Nuclear comes in at a very distant third. China falls in the bottom left quadrant of pessimistic determinism. The plan is to buy up oil fields in Africa and domestically mine as much coal as possible.

There’s even a market version of this, too. The value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock prices. But those truths must be accepted, not questioned. The market knows far more than you could ever know.

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One problem is that if you have a monopoly, you probably don’t want to talk about it. Antitrust and other laws on this can be nuanced and confusing. But generally speaking, a CEO bragging about the great monopoly he’s running is an invitation to be audited, scrutinized, and criticized. And if the politics problem is quite severe, there is actually strong positive incentive is to distort the truth.

How much of the market are you going to capture? What’s your assessment of the competition? It’s almost always a mistake to insist that you have no competition. VCs will get that you think you’re (going to be) better than the competition—everyone knows it’s a pitch. But radically underestimating your competition will set off peoples’ BS detectors.

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Maybe someone will release a trapezoid version soon. Maybe then they’ll run out of shapes. Then there was a proliferation of copycat readers. They basically copied the idea of a simple geometric-shaped reader. But they tried to one-up Square; 3 sides, after all, was simpler than 4. At one point, Oracle hatched an interesting plan of attack.

Just have something reasonable to say about this. For young companies, it’s almost certainly a total work of fiction since it will probably change. But having a reasonable answer shows that you’re thinking about how the product will become a business. “If we build it, they will come” is simply not true. Being able to talk about revenue, sales processes, customer acquisition, and barriers to entry/exit shows your VCs that you’re not that naïve. Flat rounds, by contrast, should be avoided because they mean that the VCs involved believe things can’t have gotten that much worse.

Technical

Google and Microsoft combined are worth $456 billion. But just 3 years ago, Microsoft and Google were each individually bigger https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/playbook-raises-3m-to-help-fitness-instructors/ than Apple. In 2007, it was Microsoft vs. Google. And those who avoid it can often swoop in and capitalize on the peace.

But if you have something that takes years to do, having a small or esoteric secret is not enough to build a decisive lead. Secrets can allow you to escape mimesis and competition in a world of long time horizons, but those secrets need to be pretty big. But in practice, most wind, solar, and cleantech ventures relied on incremental improvements. Solar costs fell slowly over a number of years. Wind power came down a bit quicker, but there was still no real step function to it.

Growth

What is perceived as crazy isn’t the substance of the belief itself, but rather having the belief in the first place. But this kind of progress over the next 30 years is by no means something we can take for granted. Getting around bottlenecks—energy constraints, for example—is going to be hard.

• What translates from going to work at a big company?
• But that doesn’t necessarily mean that indeterminacy is sound practice.
• I created a brief, fully anonymous, nine question survey to help me better understand who you are.
• Computers will probably beat humans in Go in 4 or 5 years.
• Markets that are too big are bad for all the reasons discussed above; it’s hard to get a handle on them and they are usually too competitive to make money.

The pushback to all this is that, generally speaking, life really is war. Determining how much of life is actually perfect competition versus how much is monopoly isn’t easy. We should start by evaluating the various versions of the claim that life is war.

Larry Ellison said in 1995 that the Internet would go nowhere because it’d be too slow. This was puzzling, since you could theoretically run Internet on the same wire that people already had coming into their houses. Cable modems https://bookkeeping-reviews.com/ turned out to work pretty well. So to say in 1992 that Internet was going to be the thing was very contrarian. Returning to the globalization axis, you’re left with cooperating with China. That’s better than competing with China.

• Strive to get 1% better every day.2) Keep your daily mindset big.
• But instead of investing, companies today are generating huge cash flows—about $1 trillion annually at this point.
• Many venture capitalists seem to be looking for incremental improvements—small secrets, if they’re even secrets at all.
• People might be focusing too much on the financial aspect of the so-called financial crisis of 2007.
• The reality is that people were right about lots of things in the ‘90s.

The timing question is a complicated one, but some intermediate answer is likely the best. Much depends on what you think the rest of the ecosystem looks like. If you think that you have a big secret but lots of other people are about to discover it, it’s worth being risky. You have to move as fast as possible and tell whomever you need to. Another search for secrets leads to biotech. Stem cell research and cancer research are the two really big areas there.