248 words: 73,689

Age of the City: Why Our Future Will Be Won or Lost Together by Ian Goldin, Tom Lee-Devlin

15-minute city, 1960s counterculture, agricultural Revolution, Alvin Toffler, Anthropocene, anti-globalists, Berlin Wall, Bonfire of the Vanities, Brixton riot, call centre, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, charter city, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, congestion charging, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, data science, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Enrique Peñalosa, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial independence, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, income per capita, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Perry Barlow, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, megacity, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, Ray Oldenburg, remote working, rent control, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, Salesforce, Shenzhen special economic zone , smart cities, smart meter, Snow Crash, social distancing, special economic zone, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, superstar cities, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Great Good Place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Victor Gruen, white flight, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Anchor institutions are a second important pillar for levelling up struggling cities. The decision by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to relocate Microsoft from Albuquerque in New Mexico – where its sole customer was based – to Seattle – where the co-founders were originally from – transformed the fate of the city.50 By the time Jeff Bezos chose Seattle for Amazon’s original headquarters, the presence of Microsoft had already transformed the city into a technology hub. The challenge with anchor institutions, of course, is how to attract them. Struggling cities cannot simply wait for the stroke of good luck that occurred for Seattle.


pages: 257 words: 77,612

The Rebel and the Kingdom: The True Story of the Secret Mission to Overthrow the North Korean Regime by Bradley Hope

Airbnb, battle of ideas, bitcoin, blockchain, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, digital map, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, failed state, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, off-the-grid, operational security, Potemkin village, restrictive zoning, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, TED Talk, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks

By 2009, TED Talks were a household name thanks to the media entrepreneur Chris Anderson, whose nonprofit foundation had acquired the TED Conferences business from its two original founders eight years earlier and steadily built it into a juggernaut of videos and events featuring “the world’s most inspired thinkers.” From that success the organization launched TED Fellows, a yearlong program that funded a new generation of thinkers. With financial backing from Jeff Bezos, Google’s charitable foundation, and others, the TED Fellows program followed the tradition of the great grant-giving programs for people looking to change the world, such as the famous “MacArthur Genius Grants.” But at TED, the focus was on younger achievers who were working on “world changing ideas.”


pages: 263 words: 77,786

Tomorrow's Capitalist: My Search for the Soul of Business by Alan Murray

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, call centre, carbon footprint, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, decarbonisation, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Greta Thunberg, gun show loophole, impact investing, income inequality, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge worker, lockdown, London Whale, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, natural language processing, new economy, old-boy network, price mechanism, profit maximization, remote working, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, The Future of Employment, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

Often these communities are the casualties of manufacturing downturns or are struggling to find new opportunities to replace dying industries. New technologies are also revitalizing agricultural regions. Case’s focus on rejuvenating communities by investing in emerging businesses has been supported by a host of business leaders, including Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Howard Schultz, Meg Whitman, and the Walton family. A big part of the discussion about revitalizing cities is the distinction between homegrown entrepreneurial ventures and existing megacompanies that open up headquarters in locations across the country. The model for the latter is America’s car industry, which boosted the fortunes of regions outside Michigan with plant openings and extended supply chains.


pages: 677 words: 206,548

Future Crimes: Everything Is Connected, Everyone Is Vulnerable and What We Can Do About It by Marc Goodman

23andMe, 3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, Chelsea Manning, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, cognitive dissonance, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, don't be evil, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, future of work, game design, gamification, global pandemic, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, Hacker News, high net worth, High speed trading, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, illegal immigration, impulse control, industrial robot, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kuwabatake Sanjuro: assassination market, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Laura Poitras, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lean Startup, license plate recognition, lifelogging, litecoin, low earth orbit, M-Pesa, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, national security letter, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, operational security, optical character recognition, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, printed gun, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, Russell Brand, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Snapchat, social graph, SoftBank, software as a service, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, Stuxnet, subscription business, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tech worker, technological singularity, TED Talk, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, uranium enrichment, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Wave and Pay, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, Westphalian system, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, you are the product, zero day

Those fears we’ve always had about killer robots, depicted in films such as Westworld, Blade Runner, RoboCop, The Terminator, and I, Robot, may unfortunately be at the early stages of already materializing. Attack of the Drones Drones are scary. You can’t reason with a drone. MATT GROENING When Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon.com, announced in late 2013 that the world’s “everything store” would soon be using octocopter drones to deliver packages to its customers, the world sat up and noticed. Sure, others had beaten Bezos to the punch, such as the entrepreneurs who launched the TacoCopter and the Burrito Bomber, not to mention the Vegas hotel that delivers chilled champagne poolside to its guests via drone, but Bezos’s announcement was different.

., “The Gray Goo Problem,” Kurzweil Accelerating Intelligence, March 20, 2001; “Address Nanotechnology Concerns, Experts Urge,” Reuters, Nov. 15, 2006. 86 Eventually, Drexler himself clarified: Paul Rincon, “Nanotech Guru Turns Back on Goo,” BBC, June 9, 2004. 87 Although there is much work: Jacob Aron, “Google’s Quantum Computer Flunks Landmark Speed Test,” New Scientist, Jan. 15, 2014. 344 in one test carried out by Google and NASA: Nick Statt, “Confirmed, Finally, D-Wave Quantum Computer Is Sometimes Sluggish,” CNET, June 19, 2014. 88 This could help answer: Tom Simonite, “The CIA and Jeff Bezos Bet on Quantum Computing,” MIT Technology Review, Oct. 4, 2012. 89 Quantum computers: Ibid. 90 Even with a supercomputer: Mohit Arora, “How Secure Is AES Against Brute Force Attacks?,” EETimes, May 7, 2012. 91 Not surprisingly, the NSA: Steven Rich and Barton Gellman, “NSA Seeks to Build Quantum Computer That Could Crack Most Types of Encryption,” Washington Post, Jan. 2, 2014; “Quantum Computing, the NSA, and the Future of Cryptography,” On Point with Tom Ashbrook, WBUR. 92 In the year 2000: Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, April 2000.


pages: 720 words: 197,129

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

I said to myself, ‘this is going to be a whole lot of fun.’ ”62 SHOCKLEY UNRAVELS Some leaders are able to be willful and demanding while still inspiring loyalty. They celebrate audaciousness in a way that makes them charismatic. Steve Jobs, for example; his personal manifesto, dressed in the guise of a TV ad, began, “Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The trouble-makers. The round pegs in the square holes.” Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos has that same ability to inspire. The knack is to get people to follow you, even to places they may not think they can go, by motivating them to share your sense of mission. Shockley did not have this talent. Because of his aura, he was able to recruit brilliant employees, but soon after they began working together, they were rankling under his ham-fisted management, just as Brattain and Bardeen had.

It seemed like the right combination of ways to celebrate the funding.”164 Bechtolsheim’s check made out to Google Inc. provided a spur to get themselves incorporated. “We had to quickly get a lawyer,” Brin said.165 Page recalled, “It was like, wow, maybe we really should start a company now.”166 Because of Bechtolsheim’s reputation—and because of the impressive nature of Google’s product—other funders came in, including Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. “I just fell in love with Larry and Sergey,” Bezos declared. “They had a vision. It was a customer-focused point of view.”167 The favorable buzz around Google grew so loud that, a few months later, it was able to pull off the rare feat of getting investments from both of the valley’s rival top venture capital firms, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins.


pages: 273 words: 85,195

Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century by Jessica Bruder

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, back-to-the-land, big-box store, Boeing 747, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, company town, crowdsourcing, fulfillment center, full employment, game design, gender pay gap, gentrification, Gini coefficient, income inequality, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, Mars Rover, new economy, Nomadland, off grid, off-the-grid, payday loans, Pepto Bismol, precariat, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, six sigma, supply-chain management, traumatic brain injury, union organizing, urban sprawl, Wayback Machine, white picket fence, Y2K

Meanwhile, “living in a van, or ‘vandwelling,’ is now fashionable,” proclaimed The New York Times Magazine in late 2011, adding that 1.2 million homes were predicted to be repossessed that year and noting that van sales were up 24 percent. Of all the programs seeking workampers, the most aggressive recruiter has been Amazon’s CamperForce. “Jeff Bezos has predicted that, by the year 2020, one out of every four work campers in the United States will have worked for Amazon,” read one slide in a presentation for new hires. To find warm bodies, the company has set up recruiting kiosks at nomad-friendly events—mostly RV shows and rallies—in more than a dozen states across the country.


pages: 337 words: 86,320

Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz

affirmative action, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asian financial crisis, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, computer vision, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, game design, happiness index / gross national happiness, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, John Snow's cholera map, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, quantitative hedge fund, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, working poor

Pandora does the same in picking what songs you might want to listen to. And this is how Netflix figures out the movies you might like. The impact has been so profound that when Amazon engineer Greg Linden originally introduced doppelganger searches to predict readers’ book preferences, the improvement in recommendations was so good that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos got to his knees and shouted, “I’m not worthy!” to Linden. But what is really interesting about doppelganger searches, considering their power, is not how they’re commonly being used now. It is how frequently they are not used. There are major areas of life that could be vastly improved by the kind of personalization these searches allow.


pages: 348 words: 83,490

More Than You Know: Finding Financial Wisdom in Unconventional Places (Updated and Expanded) by Michael J. Mauboussin

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atul Gawande, availability heuristic, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, Brownian motion, butter production in bangladesh, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, complexity theory, corporate governance, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deliberate practice, demographic transition, discounted cash flows, disruptive innovation, diversification, diversified portfolio, dogs of the Dow, Drosophila, Edward Thorp, en.wikipedia.org, equity premium, equity risk premium, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fixed income, framing effect, functional fixedness, hindsight bias, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, index fund, information asymmetry, intangible asset, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, Kenneth Arrow, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, margin call, market bubble, Menlo Park, mental accounting, Milgram experiment, Murray Gell-Mann, Nash equilibrium, new economy, Paul Samuelson, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Richard Florida, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, shareholder value, statistical model, Steven Pinker, stocks for the long run, Stuart Kauffman, survivorship bias, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, traveling salesman, value at risk, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

And wealth in the future is likely to follow those who create the useful ideas instead of those who execute those ideas. 19 Pruned for Performance What Brain Development Teaches Us About Innovation I think that’s exactly what you see going on here. Every experiment [on the Internet] is getting tried. Many of them are going to succeed, and many of them are going to fail. —Jeff Bezos, Internet summit, 1999 Too Clever by Half Whenever I start to feel smart, I take a good look at a three-year-old child. That child is learning at a staggering pace. Research shows that preliterate children learn a new word every two hours they are awake on their way to knowing approximately 45,000 words by high school graduation.1 Young children have a remarkable ability to learn what is useful given their environment.


pages: 142 words: 18,753

Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Community Supported Agriculture, David Brooks, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, George Gilder, haute couture, haute cuisine, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, PalmPilot, place-making, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Bork, scientific management, Silicon Valley, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Thorstein Veblen, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, urban planning, War on Poverty, Yogi Berra

The zillionaires say they are in it for the self-expression, not the money. “The money hasn’t changed a thing,” Rob Glaser of RealNetworks told the Wall Street Journal in one interview. “The money has not changed a thing in my life,” Steve Case of America Online told the Journal in another. “The money has not changed a thing in my life,” said Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com in a third. Workers in this spiritualized world of Bobo capitalism are not the heroes of toil. They are creators. They noodle around and experiment and dream. They seek to explore and then surpass the full limits of their capacities. And if a company begins to bore or stifle them, they’re gone.


pages: 280 words: 83,299

Empty Planet: The Shock of Global Population Decline by Darrell Bricker, John Ibbitson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, BRICs, British Empire, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Hans Rosling, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kibera, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, off grid, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Potemkin village, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, urban planning, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

The digital revolution—the transistor, the silicone chip, the personal computer, the Internet, online shopping, the Cloud—has largely been driven by inventors and entrepreneurs based in Silicon Valley, Seattle, or at elite universities such as Harvard. And if you read their biographies—from Jack Kilby, Robert Noyce, and others who developed the integrated circuit and the silicon chip to Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Apple’s Steve Jobs, from Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and on—they have one thing in common. When they came up with whatever breakthrough they were responsible for, they were young. Japan doesn’t have many young people anymore. It’s hard to innovate when your society is old. The examples of Japan and Korea repeat themselves through the Asian Pacific in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore.


pages: 316 words: 87,486

Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People? by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, antiwork, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Burning Man, centre right, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, Credit Default Swap, David Brooks, deindustrialization, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, fulfillment center, full employment, George Gilder, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, high-speed rail, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, McMansion, microcredit, mobile money, moral panic, mortgage debt, Nelson Mandela, new economy, obamacare, payday loans, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, pre–internet, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, union organizing, urban decay, WeWork, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, young professional

What each version brushes under the rug is that it doesn’t have to be this way. Economies aren’t ecosystems. They aren’t naturally occurring phenomena to which we must learn to acclimate. Their rules are made by humans. They are, in a word, political. In a democracy we can set the economic table however we choose. “Amazon is not happening to bookselling,” Jeff Bezos of Amazon likes to say. “The future is happening to bookselling.” And what the future wants just happens to be exactly what Amazon wants. What an amazing coincidence. As long as we continue to believe such statements, for exactly that long will the situation of average Americans continue to deteriorate and inequality to worsen. 11 Liberal Gilt We have now observed several instances of the cycle of enthusiastic idealism that propels modern Democratic politics, as well as the lagging cycle of disappointment that invariably follows it.


pages: 302 words: 84,881

The Digital Party: Political Organisation and Online Democracy by Paolo Gerbaudo

Airbnb, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Californian Ideology, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital rights, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, gig economy, industrial robot, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Mark Zuckerberg, Network effects, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, oil shock, post-industrial society, precariat, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ruby on Rails, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, Snapchat, social web, software studies, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, universal basic income, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, WikiLeaks

Whereas in the industrial era, the party styled itself after the Fordist factory, in these times of social media and apps it has come to adopt the quality of Facebook and other digital companies known under the collective acronym of FAANGs. Looking at the doings of formations such as the Pirate Parties, the Five Star Movement and Podemos, it soon becomes apparent that what these organisations propose is a political translation of the operational model that brought to success figures such as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, applying the logic of the digital company to the political arena to reap economies of scale in the way they reach out to their supporters and involve them in online discussions and decisions. This tendency has been seen in their enthusiastic adoption of social media of all sorts, with many of these formations rapidly gathering a large following on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.


pages: 276 words: 81,153

Outnumbered: From Facebook and Google to Fake News and Filter-Bubbles – the Algorithms That Control Our Lives by David Sumpter

affirmative action, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Bernie Sanders, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, classic study, cognitive load, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, fake news, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, illegal immigration, James Webb Space Telescope, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kenneth Arrow, Loebner Prize, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Minecraft, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, p-value, post-truth, power law, prediction markets, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Mercer, selection bias, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social contagion, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, traveling salesman, Turing test

Netflix and Spotify delve into the film and music preferences of its users to make suggestions for us. These algorithms all build on the idea that we can learn by following the recommendations and decisions made by others. Is that really where we are now? Do the algorithms we interact with online really provide us with the best quality information? Jeff Bezos, founder of the retailer Amazon, was the first person to recognise that we only want to see a small number of relevant choices when browsing. His company introduced terms like ‘related to items you’ve viewed’ and ‘customers who bought this item also bought’ to help us find the products we want.


pages: 309 words: 81,975

Brave New Work: Are You Ready to Reinvent Your Organization? by Aaron Dignan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", Abraham Maslow, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, adjacent possible, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, autonomous vehicles, basic income, benefit corporation, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, butterfly effect, cashless society, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, content marketing, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, deliberate practice, DevOps, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Elon Musk, endowment effect, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gender pay gap, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, gig economy, Goodhart's law, Google X / Alphabet X, hiring and firing, hive mind, holacracy, impact investing, income inequality, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kanban, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, loose coupling, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, mirror neurons, new economy, Paul Graham, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, remote working, Richard Thaler, Rochdale Principles, Salesforce, scientific management, shareholder value, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, six sigma, smart contracts, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software is eating the world, source of truth, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The future is already here, the High Line, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, uber lyft, universal basic income, WeWork, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Then one day we asked ourselves, Have we ever made a change based on these metrics? Nope. We stopped tracking them that day. Last time I looked they were still going up. Proxy for Purpose. Don’t confuse your customer with your purpose. Customer obsession has become a popular theme of late, modeled to the extreme by Jeff Bezos and Amazon. And it’s needed. To ignore the customer or lose sight of their needs, as many large corporate teams have, is deadly. But simply making the customer our purpose is also dangerous. If we act on customer feedback without judgment, we run the risk of regressing to the mean, to our basest tendencies.


pages: 270 words: 79,992

The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath by Nicco Mele

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bitcoin, bread and circuses, business climate, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centralized clearinghouse, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commoditize, Computer Lib, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, global supply chain, Google Chrome, Gordon Gekko, Hacker Ethic, Ian Bogost, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, minimum viable product, Mitch Kapor, Mohammed Bouazizi, Mother of all demos, Narrative Science, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peer-to-peer, period drama, Peter Thiel, pirate software, public intellectual, publication bias, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, satellite internet, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, Ted Nelson, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, uranium enrichment, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Zipcar

No announcement, no warning—just gone.41 The titles returned a few days later, as Amazon and Macmillan got closer to a contract agreement, but the staggering power of the Even Bigger platform to control our cultural fare had been made known. On the positive side, Amazon is making it easier than ever for authors to bypass publishers and self-publish both physical books and e-books on its site. Thomas Friedman recently described a visit to see Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon: Sixteen of the top 100 best sellers on Kindle today were self-published,” said Bezos. That means no agent, no publishers, no paper—just an author, who gets most of the royalties, and Amazon and the reader.42 The Even Bigger platform creates enormous wealth for the particular platform in question and creates a little wealth for a lot of people.


pages: 223 words: 10,010

The Cost of Inequality: Why Economic Equality Is Essential for Recovery by Stewart Lansley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Adam Curtis, air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, banking crisis, Basel III, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Edward Glaeser, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, falling living standards, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Financial Instability Hypothesis, floating exchange rates, full employment, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, high net worth, hiring and firing, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job polarisation, John Meriwether, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Ellison, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Martin Wolf, Mary Meeker, mittelstand, mobile money, Mont Pelerin Society, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, proprietary trading, Right to Buy, rising living standards, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, shareholder value, The Great Moderation, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, working-age population

The premier division of American billionaires (the top 50) is still dominated by new technology tycoons—from Bill Gates and Paul Allen of Microsoft to Larry Ellison of Oracle and Larry Page and Sergey Brin who invented Google. The top 50 also includes retailers like the Walton family who own Wal-Mart and Jeff Bezos of Amazon along with manufacturers like the confectioners, Forest and John Mars. The next group of 150, in contrast, is riddled with Wall Street financiers and hedge fund and private equity operators who have made their fortunes through the financial re-engineering of existing companies. They include Henry Kravis, one of the cofounders of KKR in 1976—worth $3.4 billion, one of his fellow co-founders, George Roberts—worth $3.2 billion, and David Rubenstein, co-founder of the Carlyle group.354 These have acquired fortunes well beyond even the most generous remuneration packages offered by banks and public companies.


pages: 247 words: 81,135

The Great Fragmentation: And Why the Future of All Business Is Small by Steve Sammartino

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, cryptocurrency, data science, David Heinemeier Hansson, deep learning, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Dunbar number, Elon Musk, fiat currency, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, gamification, Google X / Alphabet X, haute couture, helicopter parent, hype cycle, illegal immigration, index fund, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Law of Accelerating Returns, lifelogging, market design, Mary Meeker, Metcalfe's law, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, prediction markets, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, Rubik’s Cube, scientific management, self-driving car, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, The Home Computer Revolution, the long tail, too big to fail, US Airways Flight 1549, vertical integration, web application, zero-sum game

And given there are only so many channels any one person can pay attention to, we’re quickly moving to the point where big and general are both fast tracking towards extinction. Not one of the ‘top-10’ blogs was originally created by a traditional media owner. This doesn’t mean that blogs can’t have as much in-market value as traditional newspapers either. The Washington Post was recently sold to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos for US$250 million, while Gawker Media has a reported market value of more than US$300 million. Über-niche blogs — such as Treehugger and Celebrity Baby Blog, which were each sold for US$10 million in the 2000s — are also going for significant sums. Add to this that the ‘rivers of gold’ that flowed from classified ads are also being taken over online by single-minded competitors, and we’ve witnessed a classic ‘David’ victory.


pages: 291 words: 90,771

Upscale: What It Takes to Scale a Startup. By the People Who've Done It. by James Silver

Airbnb, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, blockchain, business process, call centre, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data science, DeepMind, DevOps, family office, flag carrier, fulfillment center, future of work, Google Hangouts, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, imposter syndrome, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, pattern recognition, reality distortion field, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, WeWork, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

And in some cases - in Spain and Italy, for example - we managed to build startups organically, and replicate the DNA of the organisation and our processes, deploy into that market and then build a market leader. That’s not an easy thing to do. So I was quite proud of that.’ When it comes to adapting Just Eat to new markets, Buttress describes himself as ‘militant’ in sharing Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s belief that ‘culture eats strategy for breakfast’ (a phrase attributed to Peter Drucker, the management guru). ‘I say to every entrepreneur I meet that when you’ve defined a clear set of guiding cultural principles and behaviours - and you’ve also coupled that to what Coca-Cola used to call “execution excellence”, or what most others call good operations and processes - then it feels to me completely illogical to try and do some liberal managementstyle thing where you change the business to be culturally sensitive because you are now, for example, in Canada.


pages: 268 words: 81,811

Flash Crash: A Trading Savant, a Global Manhunt, and the Most Mysterious Market Crash in History by Liam Vaughan

algorithmic trading, backtesting, bank run, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Bob Geldof, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, data science, Donald Trump, Elliott wave, eurozone crisis, family office, financial engineering, Flash crash, Great Grain Robbery, high net worth, High speed trading, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, land bank, margin call, market design, market microstructure, Market Wizards by Jack D. Schwager, Navinder Sarao, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nelson Elliott, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ronald Reagan, selling pickaxes during a gold rush, sovereign wealth fund, spectrum auction, Stephen Hawking, the market place, Timothy McVeigh, Tobin tax, tulip mania, yield curve, zero-sum game

CHAPTER 13: THE DUST SETTLES CBS’s 60 Minutes aired a segment: Steve Kroft, “How High Speed Traders Are Changing Wall Street,” CBS 60 Minutes, October 7, 2010. stocks like Cisco Systems and the Washington Post Company: The Washington Post Company changed its name to the Graham Holdings Company in 2013 after it was acquired by Jeff Bezos. “Stock Market Flash Crash: Causes and Solutions”: A video of the hearing is available on https://c-span.org. To remedy the issue: As of November 2019, the Consolidated Audit Trail was still not completed. The SEC’s budget in 2010: It’s worth noting that the agencies usually bring in considerably more money for the government in the form of fines than they ever spend.


pages: 289 words: 86,165

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria

"there is no alternative" (TINA), 15-minute city, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-fragile, Asian financial crisis, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, cloud computing, colonial rule, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, David Graeber, Day of the Dead, deep learning, DeepMind, deglobalization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, global reserve currency, global supply chain, green new deal, hiring and firing, housing crisis, imperial preference, income inequality, Indoor air pollution, invention of the wheel, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Snow's cholera map, junk bonds, lockdown, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, Monroe Doctrine, Nate Silver, Nick Bostrom, oil shock, open borders, out of africa, Parag Khanna, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, popular capitalism, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, social distancing, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, UNCLOS, universal basic income, urban planning, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration, zoonotic diseases

Lesson Five: Life Is Digital 97 killed some 50 million people: Niall Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918–1920 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine (Spring 2002), https://www.researchgate.net/publication/11487892_Updating_the_Accounts_Global_Mortality_of_the_1918–1920_Spanish_Influenza_Pandemic. 97 up to 100,000 speakeasies: Lisa Bramen, “October 28, 1919: The Day That Launched a Million Speakeasies,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 28, 2010. 98 “return to normalcy”: Seen in Harding’s 1920 speech: “America’s present need is not heroics but healing; not nostrums but normalcy; not revolution but restoration . . . not surgery but serenity”: Library of Congress, Presidential Election of 1920, https://www.loc.gov/collections/world-war-i-and-1920-election-recordings/articles-and-essays/from-war-to-normalcy/presidential-election-of-1920/. 98 the Kenbak-1: Earliest personal computer as determined by, for instance, the Computer History Museum in Palo Alto, California: Chris Garcia, “In His Own Words: John Blankenbaker,” CHM Blog, Curatorial Insights, April 5, 2016, https://computerhistory.org/blog/in-his-own-words-john-blankenbaker/. 99 “if anyone knew the customer”: Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (New York: Little, Brown, 2013), Chapter 2. 99 $10,000 in sales—every second: In Q1 2020, per calculations from Christopher Rossbach, portfolio manager of the J. Stern & Co. World Stars Global Equity fund: Irina Ivanova, “Amazon Makes $10,000 Per Second as Shoppers Shelter in Place,” CBS News, Moneywatch, May 1, 2020, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/amazon-q1-earnings-75-billion-10000-per-second/; see also Q1 Amazon net sales of $75.5 billion, $9,709 per second: “Amazon.Com Announces First Quarter Results,” https://s2.q4cdn.com/299287126/files/doc_financials/2020/Q1/Amazon-Q1–2020-Earnings-Release.pdf. 99 over 9%: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Unemployment Rate 9.1 Percent in August 2011,” https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2011/ted_20110908.htm?


