Wtf?

That is true, but this system also disproportionately rewards luck, and even the destruction of real economic value. Bill Janeway said to me, “The process is inherently wasteful, what I call Schumpeterian waste. Progress through trial and error and error and error. So of course luck comes into the game.” In short, there is many an Internet multimil

You have to work backward from the promise to the customer to the promises that each part of the organization needs to make to each other in order to fulfill it.

For example, Schrage points out that Apple (and now also Google and Microsoft and Amazon) asks their “customers to become the sort of people who wouldn’t think twice about talking to their phone as a sentient servant.”

Technology is going to take our jobs! Yes. It always has, and the pain and dislocation are real. But it is going to make new kinds of jobs possible.

To be sure, it is those entrepreneurs—people like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Michael Dell in the personal computer era; Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Mark Zuckerberg in the web era—who saw that this world driven by a passion for discovery and sharing could become the cradle of a new economy.

Much like a phone call, which happens not just on the phones at either end of the call, but on the network in between, Google happens in the space between browser and search engine and destination content server, as an enabler or middleman between the user and his or her online experience.”

It is possible many of our challenges are at least as much social as they are economic—related to a lack of community and connection to something greater than ourselves.”

So what makes a real unicorn of this amazing kind? 1. It seems unbelievable at first. 2. It changes the way the world works. 3. It results in an ecosystem of new services, jobs, business models, and industries.

Uber or Lyft might instead create incentives for its drivers to purchase them and make them available to the company. In many ways, this would change their business model to one closer to that of Airbnb, in which the participants in the marketplace provide an asset they own rather than their labor. But for this plan to work, Uber or Lyft would not

during the decades following World War II, government policy makers decided that “sustained mass unemployment was an existential threat to capitalism.”12 The guiding “fitness function” for Western economies thus became full employment.