Why Venture Capital is cool while Private Equity is all mouth and no brains

A fascinating side observation while watching Succession is that the billionaire Logan Roy and his toxic, untalented and greedy offspring are fighting for control of a traditional media empire while Silicon Valley tech companies continue to eat away at their power and influence, eroding TV’s presence in the home and redefining how news and entertainment is created, delivered, consumed and shared.

We see Kendall’s friend, a private equity jock, help put together a bear hug, a takeover deal involving several billion of private equity funding, to…

The Republican hardliners are saying Joe Biden will take all your guns, kill your babies and hire gay communist teachers to brainwash your kids. They’re warning you that your taxes will quadruple this year. Sigh.

Yes, Joe Biden will need to raise taxes — on those who made over $400K last year. Joe the Plumber, you can relax. Only 2% of Americans make over $400K so the other 98% can relax, taxes are not going up for us.

But The Guns! Yes, there are many in the blue tent who would love to see all the guns rounded up and…

“The neoliberal fascist right wing machine is controlled by Twitter, a non-elected form of government.” Or something like that. Hysteria follows non sequitur follows illogical rant and yes, let’s blame Republicans for everything.

Wait.

The social media platforms all hail from Silicon Valley, the birthplace of neoliberalism since before Clinton. They are overwhelmingly Democrat-leaning, and although their employees are strongly progressive and woke and liberal etc., their founders and senior executives are more moderate centrists — still mostly Democrat-leaning — who eschew any kind of radical taxation or punishment of the wealthy (obviously). In building their platforms they have created…

Let’s unpack that shall we?

Hate rarely begets anything worth having. We know that, but here we are, busy hating.

We have to begin by agreeing there’s a horrible wealth gap in America, worse than many other countries, although not isolated here in US. 1% at the top of the scale own 40% (in some accounts, 50%) of all the wealth in the country. The bottom 40% don’t have $400 for an emergency. There are just under 600 billionaires and their wealth has gone up exponentially, even this year, the Covid year. …

I wish…

Tony Hsieh was the founder and CEO of Zappos. A brilliant, nonconformist guy who was often disappointed by humans behaving ‘disappointingly’, he tried to create a culture at Zappos that would surely eliminate poison, toxicity and build a very large family of delighted employees, who would in turn create delighted customers, and all would live happily ever after.

The core of his thesis was this: write your company’s core values such that they create trust, empathy and a profound sense of belonging. Then, hire and fire based on those values. So, any employee who performs extremely well but…

We are an injured nation. So much damage. But before we get to work, saving America, we have some celebrating to do. We narrowly averted a full-on dictatorship. Let’s all of us please stop and breathe for a few seconds. We literally drunk-drove ourselves to the cliff edge, looked down and turned away to safety, after putting our front tire on the very edge of a death fall.

Only Joe Biden and Kamala Harris could have won it. They did it by winning swing voters in battleground states. Some were Obama ‘08 and ‘12, then Trump ‘16 voters. Had Bernie…

I spent one of my four college years in Fribourg, Switzerland. It held a place in my heart after I returned to Canterbury, finished my undergrad degree and moved to London to begin my working career. I only lasted a year and a half in London. I got a call from my computer science professor in Fribourg, who had defected from academia to work for a shipping company that was expanding. I was being recruited. And I accepted.

The following eight years, plus the one overseas study year, hold many of my most magical memories, and I sometimes regret having…

Stop fooling yourself. No other Democratic candidate would have defeated Trump.

Joe Biden’s 2020 election win is a monumental victory for Democrats, for America, and even arguably for Republicans with a conscience. We have put a stop to the cementation of a dictatorship. More about that another day.

Democrats are already bickering about whose win it actually was. The left is claiming credit, citing individuals like Stacey Abrams, plus the activism of progressive media groups to get out the vote, plus the huge level of engagement by millennials and Gen Z to show up and vote. While all of this…