Shimon Peres started the session by saying that even though President Clinton had worked hard at bringing solutions to the Middle East conflict, unfortunately “we were more successful at bringing problems.” Another phrase of his was, quoting Ghandi, “When a cat is chasing a mouse there´s no sense if the mouse declares a ceasefire.” This he said to Nasser to ask the Palestinian Authority to stop Hamas, the cat in this picture. “Time has come to privatize peace” he also added in the sense that civil society has to play a huge role demanding peace.
Read More
2005 16
Clinton Global Initiative
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I am attending the Clinton Global Initiative. It was this year in January, at Davos, that President Clinton announced that he liked Davos, so much so that he was going to start his own. Klaus Schwab, founder of the World Economic Forum laughed nervously. It took a lot of guts to announce the conference that was going to be the most important Davos competitor…at Davos. But that´s Clinton. He saw a political void. He occupied it. There´s already a novelty here that I like. To attend this conference everyone has to write a pledge to help with money, effort or a combination in one of the four areas: fight against poverty, better governance, combat climate change, or conflict resolution. As Dennis Ross said “the Clinton Global Initiative is geared to problem solving”. Solving may be too ambitious, but alleviation is certainly achievable.
2005 11
The Math of Antisemitism
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in General with No Comments
I am Jewish. As many other Jews and non Jews I am concerned by the fact that only 60 years ago around 40% of all the Jewish people in the world at that time were killed. But what these percentages hide is how few Jews there were before the holocaust and how many there are today.
Read More
Some internet companies laid their cards right out there. For example, eBay started out as a marketplace. You sell your stuff on Ebay, you pay them a commission, they render a service, they get paid. Other companies, however, operated under what for years looked as an NGO model, and only when they were immensely popular did they come after your money, and they got amazing valuations for doing so.
Of this kind two former Internet NGO´s come to mind. One is Google and the other one is Skype. How it is that Stamford University does not own at least half of Google´s $80bn in stock escapes me. How it is that Larry and Sergey were able to use the immense Stamford University infrastructure for free for so long while building what is now an empire for themselves, is a mystery as well. If you Google the history of Google on Google you will see that during the first years of its existence, until VC money was raised and ads appeared, Google was mostly seen as a gift to humanity. What was great about the early Google is that it gave you useful results on your searches and it seemed to want none of your purchasing power. But when searches reached the billions, the famous internet bubble idea of monetizing eye balls held more truth than ever. And now at $288 per share, Google is worth $80bn. However, Stamford is not a major shareholder and Google is far from being and NGO.
The other company that emerged as an NGO and only recently has shown it´s money model, is Skype. I remember downloading Skype for the first time and wondering about the profit motive. It too looked like an NGO allowing us to talk to each other for free. It appeared that somewhere in Northern Europe there was somebody with a lot of money to lose. But again that was not the case. As Skype grew (now up to 165 million dowloads according to their site), VCs entered the game and Skype started Skype In and Skype Out. Skype is nowhere near as valuable as Google but still a remarkable business.
Read More
2005 8
Traders are Insects, Entrepreneurs: Mammals
Published by MartinVarsavsky.net in New Ideas with No Comments
I was thinking about people who have made significant amounts of money and their success strategies. I was then comparing those strategies to animals and their offspring and their success strategies. And this is what I found.
If you go through the list of the richest people in the world and take out the heirs focusing on self made (mostly) men, you would see that you can divide wealthy individuals into two main strategies of money making. One is the entrepreneur who has built one or very few businesses, as for example, Michael Dell or Bill Gates. The other one is the trader, who has not managed large organizations and has made thousands of investments in which good ones exceed bad ones, example: George Soros. These individuals have very different strategies and yet when measured by money achieved they have similar results: they are all among the richest people in the world.
Now let´s shift to the animal kingdom. In the animal kingdom the same two strategies appear. Mammals have very few offspring in their lifetime, even the most prolific mammals cannot be compared to any insect, for example, in the amounts of offspring that they have during a lifetime. In my analogy, the entrepreneurs are the mammals and the traders are the insects. Mammals as we know, care for their newborn, feed them, protect them and stay with them for a significant part of their life. Mammals cannot afford many mistakes (dead offspring) as their genes would not prevail in future generations if they did. Insects however frequently accept failure, they play a game of chance, lay thousands of eggs and leave hoping that at least more than a few survive. Interestingly both strategies work and yet in terms of personality they make very different type of animals…traders and entrepreneurs I mean.
When I look around at the people I know I see this division. There´s the traders, and there´s the entrepreneurs. Both can be as successful, but their lifestyles and personalities are completely different. Traders tolerate failure as part of their daily routine. Traders base their success in the frequency of transactions. Very successful traders make an incredible amount of trading decisions. Entrepreneurs on the other side make very few decisions, but they spend much more time thinking, studying, comparing, contrasting, analyzing. Entrepreneurs can´t be as frequently wrong. They don´t have too many chances to pass on their genes.
Originating off the tip of Africa, hurricanes often flood various parts of the US; sometimes Miami, now New Orleans. In Europe, “hurricanes” are merely very heavy rains. In 2002, Prague was greatly affected by the flooding caused from excessive downpour. You can see there is a striking difference.
When a hurricane occurs in America, news coverage tells not only of the damage caused by the rains, but also of the simultaneous destruction caused by the people of the cities these natural disasters affect! Namely uncontrolled looting is referenced time and time again during these times of crisis.
In Europe, when there is news of rain damage, there is never reference to looting, murders, or any of the atrocities that are happening right now in New Orleans. Interestingly, when the Tsunami hit South East Asia less than year ago, the news was also of death by nature. There was no mention of uncontrolled rioting and looting. Even rival factions in Sri Lanka ceased fighting during the tragedy. The question(s) I am trying to answer now is why these two reactions to natural disasters are not only on opposite sides of the globe but on opposite ends of the spectrum? Why is it that in America looting happens after blackouts or natural tragedies whilst in Europe and Asia focus is seemingly on humanitarian outreach alone?
Read More