Recently quite a few people have been using the term WWIII to speak about the new escalation of global terrorism. This is wrong. If the comparison relates the number of victims, we are not anywhere near WWIII. 80 million people died in WWII and the world had 2.5bn people then, if WWIII means something of similar magnitude, 240 million people would have to die in this war today, I think the chances of something like that are incredibly small. The world is safer than it’s ever been. The probability of any of us dying in an armed conflict or victims of terrorism is insignificant. Yes, there are and there will be global terrorists, before it was Al Qaeda, now ISIS,  and yes they maybe will kill around 1000 people per year in the USA and EU during the next decade. I am not denying terrorism, nor saying that it will go away.  But terrorist attack like Paris are not WWIII.  There’s no way that 3% of the world’s population will be killed by a few people with Kalashnikovs and explosives. Now in the Middle East, there have been many more victims than in EU/USA from terrorism and regional wars.  Over 1 million Muslims have died, mostly killed by other Muslims, in the Iran-Iraq war, the Lebanese civil war, the Algerian civil war, the Syrian civil war, the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, the Libyan civil war and the confrontations involving Muslims vs Christians in Africa. And this wars will probably go on, but these are local conflicts, not WWIII. It would be surprising to know that even in the Israeli Palestinian conflict over the last 30 less than 15,000 people have died while every day in the world around 150,000 people die of natural causes.  So while we will have regional wars and conflicts, and we will have terrorism, the vast majority of humanity will wake up and go to sleep day after day without anything violent ever happening to them.  And the proportion of violent deaths to total deaths keep shrinking decade after decade.

As I work on financing Prelude Fertility, the venture that will change the way people start families, a new company that lies in between a private equity investment and a VC investment, I am finding out that there is a real animosity between these two types of firms. For me they are just investors, but they see each other as rivals. And I understand why. PE firms would like for the world to stay the same. VCs invest in change. PE firms bet on the status quo. VCs invest in blowing it up. When PE firms buy a chain of restaurants, they want people to keep buying food the same way, they buy a chain of drug stores, they want people to buy drugs the same way, they buy a car part maker they want people to buy and drive cars the same way. PE firms just want a growing, predictable economy, but what they don’t want is what entrepreneurs and VCs are doing to them: changing the world as they know it. For every PE model there is a VC disruptor. For PE firms who own restaurants, there is Seamless, GrubHub and others delivering food without the real estate or companies like Soylent changing what we eat. For PE firms investing in the car industry there is now Uber/Lyft and driverless coming to disrupt car transportation. For PE firms who invest in hotels there is AirBnB, for PE firms who invest in media, there is Google and Facebook destroying their traditional revenue sources, for PE firms who invest in the banking industry there is now Square, Lending Club, Bitcoin VC backed ventures and others coming to desintermediate them. For PE firms investing in commercial real estate there is WeWork and all the other coworking start ups making a much more efficient use of office space and Amazon, Ebay and all e commerce destroying retail. And in this war the VC firms, like Sequoia, Andreessen Horowitz, Accel Partners, Index Ventures, Atomico are more likely to earn better returns in the end, because the world is changing, and is changing fast. In terms of investing it is becoming clear to me that the future belongs to VC firms who are large enough to do growth rounds or PE firms who are willing to invest in transformations.