And more than half the rise in the top 1% share since 1985 flowed through the pass-through businesses that was a "tax efficiency innovation" feature of the Reagan Revolution.
Managing the transition to a world with abundant and powerful AI to optimize for safety and benefits to people should be one of the highest priorities in the world.
in education there's a concept that I think is really poison and why we have trouble innovating in education which is there's a view that you must serve everybody all at once for free like just anything you do in education no matter who it's for they're like I'm going to come up with a counter example where it doesn't work for everybody all at once for free and that's not how products are developed
In the 70s and 80s, Japanese companies could get cheap plentiful bank loans to develop new products and explore new markets. Today, they can't. Innovation is downstream of finance.
If you do think it's the overall system that matters, then the alignment that's needed is far less like training a virtuous child and more like managing a semi-virtuous corporation!
In 1969, we landed on the moon for the first time and the same year we flew Concord, the faster than the speed of sound airliner. The future was supposed to be faster and better. where we're supposed to look forward to innovation in air and in space. And yet, half a century later, we can't go to the moon and we can't fly faster than the speed of sound.
we want we want to encourage everybody and every company to build their own AIs. And and and who knows what innovation will come from the fact that it's open source.
It might have worked even better as two separate books, rather than as one short book trying to do two things. But Booth's writing is soothing, and his overall message — investing is simply a bet on human innovation and progress — is a truism worth repeating. Young people, in particular, might benefit from reading it.
Like every single time there's just like the big innovation like cloud computing, like higher level programming languages, for whatever reason things do not like it doesn't lead to fewer programmers. And I would have expected it would have.
if if I got to pick one if I get to pick one thing that you do as CEO, I'm going to pick that you're right. So even if you don't, you know, even if you don't operate the ship or the factory that well, I'd rather that you picked the right product, the right strategy than you were phenomenal at execution or inspiring people or managing because, you know, being in the right body of water matters more than the right boat.
in the Peter Teal sense it's almost a moral arbitrage because there's something in our gut as a product you you became a founder an entrepreneur because you wanted to go be an innovator and so it can feel like a beatdown that your path to innovation starts with copying other people's work
13 years ago, at the Wired 2013 event in London, I was asked when robotaxis would arrive there and as a joke, gave an answer of June 22, 2026 that turned out to be impossibly spot on.
What I see now is, well, "I'm a a programmer and I've got six agents. So, really I'm managing a team." No, you're not. You're using six tools at once, which is fine. But, it's that's very different than having a conversation with somebody who believes things that are a little different than what you believe.
So you get this rapid, incredible great talent, rapid innovation because of open source and just, you know, the nature of friends, and, and insane competition. Among the company, what emerges is incredible stuff. And so this is the fastest innovating country in the world today
There were a handful of people probably managing a security review process or a launch process or a deployment process or, you know, sometimes reviews were a little slow and they got backed up. Well, now we just threw gas on the fire and so all of that is a problem.
So, I think what's happening is we're all looking at the big companies going, "When are you going to give us something?" And the answer is we're looking at the big dead companies. We just don't know they're dead yet.
In fact, innovation died on the vine like all together and since I don't know, 2008, there has been no innovation from Google. It's all been acquisitions. They have they've created nothing new.
The sequel to Inspired, this book explores what the best product companies have in common. “Most people think it’s because these companies are somehow able to find and attract a level of talent that makes this innovation possible. But the real advantage these companies have is not so much who they hire, but rather how they enable their people to work together to solve hard problems and create extraordinary products.”
the reason it's a catastrophic way to be paid my argument is that marketing is actually fat tailed so is innovation R&D pharmaceutical research science okay in other words 5 to 10% of what you do delivers perhaps 110% of the value
so I can make the argument that oh my god uh if you're a model company you may be you may have a winner's curse you may have done all the hard work done unbelievable innovation except it's kind of like one copy uh away from that being commoditized
management is just about in my mind having an outcome. So you want to get something done. That's the thing. You have a northstar. You have a vision and you're just trying to figure out how to use the resources that you have to get that thing done.
if you're really unclear about what success looks like the prompt, you're probably not going to get the most amazing work. Um I think that's true for managing teams and it's very much true for managing AIs.
I think that managing change, it's always been manager's job to manage change and there's always the chaos of what's going on. I just think the rate of change is accelerating and we've seen that over the last couple of decades.
And remember that DeepSeek happened in times of crisis, urgency, not in times of comfort. A lot of these technological breakthroughs and leapfrogging happens in times of crisis. This is called crisis innovation. And you got to thank the US for that. When the Chinese were comfortably importing chips from the US, the whole industry stalled for 20 years.
Industrial policy was heavily criticized and again, if I talk to my Harvard professors, they’ll be very, very, very skeptical about the role of the state, especially in such a major way. But if you look at the Chinese experience, the evidence for success is all there. The cities that have pushed the most on supporting that particular sector ultimately did the best in terms of production, but also in terms of innovation, measured by patents. It’s all in the data.
The US will lead for some time on breakthroughs on disruptive technologies, the zero to one technologies that ultimately change the world. But innovation is a process. It goes from invention to production and commercialization and diffusion, diffusing technology throughout all parts of the economy. And on those two stages, I think that China has a unique advantage, even if it still can’t do the zero to one breakthroughs, because in the end, how much this technology is adopted by the countries and by the various parts of the economy is fundamentally crucial to how much productivity will be unleashed.
One interesting point is that, in China, you ask the companies to innovate first, and then you regulate after, right? So, that has led to things like P2P platforms. It’s led to lots of kind of financial innovations, some of which has actually been very helpful and good, some of which had been disastrous, but the intention to regulate after the fact is to really not slow down or hinder the innovation. This is a very different approach from Europe. You regulate first, and then companies have to work around that.
Do you want technological supremacy and radical breakthroughs? Well, yes. If you do, then you have to tolerate that there are going to be some people who are just going to be uncomfortably rich, like in the United States. You can’t say that you detest the financial system for its greed, but then not accept the fact that it is what fuels innovation, right?
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order
Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.
But, whether it makes financial sense or not for the individuals involved, they are responding to distorted prices, not scarcity, and the world is not better off from their invention and innovation.
The specificity matters here because each innovation in the chain required not merely the discovery of the principle, but also the design and an economically viable use-case to all line up in order to have impact.
What blocks insight is that organizations say they want insights and they want innovation and they really don't. But they're they're being serious. They think they want insights. But insights are disorganizing.
In many cases, the person specifying a new system won’t capture the upside from actually using it - they’ll be under a sort of reverse moral hazard, where the benefits accrue to the rest of the project team, but the risks will accrue only to them.
A new or innovative system that involves changes to the process thus incurs a significant risk penalty that would likely exceed the expected benefits of the innovation.
Who are the best engineers and designers in the world? Nature. This book is an interesting, science-heavy look at some really interesting properties in nature we could use to learn from as we try to design new technology. Benyus takes us across the spectrum from photosynthesis, to agriculture, to spiders. If you want to geek out on a little biology while applying it to technology this is a good read.
It's increasingly coming to the fore and Marcus deals with it in a really interesting way. He takes us through lots of different areas where AI is being used to mimic creativity, which some people would argue is the essence of being human. It's interesting to see how close to being human AI is getting.
We challenge this approach. It encourages design by committee and infuses a superficial sense of collaboration that leads to compromises and weakens ideas. Our view, the product of years of studies of and participation in innovation projects, is that effective teams do not defer critical reflection; they create through criticism.
In this case, it’s to maintain enough slack in your team’s schedule that the team can build quality into their work, and operating continuously in innovation, and avoid backtracking.
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