Madanmohan Rao recommends my book as one of 2023’s top 10 for Entrepreneurs: “Not all startups need external funding from investors – they can grow from customer revenues alone, as explained by Rajesh Jain, who has been an entrepreneur for over three decades. Hard-earned lessons from his ventures IndiaWorld and Netcore are shared in a storytelling format. He defines a ‘proficorn’ as a private, bootstrapped, profitable, and valuable venture (worth $100 million). The 16 chapters cover his experiences learned in ideation, team building, revenue generation, managing growth, creating a flywheel, and learning from failure.”
FT: “There are no better guides to how the country might best leverage its potential — and manage the obstacles — than Raghuram Rajan, former governor of the Reserve Bank of India, and Rohit Lamba, an economist at Pennsylvania State University. In Breaking the Mould: Reimagining India’s Economic Future, they expertly devise a new growth model for India, offering detailed recommendations for reforming the country’s industrial strategy, healthcare, education and democracy. Their arguments are bolstered by several illuminating case studies — from online MBA classes in which students use virtual reality headsets, to a sari outlet combining manufacturing and services — that highlight the nation’s entrepreneurial zeal. They suggest India should not attempt to follow other countries by walking the low-skilled manufacturing path to economic development, since many nations are now competitive in building and processing. Instead, they say that India should leverage its expertise in direct services exports, from IT to education, as well as services embedded within the manufacturing sector. Importantly, the authors argue that India must also work to bolster its democracy — after all, the ability to think and speak critically is a cornerstone of innovation.”
Avishai Abrahami: “A lot of the time, I talk to entrepreneurs, and most of the time, younger entrepreneurs, they talk to me about the fact that they make a lot of decisions every day. And I usually say, “Well, I make probably four every quarter.” And I think the number one thing is to understand that it’s much better to make four every quarter than a dozen every day because I mostly try to delegate and to make sure that we know: What are the rules? How do we measure success? How do we enable other people to make smart decisions? And they’ll come and tell me what they want to do, but essentially, it’ll be mostly their decisions and not mine. It’ll be my responsibility but their decisions. We have a full method of how to make decisions. Everything is measured. This is number one. We are fanatic about it. We measure everything. If you did something that cannot be measured, then nothing happened. That’s our philosophy. In fact, a lot of the time, don’t tell us about it. Don’t come and show off a project that cannot be measured. You can come, by the way, and show us a project that you measured and had a negative effect, and you’re going to get the same amount of cheers as you would for a project that had positive effects because we want to encourage that aggressiveness in testing and going to new places.”
George Will: “Many of today’s anticipatory anxieties about artificial intelligence might be well-founded, but not its threat to cause enormous joblessness. Until the middle of the last century, many women were telephone operators. Displaced by mechanical switching technology, they moved on to other jobs. Pethokoukis says ATMs led to increased bank teller jobs as it became cheaper to open bank branches. He imagines finding ways to employ the energy around and beneath us. The Earth’s molten core is about as hot as the sun’s surface (11,000 degrees Fahrenheit), and will generate heat for billions of years as radioactive elements decay. “The continuous energy flow is roughly thirty terawatts” — trillions of watts — “almost double all current human energy consumption.” And: “There are no theoretical obstacles to placing tech in low-Earth orbit that would convert some of the 173,000 terawatts of solar energy continuously striking Earth, an amount ten thousand times annual global energy consumption.” Vitality that translates into economic growth can be transformative. “The difference between an economy growing at 2 percent for the next fifty years and growing at 4 percent over that span is,” Pethokoukis notes, “massive — a $60 trillion economy in 2076 versus $160 trillion.” A prudent society does not assume that such things are achievable. However, a dynamic society does not allow anxieties about the future to constrict is horizons, or to seek security in the embrace of the state.”
WaPo: “Conceived in 2016 by Carlos Moreno, the 15-minute city imagines putting “humans and their well-being as the main purpose of urban organization,” Moreno, an urbanist and professor at the Sorbonne University in Paris, told The Washington Post in March. The idea is “to promote sustainability and health by reducing car dependency and increasing physical activity,” primarily through walking, biking and mass transit. This decentralized urban planning model has become a rallying cry for politicians and urban activists around the world fed up with exclusive single-use zoning, car-centric development and homes segregated from work, retail shopping and other amenities. Yet the discussion about 15-minute cities obscures a central tension at the heart of the idea: How can all of us live within 15 minutes of all amenities and jobs in cities housing millions of people?”
