The Berlin rent control was just a cover up rent for some stupid mistakes that were made in the past. It's basically a bribe to the public. Oh, we sold government owned housing to private investors? Here, have some forcibly lowered rent payments. Of course they rushed the bill and it was overturned.

If the greens can somehow figure out how to avoid falling into these self inflicted traps they would be strong enough to stand their own, as it is right now they still need some common sense beaten into them. My hope is that they do their big government investments, let the economy recover and then either become a boring government party or stay a quirky opposition party.

Make alternatives economically competitive to basically free oil refinement by-products, and we're talking.

EVs might help here, it seems.

At least that's what Astro Teller is talking about a lot: Work on the approach, don't pursue single lucky punches.

Sad that loom didn't work out. If X fails eventually, I think the idea of radical corporate innovation from scratch is dead.

Then Elon seems to be the only one left with the most promising 10x or even 100x playbook: hardcore dedication to insane goals in terms of resources, work ethics and throughput.

Platforms thrive if you match supply and demand in a highly relevant way, and once they thrive, they generate network effects.

So PG & Jessica were sort of the equivalent of the seller terms and conditions on the Amazon marketplace platform haha. They were able to spot and shape promising founding teams.

Before YC, there was no real playbook about how to start a startup. Now there is one (startup school). That's one reason why sama switched gears towards openAI. Starting up is now kind of a solved problem, conceptually

But on top of that playbook, there is tons of advice available from countless people in any kind of niche imaginable, state of the art, updated almost every week. SaaS, e-commerce, platforms, engineering, marketing, you name it.

But this very differentiated professionalism was a direct result of the success of YC, among a bunch of other players. Starting up in your early 20s in your doorm was a niche itself before YC, now it's very much mainstream (thanks as well to cloud and mobile).

PG never was a 'startup expert' it seems to me. He always has been and still is a hacker that enjoys building things that are interesting. It just so happened that between 1995-ish and 2015-ish that very niche-y hobby turned out to be extremely valuable for (more or less accidentally) building the foundation of one of the most lucrative global commercial and societal transformations in history.

The period between 2000 and 2010 laid the foundation. But not because it was intended, but because in hindsight, the right people with the right mindset turned out to build the right tool set that paved the way.

And once this way was paved, the 'army' marched in with trillions of dollars and a global flocking of talent and ambition.

Job done, it seems.

That's why he lives in England now, writes, codes and checks out interesting stuff built at Demo Day. Like it has always been, but in a completely different world, in which building tech became the most valuable thing.

But here is what I've learned from Tesla/SpaceX: Cutting-edge tech changes the initial conditions of a problem. How things are measured, analyzed, manufactured, simulated etc.

The only things that are fundamentally constraining are the laws of nature. As long as you don't violate them, things can be done, potentially (in principle).

That why Musk has been like: OK, I see a feasible trajectory, so let's throw money and talent at the problem and see how it goes. Which by the way is how progress works. Pushing things.

Experts (especially scientists) have acquired their expertise within certain initial conditions. Initial conditions incorporate assumptions that might be outdated after having thrown money and tech at the issue.

That's why Musk doesn't give a damn about conventional wisdom but in my opinion only cares about the fundamental physics when it comes to basic feasibility.

What seems to be different compared to a lot of others seems to be that he is a scientific mind by training and a hardcore engineer by profession. Plus basic economics literacy and tons of money.

You usually find only one or those traits in people.

Tldr : his mantra is 'question your constraints'... Let's see how well that goes with this project

And there are less and less incentives to contribute in making / selling things vs. just making more money out of money for a living.

It's an important debate that the MM is trying to facilitate. And actually quite a good historic recap of the term value over time.

But while the finance economy 'feels morally wrong' (especially when being on the loser side), that doesn't make for a convincing argument yet.

We already do. Finance is an extremely heavily regulated industry. The regulations make all kinds of distinctions.

The hard part is deciding what the regulations should be. What, specifically, would you change?

While it might seem to rob the global economy of vast wealth overnight, all physical and intellectual assets are still around. So, if anything it’s simply aligning the economy more closely with reality which should increase efficiency.

What is more useful? A factory that makes shoes for your population or a vault of gold? Gold has a role, but factories are king. This is why the USA is so, so screwed in handing over manufacturing to China. Americans usually criticize China by stating that they will stop consuming and what will China do? Nuts.

I'd encourage banks to lend into productive industries by taxing land, not labour (and properly tax externalities like pollution) , capturing publicly created location value and allowing wealth creators to retain more (all?) of the value they create.

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Replying to the sibling comment as yet again after typing "rent seeking" => "you're submitting too fast". Surprise!

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I think we should tax things that have an opportunity cost or externality.

If you keep gold in a vault, assuming there is enough for industrial production (if not you have a lot of gold!), then please continue to do so. It doesn't impact me.

If you hold land I and others cannot use it. You did not create it, society should be compensated via a tax, as the land itself has value due to society at large. A square plot in the middle of nowhere is worth considerably less than a square plot in NY.

If you dump sewage into a river or burn lots of coal, you are also damaging the common wealth.

It seems to be that simple: If you WANT innovation, you'll get innovation.

