Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

My partners and I at The Family are constantly rooting for old incumbents to become more like tech companies. The reason is simple and very much in line with our mission of supporting entrepreneurs: startups cannot succeed in Europe until everyone in the business world is convinced that tech companies will win in the end in every industry. A health

For a time, the impact of technology was contained within a narrow segment of the economy. The only ones to be unnerved were executives in the advertising and media industries. The Napster trial was the first showdown between a fast-growing startup and incumbents dominating an old industry. Then Google began its rise from being a better search engi

Now, the Great Safety Net is a complex solution to a complex set of problems. And as stated by John Gall in his landmark (and fun) book Systemantics, we can’t try to design a complex system from the start: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never

We’re currently going through the fifth great surge of development since the Industrial Revolution, one that is leading us into the age of ubiquitous computing and networks. ● During the previous great surge, that of the automobile and mass production, the installation period culminated in problems similar to those we’re experiencing today. ● Those

The

Because they think in Western-centric terms, many people in the West thought that the first step for the expanding Chinese giants would be to try and enter Europe. Few realized that before considering the European market, the Chinese would warm up in Asia and Africa. Lifted by the Belt and Road Initiative, the underlying network infrastructure, and

My thinking is that in the Entrepreneurial Age the housing market should be analyzed through a categorization scheme that simply separates two groups. On the one hand are what my wife, Laetitia Vitaud, calls the hunters: people who spend a relatively short amount of time in a particular area because they’re hunting for money (as workers), knowledge

But today things are different. One path to reinventing government through a more entrepreneurial approach has been brought forward by Tim O’Reilly, who coined the notion of “government as a platform”[401]. The vision is inspired by the strategy of the most successful tech companies. The likes of Amazon, Facebook, and Apple do not only operate appl

On top of that, many new jobs are simply unsustainable (if not plainly illegal) due to regulations rendered obsolete by technology but that endure nonetheless[369]. The taxi industry has become an infamous example of corporatist resistance against the creation of new jobs. We could all renounce our personal car and be driven around through ride-hai