Somewhere in my blog I told the story of my unfulfilled promise to do my PhD. In short, I promised my grandmother Ora Alperovich, before she died in 1994, that one day I would have a PhD like my father (who had one in Physics from Harvard University). For her my two Master´s from Columbia University were not enough and she was terribly disappointed when I was accepted to do a PhD in Economics at Oxford, but did not go. During her last days before her lymphoma took her away, she kept going on and on about how important it was for Jewish people to be well educated and she asked me to promise her that I would do my PhD one day.

My grandma had grown up in a very antisemitic Russia and left only to see Nazis coming close to winning WWII (she feared they would win and then Argentina would hand over all the Jews as other countries had done). Basically, her view of the Jewish people is that, unfortunately, we were always going to be on the run and that the more knowledge we carried around with us the better we could do.

While I think that the global environment for Jews has changed for the better since my grandmother´s time, I am sometimes concerned about my unfulfilled promise to my grandmother. Hence, I keep coming up with ideas for my PhD thesis. As I am managing Fon full time and don´t have time for a PhD, I decided that for now I am just going to blog these ideas which is all I have time to do.
Read More

When people analyze wealth they tend to look for wealth. I instead, thanks to Argentine entrepreneur and dear friend Maximiliano Fernandez who once educated me on this matter, think differently. I think that the richest countries are those with the richest poor. Why? Because if the poor are not doing that badly then the rest are all doing better.

Today I found out that the World Bank keeps the closest proxy to this assertion.
Read More

I have an 11 year old son. Tonight we were talking about Bit Torrent with some friends at dinner table and then somebody asked him, I guess as a representative of a new generation, how he felt about downloading files over the internet and whether it was theft of not. This was his answer.

When you steal from somebody you deprive this person of something, you take it, they lose it. You have a hot dog you are about to eat, I run away with it, I eat it, you don´t. But with music and movie files theft does not take place. You have a file, I copy it with your permission, you still have it. No stealing, and we both have it.

Read More

I am back in Madrid after spending a week in the Bay Area and Seattle. The companies I met there were Google, our investor in the Bay Area and Microsoft and Starbucks in Seattle. From what I saw corporate America has decided to make food and drink one of the key competitive advantages in recruitment. First an article. Walking around Seattle I was surprised to see this headline in the local paper:

Under Pressure Microsoft Fights to Keep its Workers, Here´s a link to the full article.
Read More

For how long is the pile of lies related to America´s role in Iraq going to continue generating a pile of dead bodies in Iraq? When is this cycle of horror and waste going to end?

America first invaded Iraq because Iraq was making WMD. That was a lie. Then America stayed in Iraq to fight the war on terror and that was a lie as well. There were no terrorists in Iraq before the American invasion. And now we are on to the third big lie, that America stays in Iraq in order to prevent a civil war.
Read More