What most people (at least those willing to climb the corporate ladder) want however is a career. And within a corporate incentive structure, career and failure don't go well together. Creating value out of nothing is way harder than simply not screwing up existing value. So it's obvious what you're gonna get.

Eventually, there is no such thing as 'corporate innovation'. There could be a thing called 'corporate sponsored innovation garage', or something similar. At least for new business development from the ground up.

The promising way to pull that off it seems is a blend of YC startup school tutoring, venture capital, [Google] X, the innovation culture of Tesla/SpaceX and access to cutting edge technology/people - baked into the right incentive structure.

IF innovation was repeatable, I'd bet on such a vehicle and allocate resources there.

proceeds to promote people who only make safe bets, suck up to management and tow the party line

Most attempts I've seen about fixing that by creating a "startup culture" inside a company have not really added more value compared to simply investing that money in a start up.

In my experience, end of the day, “innovation” or “creating value” or “getting shit done” boils down to solving problems. It could be big problems like fundamental research or little problems like moving a desk in an office.

Either way, big organizations, private or public sector, create their own problems that are difficult to solve. Inefficient or dumb process sticks around until times are tough because the process gives someone power.

Doesn't it just.

I approached someone in charge of innovation for a part of the UK's National Health Service. I offered some software (at no cost to them until they were content it met a need) based on a project I'd worked on in a different part of the public sector where the same idea had been successful. I was turned away, not because it wasn't actually innovative, but because to the NHS innovation meant funding deployment of commercially successful, mature software with existing customers and I didn't own the software from the previous project so I'd written a new (and improved) version.

It still puzzles me. I occasionally wonder how much time he must spend turning away people who have innovation ideas wondering why companies with mature products aren't calling his innovation department.

The word innovation is awesome at dedicating when someone is speaking bullshit.

When someone says the word innovation I assume they are a politician, marketer, salesperson, or in public relations. This causes me to listen to what they are saying more critically because I assume they as a professional attempt to persuade or influence people.

Now, the iPhone 1 didn’t do very much, and often there is far more value in the innovation than there was in the original invention. But you don’t get the innovation without first inventing something that didn’t previously exist.

Sadly, using words incorrectly swaps into thoughts, and affects reasoning. Because these words have been conflated, organizations are typically no longer able to reason about invention and innovation correctly, and are uninterested in inventing as a result. I would argue we see this in the lack of new underlying technological inventions after the 90s. It is like we have eaten our own seed corn. Very sad.

I disagree. Not screwing up existing value is way harder than simply creating value out of nothing.

Given that most corporations fail eventually no matter what, you might have a point there.

Maybe what I meant was the micro-level, not the macro-level evaluation. It might be easier for a given individual within a large corporation to play the game of 'keep the system running' and do well as compared to playing an active role in a small group of pirates that is building value from scratch which eventually can scale to a significant size.

Fair point though!

For instance, do you mean to say that, given the average company making $X net profit per month, it is harder to steer that company to grow to make $(X + Y) per month, than it is to start another company that makes $Y per month, from nothing?

Like sibling comment said, from a data-driven perspective that seems incorrect, but I wonder if your definitions of "value" or "difficulty" have some other nuance.

I’m not sure I 100% agree with the statement, but it’s an interesting perspective to try from time to time.

I've seen a few big companies attempt to avoid the pitfalls you're describing. They set up some moonshot division consisting of "startups" and they do allow them to fail, but that's not enough. The problems are that they don't face the same financial pressures as startups, and they draw from the same talent pool as the general engineering pool of the company.

This is a problem because I don't think the article's premise goes far enough, big companies don't just drive out innovators, they convert them. They create a context where adding more bloat is seen as innovation, and then suck up enormous amounts of talent into this environment.

These "startups" I've seen look on paper like they have every chance to succeed. Financial institutions starting companies in the finance space for example, they have all the domain knowledge, it's right in their wheelhouse etc etc. But they don't seem to realise that they don't have the right kind of engineering talent. It's not that their devs are bad, they're just playing a completely different game. I think this is partly to blame for the whole "ageism" thing in SV as well. Somewhere along the track a big group of people realised (probably subconsciously) that there's a whole bunch of very talented senior engineers out there that are complete garbage at building something from scratch in an environment where you live and die by the quality of your software, because the majority of people work in places where their success and failure is just indistinguishable noise in quarterly profits. And for interviewers that aren't particularly good at surfacing that or don't even know what they're looking for, ageism is the easiest (and shittiest) way to filter most of that out and improve your odds

All these "startup within a big company" projects seem to follow the same rules as a modern trendy enterprise project. Big fuck off kubernetes clusters on the back end, a monorepo clusterfuck for the front end with more packages than pages in the app. Everything "scales", everything is perfectly set up to handle every possible use case, there's 8 kinds of tests, and a huge CI/CD setup, and all the tooling you could ever need. And then once that's all set up, in true waterfall fashion, the dev finally starts... at the same pace all the company's other projects run at.

And because all the other company's projects run at that pace, nobody notices anything is wrong. But if you do this, and you have any even remotely competent competition, you're going to get absolutely fucking poleaxed in features. Slow and steady might win the race but nobody has ever won the race after being shot in the foot with the starting pistol.