There are a lot of great posts buried in this blog’s archives that are still quite apt. Today is another reprise, this time revisiting the (often invisible) tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Last time I explained that tradeoff with the case study of electricity blackouts in Texas and how that related to Google’s monopoly on search and Amazon’s dominance of eCommerce...
The GDP per capita metric is helpful to gauge the level of economic development within a region, but misleading in that the metric gets skewed by extraction-based industries like mining and oil (which is why Botswana, Namibia, and Gabon) are higher than their neighboring countries). Visual Capitalist has published a map of the per-capital GDPs of most of the African nations (in most cases rounded...
I’m in a reprise mood this season… recently thinking about a blog post from 2015 with a lesson learned in an old movie on how to blow up a dam. A lesson about the expectations when making a big change to the world. The lesson comes from Force 10 from Navarone, starring Harrison Ford and Robert Shaw. This is a movie I first saw on a Sunday afternoon on TV as a pre-teen, and then dozen...
“History Doesn’t Repeat Itself, but It Often Rhymes” (Twain). Wednesday, November 6th, and it feels a bit more repeat than rhyme. Eight years ago I posted Plan 11. It seems apt to reprise that post. 2016 Every event in Seattle this week seems to start with a lamentation of last week’s election results. Three days after posting about #lemonade and I’m getting more funny...
The amazing Berkshire Hathaway set two new huge milestones this week: (i) The stock price of the BRKA shares are now more than $700,000 each, up from $7.50 when Warren Buffett bought his first share in December 1962. And with that (ii) the market cap of the company now exceeds $1 trillion. Quite amazing unto itself, but even more amazing when you look at the other trillion dollar companies of the...
In today’s episode of Superpowers for Good, I had the pleasure of welcoming back a dear friend and visionary entrepreneur, Luni Libes, the CEO of Africa Eats. Luni is not only an inspiring leader but also a key investor in the super crowd. His innovative company, Africa Eats, is on a mission to end hunger and poverty in Africa through a unique for-profit model, currently crowdfunding on WeFunder...
I grew up in the early years of personal computers and was a young adult in the early years of the web/internet, with most of my career in the age of mobile phones and wireless connectivity. I’ve never had to run a company without having a computer-based spreadsheet for computations. I remember adding machines with paper tapes, but never owned one. And until this week had never seen and NCR...
While reading about nostalgic computing on the Chip Letter, I came across the following picture of hand-written assembly code for the IBM S/360. What caught my eye wasn’t the paper spreadsheet, but the ah ha moment of clarity explaining why assemblers assume anything in the first column of text is a label, i.e. why assemblers require mnemonics to be prefixed by a space or tab. I’m an...
GDP is not the best of measures but it is what we use to meaure economies. Globally, (in 2023) that totals more than $100 trillion. My post-pandemic work is primarily focused on the bottom left slice of this big pie, in Africa. That continent’s GDP is more than $3 trillion, and even 1 trillion dollars is a lot of dollars, but in comparison to the rest of the world, is tiny. Smaller still as...
There are so many lessons in startups, startup investing, and technology adoption that come from looking back a few decades. For example, I’m out of the 1970s nostalgic computing rabbit hole, but that journey has subsequently led to reviewing the technological progress of the late 1900s and early 2000s. This week, that was the rise of the RISC-based CPU, which was then obviously going to...