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

One study for New York City did ask this question and found that in areas where African Americans were the biggest racial group, nearly 75 percent of Airbnb hosts were white.42 This suggests that our results may be significantly understating racial differences in outcomes on the platform. Reproducing Social Class Inequalities Since the Occupy protests of 2011, the public conversation about economic inequality has focused on the concentration of income and wealth at the top of the distribution. In 2017 the three richest Americans (Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates) had more wealth than the bottom half of the population. The top four hundred from Forbes’s list of the richest Americans have nearly as much as two-thirds of the population.43 In addition, the share of the top 1 percent has grown substantially, and their assets now exceed those of the entire bottom 95 percent.44 This is the highest level of wealth inequality in a half century.


pages: 286 words: 87,168

Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World by Jason Hickel

air freight, Airbnb, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, biodiversity loss, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, circular economy, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate personhood, cotton gin, COVID-19, David Graeber, decarbonisation, declining real wages, degrowth, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, disinformation, Elon Musk, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairphone, Fellow of the Royal Society, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the steam engine, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, land reform, liberal capitalism, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, means of production, meta-analysis, microbiome, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Murray Bookchin, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, new economy, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, out of africa, passive income, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Post-Keynesian economics, quantitative easing, rent control, rent-seeking, retail therapy, Ronald Reagan, Rupert Read, Scramble for Africa, secular stagnation, shareholder value, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, universal basic income

Such shops existed thousands of years before capitalism emerged. Now consider a corporation, like Exxon or Facebook or Amazon. A corporation doesn’t operate according to the steady-state approach favoured by your local restaurant. Amazon’s profits don’t just go to putting food on the table for Jeff Bezos – they go into expanding the company: buying up competitors, putting local shops out of business, breaking into new countries, building more distribution centres, pumping out marketing campaigns to get people to buy stuff they don’t need, all to extract more profit each year than the year before.


Know Thyself by Stephen M Fleming

Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, citation needed, computer vision, confounding variable, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, global pandemic, higher-order functions, index card, Jeff Bezos, l'esprit de l'escalier, Lao Tzu, lifelogging, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, patient HM, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, prediction markets, QWERTY keyboard, recommendation engine, replication crisis, self-driving car, side project, Skype, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury

But it, too, stood out for its unusual focus on self-awareness: “You can consider yourself a person of high standards in general and still have debilitating blind spots. There can be whole arenas of endeavor where you may not even know that your standards are low or nonexistent, and certainly not world class. It’s critical to be open to that likelihood.” Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos practices what he preaches, being famous for his unusual executive meetings. Rather than engaging in small talk around the boardroom table, he instead mandates that executives engage in a silent thirty-minute “study session,” reading a memo that one of them has prepared in advance. The idea is to force each person to think about the material, form their own opinion, and reflect on what it means for them and the company.


pages: 251 words: 80,831

Super Founders: What Data Reveals About Billion-Dollar Startups by Ali Tamaseb

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Anne Wojcicki, asset light, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, bitcoin, business intelligence, buy and hold, Chris Wanstrath, clean water, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, game design, General Magic , gig economy, high net worth, hiring and firing, index fund, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Network effects, nuclear winter, PageRank, PalmPilot, Parker Conrad, Paul Buchheit, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, power law, QR code, Recombinant DNA, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, software as a service, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, Startup school, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, survivorship bias, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the payments system, TikTok, Tony Fadell, Tony Hsieh, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, web application, WeWork, work culture , Y Combinator

So I think with a number of the consumer internet companies, there are certain ways you would score the people as not that strong, yet they succeeded. This seems to be only about consumer internet companies. If the people are bad, it doesn’t work. But if they are B+ instead of A, and they’ve come with a great idea, it’s going to perhaps get capped at a much lower place than it otherwise would’ve been. Maybe Jeff Bezos was more talented than the eBay founders on some level. And you know, eBay had three times the market cap of Amazon in 2002 and 2003, and then they lost the thread over twenty years, but still they had caught lightning in a bottle. So I want to say there’s always an adjustment for the industry.


pages: 295 words: 81,861

Road to Nowhere: What Silicon Valley Gets Wrong About the Future of Transportation by Paris Marx

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, An Inconvenient Truth, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cashless society, clean tech, cloud computing, colonial exploitation, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, DARPA: Urban Challenge, David Graeber, deep learning, degrowth, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital map, digital rights, Donald Shoup, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Extinction Rebellion, extractivism, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, frictionless, future of work, General Motors Futurama, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, gigafactory, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, green new deal, Greyball, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, independent contractor, Induced demand, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jitney, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, lockdown, low interest rates, Lyft, Marc Benioff, market fundamentalism, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, Murray Bookchin, new economy, oil shock, packet switching, Pacto Ecosocial del Sur, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, price mechanism, private spaceflight, quantitative easing, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, safety bicycle, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, smart cities, social distancing, Southern State Parkway, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stop de Kindermoord, streetcar suburb, tech billionaire, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, TikTok, transit-oriented development, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, VTOL, walkable city, We are as Gods, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, work culture , Yom Kippur War, young professional

From the early days, Kalanick and those around him were not just seeking to capture a large market share in key cities; they wanted to dominate urban transportation by remaking it for their ends and establishing a monopoly that would allow them to extract the enormous profits their investors were expecting. Uber sought to follow the growth model pioneered by Amazon. Instead of turning a profit as quickly as possible to return value to investors, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos played the long game. It took his company nearly a decade to turn a profit, and even then it was not a big one. When Amazon made money, it was reinvested to improve existing services and expand into new product categories, and later into whole lines of business. In 1994, Amazon was an online bookseller operating out of Bellevue, Washington, but less than three decades later it is the leading ecommerce platform and cloud computing provider in the United States, with its hands in film production, game streaming, pharmaceuticals, grocery, and much more.


pages: 864 words: 222,565

Inventor of the Future: The Visionary Life of Buckminster Fuller by Alec Nevala-Lee

Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, American energy revolution, Apple II, basic income, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, Columbine, complexity theory, Computer Lib, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, declining real wages, digital nomad, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, East Village, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, gig economy, global village, Golden Gate Park, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, hydraulic fracturing, index card, information retrieval, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kitchen Debate, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, Lean Startup, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megastructure, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, Own Your Own Home, Paul Graham, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, reality distortion field, remote working, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, Thomas Malthus, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, WeWork, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Both were also contemptuous of critics, obsessed with their press coverage, willing to pull projections out of thin air, and eager to portray themselves as martyrs, although Fuller concealed his flaws more capably than Musk, who has occasionally spoken of using geodesic domes on Mars. The most fascinating parallel of all was with Amazon. On January 29, 2018, Jeff Bezos dedicated the centerpiece of the company’s Seattle headquarters, which consisted of three domes “where employees can think and work differently surrounded by plants.” He also partnered with Stewart Brand on a clock that would keep accurate time for ten thousand years, in the kind of giant pedagogical object that Fuller could never afford—a Geoscope for enormous timescales.

“Industrialization involves all the resources of the earth, all the knowledge and all the experience of all men everywhere and involves everybody on earth as the logical clients.” Fuller’s claim that he needed an entire distribution system to sell the Wichita House had been little more than a convenient excuse, but for Jeff Bezos—who represented the concentration of wealth that his predecessor saw as a danger to society—it was a practical strategy. Bezos wanted to control the supply chain from one end to the other, and his obsession with carrying packages over the last mile demanded a move from track to trackless. Amazon’s smart devices, drones, fleet of vans, and wireless delivery of content all aimed at the same goal, while its most profitable business was selling ephemeralization in the form of cloud computing.


pages: 285 words: 86,853

What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing by Ed Finn

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, blockchain, business logic, Charles Babbage, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, commoditize, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, DeepMind, disruptive innovation, Donald Knuth, Donald Shoup, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Conference 1984, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late fees, lifelogging, Loebner Prize, lolcat, Lyft, machine readable, Mother of all demos, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, power law, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skinner box, Snow Crash, social graph, software studies, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, wage slave

At its dystopian extreme, this new financial public sphere makes bank accounts into citizens: SuperPACs and venture capitalists have the important conversations about events of the day, joined by those individuals wealthy enough to speak and be heard: not just Thiel but Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, and Jeff Bezos, for example. On a more positive note, we can see the public sphere of cash transforming the arts through fundraising sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo, which allow for the collective approval of new projects through crowdfunding, or a kind of financial voting. The algorithmic process of crowdfunding rewards those who master the methods of privatized publicity: a strong introductory video, frequent updates, tiered reward structures, and effective use of social media to raise awareness.


pages: 304 words: 93,494

Hatching Twitter by Nick Bilton

4chan, Airbus A320, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Blue Bottle Coffee, Burning Man, friendly fire, index card, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, messenger bag, PalmPilot, pets.com, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Ruby on Rails, Saturday Night Live, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technology bubble, traveling salesman, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks

No explanation was needed. Fred knew exactly what had just happened. Bijan buried his head in his hands, closed his eyes, and repeated the word one last time to himself. “Fuck!” In Twitter’s eighteen-million-dollar round of financing in June 2008, Bijan’s company, Spark Capital, had invested fourteen million, with Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Fred Wilson investing the majority of the other four million—along with several angel investors. The large sum put in by Bijan’s company had secured him a seat on the board of Twitter, along with Fred Wilson. Over the next couple of months Bijan had started to become entrenched in the company, attending a few meetings, raising his hands for a few critical infrastructure votes.


pages: 330 words: 88,445

The Rise of Superman: Decoding the Science of Ultimate Human Performance by Steven Kotler

Abraham Maslow, adjacent possible, Albert Einstein, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Clayton Christensen, data acquisition, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, do what you love, escalation ladder, fear of failure, Google Earth, haute couture, impulse control, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, Lao Tzu, lateral thinking, life extension, lifelogging, low earth orbit, Maui Hawaii, pattern recognition, Ray Kurzweil, risk tolerance, rolodex, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, SimCity, SpaceShipOne, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, time dilation, Virgin Galactic, Walter Mischel, X Prize

University of Virginia psychologist Angeline Lillard: Angeline Lillard and Nicole Else-Quest, “The Early Years: Evaluating Montessori Education,” Science, September 29, 2006, 313(5795), pp. 1893–94. When professor Jeffrey Dyer…and Hal Gregersen: The innovators Dyer and Gregersen are referring to include everyone from high-tech pioneers like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, SimCity creator Will Wright, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, and Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to culture-shaping creatives like rapper/entrepreneur Sean Combs, chef/entrepreneur Julia Child, and Nobel laureate author Gabriel García Márquez. In 2004, when Barbara Walters interviewed Page and Brin, she asked if the fact that their parents were both college professors was the major reason for their success.


pages: 353 words: 91,520

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing Our Kids for the Innovation Era by Tony Wagner, Ted Dintersmith

affirmative action, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, David Brooks, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, immigration reform, income inequality, index card, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, language acquisition, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, school choice, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steven Pinker, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the scientific method, two and twenty, uber lyft, unpaid internship, Y Combinator

Since the days of Maria Montessori, educators have had a growing understanding of what excellent elementary schools should look like. More recent work that’s been done in Reggio Emilia and Waldorf schools has added to the richness and variety of the education models that exist at the elementary level. The Wall Street Journal recently reported on several of our country’s most successful innovators: Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google), Julia Child, Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia), and Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. The article suggested the Montessori School experience was the most important aspect of these influencers’ education, setting them on a life path of creativity, passion, self-direction, and comfort with failure and ambiguity.


pages: 329 words: 95,309

Digital Bank: Strategies for Launching or Becoming a Digital Bank by Chris Skinner

algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, augmented reality, bank run, Basel III, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, business cycle, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, cashless society, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, demand response, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial innovation, gamification, Google Glasses, high net worth, informal economy, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, M-Pesa, margin call, mass affluent, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Pingit, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, pre–internet, QR code, quantitative easing, ransomware, reserve currency, RFID, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, software as a service, Steve Jobs, strong AI, Stuxnet, the long tail, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, We are the 99%, web application, WikiLeaks, Y2K

There’s no view on Amazon’s share of wallet or who is cross-selling what to each customer. They have tried to improve this over the years, but the line of business heads for books, music, electronics, retail, wholesale, cloud and kindle are all at each other’s throats, motivated by their own line of business results. I heard that Jeff Bezos thought about a mass clear-out of all management and replacing them with a new organisational structure that would allow seamless integration of all divisions with a single platform for the company to see a single version of all the customer information in a single view … but no sooner was this mentioned than the Board’s management and Chairman slapped him around the face and he had to back down.


pages: 282 words: 88,320

Brick by Brick: How LEGO Rewrote the Rules of Innovation and Conquered the Global Toy Industry by David Robertson, Bill Breen

barriers to entry, Blue Ocean Strategy, business logic, business process, Clayton Christensen, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Day of the Dead, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disruptive innovation, financial independence, game design, global supply chain, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, subscription business, systems thinking, The Wisdom of Crowds, Wall-E, work culture

First Principle: Values Are Priceless Every venture, at its inception, is imbued with a core purpose and set of values that emanate from the founder, shape the organization’s culture, and largely define its future, for good or ill. Amazon is famous for its “customer obsession” largely because its founder, Jeff Bezos, is hell-bent on making it the “world’s most customer-centric company.” Google’s mission to “organize the world’s information” reflects its founders’ surroundings—Silicon Valley and Stanford University’s School of Engineering—where an outsize pursuit of knowledge is highly valued. And in Bentonville, Arkansas, Walmart founder Sam Walton’s frugality and competitive fire continue to define his company’s core ethos of “always low prices.”


pages: 310 words: 91,151

Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur's Odyssey to Educate the World's Children by John Wood

airport security, Alan Greenspan, Apollo 13, British Empire, call centre, clean water, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, fear of failure, glass ceiling, high net worth, income per capita, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Marc Andreessen, microcredit, Own Your Own Home, random walk, rolodex, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Ballmer

One of the biggest frustrations that funders have is that “we are spending all this money, yet so little seems to change as a result.” Therefore, when they meet someone who declares a bold set of goals, they are likely to take notice and you’ll be in a position to “get the meeting.” My favorite “poster child” for this advice is actually from the private sector—Amazon. When Jeff Bezos launched the company in 1995, the home page boldly declared Amazon to be “Earth’s Biggest Bookstore” even though they had yet to sell a single title. He was referring, of course, to the breadth of selection they would be able to offer via a virtual store, so the claim was at least plausible. Many naysayers were of course on hand to point out that Amazon’s first-year revenues were less than what a single Barnes & Noble outlet in Manhattan might do during a slow week.


pages: 330 words: 91,805

Peers Inc: How People and Platforms Are Inventing the Collaborative Economy and Reinventing Capitalism by Robin Chase

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, Andy Kessler, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Burning Man, business climate, call centre, car-free, carbon tax, circular economy, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, congestion charging, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deal flow, decarbonisation, different worldview, do-ocracy, don't be evil, Donald Shoup, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Eyjafjallajökull, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, Gini coefficient, GPS: selective availability, high-speed rail, hive mind, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Kinder Surprise, language acquisition, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, minimum viable product, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, openstreetmap, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, Post-Keynesian economics, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TaskRabbit, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, turn-by-turn navigation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, vertical integration, Zipcar

It seems that only the strongest CEOs are able to place big bets and rely on cross-subsidization from existing revenue streams to finance new ideas. And it appears that these CEOs are most often founding CEOs. Steve Jobs’s early years after he reclaimed the helm of Apple were greeted miserably by the stock market, which couldn’t imagine or quite believe in his promises about the iMac, then the iPod, and then the iPhone. Ditto Jeff Bezos at Amazon, who ran the company in the red for its first four years, reinvesting all the while in service of his grand vision. Short-termism is indeed a problem for public companies. Other than changing SEC reporting requirements, I can only add that one of Peers Inc’s greatest attributes, is its ability to deliver lots of low-cost experimentation at the fastest possible rate (remember the three miracles from Chapter 5).


pages: 297 words: 89,820

The Perfect Thing: How the iPod Shuffles Commerce, Culture, and Coolness by Steven Levy

Apple II, Bill Atkinson, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, en.wikipedia.org, General Magic , Herbert Marcuse, indoor plumbing, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, reality distortion field, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, social web, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, technology bubble, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, Tony Fadell

But not even Wal-Mart has Apples 85 percent market share, a number that didn't budge as the music industry granted licenses to more and more competitors. Online buyers could now buy downloads from Microsoft, Yahoo!, Napster (not the original file-sharing crew but some company that bought the name at a bankruptcy fire sale), and, uh, Wal-Mart. (Oddly absent was Amazon.com; as late as 2004, CEO Jeff Bezos assured me that his company would join in, but only when it figured out some innovative twists.) Didn't matter how many or who .. . iTunes ruled. That dominance began to make record executives more than a little nervous. They voiced two complaints in particular. One was that Apple was scooping up too much money.


pages: 302 words: 95,965

How to Be the Startup Hero: A Guide and Textbook for Entrepreneurs and Aspiring Entrepreneurs by Tim Draper

3D printing, Airbnb, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, business climate, carried interest, connected car, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deal flow, Deng Xiaoping, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, family office, fiat currency, frictionless, frictionless market, growth hacking, high net worth, hiring and firing, initial coin offering, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pez dispenser, Ralph Waldo Emerson, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, school choice, school vouchers, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Twitter Arab Spring, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Lisa Gansky You have to understand your own personal DNA. Don't do things because I do them or Steve Jobs or Mark Cuban tried it. You need to know your personal brand and stay true to it. Gary Vaynerchuk A brand for a company is like a reputation for a person. You earn reputation by trying to do hard things well. Jeff Bezos My Brand Logo. Your logo should mean something. The initial logo for Draper Associates, designed by my cousin, Phyllis Merikallio, was a blue globe in front of a black triangle. I liked this for a lot of reasons. The triangle represented “change” and the globe represented “the world,” so together these images said, “Change the world.”


pages: 326 words: 91,559

Everything for Everyone: The Radical Tradition That Is Shaping the Next Economy by Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, altcoin, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, back-to-the-land, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Clayton Christensen, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, degrowth, disruptive innovation, do-ocracy, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, Fairphone, Food sovereignty, four colour theorem, future of work, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, gig economy, Google bus, holacracy, hydraulic fracturing, initial coin offering, intentional community, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, means of production, Money creation, multi-sided market, Murray Bookchin, new economy, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, Pier Paolo Pasolini, post-work, precariat, premature optimization, pre–internet, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart contracts, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, TED Talk, transaction costs, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, underbanked, undersea cable, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, working poor, workplace surveillance , Y Combinator, Y2K, Zipcar

It fit into a widely felt longing at the time, evident in many parts of Europe and North America where protest had been breaking out, to start figuring out practical alternatives to the failed order. This was the period, too, of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s leaks, of persecuted hacker Aaron Swartz’s suicide, of blockades against techie commuter buses in San Francisco. Google became one of the world’s leading lobbyists, and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post. The internet could no longer claim to be a postpolitical subculture; it had become the empire. As tech achieved its Constantinian apotheosis, old religious tropes seemed to offer a return to lost purity, a desert in which to flee, the stark opposite of Silicon Valley.


pages: 307 words: 90,634

Insane Mode: How Elon Musk's Tesla Sparked an Electric Revolution to End the Age of Oil by Hamish McKenzie

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Ben Horowitz, business climate, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, Colonization of Mars, connected car, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, Didi Chuxing, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Hyperloop, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, low earth orbit, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, megacity, Menlo Park, Nikolai Kondratiev, oil shale / tar sands, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Shenzhen was a fishing village, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Solyndra, South China Sea, special economic zone, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, Zenefits, Zipcar

