Category: Thinks

The Four Basic Truths of Macroeconomics: by Tyler Cowen. “The first and most important thing to know about macroeconomics is that a strong negative shock to demand — a sudden decline, in other words — usually leads to a loss of output and employment. Nominal wages are sticky, for a complex mix of sociological reasons, and so employers do not always respond to lower demand with lower wages for workers. Instead they lay some people off, and that can lead to a recession.”

10 Breakthrough Technologies 2021: from Technology Review.

Reading: Hot Seat by Jeff Immelt. The story of his ‘controversial’ tenure as GE CEO.

8 predictions in technology that will change our lives: by AWS Lead Technologist Olivier Klein.

The Crisis of Venture Capital: Fixing America’s Broken Start-Up System: by Jeffrey Funk. “More than 90 percent of America’s “unicorns”—start-ups valued at $1 bil­lion or more while privately held (before IPOs)—lost money in 2019 or 2020, even though more than half of them were founded over ten years ago. And a similar trend of losses holds for European, Indian, and Chinese start-ups.”

The Virus has Killed the Liberal Order: Atanu Dey, quoting Daniel Hannan. “Let’s acknowledge that capitalist moment, when reason overcame dogma and when ordinary people came to enjoy lifestyles that mediaeval kings could not have dreamt of. It was an achievement made all the more remarkable by the fact that hardly anyone understood or appreciated it. Its beneficiaries remained suspicious and hostile to the end. Only now, perhaps, as we revert to our natural condition, do we appreciate what we are losing.”

A new idea that’s gaining some traction: Non-fungible token (NFT). More from a16z: “NFTs are blockchain-based records that uniquely represent pieces of media. The media can be anything digital, including art, videos, music, gifs, games, text, memes, and code. NFTs contain highly trustworthy documentation of their history and origin, and can have code attached to do almost anything programmers dream up (one popular feature is code that ensures that the original creator receives royalties from secondary sales). NFTs are secured by the same technology that enabled Bitcoin to be owned by hundreds of millions of people around the world and represent hundreds of billions of dollars of value.”

Salesforce: Slate, SaaStr

Benedict Evans on Shopify: “Amazon’s rather different Marketplace business, which started back in 1999, probably had $275bn of third party GMV in 2020. That means Shopify’s merchant sales were over 40% of Amazon’s. Looking back a bit, Amazon had $130bn of 3P GMV in 2017, so in that sense Shopify is only three years behind.”

Clubhouse: Ben Thomson, zeynep

Reading; The Satapur Moonstone by Sujata Mistry

Matt Mullenweg: “One thing I love about great creators, you can imagine like a J.R.R. Tolkien or something. He doesn’t just write a book, he creates a world. […] When we talk about Salesforce, we talk about their acquisitions, or Mark Benioff and Bret Taylor, like these sorts of things. But you miss that they created a world. There are events, where they share information. There are interactions with the communities. They put their name on the tallest building in every city. All of these things are part of the universe, the mythology, the world of something like a Salesforce. That’s also what we tried to do with WordPress. We said: it’s not just product, it’s a movement, it’s an ecosystem, it’s a philosophy, it’s a worldview.”

To become a global supply hub, India must attract investment from sub-MNC smaller firms too: by Richard M Rossow. “Attracting big investments is conceptually easier to understand when it is in terms of an automobile production facility, consumer durables factory, or food production plant. But smaller suppliers are the crucial underbelly to supply chains. India’s ability to attract investment from these risk averse firms with less capital will cement India’s place as a global manufacturing superpower.”

Exploring Deeply the Economics of Price Controls: by Donald Boudreaux. “Governments are fond of dictating maximum prices and minimum wages. To the economically ignorant, these policies appear humane and worthwhile. But when examined through the lens of economics, these policies are clearly revealed to be harmful to the very persons they are ostensibly meant to help. Under no plausible real-world circumstances would such controls be economically justified.”

The Economic Story so Far: by Atanu Dey. “Stagnation and poverty has been the story of humanity for nearly all its existence for 250,000 years. Only in the last couple of thousand years, escape from grinding poverty became possible. And only in the last couple of centuries did a significant number of people became rich. From a world where 90 percent of the people lived in abject poverty to a world in which less than 9 percent who are in just a bit over 200 years is the most remarkable event in human history.”

The Great Fact: by Donald Boudreaux. “Economist and historian Deirdre McCloskey calls it “the Great Fact” — the humongous increase in humans’ standard of living that began about 200 years ago…Only when merchants, tinkerers and practical seekers of profit in markets came to be respected — and to be widely spoken of with respect, even with admiration — did the social status of the bourgeoisie increase enough to make membership in that group desirable to large numbers of people. And when this Bourgeois Revaluation happened, innovation skyrocketed. It’s this innovation — mad, fevered, historically off-the-charts amounts of innovation — that really is what we today call “capitalism.””

The Rule of 40 for SaaS companies

Reading: A Murder on Malabar Hill, by Sujata Massey. Mumbai in the 1920s.