I never understood why it is acceptable for American media to call political appointees “czars” as if it was a great example to others to be a czar.

Here´s a mention to Podesta being a possible energy czar.

Another observer said John Podesta, Clinton’s White House chief of staff and now co-chair of Obama’s transition team, may also be in consideration for energy secretary or climate “czar,” a White House position being created by Obama to spearhead climate change policy.

Or a drug czar

On paper, Jim Ramstad — who is rumored to be Obama’s choice for drug czar — looks like the ideal man for the job.

A czar, or tsar, is basically a Russian emperor who hardly ruled in a manner that would be compatible with anything that we would call democratic in the States today. One of the most famous czars is Ivan the Terrible. Here´s an excerpt of his biography:

Other events of this period include the introduction of the first laws restricting the mobility of the peasants, which would eventually lead to serfdom, and change in Ivan’s personality, traditionally linked to his near-fatal illness in 1553 and the death of his first wife, Anastasia Romanovna in 1560. Ivan suspected boyars of poisoning his wife and of plotting to replace him on the throne with his cousin, Vladimir of Staritsa. In addition, during that illness Ivan had asked the boyars to swear an oath of allegiance to his eldest son, an infant at the time. Many boyars refused, deeming the tsar’s health too hopeless to survive. This angered Ivan and added to his distrust of the boyars. There followed brutal reprisals and assassinations, including those of Metropolitan Philip and Prince Alexander Gorbatyi-Shuisky.

So if czar is in fashion how about some other possibilities. The Energy Fuhrer. The Drug Tyrant. The Tech Despot. The Intelligence Dictator. Or maybe, these last days as we witness the collapse of the car industry we could name an Auto Autocrat to lead the way to recovery.

I have been criticized many times in this blog for having had done well in life. Especially in my Spanish blog. Many readers know however that I grew up in a middle class family environment –the son of professors– and that I made my money by founding different companies. They also know that I started my companies by writing a business plan, searching for investors, recruiting a good management team, and executing out a strategy. So there are not many secrets about how I made my money in technology. Criticizing me for being rich in my blog. If it is done with humor, I leave it. If it is a direct insult, I don’t publish it. But the attitude of some readers towards my makes me wonder if people who hate successful people realize that what a society needs successful businesses in order not to eliminate poverty.

What do we want, a society without rich people or a society without poor people? To me the answer is clear. What we want is a society without poor people or, like my Argentinean friend Maximiliano Fernandez says, what a country has to aspire to is to have the “richest poor” people in the world. Why? Because if the poor people of, let’s say, Switzerland are the richest in the world –which they may very well be– then the rest of the Swiss will be even better off and all is well. And Switzerland is a good example because it has the richest poor people in the world, but it also has some of the richest people in the world. The same goes for Sweden, another country where the poor live well, but where there are also people, like the founder of IKEA, with huge fortunes almost unrivaled in the world.

Still unconvinced readers will ask me, “What’s going on in countries like Nigeria, in which almost everyone lives in misery, but some are billionaires?”. My answer is that my argument in defense of the rich is not valid in countries that live off of the exploitation of natural resources. In those cases, where it is common for a few to take control of everything, then the argument of some of my readers, that many are poor because a few are rich, is valid. So in those societies what is needed is strict policies of wealth distribution. But in information societies like the EU, USA and Japan of today, which live mainly off of the accumulation of knowledge, the formula that says that in order for there to be fewer poor people there have to be many business leaders competing for human resources and raising wages, is applicable. And those business leaders and entrepreneurs are generally rich.

Take the United States for example, the country with by far the most billionaires in the world. Interestingly enough, its Gini index (which measures a country’s inequality of wealth distribution) is not so much better than Nigeria’s. And yet the USA’s Human Development Index (HDI) is the 12th highest in the world, while Nigeria ranks near the bottom of the barrel at 158th. Perhaps Nigeria’s Gini coefficient is not much worse than the USA’s because so many people are poor, and its rich citizens are actually few and far in between. In contrast, the USA has hundreds of billionaires and thousands of millionaires in addition to a very large middle class. Hence, there is still inequality, but poor – better yet, non-rich – Americans are much better off than non-rich Nigerians.

What’s more, I don’t know of a single successful society, meaning a country whose poor are among the richest on the planet, that doesn’t also have very rich people. As for rich Americans, well let’s look at Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the co-founders of Google. Their combined net worth is over $22 billion, but think about how many jobs Google has created, and how much wealth it has brought, not only to its thousands upon thousands of employees, but to the computer industry in general, both in the USA and around the world. In contrast, Aliko Dangote, Nigeria’s richest citizen with a net worth of $3.3 billion, amassed his fortune by gaining a near monopoly on Nigeria’s commodities trade. Again: by taking control of natural resources. Dangote Group is not exactly a boon to Nigeria’s economy.

My conclusion is that when a country really mistreats its entrepreneurs it becomes impoverished. This doesn’t mean that we don’t have to implement progressive taxes –which I think are very good– or create an environment in which people that fall into adverse situations receive the help that they deserve to come out on top, and in which inequalities are reduced. But the solution is not to have fewer rich people, but to have fewer poor people.