The group calculated that two trucks platooning for a hundred thousand kilometers (about sixty-two thousand miles) would save €6,000 (about US$6,500) a year on fuel compared to driving in normal cruise control. The European convoy is a taste of what’s to come. A start-up called Convoy—backed by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and other tech luminaries—is attempting to apply Uber’s logistics-on-demand model to trucking, with a focus on short-haul trips. Shipping software start-up Flexport, backed by Google Ventures, wants to be the “Uber of the oceans.” There’s Tesla, of course, with its autonomous electric semitruck, and other electric truck start-ups Nikola, Thor, and Starsky Robotics.


pages: 284 words: 92,688

Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blue Bottle Coffee, call centre, Carl Icahn, clean tech, cloud computing, content marketing, corporate governance, disruptive innovation, dumpster diving, Dunning–Kruger effect, fear of failure, Filter Bubble, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, Googley, Gordon Gekko, growth hacking, hiring and firing, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, new economy, Paul Graham, pre–internet, quantitative easing, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, South of Market, San Francisco, Stanford prison experiment, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, TED Talk, telemarketer, tulip mania, uber lyft, Y Combinator, éminence grise

In the other ten, it has posted losses. Recently the losses have been prodigious—LinkedIn lost $150 million in the first nine months of 2015. Yet Hoffman’s net worth stands at nearly $5 billion. Amazon, the online retailer, is twenty-one years old and has never made huge profits, yet its founder, Jeff Bezos, is worth $60 billion. Salesforce.com, a software company, reported net losses totaling three-quarters of a billion dollars from 2011 through 2014, yet its founder, Marc Benioff, is worth $4 billion. Someone has to get left holding the bag. In summer 2015 I speak with Pat, a well-known Silicon Valley serial entrepreneur who is both the CEO of a privately held company and an angel investor.


pages: 307 words: 92,165

Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing by Hod Lipson, Melba Kurman

3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, additive manufacturing, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, DIY culture, dumpster diving, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, factory automation, Free Software Foundation, game design, global supply chain, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, lifelogging, Mars Rover, Marshall McLuhan, microcredit, Minecraft, Neal Stephenson, new economy, off grid, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, printed gun, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Steve Jobs, technological singularity, TED Talk, the long tail, the market place

The leap from computer networks to running a 3D printing services firm makes sense if you see Shapeways from Robert’s perspective, as a “platform for personal fabrication that works for the consumer and for the professional.” Robert sees the future of consumer 3D printing as one that’s based on the notion of a service-oriented “platform” rather than at-home fabrication. “Shapeways is like Amazon’s platform, an outlet for people to sell their own products,” Robert explained. “In 2002, Jeff Bezos sent Amazon employees an internal memo that Amazon was going to be a platform company.” Bezos’s directive that would change the future of ecommerce was that every team inside the company must expose their data to one another and to the outside world via APIs. Over a decade later, Amazon is the Internet’s biggest e-commerce platform with automated feeds to outside product vendors, inventories, and other software companies.


pages: 307 words: 88,180

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

BUILDING BLOCKS AND STUMBLING BLOCKS Silicon Valley investors take as an article of faith that a pure innovation mentality is the foundation on which companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple are built. It was an irrepressible impulse to “think different” that drove people like Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos to create these companies that would change the world. In that school of thought, China’s knockoff clockmakers were headed down a dead-end road. A copycat mentality is a core stumbling block on the path to true innovation. By blindly imitating others—or so the theory goes—you stunt your own imagination and kill the chances of creating an original and innovative product.


pages: 310 words: 88,827

The Diary of a Bookseller by Shaun Bythell

invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, Skype, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Competition has driven prices to a point at which online bookselling is reduced to either a hobby or a big industry dominated by a few huge players with vast warehouses and heavily discounted postal contracts. The economies of scale make it impossible for the small or medium-sized business to compete. At the heart of it all is Amazon, and while it would be unfair to lay all the woes of the industry at Amazon’s feet, there can be no doubt that it has changed things for everyone. Jeff Bezos did not register the domain name ‘relentless.com’ without reason. The total for the number of customers may also be misleading – it is not representative of footfall, merely of the number of customers who buy books. Normally, the footfall is around five times the figure for the number who buy. THURSDAY, 6 FEBRUARY Online orders: 6 Books found: 5 Our online stock consists of 10,000 books from our total stock of 100,000.


pages: 345 words: 87,534

Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters by Abigail Shrier

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, autism spectrum disorder, deplatforming, en.wikipedia.org, false memory syndrome, Frances Oldham Kelsey, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Jeff Bezos, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, scientific mainstream, Skype, social contagion, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, unpaid internship

Instead we presume that if men dominate the STEM departments, they must be occupying the university’s Arcadia. If CEOs are overwhelmingly male, then women are being unfairly excluded—by men who outfox them, a system that diminishes them, preferences that lead them astray. We want to have it both ways: acknowledging sotto voce that Sumner Redstone, Rupert Murdoch, and Jeff Bezos have not enjoyed enviable personal lives, while insisting every woman should or would stand in their shoes, given half a chance. Nothing I have written here should be taken to discourage young women from wanting to become CEOs or math professors. (Does this even need to be said?) The point is only that women need to own up to a hard truth: We assume—so often, so immediately— that the guys have it better, that whatever men want must be better, too.


pages: 345 words: 92,063

Power, for All: How It Really Works and Why It's Everyone's Business by Julie Battilana, Tiziana Casciaro

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, Andy Rubin, Asperger Syndrome, benefit corporation, Big Tech, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, deep learning, different worldview, digital rights, disinformation, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, fundamental attribution error, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, Greta Thunberg, hiring and firing, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of movable type, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Joshua Gans and Andrew Leigh, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, mega-rich, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, Occupy movement, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, School Strike for Climate, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

Manstead, Nico Frijda, and Agneta Fischer (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 158–73; James Jasper, The Emotions of Protest (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018). 72 See, for example, Michele Masterfano, “Unions: The Good, the Bad, the Ugly,” HuffPost, September 17, 2013, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/unions-the-good-the-bad-t_b_3880878. 73 Joseph Stiglitz, The Price of Inequality: How Today’s Divided Society Endangers Our Future (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012). 74 “Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos,” Frontline, February 18, 2020, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/amazon-empire/; Jay Greene, “Amazon Sellers Say Online Retail Giant Is Trying to Help Itself, Not Consumers,” Washington Post, October 19, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/10/01/amazon-sellers-say-online-retail-giant-is-trying-help-itself-not-consumers/. 75 Erin Griffith, “To Fight Apple and Google’s Grip, Fortnite Creator Mounts a Crusade,” New York Times, August 25, 2020, sec.


pages: 297 words: 88,890

Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation by Anne Helen Petersen

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American ideology, big-box store, Cal Newport, call centre, cognitive load, collective bargaining, COVID-19, David Brooks, death from overwork, delayed gratification, do what you love, Donald Trump, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, Gordon Gekko, helicopter parent, imposter syndrome, Inbox Zero, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, McMansion, Minecraft, move fast and break things, precariat, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, school choice, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, TikTok, uber lyft, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Vanguard fund, work culture , working poor, workplace surveillance

It doesn’t help that beginning in the 1990s, corporations began hiring MBAs and ex-investment bankers directly from Wall Street instead of hiring leadership from within—as had been customary for decades.7 Once in a leadership role, ex–finance bankers could explicitly and implicitly reproduce the understanding of “hard work” they internalized during their time on Wall Street. (It’s worth noting that Jeff Bezos, who has fashioned a “bruising” workplace culture at Amazon, worked at the same firm as Ho.)8 The phenomenon is similar to the spread of consulting “alums” across the corporate sector: Barring a significant, psychology-altering intervention, once someone equates “good” work with overwork, that conception will stay with them—and anyone under their power—for the rest of their lives.


pages: 332 words: 93,672

Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy by George Gilder

23andMe, Airbnb, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Asilomar, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bob Noyce, British Empire, Brownian motion, Burning Man, business process, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, crony capitalism, cross-subsidies, cryptocurrency, Danny Hillis, decentralized internet, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, distributed ledger, don't be evil, Donald Knuth, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fake news, fault tolerance, fiat currency, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, George Gilder, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, Joan Didion, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, means of production, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, OSI model, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, random walk, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Ruby on Rails, Sand Hill Road, Satoshi Nakamoto, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Snow Crash, software is eating the world, sorting algorithm, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, Susan Wojcicki, TED Talk, telepresence, Tesla Model S, The Soul of a New Machine, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Rollerblading down the corridors of Stanford’s computer science pantheon in the madcap spirit of Claude Shannon, the Google founders consorted with such academic giants as Donald Knuth, the conceptual king of software, Bill Dally, a trailblazer of parallel computation, and even John McCarthy, the founding father of artificial intelligence. By 1998, Brin and Page were teaching the course CS 349, “Data Mining, Search, and the World Wide Web.” Sun founder Andy Bechtolsheim, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Cisco networking guru Dave Cheriton had all blessed the Google project with substantial investments. Stanford itself earned 1.8 million shares in exchange for Google’s access to Page’s patents held by the university. (Stanford had cashed in those shares for $336 million by 2005). Google moved out of Stanford in 1999 into the Menlo Park garage of Susan Wojcicki, an Intel manager soon to be CEO of YouTube and a sister of Anne, the founder of the genomic startup 23andMe.


pages: 295 words: 89,441

Aiming High: Masayoshi Son, SoftBank, and Disrupting Silicon Valley by Atsuo Inoue

Adam Neumann (WeWork), air freight, Apple II, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, business climate, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, fixed income, game design, George Floyd, hive mind, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Masayoshi Son, off grid, popular electronics, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, TikTok, Vision Fund, WeWork

Son saying he was quick to pick up on the way the winds were blowing but then adding he feels he still has not achieved anything reveals that in his own life, on a personal level and as a businessman, there are still things he is not completely satisfied with. ‘Going forward there’ll be no excuses. I’ve realised that up until now the problem has always been we never had the money. We were always just that little bit short.’ Son laughs. ‘We always had loans to repay. I’ll tell you a story about Jeff Bezos, before Amazon went public. The two of us met in private and I told him I wanted to invest in the company – we actually ended up going back and forth with negotiations for about four hours. But SoftBank were just that little bit short on the financial front.’ Son is speaking frankly, honestly, absent of any affect.


pages: 436 words: 98,538

The Upside of Inequality by Edward Conard

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, future of work, Gini coefficient, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidity trap, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, new economy, offshore financial centre, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, pushing on a string, quantitative easing, randomized controlled trial, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, survivorship bias, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, zero-sum game

Similarly, they point to the success of Bill Gates and others like him when marginal tax rates were higher.7 Perhaps only curiosity or glory motivated them. These arguments ignore the fact that high-tech entrepreneurialism was nascent prior to Bill Gates’s windfall, and that it has accelerated greatly since. Surely, the successes of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and the other technology billionaires have sparked an enormous army of wishful risk-takers in their wake. In the short run, slightly higher tax rates may make imperceptible differences in the motivation of determined entrepreneurs. But these small differences have proved to have large compounding effects in the long run.


Future Files: A Brief History of the Next 50 Years by Richard Watson

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Black Swan, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, cashless society, citizen journalism, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, congestion charging, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, deglobalization, digital Maoism, digital nomad, disintermediation, driverless car, epigenetics, failed state, financial innovation, Firefox, food miles, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, global pandemic, global supply chain, global village, hive mind, hobby farmer, industrial robot, invention of the telegraph, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, lateral thinking, linked data, low cost airline, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, mass immigration, Northern Rock, Paradox of Choice, peak oil, pensions crisis, precautionary principle, precision agriculture, prediction markets, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Richard Florida, self-driving car, speech recognition, synthetic biology, telepresence, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing test, Victor Gruen, Virgin Galactic, white flight, women in the workforce, work culture , Zipcar

This will be good news for brands with history and heritage, but it will also benefit retailers that can tell a story through a hands-on experience. Similarly, the issue of trust isn’t going away any time soon. Chapter 8 Retail and Shopping: what we’ll buy when we’ve got it already The internet in general, and Amazon.com in particular, is still chapter one. —Jeff Bezos J ump in a Volkswagen and take a quick trip to the town of Rheinberg, Germany. It’s home to a 4,000-square-meter supermarket created by Metro, the world’s fifth-largest retailer. If you believe all the hype, you’ll see the future of supermarket shopping right here. In this store — and there are a few others like it scattered across the globe — you’ll find the latest retail innovations, including “Veggie Vision” intelligent scales that can identify and price fruit and vegetables by sight, regardless of whether they’re loose or wrapped in plastic.


pages: 146 words: 43,446

The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story by Michael Lewis

Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, Benchmark Capital, business climate, classic study, creative destruction, data acquisition, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, high net worth, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, PalmPilot, pre–internet, risk tolerance, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, tech worker, the new new thing, Thorstein Veblen, wealth creators, Y2K

Internet anxiety was simply the sense, now widely shared, that you were about to be put out of business by someone who operated in the spirit of Jim Clark. The Internet created many opportunities for people like Clarkoutsiders, troublemakersto think thoughts that would turn entire industries on their heads. Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, had upended the book business; the founders of eBay had upended the auction business; the founders of E*Trade and Ameritrade had upended the Wall Street stock brokerage firms. In 1998 the manager of Merrill Lynch's fifteen thousand stock brokers, John Steffans, had called the Internet trading firms "a serious threat to America's financial lives," and assured his employees that Page 252 Merrill Lynch would never do such a thing.


pages: 391 words: 102,301

Zero-Sum Future: American Power in an Age of Anxiety by Gideon Rachman

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, bank run, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, BRICs, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, energy security, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, Greenspan put, Hernando de Soto, illegal immigration, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, laissez-faire capitalism, Live Aid, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, pension reform, plutocrats, popular capitalism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Sinatra Doctrine, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Tax Reform Act of 1986, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, trickle-down economics, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

It made businessmen and entrepreneurs heroes once again. In 1991, Time magazine had not selected a businessman as “man of the year” for more than three decades. But in the 1990s it chose three businessmen from the technology and media industries: Ted Turner of CNN in 1991, Andy Grove of Intel in 1997, and Jeff Bezos of Amazon in 1999. Bill Gates had to wait until 2005 until he got that particular honor, when he shared it for his charitable work, with his wife, Melinda, and with Bono, the rock musician. But the founder of Microsoft was—amid a great deal of competition—the dominant businessman of his era. Gates founded Microsoft in 1975 and launched the first version of his Windows operating system in 1985.


pages: 327 words: 103,336

Everything Is Obvious: *Once You Know the Answer by Duncan J. Watts

"World Economic Forum" Davos, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Black Swan, business cycle, butterfly effect, carbon credits, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, collapse of Lehman Brothers, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, East Village, easy for humans, difficult for computers, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, framing effect, Future Shock, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Santayana, happiness index / gross national happiness, Herman Kahn, high batting average, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, industrial cluster, interest rate swap, invention of the printing press, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, Long Term Capital Management, loss aversion, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, oil shock, packet switching, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, prediction markets, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, RFID, school choice, Silicon Valley, social contagion, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, urban planning, Vincenzo Peruggia: Mona Lisa, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, X Prize

The original Turk, of course, was a hoax—in reality there was a human inside making all the moves—and that’s exactly the point. The tasks that one typically finds on Mechanical Turk are there because they are relatively easy for humans to solve, but difficult for computers—a phenomenon that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos calls “artificial, artificial intelligence. See Howe (2006) for an early report on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, and Pontin (2007) for Bezos’s coinage of “artificial, artificial intelligence.” See http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com for additional information on Mechanical Turk. 22. See Mason and Watts (2009) for details on the financial incentives experiment. 23.


pages: 304 words: 96,930

Starbucked: A Double Tall Tale of Caffeine, Commerce, and Culture by Taylor Clark

Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, commoditize, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deskilling, digital capitalism, Edmond Halley, fear of failure, gentrification, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, McJob, McMansion, Naomi Klein, pneumatic tube, Ray Oldenburg, Ronald Reagan, tech worker, The Great Good Place, trade route

He also owns a $14 million vacation home in the Hamptons, and according to Forbes magazine, his net worth exceeds $1.1 billion.) The Sonics investment has been something of a disaster for Schultz’s public image in Seattle. Before dabbling in sports franchise ownership, Schultz fit in nicely with the city’s pantheon of young male business titans, like Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos and Microsoft’s Bill Gates. Local newspapers referred to him affectionately as “Mr. Coffee,” and many Seattleites found it hard to understand why anyone wouldn’t adore Starbucks (which happened to have made a lot of them rich). Sure, there was one dustup in 1994, when Schultz rerouted the driveway at his new multimillion-dollar Lake Washington mansion through a small, disused area of adjacent Viretta Park, later nicknamed “Vendetta Park.”


pages: 313 words: 101,403

My Life as a Quant: Reflections on Physics and Finance by Emanuel Derman

Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, capital asset pricing model, Claude Shannon: information theory, Dennis Ritchie, Donald Knuth, Emanuel Derman, financial engineering, fixed income, Gödel, Escher, Bach, haute couture, hiring and firing, implied volatility, interest rate derivative, Jeff Bezos, John Meriwether, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, law of one price, linked data, Long Term Capital Management, moral hazard, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, PalmPilot, Paul Samuelson, pre–internet, proprietary trading, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Sharpe ratio, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, stochastic volatility, technology bubble, the new new thing, transaction costs, volatility smile, Y2K, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

To their credit, the Center organized a sequence of master's-equivalent courses on computer science, taught mostly by professors from Columbia University in New York City. I learned software design and algorithms from John Kender, a mildmannered, low-key expert on vision software; we learned database theory from David Shaw, who later founded the investment boutique D. E. Shaw & Co., as well as the first free email service, Juno. At D. E. Shaw, David employed Jeff Bezos, who later left to found Amazon.com. David was already a free-wheeling entrepreneur. He had run a software company while studying computer science at Stanford; when I met him he still radiated a sloppy academic demeanor that didn't completely jibe with his business-oriented self-assurance. He was an early incarnation of the now ubiquitous capitalist academic.


pages: 296 words: 98,018

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist lawyer, affirmative action, Airbnb, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 747, Brexit referendum, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, David Heinemeier Hansson, deindustrialization, disintermediation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake it until you make it, fake news, food desert, friendly fire, gentrification, global pandemic, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Hyperloop, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, Larry Ellison, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, new economy, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit maximization, public intellectual, risk tolerance, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech baron, TechCrunch disrupt, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Two Sigma, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, Vilfredo Pareto, Virgin Galactic, work culture , working poor, zero-sum game

In fact, it was nine billionaires, not sixty-two, as Oxfam would later say when better data came in. And the following year, the number of billionaires it took to account for half the world’s resources dropped from nine to eight. Six of those eight made their money in the supposedly equalizing field of technology: Gates, Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, Larry Ellison of Oracle, Carlos Slim of Telmex and other Mexican businesses, and Michael Bloomberg, the purveyor of computer terminals. Another, Amancio Ortega, who built the retailer Zara, was famous for applying advanced technology to manufacturing and for automating his factories.


pages: 370 words: 97,138

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

Bigelow’s products are all vaporware, so it surprised many people and was an important milestone when the company signed an $18 million contract with NASA in late 2012 to build an inflatable module for the Space Station. The dark horse in the new space race is Blue Origin. Established by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin is following an incremental approach to go from suborbital to orbital flights. The company motto is Gradatim Ferociter, Latin for “Step by step, ferociously.” Because Amazon so deftly progressed from online bookseller to merchandising behemoth, most experts expect Blue Origin to be a major player in space.


pages: 390 words: 96,624

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Sarkozy was more successful at promoting his agenda eight months later, at a gathering called the “e-G8”: an exclusive conference of Internet CEOs, government representatives, and assorted Internet celebrities, organized by the French public relations firm Publicis and held as a prelude to the annual G8 meeting scheduled that year for Deauville, France. Addressing the Internet executives and CEOs in attendance, including Google’s Eric Schmidt, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Sarkozy declared, “The world you represent is not a parallel universe where legal and moral rules and, more generally, all the basic principles that govern society in democratic countries do not apply.” In a speech not long before the conference, he had said something similar: “The Internet is the new frontier, a territory to conquer.


pages: 299 words: 19,560

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

For that matter, the Kindle has won praise, as might the Sony Readers, as a hightech means of curling up with a book rather than being forced to read it on a conventional computer screen.72 At the same time, online booksellers, Amazon again above all, have sold millions of printed books, new and used alike, in the same way as other merchants have sold other products. Amazon’s CEO Jeff Bezos has repeatedly stated that he, like many others in bookselling today, sees books as just another product. He is primarily concerned with increasing market 220 The Resurgence of Utopianism share.73 So popular have online book sales become that Barnes and Noble, America’s largest and most powerful bookstore chain, has reported declining sales and in-store traffic—exactly what Barnes and Noble has done to hundreds of small independent bookstores in recent years!


pages: 344 words: 96,020

Hacking Growth: How Today's Fastest-Growing Companies Drive Breakout Success by Sean Ellis, Morgan Brown

Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Ben Horowitz, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, content marketing, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark pattern, data science, DevOps, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, game design, gamification, Google Glasses, growth hacking, Internet of things, inventory management, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, minimum viable product, multi-armed bandit, Network effects, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, subscription business, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, working poor, Y Combinator, young professional

Christoph Janz, “From ‘A as in Amiga’ to ‘Z as in Zendesk,’ ” The Angel VC (blog), July 16, 2016, christophjanz.blogspot.com/2016/07/from-as-in-amiga-to-z-as-in-zendesk.xhtmll. 12. Nir Eyal, Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products (Portfolio: 2014), 5–10. 13. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown: 2013), 187. 14. Brad Stone, “What’s in Amazon’s Box? Instant Gratification,” Bloomberg, November 24, 2010, bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-11-24/whats-in-amazons-box-instant-gratification. 15. Dave Kim, comment on question “How did Yelp get initial traction and overcome the critical mass problem?”


pages: 305 words: 101,743

Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion by Jia Tolentino

4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alexander Shulgin, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, cloud computing, Comet Ping Pong, crowdsourcing, Donald Trump, financial independence, game design, Jeff Bezos, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, late capitalism, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Mason jar, Norman Mailer, obamacare, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, QR code, rent control, Saturday Night Live, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, TikTok, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, wage slave, white picket fence

She was toppled eventually, but for years, she was one of the biggest success stories in the world. The absurd length of time that it took for Holmes to be exposed illuminates a grim, definitive truth of our era: scammers are always safest at the top. The Disruptors Amazon, a company now worth $1 trillion, was originally going to be called Relentless. Jeff Bezos’s friends told him that the name sounded too aggressive, but he hung on to the URL anyway—if you type in relentless.com, you’ll find yourself on Amazon, at which you can buy almost anything you could think of: an 1816 edition of the Bible ($2,000); a new hardcover copy of #GIRLBOSS ($15.43); a used paperback #GIRLBOSS ($2.37); paranormal romance ebooks published by Amazon itself (prices vary); a Goodyear SUV tire ($121 with Amazon Prime); a Georgia-Pacific automated paper-towel dispenser ($35 with Prime); 3,000 Georgia-Pacific paper towels (also $35 with Prime); more than 100,000 different cellphone cases under $10; 5,000 pens customized with your name and logo ($1,926.75); a jar of face mask made from sheep placenta and embryo ($49); a bunch of bananas ($2.19); a forty-pound bag of Diamond Naturals Adult Real Meat dog food ($36.99); voice-controlled Amazon hardware that will tell you the weather, and play you Tchaikovsky, and turn over evidence to the police if it needs to ($39.99 to $149.99); a stream of the 1942 movie Casablanca ($3.99 to rent); two seasons of the Amazon show The Marvelous Mrs.


