Bloomberg: “Think about the world of the last few decades. It has been a time of falling and low inflation, of plentiful (and pliant) labor, cheap energy, easy access to capital, globalization and a gradual shift in the world’s wealth from tangible things (energy infrastructure, machines, factories, inventory and the like) to the intangible (patents, data, brand value, etc.). In 1975, notes Saxo Bank’s Steen Jakobsen in my recent podcast, intangible assets made up around 17% of the world’s wealth; the rest was real stuff. By 2020, that number surged to 90%. The intervening period had been a perfect time to invest in technology companies. Now look to today. All of these trends are changing. Globalization is firmly in reverse — countries are backing away from the cheap, easy supply chains that once characterized trade with China and are looking to move manufacturing home…Labor is no longer remotely pliant…Forget everything you have learned about investing in the last 20 years.” WSJ: “In a world where interest rates are rising and giant tech companies can no longer count on shareholders to indulge their spending on moonshot projects, the most important advice ex-venture capitalist and current serial entrepreneur Adam Dell has for companies of every size, and startups in particular, is: “Don’t run out of money.””
Atanu Dey: “I think that one of the most important lessons I have learned as an economist is the relationship between liberty and human flourishing. Freedom is an essential feature of being fully human. The fact that freedom is also a necessary condition for the creation of wealth further seals the case that without freedom human flourishing is practically impossible. It is unwise to surrender one’s freedom in exchange for wealth.”
Edward Chiu: “Customer Success is important in this economy because it helps to ensure your existing customers, who are keeping your business afloat – are satisfied with the products and services they have purchased. This ultimately leads to the much-needed retention during a down market and most importantly, organic revenue growth. There’s nothing cheaper than generating repeat business and word-of-mouth growth through your existing champions. CS has become an increasingly important part of many companies’ growth strategies, as they also leverage it as a differentiating “product” from their competitors. Having spoken to hundreds of Chief Customer/Revenue/Executive Officers in the past couple of months, the number 1 focus they are all shifting to is creating “growth through their existing customers”. Leaders are frantically trying to organize all of their customer data from disparate sources and find immediate opportunities where Customer Success and Sales can start to tackle jointly.”
Alex Kantrowitz: “Google’s LaMDA — made famous when engineer Blake Lemoine called it sentient — is a more capable bot than ChatGPT, yet the company’s been hesitant to make it public. For Google, the problem with chatbots is they’re wrong a lot, yet present their answers with undeserved confidence. Leading people astray — with assuredness — is less than ideal for a company built on helping you find the right answers. So LaMDA remains in research mode. Even if chatbots were to fix their accuracy issues, Google would still have a business model problem to contend with. The company makes money when people click ads next to search results, and it’s awkward to fit ads into conversational replies. Imagine receiving a response and then immediately getting pitched to go somewhere else — it feels slimy, and unhelpful. Google thus has little incentive to move us beyond traditional search, at least not in a paradigm-shifting way, until it figures out how to make the money aspect work. In the meantime, it’ll stick with the less impressive Google Assistant.”
Russ Roberts: “I suspect that if we appreciated the role of specialization and exchange in creating the wonders of modern life, we would be more tolerant of its imperfections and more eager to preserve what gives it its power.” [via CafeHayek]