Over the last 4 years my biggest investments have been in the development of wind farms, solar farms and in FON. One could argue that it is quite a diversified strategy. What correlation could there be among a global WiFi network, and wind farms and solar farms around Spain? Well there is one. On a day like today, when it is cloudy, but not windy, throughout Spain and cold everywhere in the Northern hemisphere, revenues are at their lowest in all companies. Solar Farms get no sun, Wind Farms get no wind, and people stay indoors and connect less to WiFi at FON. And on top of that, I can´t even go cycling ’cause it´s too cold! The weather sucks big-time today!

Spain is going to grant citizenship to 1.5 million grandchildren of civil war exiles. The news came as a surprise. Although I myself am an Argentine immigrant, am in favor of immigration, supported the PSOE in their amnesty and am sure that things would be going much worse for Spain had it not welcomed 4 million immigrants since the year 2000, I believe that this measure is a mistake by the government. There are two main reasons for this: one is the criterion for selection, as only one out of four grandparents needs to have been exiled; the other is the idea itself: welcoming many new Spaniards during a period in which things in general are going pretty poorly for Spain, and it is simply not capable of receiving many new immigrants without jobs and a nationality. Moreover this measure stands in great contrast with other government measures in which residents in Spain are given rewards to return to their country.

Potentially allowing 20% more immigrants to enter the country, chosen because of who their grandparents were, abandons the concept of meritocracy in practice until now, which says that an immigrant has to have a work contract. With respect to immigrants, Spain needs to have a selection criterion that has more to do with who they are today and not so much who one of their deceased grandparents was. There is no doubt in my mind that it was an enormous injustice that so many Spaniards had to emigrate more than 70 years ago. What is not very clear to me is how there is a stronger connection between that – in most cases – already deceased person that had to leave and his or her grandchild than there is, for example, between a current Argentinean resident of Spain and his own family, whom he cannot bring, even though he already lives in Spain and contributes to the country. I understand the concept of citizenship passing from parents to their children, especially because it is about the reunification of family, but passing it from a grandparent to all of his or her offspring is an idea that – although beautiful – ends up producing an enormous pool of possible candidates without job offers whom, at this time, Spain simply cannot take in.

What’s more, if the idea is to link immigration with family, then to me the case of the immigrant with a deceased grandparent who was exiled is much less convincing than the case of a husband or wife who wants to have citizenship and bring his or her living spouse or children now. It doesn’t make sense to think about an injustice that occurred 75 years ago and forget about a current one. In other countries, immigration is seen as a quota issue, and the best way to fill said quota is sought. While I do believe that a tremendous injustice was committed by Franco 3 generations ago I believe that a new one is being made today if nationality is not granted first to those foreigners now working in Spain who are not allowed to bring their loved ones.

YouTube´s new moral guidelines are suprising. In America, people confuse nudity with pornography and it is unfortunate that YouTube is a global site so we all have to live by American standards. In America, as opposed to Europe, nudity is a no-no. But then when it gets to violence anything goes. I don´t think much should be censored on YouTube. If it was up to me I would territorialize it, not censor it. But if I was forced to censor I would ban graphic violence way ahead of nudity. Seeing people die, people tortured, corpses, real war scenes, shocks me much more than seeing people naked.

Pietro Saccomani, my TA of last year at my entrepreneurship class has started a group in Facebook that is called I studied entrepreneurship with Martin Varsavsky. If you were ever a student of mine please feel free to join. Thank you XL for the recommendation to start this group. In theory there could be over 500 people who have studied with me in the last 10 years at IE. But students are all over the world now and I don´t really know how to reach them other than blogging about this group.

Image via Wikipedia

I met Kevin Rose co founder of Digg and Pownce a couple of times. I found him smart, funny and engaging. I signed up for Pownce after we met, over a year ago. But now Pownce is shutting down. I just woke up in Madrid with this email from them.

We are sad to announce that Pownce is shutting down on December 15,
2008. As of today, Pownce will no longer be accepting new users or new
pro accounts.
To help with your transition, we have built an export tool so you can
save your content. You can find the export tool at Settings > Export.
Please export your content by December 15, 2008, as the site will not
be accessible after this date.
Please visit our new home to find out more:
http://www.sixapart.com/pownce
Our thanks go out to everyone who contributed to the Pownce community,

The Pownce Crew

Pownce was supposed to be a “better Twitter” but Kevin, founder of Pownce has become extremely famous on …Twitter. To me that is as if Steve Jobs used Blackberry as his main communication platform. Not good. Because as raw communication power goes with over 75K followers on Twitter (I only have 2500) Kevin is a walking PR machine. This ranking will give you a sense of how famous Kevin is on Twitter. He is only second to Barack Obama! Pity he could not use that power and the promotional tools of Digg (Diggnation) to make Pownce the success it could have been. And Twitter itself, as popular as it is, still needs to achieve two milestones: one is to get out of the geek community itself and truly go mainstream, and the other is to find a way to charge for its services. Charging for sending SMS would be a start. As the financial crisis continues and VC´s stop funding fame and finally seek fortune, Silicon Valley´s new motto will be “earn or die”.

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