Free Money for All: A Basic Income Guarantee Solution for the Twenty-First Century by Mark Walker

3D printing, 8-hour work day, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, commoditize, confounding variable, driverless car, financial independence, full employment, guns versus butter model, happiness index / gross national happiness, industrial robot, intangible asset, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, longitudinal study, market clearing, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, obamacare, off grid, off-the-grid, plutocrats, precariat, printed gun, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, RFID, Rodney Brooks, Rosa Parks, science of happiness, Silicon Valley, surplus humans, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, transaction costs, universal basic income, warehouse robotics, working poor

Thus, it only requires the barest extrapolation on today’s technology to imagine robots packing orders at the factory, driverless trucks shuttling inventory between factory and warehouse, and robots packing and delivering orders straight to the doors of customers. Amazon recently demonstrated a helicopter delivery drone that could potentially make 30-minute deliveries possible, with the prediction by its CEO, Jeff Bezos, that the technology could be deployed within five years.4 An obvious analogy here is the great reduction in the workforce as a percentage of the population devoted to agriculture. In 1790, there were about 3.5 million farmers, which was 90 percent of the PEACE, ROBOTS, AND TECHNOLOGICAL UNEMPLOYMENT 97 population.


pages: 372 words: 100,947

An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination by Sheera Frenkel, Cecilia Kang

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, data science, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, fake news, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, immigration reform, independent contractor, information security, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, natural language processing, offshore financial centre, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social web, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks

Advertisers were excited about the explosion of growth in internet use, and sites like Google and Yahoo were scraping stories from CNN, the Post, and other media to draw audiences to their platforms and away from the news organizations’ own nascent websites. Graham wanted to reach a new generation of readers. Unlike many of his counterparts in the music industry and Hollywood, he hadn’t taken a hostile stance toward the tech platforms; instead, he was seeking information and potential partnerships. He had already talked to Jeff Bezos about Amazon’s distribution of books, and now he was curious about this young techie on a leave of absence from his alma mater. “I was not somebody who understood technology deeply, but I wanted to learn,” Graham recalled. The kid struck him as extremely awkward and shy. Zuckerberg didn’t seem to blink as he haltingly explained to Graham, almost forty years his senior, how Thefacebook worked.


Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

Data collected in jails is then propagated: through ICE, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) passes fingerprint to DHS, where they are cross-referenced with immigration databases.7 FIGURE 4.1  Left: Protester hangs a sign outside Microsoft offices in San Francisco, California, that reads “Detaining children for profit: brought to you by Microsoft” (July 2018). Photograph by Fight for the Future. Right: Activists with Mijente protesting outside Amazon headquarters in Seattle, Washington (October 2018). Some protesters are holding masks imprinted with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s face. Photograph by NWDC Resistance. Yet these are familiar uses of computing that do not fall under the fundable rubric of “AI” that the AI expert industry is after. And activists haven’t framed these issues around “AI,” nor around phrases such as “algorithmic accountability” or “algorithmic bias” invoked by critical AI experts.


pages: 362 words: 97,288

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

I’d make the case that not only was my system better for the people, it was better for industry too. By combining the best of machine learning and human intelligence, it would eliminate the perplexing problem of teaching robots to climb stairs, operate elevators, and knock on doors. I’d call up Jeff Bezos to point out that customers prefer a live delivery person, and are reluctant to use his company’s package lockers even when offered discounts. And then the real fun would start. Because once in place, porters would themselves become a platform for grassroots economic development. Beyond keeping sidewalks and curbs clear, porters could insert themselves in the value chain between click and consumer.


pages: 599 words: 98,564

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans by Eben Kirksey

23andMe, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Bernie Sanders, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, double helix, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, experimental subject, fake news, gentrification, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, microdosing, moral panic, move fast and break things, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, special economic zone, statistical model, stem cell, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technological determinism, upwardly mobile, urban planning, young professional

Aaron explained how their order system worked: “Like anything else you buy on Amazon, you buy one of the ethers and it gets you in on the waitlist for whatever project that you’re buying into.” Aaron believed that the biotechnology field should be completely unregulated. The free market would bring well-being to the people, he said. Imagining himself as the next Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, Aaron planned to bring a disruptive technology directly to consumers, government regulators and societal concerns be damned. * * * Aaron Traywick’s dreams for enhancing humanity seemed to be getting closer to reality in January 2018. The price of an Ethereum ether peaked at $1,432 as Ascendance Biomedical was about to go public with new findings and research initiatives.


pages: 385 words: 111,113

Augmented: Life in the Smart Lane by Brett King

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, chief data officer, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, congestion charging, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, different worldview, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, distributed ledger, double helix, drone strike, electricity market, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Fellow of the Royal Society, fiat currency, financial exclusion, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, future of work, gamification, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, gigafactory, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hans Lippershey, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, income inequality, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telephone, invention of the wheel, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kiva Systems, Kodak vs Instagram, Leonard Kleinrock, lifelogging, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Minecraft, mobile money, money market fund, more computing power than Apollo, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off grid, off-the-grid, packet switching, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Ray Kurzweil, retail therapy, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart transportation, Snapchat, Snow Crash, social graph, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, synthetic biology, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, technological singularity, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Travis Kalanick, TSMC, Turing complete, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, urban sprawl, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, yottabyte

The drone was launched at CES in Las Vegas in 2016, and represents the first possible deployment of an autonomous flying vehicle. Unlike self-driving cars, which are focused primarily on the comfort of passengers, it is more likely that the first self-flying vehicles won’t be passenger aircraft at all, but drones. On 1st December 2013, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos appeared on 60 Minutes to launch an audacious plan to ship purchases to Amazon Prime customers via drone. If this had been aired on 1st April, most of the US population would have assumed it was an April fool’s joke, but Bezos was serious. He pointed out that 86 per cent of Amazon’s orders were less than 5 pounds in total weight and that orders in this category could be fulfilled in 30 minutes or less using a drone-based delivery system.


pages: 416 words: 106,532

Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond by Chris Burniske, Jack Tatar

Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset allocation, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, Bear Stearns, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, correlation coefficient, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversification, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Future Shock, general purpose technology, George Gilder, Google Hangouts, high net worth, hype cycle, information security, initial coin offering, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, litecoin, low interest rates, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, packet switching, passive investing, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk free rate, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Skype, smart contracts, social web, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, transaction costs, tulip mania, Turing complete, two and twenty, Uber for X, Vanguard fund, Vitalik Buterin, WikiLeaks, Y2K

It’s the blockchain, the technology behind digital currencies like bitcoin.”7 Incumbents are sensing the inherent creative destruction, especially within the financial services sector, understanding that winners will grow new markets and feast off the disintermediated. Many startups are eyeing these middlemen with the oft-flickering thought that has been credited to Amazon’s Jeff Bezos: “Your fat margins are my opportunity.”8 If financial incumbents don’t embrace the technology themselves, Bitcoin and blockchain technology could do to banks what cell phones did to telephone poles. Nearly every global bank, exchange, custodian, and financial services provider is part of some blockchain consortium, investing in the potential disruptors or internally building its own team.


pages: 364 words: 99,897

The Industries of the Future by Alec Ross

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, Brian Krebs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, connected car, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, distributed ledger, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fiat currency, future of work, General Motors Futurama, global supply chain, Google X / Alphabet X, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lifelogging, litecoin, low interest rates, M-Pesa, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mobile money, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Nelson Mandela, new economy, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open economy, Parag Khanna, paypal mafia, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, Peter Thiel, precision agriculture, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rubik’s Cube, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, social graph, software as a service, special economic zone, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, underbanked, unit 8200, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, work culture , Y Combinator, young professional

I would not be surprised to see Uber take over pizza and flower delivery services and be contracted out to pharmacies to deliver drugs to homebound patients. At its last financing, the seven-year-old company was worth $50 billion, making it worth more than double the value of Hertz and Avis combined. High-profile investors include Google Ventures and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. * * * Coded markets like eBay and Airbnb simultaneously concentrate and disperse the market. With coded markets available to even the smallest vendors, a trend has arisen that pushes economic transactions away from physical stores or hotels and toward individual people, as they connect either locally or online.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

I think as technologists we should have some safe places where we can try out some new things and figure out: What is the effect on society? What’s the effect on people? Without having to deploy it into the normal world. And people who like those kinds of things can go there and experience that. It’s not only Page. Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk dream of establishing Learyesque space colonies, celestial Burning Mans. Peter Thiel is slightly more down to earth. His Seasteading Institute hopes to set up floating technology incubation camps on the ocean, outside national boundaries. “If you can start a new business, why can you not start a new country?”


pages: 371 words: 108,317

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

The more we embed intelligence and smarts into the objects in our households and offices, the more we’ll treat these articles as social property. We’ll share aspects of them (perhaps what they are made of, where they are, what they see), which means that we’ll think of ourselves as sharing them. When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos first introduced the Kindle ebook reader in 2007, he claimed it was not a product. He said it was a service selling access to reading material. That shift became more visible seven years later when Amazon introduced an all-you-can-read subscription library of almost a million ebooks. Book fans no longer had to purchase individual books, but could buy access to most books currently published with the purchase of one Kindle.


pages: 352 words: 104,411

Rush Hour: How 500 Million Commuters Survive the Daily Journey to Work by Iain Gately

Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, California high-speed rail, call centre, car-free, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, corporate raider, DARPA: Urban Challenge, Dean Kamen, decarbonisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, extreme commuting, Ford Model T, General Motors Futurama, global pandemic, Google bus, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, Jeff Bezos, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Marchetti’s constant, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, remote working, safety bicycle, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social distancing, SpaceShipOne, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Suez crisis 1956, telepresence, Tesla Model S, Traffic in Towns by Colin Buchanan, urban planning, éminence grise

The blurb for its i2 Commuter model emphasizes the pleasure and convenience it offers to motorists who are sick of being stuck in jams: ‘sail past gas stations and lines of stopped traffic… getting to work has never been more fun!’ However, Segways have been around for nearly a decade, and have yet to make any sort of dent in automobile sales. When Jeff Bezos of Amazon was shown a prototype, he made the prescient observation to its inventor that ‘you have a product so revolutionary, you’ll have no problem selling it. The question is, are people going to be allowed to use it?’ The answer in many places has been no. Pedestrians don’t want Segways on the pavements, cyclists don’t want them in their lanes, and there are safety concerns about their use on the roads.


pages: 379 words: 108,129

An Optimist's Tour of the Future by Mark Stevenson

23andMe, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Andy Kessler, Apollo 11, augmented reality, bank run, Boston Dynamics, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon-based life, clean water, computer age, decarbonisation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, flex fuel, Ford Model T, Future Shock, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, Leonard Kleinrock, life extension, Louis Pasteur, low earth orbit, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Nick Bostrom, off grid, packet switching, peak oil, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Scaled Composites, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, SpaceShipOne, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the scientific method, Virgin Galactic, Wall-E, X Prize

‘Not everyone has picked up on the David and Goliath aspect of XCOR,’ says Jeff. ‘Richard Branson is pouring more money into Virgin Galactic in a month than we’ve spent in our history. You’ve got NASA doing billions and billions of dollars of its thing. Elon Musk pouring all of his money into SpaceX. Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos is funding Blue Origin …’ And yet, despite their underdog status, XCOR keeps being mentioned in the same breath as its far better-funded rivals. Talking to Jeff you don’t get any sense of ego. He’s trying to run a business – it just happens to be one that wants to make spaceplanes. That XCOR exists gives me more of a sense of a real spaceflight industry putting down roots.


pages: 385 words: 101,761

Creative Intelligence: Harnessing the Power to Create, Connect, and Inspire by Bruce Nussbaum

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Black Swan, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, declining real wages, demographic dividend, disruptive innovation, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, follow your passion, game design, gamification, gentrification, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, industrial robot, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Gruber, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, lone genius, longitudinal study, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, Max Levchin, Minsky moment, new economy, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, QR code, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, reshoring, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, six sigma, Skype, SoftBank, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, supply-chain management, Tesla Model S, The Chicago School, The Design of Experiments, the High Line, The Myth of the Rational Market, thinkpad, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, We are the 99%, Y Combinator, young professional, Zipcar

“We both went to Montessori School,” Page said, “and I think it was part of that training of . . . questioning what’s going on in the world, doing things a bit differently.” Montessori schools use games to teach children how to discover knowledge. It’s perhaps no accident then that Montessori alums include Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Sims video game creator Will Wright, and rap mogul Sean “P. Diddy” Combs. Other entrepreneurs with educational backgrounds in art, design, and music where play is intrinsic to learning have founded a whole slew of new companies, including Kickstarter, Tumblr, YouTube, Flickr, Instagram, Vimeo, Android, and, of course, Apple.


pages: 401 words: 109,892

The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets by Thomas Philippon

airline deregulation, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, business cycle, business process, buy and hold, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, central bank independence, commoditize, crack epidemic, cross-subsidies, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, flag carrier, Ford Model T, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, inventory management, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, law of one price, liquidity trap, low cost airline, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, money market fund, moral hazard, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, price discrimination, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, robo advisor, Ronald Reagan, search costs, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, the payments system, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, warehouse automation, zero-sum game

The Dangers of Monopsony Power We have seen that there is a rise in monopsony power in the labor market. There is also the risk of a rise in monopsony power in online platforms. Large platforms have monopsony power with respect to their suppliers, even if they do not have much monopoly power on the consumer side. Jeff Bezos once said that “there are two kinds of companies, those that work to try to charge more and those that work to charge less. We will be the second.” And he was right: Amazon does not charge high prices to consumers. Amazon, however, uses the large scale of its operations to obtain rebates from its suppliers and delivery services, which increases its market power and makes it difficult for other firms to compete if they do not enjoy the same rebates.


pages: 374 words: 111,284

The AI Economy: Work, Wealth and Welfare in the Robot Age by Roger Bootle

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, anti-work, antiwork, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, blockchain, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Chris Urmson, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, facts on the ground, fake news, financial intermediation, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, Great Leap Forward, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, job satisfaction, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, low interest rates, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mega-rich, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Ocado, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, positional goods, quantitative easing, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Rutger Bregman, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Simon Kuznets, Skype, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, synthetic biology, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K, Yogi Berra

This is particularly true in a world of pension funds and widespread property ownership.16 A further, telling, criticism is not theoretical but empirical. When you look at the rich lists, particularly in the USA, but also elsewhere, it is striking that so many of the superrich have acquired their wealth through work, leading to fantastic increases in the value of the companies that they founded and/or built up. This applies to Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and many more. And the key players are constantly changing. Consider the Forbes list. Of those listed as the wealthiest Americans in 1982, less than a tenth were still on the list in 2012. Moreover, the share of the Forbes 400 who came to their wealth through inheritance seems to be in sharp decline.


pages: 421 words: 110,272

Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism by Anne Case, Angus Deaton

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Boeing 737 MAX, business cycle, call centre, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, crack epidemic, creative destruction, crony capitalism, declining real wages, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, falling living standards, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial engineering, fulfillment center, germ theory of disease, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, Martin Wolf, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pensions crisis, pill mill, randomized controlled trial, refrigerator car, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, Tyler Cowen, universal basic income, working-age population, zero-sum game

They profit from improving and extending other people’s lives. It is good for great innovators to get rich. Making is not the same as taking. It is not inequality itself that is unfair but rather the process that generates it. The people who are being left behind care about their own falling living standards and loss of community, not about Jeff Bezos (of Amazon) or Tim Cook (of Apple) being rich. Yet when they think the inequality comes from cheating or from special favors, the situation becomes intolerable. The financial crisis has much to answer for. Before it, many believed that the bankers knew what they were doing and that their salaries were being earned in the public interest.


pages: 379 words: 109,223

Frenemies: The Epic Disruption of the Ad Business by Ken Auletta

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, bike sharing, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, connected car, content marketing, corporate raider, crossover SUV, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, financial engineering, forensic accounting, Future Shock, Google Glasses, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Mary Meeker, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, NetJets, Network effects, pattern recognition, pets.com, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, éminence grise

“When I come to New York, I ask to see him,” says marketing consultant and former Procter & Gamble CMO Jim Stengel. “I think he has the most forward-looking operation of anyone. I wanted to hire his agency when I was at P&G, but my clients would not agree.” Like his business heroes, Steve Jobs and Jeff Bezos, Bob Greenberg does not lack for confidence. Unlike Jobs, he does not glare at or scream at underlings. Unlike Bezos, he does not have a high-pitched laugh. Unlike both, he does not treat his work as if it were a national security secret. However, like them, his self-confidence borders on messianic.


pages: 461 words: 106,027

Zero to Sold: How to Start, Run, and Sell a Bootstrapped Business by Arvid Kahl

business logic, business process, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cognitive load, content marketing, continuous integration, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, domain-specific language, financial independence, functional programming, Google Chrome, hockey-stick growth, if you build it, they will come, information asymmetry, information retrieval, inventory management, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kanban, Kubernetes, machine readable, minimum viable product, Network effects, performance metric, post-work, premature optimization, risk tolerance, Ruby on Rails, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, single source of truth, software as a service, solopreneur, source of truth, statistical model, subscription business, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, the long tail, trickle-down economics, value engineering, web application

You will know when your MVP is minimally viable since it will solve your problem enough at some point. From there, it will be good enough for others as well. This practice is called "dogfooding," named after a television ad from the 1970s, where the owner of a dog food brand claimed that he fed his dog food to his own dogs. In the IT world, this process has been made famous by Amazon, where Jeff Bezos forced all his development teams to build internal APIs that would eventually be made available to external developers, too. That way, all external services would have gone through a long time of internal use, ironing out the bugs and making the interfaces usable. Another way of thinking about your MVP is to make it a Minimum Loveable Product.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab, Peter Vanham

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Today, we know many of these industrial tycoons for their societal contributions, which include Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, and many philanthropic organizations, which are still active today. But at the end of the 1880s, they were best known for their opulent wealth and often questionable business practices. While their wealth in today's terms would exceed that of even Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, that of the man and woman in the street was often non-existent. Extreme poverty was the norm in the tenement houses of big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Worker wages were low and bargaining power absent in the face of the trusts’ economic power. The contrast between rich and poor living standards was so shocking that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 wrote a satirical book about it, which became a nickname for the era: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.


pages: 460 words: 107,454

Stakeholder Capitalism: A Global Economy That Works for Progress, People and Planet by Klaus Schwab

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, air traffic controllers' union, Anthropocene, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, Asperger Syndrome, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, centre right, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, colonial rule, company town, contact tracing, contact tracing app, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, currency peg, cyber-physical system, decarbonisation, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, digital divide, don't be evil, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google bus, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, high net worth, hiring and firing, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, lockdown, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, means of production, megacity, microplastics / micro fibres, Mikhail Gorbachev, mini-job, mittelstand, move fast and break things, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, precariat, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, School Strike for Climate, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, transfer pricing, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Yom Kippur War, young professional, zero-sum game

Today, we know many of these industrial tycoons for their societal contributions, which include Rockefeller Center, Carnegie Hall, and many philanthropic organizations, which are still active today. But at the end of the 1880s, they were best known for their opulent wealth and often questionable business practices. While their wealth in today's terms would exceed that of even Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, that of the man and woman in the street was often non-existent. Extreme poverty was the norm in the tenement houses of big cities like New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Chicago. Worker wages were low and bargaining power absent in the face of the trusts’ economic power. The contrast between rich and poor living standards was so shocking that Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 wrote a satirical book about it, which became a nickname for the era: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.


pages: 387 words: 106,753

Why Startups Fail: A New Roadmap for Entrepreneurial Success by Tom Eisenmann

Airbnb, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Ben Horowitz, Big Tech, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, Checklist Manifesto, clean tech, conceptual framework, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, Dean Kamen, drop ship, Elon Musk, fail fast, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, growth hacking, Hyperloop, income inequality, initial coin offering, inventory management, Iridium satellite, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, Larry Ellison, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, Network effects, nuclear winter, Oculus Rift, PalmPilot, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Pan Syndrome, Peter Thiel, reality distortion field, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk/return, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, software as a service, Solyndra, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, WeWork, Y Combinator, young professional, Zenefits

According to Hamm, these impulses include 1) loyalty to colleagues who may lack the skills to fulfill evolving leadership roles, 2) a relentless focus on executing today’s “to-do list” at the expense of thinking strategically, and 3) working in isolation instead of with management team members or ecosystem partners, which is especially prevalent among founders who excel at product development. Founders who successfully led their firms through the scaling phase and beyond come readily to mind—Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk. However, these entrepreneurs are the exception rather than the rule. Despite coaching, most founder/CEOs cannot master the skills required to lead a larger, more complex startup. According to research by Yeshiva University’s Noam Wasserman, 61 percent of founders who held the CEO role when their ventures launched were no longer in that role after their firms raised Series D financing.


Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral by Ben Smith

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AOL-Time Warner, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, data science, David Brooks, deplatforming, Donald Trump, drone strike, fake news, Filter Bubble, Frank Gehry, full stack developer, future of journalism, hype cycle, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Larry Ellison, late capitalism, lolcat, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, moral panic, obamacare, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, post-work, public intellectual, reality distortion field, Robert Mercer, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, skunkworks, slashdot, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, subscription business, tech worker, TikTok, traveling salesman, WeWork, WikiLeaks, young professional, Zenefits

While he was in town, Nick Denton ran into one of those Silicon Valley tech journalists he so scorned, Sarah Lacy, who had just had a big BusinessWeek cover on the founder of Digg. Nick and Lacy were in the hallway of San Francisco’s Palace Hotel for the Web 2.0 Summit (the theme: “Disruption & Opportunity”), listening in on speakers who included Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, and Arthur Sulzberger Jr. Neither of them could afford tickets to the exclusive hallways where deals got done. So she was wearing a badge that the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen had lent her; the Englishman who introduced himself to her, she noticed, was wearing someone else’s badge too.


pages: 432 words: 106,612

Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever by Robin Wigglesworth

Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Benoit Mandelbrot, Big Tech, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Blitzscaling, Brownian motion, buy and hold, California gold rush, capital asset pricing model, Carl Icahn, cloud computing, commoditize, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, COVID-19, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, index fund, industrial robot, invention of the wheel, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Bogle, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, lockdown, Louis Bachelier, machine readable, money market fund, Myron Scholes, New Journalism, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Performance of Mutual Funds in the Period, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, RAND corporation, random walk, risk-adjusted returns, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, rolodex, seminal paper, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, subprime mortgage crisis, the scientific method, transaction costs, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund

Ever the showman, Buffett insisted that he would announce a tally of how things were going at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting every year. Due to legal restrictions on gambling in some US states, the bet was arranged through something called Long Bets, a forum for big wagers on the future backed by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. Although seemingly frivolous, friendly gambles can have a lot of power. In 1600, Johannes Kepler entered into a bet with a Danish astronomer that he could calculate a formula for the solar orbit of Mars in eight days. In the end, it took him five years, but the work help revolutionize astronomy.7 This was precisely what the Long Bets Project wanted to encourage, and the Buffett-Protégé wager was perfect.


pages: 322 words: 106,663

Women Talk Money: Breaking the Taboo by Rebecca Walker

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, BIPOC, Black Lives Matter, call centre, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, export processing zone, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, high net worth, hockey-stick growth, hustle culture, impact investing, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, microaggression, neurotypical, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Rana Plaza, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, TED Talk, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, women in the workforce, working poor, Y Combinator

It was scary and guilt-provoking to admit, but we were forced to recognize that our families made their wealth by extracting the labor of workers or refining the raw materials of the earth. Our accumulated wealth did not take place in a vacuum—it was at the expense of someone else. Mark Zuckerberg made his billions by selling the data of Facebook users to advertising companies. Jeff Bezos made his billions by putting innumerable independent stores out of business. There is always a component of exploitation behind massive accumulation. My family’s accumulation was no different, and my role was to begin to undo this. When #BlackLivesMatter went viral after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, we were ready to support.


pages: 394 words: 112,770

Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House by Michael Wolff

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Biosphere 2, Carl Icahn, centre right, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, forensic accounting, illegal immigration, impulse control, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, obamacare, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paris climate accords, Peter Thiel, Renaissance Technologies, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, Travis Kalanick, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

Bannon felt—perhaps with overconfidence—that Trump could be easily switched on and off. Against the background of a mortal war of wills—with the media, the Democrats, and the swamp—that Bannon was encouraging him to wage, Trump could also be courted. In some sense, he wanted nothing so much as to be courted. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, which had become one of the many Trump media bêtes noires in the media world, nevertheless took pains to reach out not only to the presidentelect but to his daughter Ivanka. During the campaign, Trump said Amazon was getting “away with murder taxwise” and that if he won, “Oh, do they have problems.”


pages: 395 words: 116,675

The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge by Matt Ridley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, adjacent possible, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, altcoin, An Inconvenient Truth, anthropic principle, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, bitcoin, blockchain, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Broken windows theory, carbon tax, Columbian Exchange, computer age, Corn Laws, cosmological constant, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, Donald Davies, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Eben Moglen, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Snowden, endogenous growth, epigenetics, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fail fast, falling living standards, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, George Santayana, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, Greenspan put, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Henri Poincaré, Higgs boson, hydraulic fracturing, imperial preference, income per capita, indoor plumbing, information security, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, land reform, Lao Tzu, long peace, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Necker cube, obamacare, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Feynman, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, smart contracts, South Sea Bubble, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, twin studies, uber lyft, women in the workforce

Surely it is the height of irony that the most iconic, powerful and imperial chief executives are found today in companies that float in the fluid, egalitarian, dynamic world of the digital economy. Their firms provide cobwebs of horizontal interaction among billions of customers, their employees wear jeans, eat vegan salads and work flexible hours. Yet the pronouncements of their bosses are treated as scripture. Jeff Bezos’s favourite saying is ‘Start with the customer and work backwards,’ but it is repeated as a mantra so frequently by his staff that you cannot help thinking they start with the boss and work forwards. At the death of Steve Jobs in 2011 it was widely assumed that the survival of Apple itself was at risk, and the share price plunged.


pages: 289 words: 113,211

A Demon of Our Own Design: Markets, Hedge Funds, and the Perils of Financial Innovation by Richard Bookstaber

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, beat the dealer, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, butterfly effect, commoditize, commodity trading advisor, computer age, computerized trading, disintermediation, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Edward Thorp, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, frictionless, frictionless market, Future Shock, George Akerlof, global macro, implied volatility, index arbitrage, intangible asset, Jeff Bezos, Jim Simons, John Meriwether, junk bonds, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, loose coupling, managed futures, margin call, market bubble, market design, Mary Meeker, merger arbitrage, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, new economy, Nick Leeson, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, Pierre-Simon Laplace, proprietary trading, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolodex, Saturday Night Live, selection bias, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, statistical arbitrage, tail risk, The Market for Lemons, time value of money, too big to fail, transaction costs, tulip mania, uranium enrichment, UUNET, William Langewiesche, yield curve, zero-coupon bond, zero-sum game

Two years later, he left to start his own stat arb fund following a row with Tartaglia, who felt he was trying to steal his thunder. Almost from the start Shaw’s fund pulled in $100 million plus a year from the strategy. Although he has since limited his day-to-day involvement, pursuing research in biotech instead, his firm, D.E. Shaw, continues to this day. (One of his Princeton recruits, Jeff Bezos, left his ranks in 1994 to start his own enterprise, Amazon.com.) Thanks to Gerry Bamberger, who started as a programmer on Morgan’s equity desk, the way trading was done and the function it performed 189 ccc_demon_165-206_ch09.qxd 7/13/07 2:44 PM Page 190 A DEMON OF OUR OWN DESIGN had changed.


pages: 424 words: 114,905

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

By the end of 2016, more than 40 percent of smartphone owners said they had used one of these assistants.2 We’re getting ever more used to using an artificially intelligent personal assistant. I skipped over Amazon’s Echo and Dot voice-controlled devices, which we know as Alexa, because they seemed to have taken the world (or at least the United States) by storm. Back in 2011, Jeff Bezos described his vision for the Alexa system: “A low-cost, ubiquitous computer with all its brains in the cloud that you could interact with over voice—you speak to it, it speaks to you.”3 Although introduced in late 2014 to its Prime members, it took a couple of years for Alexa’s popularity to soar.


pages: 386 words: 116,233

The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime by Mj Demarco

8-hour work day, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, back-to-the-land, Bernie Madoff, bounce rate, business logic, business process, butterfly effect, buy and hold, cloud computing, commoditize, dark matter, delayed gratification, demand response, do what you love, Donald Trump, drop ship, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial independence, fixed income, housing crisis, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, multilevel marketing, passive income, passive investing, payday loans, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, Ronald Reagan, subscription business, upwardly mobile, wealth creators, white picket fence, World Values Survey, zero day

If you want your business to get funded, take action and create something that reflects tangible execution. Investors are more likely to invest in something tangible and real; not ideas dissected ad nauseam on paper. * * * CHAPTER 40: PEDESTRIANS WILL MAKE YOU RICH! If you do build a great experience, customers tell each other about that. Word of mouth is very powerful. ~ Jeff Bezos The Bishop in Your Chess Match When life is tough, we seek the counsel of priests, rabbis, or pastors. They are the “go-to” guys of life's problems. Yet when it comes to your business, who is your go-to guy? Who is on the frontline with your customers? The bishop in business's chess match is your customer service, and how you treat the people who buy your product or service.


pages: 379 words: 114,807

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight Over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

activist lawyer, Asian financial crisis, banking crisis, big-box store, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blood diamond, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, Cape to Cairo, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, corporate raider, credit crunch, Deng Xiaoping, Elliott wave, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, Garrett Hardin, Global Witness, index fund, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Kondratiev cycle, land reform, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, megacity, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, out of africa, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, smart cities, structural adjustment programs, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, undersea cable, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks

His private investment company, the Tavistock Group, has its fingers in everything from real estate and biotechnology research to brewing and the Tottenham Hotspurs soccer club. Another part-time Patagonian resident is Harvard graduate Warren Adams, who made his fortune by inventing the first social networking site, PlanetAll, and selling it to Amazon for a reported $100 million. He says Amazon boss Jeff Bezos failed to develop it—and the rest is Facebook history. Like the others, Adams pocketed his fortune, went traveling, and ended up starstruck by Patagonia. Unlike the others, he is not content to be a custodian of the land. He thinks it should earn its keep. So in 2007, Adams founded Patagonia Sur, a “for profit” company that now has 60,000 acres in six blocks of southern Chile, from the mountain glaciers to the ocean.


pages: 561 words: 114,843

Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website by Matt Blumberg

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, airport security, Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, bank run, Ben Horowitz, Blue Ocean Strategy, book value, Broken windows theory, crowdsourcing, deskilling, fear of failure, financial engineering, high batting average, high net worth, hiring and firing, Inbox Zero, James Hargreaves, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, pattern recognition, performance metric, pets.com, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype

This is best developed by setting expectations of change up front, from the very first day. Very often we steer blindly, even with the best road maps and the best-laid plans. The changes in direction required to navigate over and around obstacles must be recognized and accepted by everyone. One of my favorite explanations of the rationale behind pivoting comes from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos (as related to 37signals founder Jason Fried): People who were right a lot of the time are people who often changed their minds. I don’t think consistency is a particularly positive trait. It’s perfectly healthy—encouraged, even—to have an idea tomorrow that contradicted your idea today. The smartest people are constantly revising their understanding, reconsidering a problem they thought they’d already solved.


pages: 421 words: 110,406

Platform Revolution: How Networked Markets Are Transforming the Economy--And How to Make Them Work for You by Sangeet Paul Choudary, Marshall W. van Alstyne, Geoffrey G. Parker

3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Andrei Shleifer, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, bitcoin, blockchain, business cycle, business logic, business process, buy low sell high, chief data officer, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, clean water, cloud computing, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, digital map, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial innovation, Free Software Foundation, gigafactory, growth hacking, Haber-Bosch Process, High speed trading, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, market design, Max Levchin, Metcalfe’s law, multi-sided market, Network effects, new economy, PalmPilot, payday loans, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pre–internet, price mechanism, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snapchat, social bookmarking, social contagion, software is eating the world, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, The Chicago School, the long tail, the payments system, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, zero-sum game, Zipcar

To avoid this kind of dysfunction, platform managers should strive to give all their business divisions a clear view across the entire platform. Such transparency promotes consistency, helps others develop and use key resources, and facilitates growth to scale. The so-called Yegge Rant, executive Steve Yegge’s attempt to summarize a mandate issued by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, captures the spirit of this principle very effectively. Bezos insisted that all members of the Amazon team must learn to communicate with one another using “service interfaces”—data communication tools specifically designed to be clear, understandable, and useful to everyone in the organization as well as to outside users and partners.


pages: 390 words: 114,538

Digital Wars: Apple, Google, Microsoft and the Battle for the Internet by Charles Arthur

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Andy Rubin, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, gravity well, Jeff Bezos, John Gruber, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, pre–internet, Robert X Cringely, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, slashdot, Snapchat, software patent, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Susan Wojcicki, the long tail, the new new thing, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, turn-by-turn navigation, upwardly mobile, vertical integration

Though the Facebook advertising deal positioned it within the ramparts of the social citadel that Google had most wanted to conquer, it wasn’t enough; its rival remained miles ahead in everything that mattered – share of search, share of advertising, rate of growth, search of online video viewing, share of cloud services (where Google’s principal competition came from Amazon, whose Jeff Bezos had been one of its original investors), and of course mindshare whenever search was mentioned. Microsoft tried promotions – offering ‘Cashback’ rebates to shoppers if they bought an item via Windows Live (and later Bing), which could earn them up to $2,500 per year. But the tracking system was flawed, as Samir Meghani, of the price comparison site Bountii.com, showed (you could easily spoof it to generate payments even without buying); and worse, merchants offering goods via Cashback were charging higher prices than elsewhere on the web – even after the rebate.


A People’s History of Computing in the United States by Joy Lisi Rankin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Albert Einstein, Apple II, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Charles Babbage, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, corporate social responsibility, digital divide, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Howard Zinn, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, language acquisition, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mother of all demos, Multics, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, pink-collar, profit motive, public intellectual, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, urban planning, Whole Earth Catalog, wikimedia commons

They started companies: Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak established Apple; Bill Gates and Paul Allen developed Microsoft. Then, in the 1990s, along came the Internet to connect all of ­t hose personal computers, and the ­people using them. Another round of eccentric nerds (still all young white men)—­Jeff Bezos, Sergey Brin, Larry Page, and Mark Zuckerberg among them—­gave us Amazon, Google, Facebook, and the fiefdoms of Silicon Valley. Walter Isaac­son’s The Innovators expands the popu­lar narrative of digital history to include less familiar contributors such as the nineteenth-­century mathematician Charles Babbage and the twentieth-­century computing visionary J.


pages: 404 words: 115,108

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

But unless one has something against books, it doesn’t harm society or anyone else. Maybe we’d worry if Amazon only recommended books it had an interest in. Maybe we’d worry if Amazon only recommended liberal or conservative books. Maybe we’d worry if every fifth book it recommended was a story of how great Jeff Bezos was. Those are all certainly possible reasons to worry. But from the simple fact that Amazon uses my data to recommend things I should buy, we can’t conclude that there’s any real reason we need to worry about that use of data. Or the same with Netflix recommending a new television series. Or the same with Google giving me recommendations for hiking boots.


pages: 450 words: 113,173

The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties by Christopher Caldwell

1960s counterculture, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, computer age, crack epidemic, critical race theory, crony capitalism, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Attenborough, desegregation, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Firefox, full employment, Future Shock, George Gilder, global value chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, James Bridle, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, junk bonds, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, libertarian paternalism, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Nate Silver, new economy, Norman Mailer, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, post-industrial society, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Silicon Valley, Skype, South China Sea, Steve Jobs, tech billionaire, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, Whole Earth Catalog, zero-sum game

., midway between Dupont Circle and the White House. In a neighborhood where any major lobbying firm might consider it a status symbol to rent a floor, the Human Rights Campaign owned an entire nine-story, two-wing building. The investors George Soros and Michael Bloomberg, tech billionaires Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, entertainers David Geffen and Brad Pitt, Republican financiers Paul Singer and Seth Klarman—all backed gay marriage with millions in donations. Support for gay marriage in Silicon Valley was almost unanimous. Google’s employees gave 96 percent of their campaign contributions, and Apple’s 94 percent, to oppose California’s anti–gay marriage Proposition 8.


pages: 463 words: 115,103

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

Left Democrats like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren go even further and demand “college for all.” Not everyone can be a winner, however you design the game. In some fields such as law, medicine, technology, and some corners of business, “winner-takes-all” markets have provided exceptional rewards to exceptional people—people like Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk—who have both high cognitive skills and practical knowledge of something that gives them a big first-mover advantage in new digital markets. Below them is a wider group of highly educated—and highly credentialized—people from top universities who have the intelligence and personality attributes to propel them into the top layer of jobs.


pages: 409 words: 112,055

The Fifth Domain: Defending Our Country, Our Companies, and Ourselves in the Age of Cyber Threats by Richard A. Clarke, Robert K. Knake

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, blockchain, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, Boston Dynamics, business cycle, business intelligence, call centre, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, cognitive bias, commoditize, computer vision, corporate governance, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Exxon Valdez, false flag, geopolitical risk, global village, immigration reform, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kubernetes, machine readable, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, Network effects, open borders, platform as a service, Ponzi scheme, quantum cryptography, ransomware, Richard Thaler, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, Schrödinger's Cat, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Snapchat, software as a service, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, technoutopianism, The future is already here, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day

According to data from Spamhaus, a nonprofit corporation that tracks online spam propagation, Amazon is one of the worst sources of all kinds of malicious cyber activity. Out of its data centers spew many of the ads for CheapPills and Ponzi schemes that clog up your junk mail folder. Amazon’s servers host many of the domains that cyber criminals try to get you to click on. Of course, Jeff Bezos isn’t relying on spam or botnets to make his billions. As with the internet itself, the cloud has turned out to be a neutral medium, a mirror that reflects the intentions, good or bad, of those who are using it. So, like email or the World Wide Web, the cloud quickly has become vital to both legitimate businesses and the cyber-criminal underworld.


pages: 447 words: 111,991

Exponential: How Accelerating Technology Is Leaving Us Behind and What to Do About It by Azeem Azhar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 3D printing, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Ada Lovelace, additive manufacturing, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, computer vision, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, decarbonisation, deep learning, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Demis Hassabis, Diane Coyle, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, drone strike, Elon Musk, emotional labour, energy security, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, global macro, global pandemic, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, GPT-3, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, intangible asset, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, Just-in-time delivery, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Law of Accelerating Returns, lockdown, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, Network effects, new economy, NSO Group, Ocado, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, Planet Labs, price anchoring, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Sam Altman, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, software as a service, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, subscription business, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Malthus, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, warehouse automation, winner-take-all economy, workplace surveillance , Yom Kippur War

Online sales of calculators, gym equipment, phone chargers, printer paper and much else besides boomed. The firm’s sales grew 40 per cent in the first couple of quarters of 2020. Amazon is an aggressively automated company, and it is easily the world’s most technically sophisticated retailer. From early on, its founder, Jeff Bezos, was mindful of the power of automation. In 2002, for example, he sent a ground-breaking memo to the firm insisting that all systems in the company be designed to allow for automatic, rather than human-mediated, coordination. ‘Anyone who doesn’t do this will be fired,’ he concluded cheerfully.29 This edict forced Amazonians, as the retailer’s employees are known, to design their internal systems to make it easier to build automated connections between them.30 It laid the groundwork for massive automation down the line.


pages: 444 words: 118,393

The Nature of Software Development: Keep It Simple, Make It Valuable, Build It Piece by Piece by Ron Jeffries

Amazon Web Services, anti-pattern, bitcoin, business cycle, business intelligence, business logic, business process, c2.com, call centre, cloud computing, continuous integration, Conway's law, creative destruction, dark matter, data science, database schema, deep learning, DevOps, disinformation, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, fail fast, fault tolerance, Firefox, Hacker News, industrial robot, information security, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Kanban, Kubernetes, load shedding, loose coupling, machine readable, Mars Rover, microservices, Minecraft, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Morris worm, move fast and break things, OSI model, peer-to-peer lending, platform as a service, power law, ransomware, revision control, Ruby on Rails, Schrödinger's Cat, Silicon Valley, six sigma, software is eating the world, source of truth, SQL injection, systems thinking, text mining, time value of money, transaction costs, Turing machine, two-pizza team, web application, zero day

It reduces dependencies, which is vital to the long-term health of your organization. Kill services in small grains to preserve the larger entity. As for Fiji, it’s a beautiful island with friendly people. Bring sunscreen and grow mangoes. Team-Scale Autonomy You’re probably familiar with the concept of the two-pizza team. This is Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos’s rule that every team should be sized no bigger than you can feed with two large pizzas. It’s an important but misunderstood concept. It’s not just about having fewer people on a team. That does have its own benefit for communication. A self-sufficient two-pizza team also means each team member has to cover more than one discipline.


pages: 412 words: 115,048

Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West, From the Ancients to Fake News by Eric Berkowitz

Albert Einstein, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, colonial rule, coronavirus, COVID-19, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, high-speed rail, Index librorum prohibitorum, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, Minecraft, New Urbanism, post-truth, pre–internet, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, source of truth, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, undersea cable, W. E. B. Du Bois, WikiLeaks

While most of the comments were forgotten, they and some very tangible actions against his perceived media enemies have collectively “dangerously undermined truth” and chilled critical reporting, as a 2020 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists concludes.36 According to a lawsuit filed by PEN America, a nonprofit association of writers and media professionals, about one-third of its members avoided reporting on certain topics out of concern over potential retaliation, and more than half believed criticism of the administration would put them at risk.37 Disfavored reporters such as CNN’s Jim Acosta were barred from the White House; threats to revoke the broadcast licenses of TV networks were made for airing an ad that highlighted the deficiencies of Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic; actions were taken to raise postal rates to target Amazon, whose CEO, Jeff Bezos, is the majority shareholder of the Washington Post; and an antitrust action was filed to challenge a merger between AT&T and Time Warner, whose subsidiary is CNN. The full impact of such efforts will take time to gauge. The courts beat back the most egregious of them. The antitrust action failed, as did the administration’s attempt to bar Acosta from the White House.


pages: 350 words: 115,802

Pegasus: How a Spy in Your Pocket Threatens the End of Privacy, Dignity, and Democracy by Laurent Richard, Sandrine Rigaud

activist lawyer, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, centre right, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, corporate governance, COVID-19, David Vincenzetti, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, food desert, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, lockdown, Mohammed Bouazizi, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, operational security, Stuxnet, Tim Cook: Apple, unit 8200, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero day

Mexico was by far the biggest client of NSO, but Morocco was not far behind, and neither was Saudi Arabia. We were going to want to get Jamal Khashoggi’s phone number, Sandrine explained, to see if the Saudis had targeted him for cybersurveillance before they assassinated him. There were some recent public accusations that Amazon chieftain Jeff Bezos, who also owned Khashoggi’s sometime employer, the Washington Post, was a target of the Saudis also. The reports were sketchy, and NSO always claimed that Pegasus could not be used on a cell phone with a US number (any number with a plus-1 country code), but the list gave us a way to check. So we wanted to get Bezos’s personal cell phone number if possible.


pages: 654 words: 120,154

The Firm by Duff McDonald

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, asset light, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, book value, borderless world, collective bargaining, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, family office, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Glass-Steagall Act, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, new economy, pets.com, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Solow, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, The Nature of the Firm, vertical integration, young professional

THE OZARK FARM BOY From Gamma to Lake Shore Drive The history of American business is the story of men who came along with a healthy dose of self-confidence. Henry Ford knew he had found a way to mass-produce cars. Steve Jobs knew there was huge opportunity in taking the computer out of the office and into the home. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com saw the promise of the Internet early, and he took retailing into the ether. James O. McKinsey’s confidence wasn’t about something so tangible. Did you have a problem in your business? Let him have a look at it, and he was confident he could help you figure out what to do about it.


