How Many Trillion-Dollar Companies Should There Be?
[T]hey identified a small group of the foxiest forecasters—bright people with extremely wide-ranging interests and unusually expansive reading habits, but no particular relevant background—and weighted team forecasts toward their predictions. They destroyed the competition. […] They were “curious about, well, really everything,” as one of the top f... See more
Patrick Tanguay • Why Is It So Hard to Predict the Future?
As a venture-capital investor, I see a particularly strong role for a new kind of impact investing. I foresee a venture ecosystem emerging that views the creation of humanistic service-sector jobs as a good in and of itself. It will steer money into human-focused service projects that can scale up and hire large numbers of people: lactation consult
... See moreKai-Fu Lee • AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order
Richard Thaler tells of a discussion about decision making he had with the top managers of the 25 divisions of a large company. He asked them to consider a risky option in which, with equal probabilities, they could lose a large amount of the capital they controlled or earn double that amount. None of the executives was willing to take such a dange
... See moreDaniel Kahneman • Thinking, Fast and Slow
Richard Thaler tells of a discussion about decision making he had with the top managers of the 25 divisions of a large company. He asked them to consider a risky option in which, with equal probabilities, they could lose a large amount of the capital they controlled or earn double that amount. None of the executives was willing to take such a dange
... See moreDaniel Kahneman • Thinking, Fast and Slow
that, contrary to standard belief, the market shares of many technology companies could be predicted with great accuracy, even if the underlying changes in technology changed frequently.
W. Brian Arthur • Complexity Economics: Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute's 2019 Fall Symposium
despite the inherent unpredictability of consumer tastes and the complex way they interact, Venture Capitalists (VC) still put a heavy bet on pattern recognition. These patterns – be it a proprietary product, low-cost customer acquisition tactics, or the ability to reach scale fast – are hardly reliable predictors of success.