Is there really a straight line between you and the things you want in life? Entrepreneur and educator Luke Burgis goes deep on how understanding mimetic desire can help you better connect the dots between where you are now, and where you want to go. 

Bill and I have been frequently paired in a variety of venues as pessimist and optimist respectively. Recently a Noble Prize winning panelist dismissed Bill’s concerns, exclaiming that, “we’re not going to see self-replicating nanoengineered entities for a hundred years.” I pointed out that 100 years was indeed a reasonable estimate of the amount o... See more

One of the most important things a General Partner (GP) needs to consider early on when starting a venture fund is their portfolio construction strategy. Portfolio construction will impact nearly every aspect of running a fund, including return performance. 

Most things that happen in society are multi-turn and repetitive. These are called preferential attachment processes which happen when something (such as money, status, fame, punishment) is distributed based on how much is already possessed. Most social processes are preferential attachment. For example, if two Founders each tweet out the same grea... See more

Though energy may never be “too cheap to meter,” Vernon and Dourado explain that higher energy consumption directly increases economic growth. Achieving energy superabundance would radically improve the US economy as well as the quality of life for all Americans. They show us a vision of the future that includes flying cars, hyperloop, sub-orbital ... See more

None of this bodes well for many of the new VC entrants who have suddenly become enamored by the capital return potential of science. We have a view that real advances in science are relatively rare, that they are hard to produce, and they tend to be signaled by clear research evidence years if not decades in advance. Venture capital is not a fit f... See more

Two quiet revolutions: reading/writing DNA. The ability to read DNA has greatly exceeded Moore's Law. Your genome can now be sequenced for $100 (which used to cost billions only 25 years ago).

Presumably, parents in the past cared as much about their kids' safety as parents today do. But they took far fewer precautions than parents today, and exerted far fewer controls over kids' behavior. Perhaps they thought it was important that children learn to take risks in order to develop courage. Or perhaps they thought that getting into scrapes... See more

His aim with this challenge was to prove that you can attain an Ivy League education (without the degree) in much less time and 100x less cost.