pages: 398 words: 120,801

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

Aaron Swartz, airport security, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, citizen journalism, Firefox, game design, Golden Gate Park, Haight Ashbury, Internet Archive, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, mail merge, Mitch Kapor, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, RFID, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Thomas Bayes, web of trust, zero day

Amazon is amazing -- a "store" where you can get practically any book ever published (along with practically everything else, from laptops to cheese-graters), where they've elevated recommendations to a high art, where they allow customers to directly communicate with each other, where they are constantly inventing new and better ways of connecting books with readers. Amazon has always treated me like gold -- the founder, Jeff Bezos, even posted a reader-review for my first novel! -- and I shop there like crazy (looking at my spreadsheets, it appears that I buy something from Amazon approximately every six days). Amazon's in the process of reinventing what it means to be a bookstore in the twenty-first century and I can't think of a better group of people to be facing down that thorny set of problems.]]


pages: 428 words: 126,013

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions by Johann Hari

Adam Curtis, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, correlation does not imply causation, Donald Trump, gig economy, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Joi Ito, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Occupy movement, open borders, placebo effect, precariat, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Rat Park, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Stephen Fry, sugar pill, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Spirit Level, Tipper Gore, twin studies, universal basic income, urban planning, zero-sum game

He knew how bike shops were run. The workers knew how it operated—because they literally did almost all the work. He thought—we could do this. We could run a store like this, ourselves, without the boss. If this was a conventional American story, Josh would now break away and set up his own business and rise to become the Jeff Bezos of bikes (or at least end up owning his own beach house on the Jersey Shore). But Josh didn’t want to become the guy who orders everyone else around. In his years working in bike shops, he had noticed some things. The boss is isolated. Even when he’s a nice guy, he’s pushed into this weird position, controlling other people, which makes it hard for him to connect in ordinary ways.


pages: 510 words: 120,048

Who Owns the Future? by Jaron Lanier

3D printing, 4chan, Abraham Maslow, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, augmented reality, automated trading system, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, book scanning, book value, Burning Man, call centre, carbon credits, carbon footprint, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, computer age, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, David Graeber, delayed gratification, digital capitalism, digital Maoism, digital rights, Douglas Engelbart, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, facts on the ground, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Haight Ashbury, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Ivan Sutherland, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, life extension, Long Term Capital Management, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, off-the-grid, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-oil, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, The Market for Lemons, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, WikiLeaks, zero-sum game

EIGHTH INTERLUDE The Fate of Books BOOKS INSPIRE MANIACAL SCHEMING If there’s one blessed sweet feature of Silicon Valley culture, it’s that we don’t have many deadly dull mandatory social affairs where you have to sit in an assigned seat at a table and make your choice of beef, fish, or veggies while you pretend to listen to boring toasts and bad jokes until you get to leave. But we do have a few. I was once seated at a linen-coated affair between Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Eric Schmidt, then the CEO of Google. This was before the Kindle. Two Silicon Alphas eyed each other and suddenly locked into a manic exchange. They started trading figures and anecdotes about the book business. It all happened so fast, a blur. Someone at the podium was talking about installing a solar-powered computer in Africa.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Of course, Google isn’t the only press baron on the horizon; Amazonification, Facebookization, and Twitterification also beckon. Some will further hollow out once-hallowed properties. Others will invest, as venture capitalist Marc Andreessen recommends. Though he strikes fear into publishers, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has not yet reduced writers at his newspaper (the Washington Post) to the status of Mechanical Turkers or warehouse pickers.213 But we should not assume media independence as tech firms swallow more of the revenue that might have once gone to journalists. After Amazon inked a $600 million deal to provide the CIA with cloud computing services, 30,000 people petitioned the Post with the message “Washington Post: Readers Deserve Full Disclosure in Coverage of CIA.”214 Such inquiries will only become more common as Washington and Silicon Valley develop more partnerships for information dominance.


pages: 382 words: 120,064

Bank 3.0: Why Banking Is No Longer Somewhere You Go but Something You Do by Brett King

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, Airbus A320, Albert Einstein, Amazon Web Services, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Apollo Guidance Computer, asset-backed security, augmented reality, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, bounce rate, business intelligence, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, capital controls, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, fixed income, George Gilder, Google Glasses, high net worth, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Infrastructure as a Service, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, mass affluent, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, mobile money, more computing power than Apollo, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, operational security, optical character recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, Pingit, platform as a service, QR code, QWERTY keyboard, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, self-driving car, Skype, speech recognition, stem cell, telepresence, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, underbanked, US Airways Flight 1549, web application, world market for maybe five computers

If it takes just months now for new emergent technologies to insert themselves into the mainstream and change behaviour, and if you’ve got a 12–24 month development and deployment cycle (typical of most banks’ IT departments)—you’ll be at least three to four years behind if you wait to see someone else’s ROI demonstrated before you commit. Three to four years is the time it took Facebook to go from nowhere to half a billion users. Here’s how Jeff Bezos puts it: “I am emphasizing the self-service nature of these platforms because it’s important for a reason I think is somewhat non-obvious: even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation. When a platform is self-service, even the improbable ideas can get tried, because there’s no expert gatekeeper ready to say “that will never work!”


pages: 428 words: 121,717

Warnings by Richard A. Clarke

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, active measures, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, carbon tax, cognitive bias, collateralized debt obligation, complexity theory, corporate governance, CRISPR, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Elon Musk, failed state, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, forensic accounting, friendly AI, Hacker News, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge worker, Maui Hawaii, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, money market fund, mouse model, Nate Silver, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart grid, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, subprime mortgage crisis, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tunguska event, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, Y2K

Stephen Hawking warns that AI is “likely to be either the best or worst thing ever to happen to humanity, so there’s huge value in getting it right.” Hawking is not alone in his concern about superintelligence. Icons of the tech revolution, including former Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, echo his concern. And it terrifies Eliezer Yudkowsky. Eliezer has dedicated his life to preventing artificial intelligence from destroying humankind. Tall with a thick, dark beard that, along with wire-rim glasses, forms a frame around his large, oval face, he is a thirty-seven-year-old autodidact who dropped out of school after eighth grade.


pages: 482 words: 121,173

Tools and Weapons: The Promise and the Peril of the Digital Age by Brad Smith, Carol Ann Browne

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, air gap, airport security, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, Blitzscaling, Boeing 737 MAX, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Celtic Tiger, Charlie Hebdo massacre, chief data officer, cloud computing, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, immigration reform, income inequality, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum viable product, national security letter, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off-the-grid, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, precision agriculture, race to the bottom, ransomware, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, school vouchers, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, tech worker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Tim Cook: Apple, Wargames Reagan, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

Then we stepped into a large room for what reporters would call “the most memorable moment” of the state visit—not just at Microsoft or in Seattle, but for the entire six days across the country.5 The leaders of twenty-eight technology companies from both the United States and China had gathered for a photo opp. Flanking President Xi was a group that included Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos, Ginni Rometty, Mark Zuckerberg, and the CEOs of basically every household technology name in America. It was a photo that built on President Xi’s cybersecurity announcement during dinner the night before, one that made every other image of the trip pale in comparison. There was only one president from a country other than the United States who could command this audience.


Autonomous Driving: How the Driverless Revolution Will Change the World by Andreas Herrmann, Walter Brenner, Rupert Stadler

Airbnb, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, blockchain, call centre, carbon footprint, clean tech, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion pricing, connected car, crowdsourcing, cyber-physical system, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, deep learning, demand response, digital map, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, fear of failure, global supply chain, industrial cluster, intermodal, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Mars Rover, Masdar, megacity, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer rental, precision agriculture, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, sensor fusion, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban planning, Zipcar

There are always examples of product innovations that fail spectacularly despite extensive market research on the new features and functions they offer. One example is the Segway scooter: only a very few of the anticipated production run of 100,000 units were sold. The scooter flopped even though it had support from Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and many other famous investors. Often these new projects are objectively better than previous models, and companies launch them with great euphoria and solid conviction. Especially when disruptive technologies that lead to radical product innovations are involved such as autonomous vehicles it is dangerous to underestimate the risk of developing something beyond what the market wants.


pages: 521 words: 118,183

The Wires of War: Technology and the Global Struggle for Power by Jacob Helberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air gap, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, cable laying ship, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crisis actor, data is the new oil, data science, decentralized internet, deep learning, deepfake, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deplatforming, digital nomad, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, fail fast, fake news, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, geopolitical risk, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, Google bus, Google Chrome, GPT-3, green new deal, information security, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, lockdown, Loma Prieta earthquake, low earth orbit, low skilled workers, Lyft, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, one-China policy, open economy, OpenAI, Parler "social media", Peter Thiel, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, satellite internet, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, SoftBank, Solyndra, South China Sea, SpaceX Starlink, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, techlash, technoutopianism, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, TSMC, Twitter Arab Spring, uber lyft, undersea cable, Unsafe at Any Speed, Valery Gerasimov, vertical integration, Wargames Reagan, Westphalian system, white picket fence, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the hotly anticipated hearing into the antitrust practices of the tech industry was taking place partly by videoconference. On one coast sat the solons of Congress. On the other, the titans of tech—Google’s Sundar Pichai, Apple’s Tim Cook, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos. They were connected by the very cables and data streams under scrutiny, with the CEOs displayed in small boxes on a large screen. To avoid playing favorites with the execs’ technologies, the hearing was streamed over Cisco Webex.2 Ostensibly the hearing was focused on concerns about tech monopolies.


pages: 424 words: 123,180

Democracy's Data: The Hidden Stories in the U.S. Census and How to Read Them by Dan Bouk

Black Lives Matter, card file, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, desegregation, digital map, Donald Trump, George Floyd, germ theory of disease, government statistician, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, index card, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, linked data, Mahatma Gandhi, mass incarceration, public intellectual, pull request, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Scientific racism, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social distancing, surveillance capitalism, transcontinental railway, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Works Progress Administration, zero-sum game

“You cannot know your country, unless your country knows you” and “Get counted or your community suffers” differ less than they might seem to at first, because even in 1940 it was clear that the “self-knowledge” the census offered had significant political and economic value. The public interests represented in the Commerce auditorium included General R. E. Wood, who was listed in the census as an executive of a “Mail Order House,” which was a little like listing Jeff Bezos as the manager of a delivery company.9 Wood chaired the board of the biggest, most popular, and most important mail-order firm: Sears, Roebuck and Co. Americans of all walks of life could peruse the Sears catalog, find an appealing flannel shirt or a dress made from new fabric fibers (like rayon!)


pages: 494 words: 121,217

Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency by Andy Greenberg

2021 United States Capitol attack, Airbnb, augmented reality, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Brian Krebs, Cody Wilson, commoditize, computerized markets, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, forensic accounting, Global Witness, Google Glasses, Higgs boson, hive mind, impulse control, index card, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, market design, operational security, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pirate software, Ponzi scheme, ransomware, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, Skype, slashdot, Social Justice Warrior, the market place, web application, WikiLeaks

One summer afternoon in 2020 during that North Korean hacker investigation—in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic—Twitter suddenly blew up with strange messages, seemingly posted by many of its most high-profile users. Hackers, it soon became clear, had simultaneously taken over the Twitter accounts of Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Barack Obama, Apple, and the then presidential candidate Joe Biden, all to deliver the same message: “I’m feeling generous because of COVID-19. I’ll double any BTC payment sent to my BTC address for the next hour. Good luck, and stay safe out there!” The scam netted nearly $120,000 in just minutes before the messages could be deleted.


pages: 451 words: 125,201

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

But after spending two years and millions of dollars, they disappointingly only managed to produce a probiotic yogurt called Nar.72 More recently, many wealthy techno-optimists have provided hundreds of millions of dollars in funding for biomedical R&D companies aiming to achieve indefinite life spans. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and PayPal cofounder Peter Thiel have both invested in San Francisco–based Unity Biotechnology, a company whose mission is to prevent aging.73 In 2013, Google launched the company Calico, which also aims to combat aging, with more than a billion dollars in funding.74 Ambrosia, a California start-up, charges its elderly customers $8,000 for injections of two and a half litres of blood plasma harvested from teenagers.75 Even if aging cannot be cured in our lifetime, some people plan to punt the problem to the future by paying for cryonics: having their body or severed head frozen in the hope that resurrection will be possible with future technology.


pages: 309 words: 121,279

Wasteland: The Dirty Truth About What We Throw Away, Where It Goes, and Why It Matters by Oliver Franklin-Wallis

air freight, airport security, Anthropocene, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, barriers to entry, big-box store, bitcoin, British Empire, carbon footprint, circular economy, clean water, climate anxiety, coronavirus, COVID-19, Crossrail, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Elon Musk, epigenetics, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, global pandemic, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, John Snow's cholera map, Kintsugi, lockdown, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, oil shale / tar sands, planned obsolescence, refrigerator car, sharing economy, social distancing, space junk, Suez canal 1869, Tim Cook: Apple

Train watchers refer to these services as ‘Binliners’. One Friday in November, I find myself driving this particular Binliner’s route from the capital to the banks of the River Severn, the wide estuary at which the west of England meets the southern edge of Wales. By pure coincidence it’s Black Friday, consumerism’s holy day (patron saint: Jeff Bezos), and undoubtedly the most wasteful day of the year other than Christmas. It seems fitting, then, to spend it visiting an incinerator. The euphemistically named Severnside Energy Recovery Centre (SERC) is a modern industrial building just outside Avonmouth, with a gleaming frontage and a stepped architecture redolent of a half-spilled Russian doll.


The America That Reagan Built by J. David Woodard

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, colonial rule, Columbine, corporate raider, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, friendly fire, glass ceiling, global village, Gordon Gekko, gun show loophole, guns versus butter model, income inequality, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, Live Aid, Marc Andreessen, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, Parents Music Resource Center, postindustrial economy, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rubik’s Cube, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Strategic Defense Initiative, Ted Kaczynski, The Predators' Ball, Timothy McVeigh, Tipper Gore, trickle-down economics, women in the workforce, Y2K, young professional

Computers can be found in the home . . . and digital technologies such as cameras, video games and CD-ROMs are commonplace.’’5 In the America of the 1990s, higher-income, better-educated ‘‘haves’’ were expanding their use of the new technology. Everyday life was altered in ways few could have imagined, like shopping online, for instance. Within four years of its creation in 1995, the online bookseller Amazon.com was generating $3 million a day in sales of books, music, and videos. Its thirtysomething founder, Jeff Bezos, was another Internet success billionaire. The new Mecca of moneymaking was outside Seattle, Washington, on a 295acre campus that was home to the world’s wealthiest man, Bill Gates. Microsoft’s Redmond corporate headquarters was also the residence of a monopoly that dominated the information age just as much as John D.


pages: 469 words: 142,230

The Planet Remade: How Geoengineering Could Change the World by Oliver Morton

Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, Apollo 13, Asilomar, Boeing 747, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, carbon credits, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, colonial rule, Colonization of Mars, Columbian Exchange, decarbonisation, demographic transition, Dr. Strangelove, electricity market, Elon Musk, energy transition, Ernest Rutherford, Garrett Hardin, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kintsugi, late capitalism, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, Michael Shellenberger, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Philip Mirowski, planetary scale, plutocrats, public intellectual, renewable energy transition, rewilding, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Silicon Valley, smart grid, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tech billionaire, Ted Nordhaus, Thomas Malthus, Virgin Galactic

It is partly because of this technological feasibility that the billionaire-geoengineer is a well-worn trope of speculation: within the geoclique, it is called the ‘Greenfinger’ scenario, an allusion to James Bond introduced, I think, by David Victor, a political scientist now at the University of California, San Diego. After all, billionaires building spaceships – either very publicly, as Richard Branson does with Virgin Galactic and Elon Musk does with SpaceX, or more privately, as Jeff Bezos does with Blue Origin – is almost a commonplace. In its pure form – a billionaire who tries to take over the climate more or less by him or herself – I think the Greenfinger idea is highly implausible. Consider the case of Bill Gates (as many do, in this regard). He has funded some geoengineering research; what is more, he is part holder of the patent on the device Stephen Salter thought up to disrupt hurricanes by cooling the surface of the ocean, an idea that was fleshed out during a discussion in which Gates took part.


pages: 505 words: 142,118

A Man for All Markets by Edward O. Thorp

"RICO laws" OR "Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations", 3Com Palm IPO, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, Bear Stearns, beat the dealer, Bernie Madoff, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, book value, Brownian motion, buy and hold, buy low sell high, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carried interest, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Claude Shannon: information theory, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, diversification, Edward Thorp, Erdős number, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial engineering, financial innovation, Garrett Hardin, George Santayana, German hyperinflation, Glass-Steagall Act, Henri Poincaré, high net worth, High speed trading, index arbitrage, index fund, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, John Nash: game theory, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, Mason jar, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Murray Gell-Mann, Myron Scholes, NetJets, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, passive investing, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, Pluto: dwarf planet, Ponzi scheme, power law, price anchoring, publish or perish, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, random walk, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Feynman, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, rolodex, Sharpe ratio, short selling, Silicon Valley, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical arbitrage, stem cell, stock buybacks, stocks for the long run, survivorship bias, tail risk, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Predators' Ball, the rule of 72, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, uptick rule, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, Vanguard fund, Vilfredo Pareto, Works Progress Administration

Using statistical arbitrage as a core profit center, he expanded into related hedging and arbitrage areas (the PNP business plan again), and hired large numbers of smart quantitative types from academia. In 2014, Forbes ranked him as the 134th richest American, at $3.8 billion. One of his hires was Jeff Bezos, who, while researching business opportunities in 1994 for Shaw, got the idea for an online bookstore and left to start a company called Amazon.com. At $30 billion in 2014, Bezos was the fifteenth richest American. As PNP began winding down in late 1988, despite the stress we developed yet another approach to statistical arbitrage that was simpler and more powerful.


pages: 455 words: 133,322

The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, Benchmark Capital, billion-dollar mistake, Burning Man, delayed gratification, demand response, don't be evil, global village, happiness index / gross national happiness, Howard Rheingold, Jeff Bezos, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Network effects, Peter Thiel, rolodex, Salesforce, Sand Hill Road, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, social graph, social software, social web, SoftBank, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the payments system, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, UUNET, Whole Earth Review, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

He expects it to support him in his long-term approach to managing the company. When I ask Andreessen what he thinks about Zuckerberg’s control of the company, he blurts out, “Oh, that’s a good thing.” Only very strong founder CEOs, he says, can build big enduring tech companies. He compares Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Jobs himself. Each board member works with Zuckerberg in his own way. Jim Breyer, who joined when Accel invested in 2005, weighs in on organizational structure and hiring. (“Mark always wanted a hacker culture and creative chaos,” says Breyer. “My point to him is you want that around product innovation but not in areas like sales, human resources, or legal.”)


pages: 453 words: 130,632

Nine Pints: A Journey Through the Money, Medicine, and Mysteries of Blood by Rose George

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air freight, airport security, British Empire, call centre, corporate social responsibility, Edward Snowden, global pandemic, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, index card, Jeff Bezos, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, period drama, Peter Thiel, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, Skype, social contagion, stem cell, TED Talk, time dilation

I glimpse this excitement in the names of companies founded to sound the depths of what blood can do for us. I read about Illumina, a massive DNA-sequencing company that has launched a start-up to work on a blood test that can detect cancer. It has raised $1 billion in funding from investors including Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates. Of course it is called Grail.52 My database has hundreds of documents and articles about the widening and deepening abilities of blood to diagnose, defy death, defeat disease, with what has come to be called a liquid biopsy. I learn that blood will soon be able to diagnose manifold cancers, dementia, depression, with what is always called “a simple blood test.”


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

He called it “repressive desublimation.” CHAPTER 13 CODA TO AN ATTENTIONAL REVOLUTION Coming of age in the 1950s and 1960s, Jonathan Robbin was fascinated by two things: social movements and the power of computers. He belonged to a particular breed of idealist, one that might include Frederick Taylor, George Nielsen, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom came to believe deeply that the world’s problems could be solved by better data and management. What Wallace Stegner wrote of his character Rodman, a radical-turned-sociologist, he might have written of Jonathan Robbin: he was “interested in change, all right, but only as a process; and he is interested in values, but only as data.”1 Robbin himself put it this way: “I am interested in the problems of measurement and interpretation…understanding how things work and using that information and knowledge for the benefit of humanity.”2 In fact, over his career he would join the not-so-rare species of academic who begins by trying to save the world and ends up trying to cash in.


pages: 430 words: 135,418

Power Play: Tesla, Elon Musk, and the Bet of the Century by Tim Higgins

air freight, asset light, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, call centre, Colonization of Mars, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, Donald Trump, electricity market, Elon Musk, family office, Ford Model T, gigafactory, global pandemic, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, low earth orbit, Lyft, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, paypal mafia, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, SoftBank, Solyndra, sovereign wealth fund, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Tesla Model S, Tim Cook: Apple, Travis Kalanick, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration

It soared from a value of $100 billion to more than $800 billion in 244 days, accomplishing something it took Apple almost a decade to do. With the stock he already owned, his wealth was surging from an estimated $30 billion at the start of 2020 to around $200 billion at the start of 2021, overtaking Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s spot as the world’s richest person, according to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index. The excitement—some would say mania—spread to other related companies. In the following months, several startups went public. Among those headed in that direction was Lucid Motors, whose CEO was Peter Rawlinson.


pages: 458 words: 132,912

The Dying Citizen: How Progressive Elites, Tribalism, and Globalization Are Destroying the Idea of America by Victor Davis Hanson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 23andMe, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airport security, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, borderless world, bread and circuses, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, currency manipulation / currency intervention, defund the police, deindustrialization, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, El Camino Real, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, George Floyd, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, laissez-faire capitalism, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Nate Silver, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, Parler "social media", peak oil, Potemkin village, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Skype, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, tech worker, Thomas L Friedman, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

The overall consequence was that customers en masse shopped in conglomerate and outlet stores—and often with much less social distancing than if they had been widely dispersed in family-owned small businesses. In response to the virus, huge companies like Walmart and Amazon grabbed even more market share from tenuous family stores, thousands of which did not reopen after the end of the lockdowns and simply vanished. Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon, in 2020 alone increased his net worth by over $75 billion after the start of the lockdown. No other event in recent American history has so grievously and so abruptly widened the gap between rich and poor, masses and elites, and large corporations and American small businesses.7 Second, in relation to the issues of Chapter 2, efforts to curb illegal immigration were likewise tabled.


pages: 575 words: 140,384

It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution, and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette, John Koblin

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Big Tech, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, business cycle, call centre, cloud computing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, data science, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Erlich Bachman, Exxon Valdez, fake news, George Floyd, Jeff Bezos, Keith Raniere, lockdown, Menlo Park, multilevel marketing, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, out of africa, payday loans, peak TV, period drama, recommendation engine, Richard Hendricks, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Durst, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, subscription business, tech billionaire, TechCrunch disrupt, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban decay, WeWork

Starting the following month, Jason Kilar, a zealous technology executive with jet-black hair, dark eyes, and the enthusiastic mien of a motivational speaker, would be taking over. Early in his career, Kilar had cut his teeth at Amazon.com, where he learned to embrace the customer-first, data-observant ways of Jeff Bezos. Later, he served as the first CEO of Hulu.com, a streaming service supported by NBC Universal, 21st Century Fox, and Disney. Eventually, Kilar clashed with the service’s media-establishment backers and in 2011 let loose with an impassioned blog post on the Hulu website detailing his team’s view on the changing state of home entertainment.


pages: 535 words: 158,863

Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making by David Rothkopf

"World Economic Forum" Davos, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, asset allocation, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Bob Geldof, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, business cycle, carried interest, clean water, compensation consultant, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, fake news, financial innovation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gini coefficient, global village, high net worth, income inequality, industrial cluster, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Elkington, joint-stock company, knowledge economy, Larry Ellison, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, Long Term Capital Management, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, open borders, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, Savings and loan crisis, shareholder value, Skype, special economic zone, Steve Jobs, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, William Langewiesche

The unproductive and the uncooperative become narrow experts and rule-bound bureaucrats. While being a team player is often a key ingredient to great success, in his article “Narcissistic Leaders: The Incredible Pros, the Inevitable Cons,” Maccoby cites a resurgence of CEO superstars such as Bill Gates, Andy Grove, Jeff Bezos, and Jack Welch—individuals who claim the limelight and are leading change in much the same way as other singular figures in history. Maccoby describes the narcissistic as opposed to the obsessive personality: Throughout history, narcissists have always emerged to inspire people and to shape the future.


pages: 590 words: 153,208

Wealth and Poverty: A New Edition for the Twenty-First Century by George Gilder

accelerated depreciation, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, book value, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, clean tech, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentrification, George Gilder, Gunnar Myrdal, Home mortgage interest deduction, Howard Zinn, income inequality, independent contractor, inverted yield curve, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job-hopping, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, low interest rates, margin call, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, mortgage debt, non-fiction novel, North Sea oil, paradox of thrift, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, power law, price stability, Ralph Nader, rent control, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skinner box, skunkworks, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, volatility arbitrage, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, yield curve, zero-sum game

Despite the achievements of such heroic creators as John D. Rockefeller, J. J. Hill, Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, George Westinghouse, George Eastman, Henry Ford, Walt Disney, A. P. Giannini, Estée Lauder, Charles Merrill, Chester Carlson, Bill Gates, Ray Kroc, Norman Borlaug, Michael Milken, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and so many others, commerce is perceived as a somewhat-grubby, less-than-exalted undertaking. It is portrayed as something of a Faustian bargain: businesspeople succeed by appealing to our baser instincts; they are motivated by greed and too often may bend the rules.


pages: 528 words: 146,459

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan L. Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost

Ada Lovelace, air freight, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Buckminster Fuller, Build a better mousetrap, Byte Shop, card file, cashless society, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, Compatible Time-Sharing System, computer age, Computer Lib, deskilling, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, Edward Jenner, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, game design, garden city movement, Gary Kildall, Grace Hopper, Herman Kahn, hockey-stick growth, Ian Bogost, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, linked data, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Multics, natural language processing, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, optical character recognition, packet switching, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pirate software, popular electronics, prediction markets, pre–internet, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Robert X Cringely, Salesforce, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, the market place, Turing machine, Twitter Arab Spring, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, young professional

Companies could purchase sponsored links associated with particular keyword searches; when users clicked on these sponsored links, Google was paid a small sum. Sponsored links met the needs of many users, whose clicks made Google—which rapidly expanded to include many languages spanning the world—the global leader in web advertising revenue. Another early web success was mail-order selling. Jeff Bezos’s Amazon.com established many of web commerce’s early practices (including the incorporation of com in the firm’s name). Bezos, a Princeton graduate in electrical engineering and computer science, had enjoyed a brief career in financial services before deciding to set up a retail operation on the web.


pages: 501 words: 145,943

If Mayors Ruled the World: Dysfunctional Nations, Rising Cities by Benjamin R. Barber

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, Celebration, Florida, classic study, clean water, congestion pricing, corporate governance, Crossrail, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, digital divide, digital Maoism, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gentrification, George Gilder, ghettoisation, global pandemic, global village, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, illegal immigration, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, income inequality, informal economy, information retrieval, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Lewis Mumford, London Interbank Offered Rate, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, megacity, microcredit, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, plutocrats, Prenzlauer Berg, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technological solutionism, TED Talk, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The future is already here, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tobin tax, Tony Hsieh, trade route, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, unpaid internship, urban sprawl, Virgin Galactic, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

These companies are abetted by the enormous publicity campaigns they run to market their brands, advertising the consumer virtues of pads, pods, and play-stations and boasting about the democratic architecture of their wizardry. Billionaires like Bill Gates (Microsoft), the late Steve Jobs (Apple), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) are pop celebrities and media heroes. As such, though they regularly swallow up their rivals (critics talk about “Facebookistan”), they are rarely subjected to the harsh spotlight once shone on earlier tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie.25 The term plutocrat is widely used today to disparage Wall Street and big finance, and is occasionally employed to batter traditional media bosses like Rupert Murdoch or Silvio Berlusconi.


pages: 585 words: 151,239

Capitalism in America: A History by Adrian Wooldridge, Alan Greenspan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, air freight, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Asian financial crisis, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Blitzscaling, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, business process, California gold rush, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, edge city, Elon Musk, equal pay for equal work, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fiat currency, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, fixed income, Ford Model T, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, germ theory of disease, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, income per capita, indoor plumbing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, land bank, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, Mason jar, mass immigration, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, means of production, Menlo Park, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, plutocrats, pneumatic tube, popular capitalism, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, price stability, Productivity paradox, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, refrigerator car, reserve currency, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Sand Hill Road, savings glut, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, supply-chain management, The Great Moderation, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, vertical integration, War on Poverty, washing machines reduced drudgery, Washington Consensus, white flight, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, young professional

They got money from both of the Valley’s top venture capitalist companies, Sequoia Capital and Kleiner Perkins. John Doerr of Kleiner Perkins advised them to hire a seasoned manager to run the company and they settled on Eric Schmidt.11 The internet provided entrepreneurs with opportunities to revolutionize every business under the sun just as the railways had done a century or so earlier. In 1994, Jeff Bezos, a thirty-year-old analyst with the D. E. Shaw hedge fund, established Amazon, an online bookstore in Seattle, which, thanks to Microsoft, was emerging as a tech center. Amazon is now the world’s largest online “everything” store, as well as the world’s largest provider of space on internet servers, and Bezos is worth more than $70 billion.


pages: 459 words: 144,009

Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis by Jared Diamond

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, British Empire, California gold rush, carbon tax, clean water, correlation coefficient, cuban missile crisis, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gini coefficient, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, interchangeable parts, invention of writing, Jeff Bezos, low interest rates, medical malpractice, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, post-work, purchasing power parity, rising living standards, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, Timothy McVeigh, traffic fines, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce, World Values Survey

For instance, the share of unadjusted national income earned by the richest 1% of Americans rose from less than 10% in the 1970’s to over 25% today. Inequality is rising even within the ranks of rich Americans themselves: the richest 1% of Americans have increased their incomes proportionately much more than the richest 5%; the richest 0.1% have done proportionately better than the richest 1%; and the three richest Americans (currently Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Warren Buffett) have combined net worths currently equal to the combined net worths of the 130 million poorest Americans. The percentage of billionaires in our population is double that of the major democracies with the next highest percentage of billionaires (Canada and Germany), and seven times that of most other major democracies.


pages: 559 words: 155,372

Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley by Antonio Garcia Martinez

Airbnb, airport security, always be closing, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Burning Man, business logic, Celtic Tiger, centralized clearinghouse, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, content marketing, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data science, deal flow, death of newspapers, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, drop ship, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, Emanuel Derman, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake it until you make it, financial engineering, financial independence, Gary Kildall, global supply chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Hacker News, hive mind, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, information asymmetry, information security, interest rate swap, intermodal, Jeff Bezos, Kickstarter, Malcom McLean invented shipping containers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Maui Hawaii, means of production, Menlo Park, messenger bag, minimum viable product, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Paul Graham, performance metric, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Ruby on Rails, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Scientific racism, second-price auction, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, social graph, Social Justice Warrior, social web, Socratic dialogue, source of truth, Steve Jobs, tech worker, telemarketer, the long tail, undersea cable, urban renewal, Y Combinator, zero-sum game, éminence grise

It perceived the world as populated by either fearsome enemies that presented existential threats—and there were only a few of these—or companies that presented convenient temporary alliances. Facebook’s good graces were always conditional, and it was a foolish company indeed that took them for granted. Amazon clearly fell into the former category. Jeff Bezos was a maniacal leader who would stop at nothing until his vision of the world was realized, and who had inspired, cajoled, or intimidated an army to implement that vision. Zuck looked over at Bezos in Seattle, or Larry Page from Google in Mountain View, or (in the past) Steve Jobs from Apple in Cupertino, and he saw more than just a tech company and a chief executive.


pages: 496 words: 154,363

I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59 by Douglas Edwards

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, book scanning, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business intelligence, call centre, commoditize, crowdsourcing, don't be evil, Dutch auction, Elon Musk, fault tolerance, Googley, gravity well, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John Markoff, Kickstarter, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, microcredit, music of the spheres, Network effects, PageRank, PalmPilot, performance metric, pets.com, Ralph Nader, risk tolerance, second-price auction, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, stem cell, Superbowl ad, Susan Wojcicki, tech worker, The Turner Diaries, Y2K

That observation was never made about our founders, who paid deference only to data. As the progenitors of a golden goose that had sprung from their own minds, Larry and Sergey had no obligation to kowtow to anyone. They treated the Queen of England as an equal and Benazir Bhutto as a friend. When they wanted business advice, they called Jeff Bezos or Warren Buffett. They spoke bluntly to industry leaders they felt weren't getting what was self-evident to them, chastised vendors, and ignored or badgered staff members who disagreed with their ideas, even if those staffers had more experience or more advanced degrees.* They weren't intentionally rude so much as constantly impatient to keep things moving along the path that sometimes only they could see.


pages: 486 words: 150,849

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

*5 At the beginning of the Great Depression, when the young Burns taught economics at Rutgers University, one of his most devoted students was Milton Friedman. *6 Not-so-fun fact: In 2019, nearly half a century after the Business Roundtable formed, no less than 83 percent of its 182 CEO members—among them its chairman Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos, Tim Cook, Michael Dell, and Stephen Schwarzman—were still white men. *7 Not until 1994 did the Times run an article all about the Kochs, and then almost entirely about their business—it included just two paragraphs (of sixty) about their two decades of world-changing political work. *8 The majority opinion in this second case, First National Bank of Boston v.


pages: 467 words: 149,632

If Then: How Simulmatics Corporation Invented the Future by Jill Lepore

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, Apollo 11, Buckminster Fuller, Cambridge Analytica, company town, computer age, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, data science, desegregation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, fake news, game design, George Gilder, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, index card, information retrieval, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeffrey Epstein, job automation, John Perry Barlow, land reform, linear programming, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, packet switching, Peter Thiel, profit motive, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, SimCity, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Sorensen, Telecommunications Act of 1996, urban renewal, War on Poverty, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog

They did not consider the intelligence of women to be intelligence; they did not consider a female understanding of human behavior to be knowledge. They built a machine to control and predict what they could not. They are the long-dead, white-whiskered grandfathers of Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin and Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen and Elon Musk. The Simulmatics Corporation is a missing link in the history of technology, a clasp that fastens the first half of the twentieth century to the beginning of the twenty-first, a future in which humanity’s every move is predicted by algorithms that attempt to direct and influence our each and every decision through the simulation of our very selves, this particular hell.


pages: 511 words: 151,359

The Asian Financial Crisis 1995–98: Birth of the Age of Debt by Russell Napier

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, business cycle, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial rule, corporate governance, COVID-19, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, debt deflation, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discounted cash flows, diversification, Donald Trump, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, hindsight bias, Hyman Minsky, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, if you build it, they will come, impact investing, inflation targeting, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lateral thinking, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, Money creation, moral hazard, Myron Scholes, negative equity, offshore financial centre, open borders, open economy, Pearl River Delta, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, short selling, social distancing, South China Sea, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, yield curve

It was a lesson ignored in this period as investors bid up the price of Asian equities and shunned the equities of what they then considered to be the low-growth US economy. In 1996, UK investors were particularly slow to see the potential in US equities in general and were unconvinced by the potential of the new technology that many already speculated would revolutionise business. Jeff Bezos sold his first book online in July 1995. Netscape, a web browser with a world market share thought to be in excess of 90%, listed in August 1995 and its share price rose from an initial public offering (IPO) price of US$28 per share to close that day at US$75. A revolution had begun but UK investors were not convinced – and anyway, their holdings in Asia had underperformed the US equity market since the devaluation of the RMB in January 1994.


pages: 1,132 words: 156,379

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

In modern Western societies, the gap between the richest and poorest is larger than ever. Admittedly, the wealth is less concentrated in male hands. Nonetheless, our alien scientist would probably predict that modern Western societies would be the most polygynous on Earth. Billionaires like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos would take thousands of wives – more, even, than the despotic leaders of old. But they don’t. Why not? Well, it’s not that human nature is radically different in modern Western societies and that people are never inclined to polygyny – if that were the case, we wouldn’t need laws against it. And of course therein lies the answer to our question.


pages: 655 words: 156,367

The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order: America and the World in the Free Market Era by Gary Gerstle

2021 United States Capitol attack, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, collective bargaining, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, COVID-19, creative destruction, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, David Graeber, death from overwork, defund the police, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, European colonialism, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, George Floyd, George Gilder, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, green new deal, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, Haight Ashbury, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, informal economy, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kitchen Debate, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, microaggression, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, millennium bug, Modern Monetary Theory, money market fund, Mont Pelerin Society, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, New Journalism, Northern Rock, obamacare, Occupy movement, oil shock, open borders, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Powell Memorandum, precariat, price stability, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Seymour Hersh, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, super pumped, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, urban decay, urban renewal, War on Poverty, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, white flight, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

Clinton was at the center of these discussions and plans for party reorientation.42 A third part of the reorientation of the Democrats emerged not from the pain of losing elections but from the giddiness that accompanied the information technology (IT) revolution. The 1990s were the decade of IT’s extraordinary triumph. The first web browser, Mosaic, launched in 1993; Netscape, the forerunner of Google, debuted in 1994. Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994 and Peter Thiel and his colleagues established PayPal in 1998, which was also the year Google appeared. This was the decade as well in which prodigal son Steve Jobs returned to Apple (in 1996) and put it on the path toward its early twenty-first-century globe-straddling dominance.


pages: 578 words: 168,350

Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey West

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, Anton Chekhov, Benoit Mandelbrot, Black Swan, British Empire, butterfly effect, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, clean water, coastline paradox / Richardson effect, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, continuous integration, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, creative destruction, dark matter, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, driverless car, Dunbar number, Edward Glaeser, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, housing crisis, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of agriculture, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Benioff, Marchetti’s constant, Masdar, megacity, Murano, Venice glass, Murray Gell-Mann, New Urbanism, Oklahoma City bombing, Peter Thiel, power law, profit motive, publish or perish, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Richard Florida, Salesforce, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, smart cities, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Suez canal 1869, systematic bias, systems thinking, technological singularity, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, time dilation, too big to fail, transaction costs, urban planning, urban renewal, Vernor Vinge, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, working poor

It was their feedback that persuaded me to change gears and write a nontechnical “popular” book rather than one directed to my scientific colleagues. Among these are the historian Niall Ferguson; the art curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist; the writer-actor Sam Shepard; the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos; and the founder of Salesforce, Marc Benioff. I was really touched when Marc sent me a large painting of the Sephirot—the traditional Kabbalistic image representing the spiritual unity of life—suggesting that I meditate upon it each day. I can’t say that I religiously followed his advice but it did inspire me to stay connected to the big picture when the going got tough.


pages: 540 words: 168,921

The Relentless Revolution: A History of Capitalism by Joyce Appleby

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, Columbian Exchange, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Doha Development Round, double entry bookkeeping, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, facts on the ground, failed state, Firefox, fixed income, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francisco Pizarro, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, Great Leap Forward, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, interest rate swap, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, knowledge economy, land bank, land reform, Livingstone, I presume, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, PalmPilot, Parag Khanna, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, refrigerator car, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, union organizing, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration, War on Poverty, working poor, Works Progress Administration, Yogi Berra, Yom Kippur War

Today Internet access is approaching a billion users just ahead of the six hundred million mobile phones.27 Alas, the flexibility that so delights consumers also opens up avenues of fraud. Both the music and publishing industries have encountered serious problems protecting their products from illegal sharing through the Internet. Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com in his Bellevue, Washington, garage in 1994. A pioneer in Internet retailing, he popularized “.com” as part of a firm name. Soon the request from stores and services to their customers to go to “www [fill in the blank].com” became ubiquitous. Branching out from its initial stock of books, Amazon grew rapidly, had a rough patch, but then recovered by opening up its site to other retailers.


pages: 566 words: 163,322

The Rise and Fall of Nations: Forces of Change in the Post-Crisis World by Ruchir Sharma

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Asian financial crisis, backtesting, bank run, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, BRICs, business climate, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, colonial rule, commodity super cycle, corporate governance, creative destruction, crony capitalism, currency peg, dark matter, debt deflation, deglobalization, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, eurozone crisis, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, financial engineering, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Freestyle chess, Gini coefficient, global macro, Goodhart's law, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, hype cycle, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, inflation targeting, Internet of things, Japanese asset price bubble, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, megaproject, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, military-industrial complex, mittelstand, moral hazard, New Economic Geography, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, open immigration, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pets.com, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Kuznets, smart cities, Snapchat, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, trade route, tulip mania, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, unorthodox policies, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, work culture , working-age population

Today immigrants make up 13 percent of the total U.S. population, but they account for 25 percent of the new business owners and 30 percent of the people working in Silicon Valley. Of the top twenty-five U.S. tech companies in 2013, 60 percent were founded by first- or second-generation immigrants. Steve Jobs at Apple: second generation from Syria. Sergey Brin at Google: first generation from Russia. Larry Ellison at Oracle: second generation from Russia. Jeff Bezos at Amazon: second generation from Cuba. While many of these founders with immigrant roots hail from countries mired in war or economic dysfunction, quite a few come from families that left the heavily regulated economies of Europe, including old East Germany (Konstantin Guericke of Symantec), France (Pierre Omidyar of eBay), and Italy (Roger Marino of EMC).


pages: 614 words: 168,545

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, book value, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, cloud computing, collective bargaining, congestion charging, corporate governance, data is not the new oil, David Graeber, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Diane Coyle, digital capitalism, disintermediation, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, electricity market, Etonian, European colonialism, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, G4S, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, greed is good, green new deal, haute couture, high net worth, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, intangible asset, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, land bank, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, low interest rates, Lyft, manufacturing employment, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, patent troll, pattern recognition, peak oil, Piper Alpha, post-Fordism, post-war consensus, precariat, price discrimination, price mechanism, profit maximization, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, remunicipalization, rent control, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, risk free rate, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, sharing economy, short selling, Silicon Valley, software patent, subscription business, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech bro, The Nature of the Firm, transaction costs, Uber for X, uber lyft, vertical integration, very high income, wage slave, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, winner-take-all economy, working-age population, yield curve, you are the product

However, with the development and growth of AWS and FBA, this rentierism has become not just more explicit, but – more significantly – increasingly Amazon’s core enterprise. As Lina Khan observed, in one of the best pieces ever written about the company, Amazon has ‘emerged as central infrastructure for the internet economy’. Moreover: Reports suggest this was part of [chief executive Jeff] Bezos’s vision from the start. According to early Amazon employees, when the CEO founded the business, ‘his underlying goals were not to build an online bookstore or an online retailer, but rather a “utility” that would become essential to commerce.’ In other words, Bezos’s target customer was not only end-consumers but also other businesses.


pages: 693 words: 169,849

The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World by Adrian Wooldridge

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Bletchley Park, borderless world, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business intelligence, central bank independence, circulation of elites, Clayton Christensen, cognitive bias, Corn Laws, coronavirus, corporate governance, correlation coefficient, COVID-19, creative destruction, critical race theory, David Brooks, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Etonian, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, helicopter parent, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, intangible asset, invention of gunpowder, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jim Simons, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, meritocracy, meta-analysis, microaggression, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post-industrial society, post-oil, pre–internet, public intellectual, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, sexual politics, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, spinning jenny, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tech bro, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, three-martini lunch, Tim Cook: Apple, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, unit 8200, upwardly mobile, Vilfredo Pareto, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce

A growing proportion of great fortunes are in the hands of people with outstanding brain power: computer geeks such as Bill Gates (Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) or financial wizards such as George Soros (who pioneered hedge funds) and Jim Simons (who helped to found computer-driven ‘quant investing’).9 The world’s richest man, Jeff Bezos, graduated summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Princeton and makes a point of surrounding himself with academic super-achievers. High-IQ types are even thriving in the more rough-and-ready corners of capitalism: six of the seven biggest Russian oligarchs of the 1990s earned degrees in maths, physics or finance before becoming natural-resource tycoons.


pages: 568 words: 164,014

Dawn of the Code War: America's Battle Against Russia, China, and the Rising Global Cyber Threat by John P. Carlin, Garrett M. Graff

1960s counterculture, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, air gap, Andy Carvin, Apple II, Bay Area Rapid Transit, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business climate, cloud computing, cotton gin, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, eat what you kill, Edward Snowden, fake news, false flag, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Hacker Ethic, information security, Internet of things, James Dyson, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, millennium bug, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, moral hazard, Morris worm, multilevel marketing, Network effects, new economy, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, South China Sea, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, The Hackers Conference, Tim Cook: Apple, trickle-down economics, Wargames Reagan, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, Y2K, zero day, zero-sum game

We suspect that this shift in operations reflects the influence of ongoing military reforms, widespread exposure of Chinese cyber operations, and actions taken by the U.S. government,” the cybersecurity firm FireEye concluded in one report.5 In December 2014, even as inside government we were struggling to respond to the Sony attack, China’s head internet official, Lu Wei, had come to the United States. During his visit, he had received a personal tour from Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook’s headquarters and had met with Jeff Bezos and Tim Cook—meetings that publicly had them all smiling, given the business opportunity Lu, the gatekeeper to the Chinese internet, offered. But he also had tense meetings in Washington with officials from the National Security Council.6 In a public address at George Washington University, Lu offered that he felt China and the United States had become “one community of common interest” when it came to internet policy and that they should follow “common rules.”


pages: 569 words: 165,510

There Is Nothing for You Here: Finding Opportunity in the Twenty-First Century by Fiona Hill

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business climate, call centre, collective bargaining, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, David Brooks, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial independence, first-past-the-post, food desert, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imposter syndrome, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial cluster, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, meme stock, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, Paris climate accords, pension reform, QAnon, ransomware, restrictive zoning, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, statistical model, Steve Bannon, The Chicago School, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, University of East Anglia, urban decay, urban planning, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Foundations and individual philanthropists can also play a critical role in scaling up in the United States once there is a shared vision and broader context for action. America has long been a world leader in individual philanthropy. In December 2020, for example, MacKenzie Scott, the former wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, donated more than $4 billion to a wide range of long-established but underresourced entities in direct response to the ravages of the coronavirus pandemic. These included historically Black universities and colleges and nonprofits with programs targeted at working-­class Americans, alleviating economic hardship and promoting upward mobility.


pages: 651 words: 162,060

The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions by Greta Thunberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, basic income, Bernie Sanders, biodiversity loss, BIPOC, bitcoin, British Empire, car-free, carbon credits, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, clean water, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, degrowth, disinformation, energy transition, Extinction Rebellion, Food sovereignty, global pandemic, global supply chain, Global Witness, green new deal, green transition, Greta Thunberg, housing crisis, Indoor air pollution, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, land tenure, late capitalism, lockdown, mass immigration, megacity, meta-analysis, microplastics / micro fibres, military-industrial complex, Naomi Klein, negative emissions, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, out of africa, phenotype, planetary scale, planned obsolescence, retail therapy, rewilding, social distancing, supervolcano, tech billionaire, the built environment, Thorstein Veblen, TikTok, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, universal basic income, urban sprawl, zoonotic diseases

There have been some improvements in recent years, but the most important story of all is still pushed to the margins. Even during major climate disasters – heat domes and droughts, fires and floods – most of the news media merely glance up for a moment before returning to the trivia and court gossip that dominate their bulletins. In one day, NBC, ABC and CBS spent almost as much time covering Jeff Bezos’s eleven-minute flight in his giant metal phallus as on all climate issues in the preceding year. So what do we do? A few established outlets have consistently drawn attention to our environmental crisis, for example the Guardian (for which I write), Al Jazeera, El País, Der Spiegel, Deutsche Welle, The Nation, Canada’s National Observer, the Daily Star News in Bangladesh, Africa’s The Continent, and Cambodia’s Southeast Asia Globe.


pages: 541 words: 173,676

Generations: the Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future: The Real Differences between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future by Jean M. Twenge

1960s counterculture, 2021 United States Capitol attack, affirmative action, airport security, An Inconvenient Truth, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, book scanning, coronavirus, COVID-19, crack epidemic, critical race theory, David Brooks, delayed gratification, desegregation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Ford Model T, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, green new deal, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, Joan Didion, job automation, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, McJob, meta-analysis, microaggression, Neil Armstrong, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Thiel, QAnon, Ralph Nader, remote working, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, superstar cities, tech baron, TED Talk, The Great Resignation, TikTok, too big to fail, Travis Kalanick, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Fox (1961) Tom Cruise (1962) Rosie O’Donnell (1962) Jim Carrey (1962) Jon Stewart (1962) Steve Carell (1962) Brad Pitt (1963) Conan O’Brien (1963) Quentin Tarantino (1963) Mike Myers (1963) Stephen Colbert (1964) Adam Carolla (1964) Musicians and Artists Robert Mapplethorpe (1946) Billy Joel (1949) Annie Leibovitz (1949) Bruce Springsteen (1949) Gene Simmons (1949) Pat Benatar (1953) Madonna (1958) Prince Rogers Nelson (1958) Michael Jackson (1958) Marie Osmond (1959) K. D. Lang (1961) Melissa Etheridge (1961) Garth Brooks (1962) Sheryl Crow (1962) Whitney Houston (1963) Eddie Vedder (1964) ENTREPRENEURS AND BUSINESSPEOPLE Steve Wozniak (1950) Bill Gates (1955) Steve Jobs (1955) Jeff Bezos (1964) Politicians, Judges, and Activists Bill Clinton (1946) George W. Bush (1946) Donald Trump (1946) Hillary Clinton (1947) Dan Quayle (1947) Arnold Schwarzenegger (1947) Mitt Romney (1947) Al Gore (1948) Clarence Thomas (1948) Elizabeth Warren (1948) Samuel Alito (1950) Chuck Schumer (1950) Condoleezza Rice (1954) Sonia Sotomayor (1954) John Roberts (1955) Anita Hill (1956) Mike Pence (1959) Elena Kagan (1960) Barack Obama (1961) Kamala Harris (1964) Athletes and Sports Figures Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (1947) O.


Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys: 50th Anniversary Edition by Michael Collins, Charles A. Lindbergh

Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Neil Armstrong, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, place-making, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, the medium is the message

As I have written in Mission to Mars and elsewhere, that planet, not the moon, has always been my favorite. I used to joke that I flew to the wrong place, and that NASA should be renamed NAMA, the National Aeronautics and Mars Administration. But NASA it is, and today, for the first time since the days of Wernher von Braun, two names are recognizable in the world of spaceflight: Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. They seem to be able to do things faster and cheaper than the government, and a generation that never knew Apollo is awakening to the prospect of further space exploration. Musk is a billionaire, and Bezos is the richest person on the planet. Musk is specializing in reusable rockets, but ultimately wants to colonize Mars, starting as early as 2020 with the unmanned Blue Dragon, and then with an expedition crew of one hundred.


pages: 651 words: 186,130

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

4chan, active measures, activist lawyer, air gap, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boeing 737 MAX, Brexit referendum, Brian Krebs, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark matter, David Vincenzetti, defense in depth, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, failed state, fake news, false flag, Ferguson, Missouri, Firefox, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, global supply chain, Hacker News, index card, information security, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Ken Thompson, Kevin Roose, Laura Poitras, lockdown, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, MITM: man-in-the-middle, moral hazard, Morris worm, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, NSO Group, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, open borders, operational security, Parler "social media", pirate software, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, ransomware, Reflections on Trusting Trust, rolodex, Rubik’s Cube, Russian election interference, Sand Hill Road, Seymour Hersh, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, TED Talk, the long tail, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, undersea cable, unit 8200, uranium enrichment, web application, WikiLeaks, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, excused their oil-rich ally for the atrocity. Kushner and MbS continued to use WhatsApp even after grisly recordings emerged of MbS’s thugs dismembering Khashoggi’s body. But the journalists would not let it go, none more so than Khashoggi’s colleagues at the Post. Already Trump had taken aim at the Post and its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for its coverage of his administration. Trump had taken to calling the Post the #AmazonWashingtonPost on Twitter, where he decried the paper as a “lobbyist weapon” and “big tax shelter” for Amazon and its CEO, “Jeff Bozo.” So when the Saudis took their fight directly to Bezos, hardly anyone in the Trump White House bothered to stop them.


pages: 661 words: 185,701

The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance by Eswar S. Prasad

access to a mobile phone, Adam Neumann (WeWork), Airbnb, algorithmic trading, altcoin, bank run, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business intelligence, buy and hold, capital controls, carbon footprint, cashless society, central bank independence, cloud computing, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, deglobalization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, distributed ledger, diversified portfolio, Dogecoin, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, eurozone crisis, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial independence, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, full employment, gamification, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, index fund, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, initial coin offering, Internet Archive, Jeff Bezos, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, litecoin, lockdown, loose coupling, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, Masayoshi Son, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PalmPilot, passive investing, payday loans, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, profit motive, QR code, quantitative easing, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, random walk, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, reserve currency, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, risk/return, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, robo advisor, Ross Ulbricht, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, smart contracts, SoftBank, special drawing rights, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, Vision Fund, Vitalik Buterin, Wayback Machine, WeWork, wikimedia commons, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

There is also another dimension of technological vulnerability that strikes at the heart of what was intended as a key distinguishing feature of cryptocurrencies. We consider that next. Mirage of Digital Anonymity In July 2020, the Twitter accounts of a number of prominent persons displayed the same message: “Send Bitcoin and get double your money back.” The hacked accounts belonged to such luminaries as Joe Biden, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Barack Obama, and a few even more culturally significant personages such as Kim Kardashian and Kanye West. Former US president Obama’s account displayed this message: “I am giving back to my community due to Covid-19! All Bitcoin sent to my address below will be sent back doubled.


pages: 1,336 words: 415,037

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, book value, Brownian motion, capital asset pricing model, card file, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, collateralized debt obligation, computerized trading, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, corporate raider, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, desegregation, do what you love, Donald Trump, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, Everybody Ought to Be Rich, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, financial engineering, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Golden Gate Park, Greenspan put, Haight Ashbury, haute cuisine, Honoré de Balzac, If something cannot go on forever, it will stop - Herbert Stein's Law, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, index fund, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, interest rate swap, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, Larry Ellison, Long Term Capital Management, Louis Bachelier, low interest rates, margin call, market bubble, Marshall McLuhan, medical malpractice, merger arbitrage, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, money market fund, moral hazard, NetJets, new economy, New Journalism, North Sea oil, paper trading, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pets.com, Plato's cave, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, proprietary trading, Ralph Nader, random walk, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, shareholder value, short selling, side project, Silicon Valley, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Predators' Ball, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, tontine, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transcontinental railway, two and twenty, Upton Sinclair, War on Poverty, Works Progress Administration, Y2K, yellow journalism, zero-coupon bond

, which had quadrupled in the last year. Yahoo!, which captured the spirit of the times in its name, was now valued at $115 billion. As 1999 spun to a close, there was no doubt who was important and influential at the turn of the millennium, and even less doubt who was not. Time magazine crowned Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos as its person of the year, comparing him in importance to Queen Elizabeth, Charles Lindbergh, and Martin Luther King Jr. Buffett’s personal ranking had dropped on the annual taking-stock lists, which multiplied a thousandfold that year with the millennial summings-up and retrospectives. He had just fallen from being the second-richest to the fourth-richest man in the world.

“That shouldn’t be the way markets work,” he said, “but that is the way markets work. And in the end, that’s what you should remember.” He put up a slide. ANYTHING THAT CAN’T GO ON FOREVER WILL END. —Herb Stein18 Many in the audience were shocked and sobered—but impressed. “You basically have to listen to Warren,” said Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon.com. Amazon was trading at $17, down from $113 at its high. “Some things he said were quite painful, but, by God, the man is a genius and so far seems to be right.”19 Buffett enjoyed congratulations for his speech at lunch under a tent on the deck behind Herbert Allen’s condo, where a group of about a hundred people, including the Grahams, had gathered.


pages: 706 words: 202,591

Facebook: The Inside Story by Steven Levy

active measures, Airbnb, Airbus A320, Amazon Mechanical Turk, AOL-Time Warner, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, augmented reality, Ben Horowitz, Benchmark Capital, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blitzscaling, blockchain, Burning Man, business intelligence, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, company town, computer vision, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dunbar number, East Village, Edward Snowden, El Camino Real, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fake news, Firefox, Frank Gehry, Geoffrey Hinton, glass ceiling, GPS: selective availability, growth hacking, imposter syndrome, indoor plumbing, information security, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lock screen, Lyft, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, Menlo Park, Metcalfe’s law, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Network effects, Oculus Rift, operational security, PageRank, Paul Buchheit, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, pets.com, post-work, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Robert Metcalfe, rolodex, Russian election interference, Salesforce, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sexual politics, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skeuomorphism, slashdot, Snapchat, social contagion, social graph, social software, South of Market, San Francisco, Startup school, Steve Ballmer, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, techlash, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, WeWork, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, Y2K, you are the product

Dan Rose decided to give a pep talk at an all-hands. He recounted his experience at Amazon in the dot-com bust. The stock had crashed from $120 a share to something like $6. Rose’s personal plans to buy a house for his family had been shelved. Some people were leaving the company. But Amazon and its leader, Jeff Bezos, hung in there and now ruled the commerce world. Same deal with Facebook. The world doesn’t know it, Rose said, but we know what we’re doing. Mobile won’t kill Facebook—it will bring it to new heights. People use Facebook more on mobile. And despite the tiny screens on phones, Facebook will make money from it.


pages: 684 words: 212,486

Hunger: The Oldest Problem by Martin Caparros

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Berlin Wall, Bob Geldof, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, commoditize, David Graeber, disinformation, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Food sovereignty, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, index fund, invention of agriculture, Jeff Bezos, Live Aid, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, plutocrats, profit maximization, Slavoj Žižek, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the market place, Tobin tax, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, Upton Sinclair, Washington Consensus, We are the 99%

To them can be added other countries, according to the United National Development Program (UNDP), that score low on their Human Development Index (HDI): Bolivia, Burundi, Dominican Republic, Egypt, El Salvador, Fiji, Gabon, Guatemala, Guyana, Honduras, Indonesia, Kenya, Kirgizstan, Micronesia, Mongolia, Morocco, Namibia, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Surinam, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Syria, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and even one European country, the poorest of all: Moldavia.13 (Or, forget all those names and remember one frivolous criterion: the Other World consists of all those countries whose combined gross domestic product is less than the fortune of the richest person in the world: Jeff Bezos.) Remaining are the large mixtures: five countries whose development is moving world markets—the BRICS: Brazil, Russian, India, China, South Africa—and have huge numbers of impoverished citizens. In fact, almost half the world’s undernourished people live in China or India. Differences—and membership—don’t always respect national boundaries.


pages: 761 words: 231,902

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology by Ray Kurzweil

additive manufacturing, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bill Joy: nanobots, bioinformatics, brain emulation, Brewster Kahle, Brownian motion, business cycle, business intelligence, c2.com, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, coronavirus, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Dean Kamen, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, factory automation, friendly AI, functional programming, George Gilder, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, hype cycle, informal economy, information retrieval, information security, invention of the telephone, invention of the telescope, invention of writing, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, lifelogging, linked data, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mitch Kapor, mouse model, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, oil shale / tar sands, optical character recognition, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, phenotype, power law, precautionary principle, premature optimization, punch-card reader, quantum cryptography, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, remote working, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Rodney Brooks, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, selection bias, semantic web, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, telepresence, The Coming Technological Singularity, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, two and twenty, Vernor Vinge, Y2K, Yogi Berra

—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, "MAXIMS FOR REVOLUTIONISTS", MAN AND SUPERMAN, 1903 All progress is based upon a universal innate desire on the part of every organism to live beyond its income. —SAMUEL BUTLER, NOTEBOOKS, 1912 If I were just setting out today to make that drive to the West Coast to start a new business, I would be looking at biotechnology and nanotechnology. —JEFF BEZOS, FOUNDER AND CEO OF AMAZON.COM Get Eighty Trillion Dollars—Limited Time Only You will get eighty trillion dollars just by reading this section and understanding what it says. For complete details, see below. (It's true that an author will do just about anything to keep your attention, but I'm serious about this statement.


pages: 915 words: 232,883

Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, air freight, Albert Einstein, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apollo 13, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, big-box store, Bill Atkinson, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, death of newspapers, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, fixed income, game design, General Magic , Golden Gate Park, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, It's morning again in America, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, Jony Ive, Kanban, Larry Ellison, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Paul Terrell, Pepsi Challenge, profit maximization, publish or perish, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, The Home Computer Revolution, thinkpad, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, vertical integration, Wall-E, Whole Earth Catalog

Books were an obvious target, since Amazon’s Kindle had shown there was an appetite for electronic books. So Apple created an iBooks Store, which sold electronic books the way the iTunes Store sold songs. There was, however, a slight difference in the business model. For the iTunes Store, Jobs had insisted that all songs be sold at one inexpensive price, initially 99 cents. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos had tried to take a similar approach with ebooks, insisting on selling them for at most $9.99. Jobs came in and offered publishers what he had refused to offer record companies: They could set any price they wanted for their wares in the iBooks Store, and Apple would take 30%. Initially that meant prices were higher than on Amazon.


pages: 825 words: 228,141

MONEY Master the Game: 7 Simple Steps to Financial Freedom by Tony Robbins

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, active measures, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, addicted to oil, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, asset allocation, backtesting, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, buy and hold, Carl Icahn, clean water, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation does not imply causation, Credit Default Swap, currency risk, Dean Kamen, declining real wages, diversification, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, estate planning, fear of failure, fiat currency, financial independence, fixed income, forensic accounting, high net worth, index fund, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jeff Bezos, John Bogle, junk bonds, Kenneth Rogoff, lake wobegon effect, Lao Tzu, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, Marc Benioff, market bubble, Michael Milken, money market fund, mortgage debt, Neil Armstrong, new economy, obamacare, offshore financial centre, oil shock, optical character recognition, Own Your Own Home, passive investing, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, risk tolerance, riskless arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Salesforce, San Francisco homelessness, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, Steve Jobs, subscription business, survivorship bias, tail risk, TED Talk, telerobotics, The 4% rule, The future is already here, the rule of 72, thinkpad, tontine, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, Vanguard fund, World Values Survey, X Prize, Yogi Berra, young professional, zero-sum game

A tropical paradise with three miles of ocean frontage, tropical rainforests, waterfalls, and extraordinary diving and snorkeling sights, Namale Resort and Spa hosts only 20 couples at a time, with over 125 staff to serve them. No wonder some of the world’s most influential executives and celebrities have found their bliss at Namale, including actors Russell Crowe, Edward Norton, Anthony Hopkins, and Meg Ryan; entrepreneur Jeff Bezos; producer Quincy Jones; fashion icon Donna Karan; and NBA coach Pat Riley—just to name a few. The resort’s world-class staff is committed to providing guests with an authentic Fijian vacation experience. Namale is where every request is met, every want is anticipated, and every expectation is exceeded.


pages: 827 words: 239,762

The Golden Passport: Harvard Business School, the Limits of Capitalism, and the Moral Failure of the MBA Elite by Duff McDonald

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Bob Noyce, Bonfire of the Vanities, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, deskilling, discounted cash flows, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, eat what you kill, Fairchild Semiconductor, family office, financial engineering, financial innovation, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global pandemic, Gordon Gekko, hiring and firing, Ida Tarbell, impact investing, income inequality, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, job-hopping, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kickstarter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, market fundamentalism, Menlo Park, Michael Milken, new economy, obamacare, oil shock, pattern recognition, performance metric, Pershing Square Capital Management, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, pushing on a string, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, random walk, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Sam Altman, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, survivorship bias, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, Tragedy of the Commons, union organizing, urban renewal, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, War on Poverty, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

While that shift was at least partly in response to competition from the technology world for MBAs, it was likewise a whole new kind of competitive threat that was popping up in investment banking circles with increasing frequency as well: The choice was no longer which business school to go to, but whether to go to business school at all. “If Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos didn’t need an MBA,” wrote David Leonhard in the New York Times, “some people wonder why they do, either. Also, with technology rapidly and fundamentally changing so many industries, other people worry that two years spent outside the work force is too long.”11 Such headaches aside, the 1990s was a good time to be at HBS.


pages: 945 words: 292,893

Seveneves by Neal Stephenson

Apollo 13, Biosphere 2, clean water, Colonization of Mars, Danny Hillis, digital map, double helix, epigenetics, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Filipino sailors, gravity well, hydroponic farming, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, kremlinology, Kuiper Belt, low earth orbit, machine readable, microbiome, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, phenotype, Potemkin village, pre–internet, random walk, remote working, selection bias, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, statistical model, Stewart Brand, supervolcano, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tunguska event, VTOL, zero day, éminence grise

My studies in that area turned out to be of little direct relevance to the company, but the novelist in me scented an idea for a book. During the same period I had also become aware of the immense amount of usable matter present in near-Earth asteroids. Thus by late 2006 I had come up with the basic premise of Seveneves. So the first acknowledgment goes to Blue Origin, which was founded circa 2000 by Jeff Bezos under the name Blue Operations LLC and where I had many interesting early conversations with him and other people involved with the company, including Jaime Taaffe, Maria Kaldis, Danny Hillis, George Dyson, and Keith Rosema. It was from Keith that I first heard the idea for the multilayered emergency shelter bubble that appears in this book under the name of Luk.


Engineering Security by Peter Gutmann

active measures, address space layout randomization, air gap, algorithmic trading, Amazon Web Services, Asperger Syndrome, bank run, barriers to entry, bitcoin, Brian Krebs, business process, call centre, card file, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, combinatorial explosion, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Debian, domain-specific language, Donald Davies, Donald Knuth, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Dunning–Kruger effect, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, false flag, fault tolerance, Firefox, fundamental attribution error, George Akerlof, glass ceiling, GnuPG, Google Chrome, Hacker News, information security, iterative process, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Conway, John Gilmore, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, Laplace demon, linear programming, litecoin, load shedding, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Multics, Network effects, nocebo, operational security, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pierre-Simon Laplace, place-making, post-materialism, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, random walk, recommendation engine, RFID, risk tolerance, Robert Metcalfe, rolling blackouts, Ruby on Rails, Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Satoshi Nakamoto, security theater, semantic web, seminal paper, Skype, slashdot, smart meter, social intelligence, speech recognition, SQL injection, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain attack, telemarketer, text mining, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Market for Lemons, the payments system, Therac-25, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, Wayback Machine, web application, web of trust, x509 certificate, Y2K, zero day, Zimmermann PGP

Figure 6: What the previous dialog is really saying The warning popup that was illustrated in Figure 5, and many similarly pointless dialogs that web browsers and other applications pop up, are prime examples of conditioning users to ignore such messages — note the enabled-by-default “Do not show this message again” checkbox, in which the message’s creators admit that users will simply want it to go away and not come back again. The creation of such dialogs is very deeply ingrained in the programmer psyche. When Jeff Bezos came up with Amazon’s one-click shopping system he had to go back and tell his developers that “one-click” really did mean that the customer only had to make one click, not one click plus a warning dialog plus another click (this works in the Amazon case since their order fulfilment system gives you several hours grace to change your mind).