Earlier this year I was at a dinner party with a VC(of course main office NoCa) and a top exec from your favorite tech company that you bash all the time. VC guy did state that deal making was being discussed at a fervent pace, but that his firm was very cautious. We talked about the wisdom of the Stuyvesant Town—Peter Cooper Village $5B debacle that Tishman Speyer and BlackRock walked away from this year. BTW, CALPERS invested and (probably lost) $600M in this project with their VC allotment to this project. Its obvious that Tishman and BlackRock folks are brilliant, we Piggs should bow to them. (maybe they didn’t read the fine print, which said $5.4Billion USD)
When the guy mentioned that Green tech is where VC money is looking, I went on a tirade, Piggington style. Let’s just say that these brilliant VC folks founding Tesla, etc are looking for the massive subsidy(handout, free cheese,etc) These “Green” firms are being planned and funded ONLY because of Govt subsidies, unlike the VC funded firms of the past that were privately funded. These “Green” firms can’t defy simple laws of physics and chemistry, their firms are not viable (by factor of 2-3 times, not 20-30%) without flu’s tax dollars. Its one thing to subsidize hybrid research, but quite another to subsidize questionable technologies such as ethanol, switchgrass, etc. Follow money back to lobby and that drives the funding, not science.
Uh, sorry, this sounds crude. But…Green tech isn’t want it’s cracked up to be? Really, no shit? Who would have thought building a car from ground up woulda taken more subsidy than a VC would/can offer and woulda been drawing red for a very long time??? Perhaps maybe that’s why you don’t hear much more than almost lipservice about”green tech” in China yet, except manufacturing Li-Ion batteries at considerably less cost since one can skirt all the environment laws we have here?…
It’s simple EQ…Something like green tech is not evolution, it’s revolution innovation. Revolution innovation is always going to be capital intensive, the first people who do it are going to eat into the capital. IF it’s successful, everyone else reaps the benefits because it’s much easier to enhance whatever is successful.
I have a feeling you’re probably warped because you look at these innovations and see the 1:10 (or worse) success to failures and think most of this is bullshit. (Most of the ideas are bullshit.) But at the same time I think you’re dismissing all of innovation and all the usefulness of what folks can do with what we have now. And entire businesses/innovation built around other people’s success (or failures)…
The playbook for why a lot of these companies from Asia are so good at what they are doing now is simple. Someone else took care of all the hard part, and they are just adding innovation on top of that to take it to the next level. Japanese companies did this. Taiwanese companies did this. Korean companies are doing this, and same could be said for the Chinese companies (such as Huawei)..And frankly this is what consumers want. They want innovation, and evolution. And they don’t care who does it. Faster, cheaper, better.
Anyone who does tech knows, it’s far easier to get add enhancements to something that has been proven to succeed versus coming up with that 1 hit idea in the first rate, because I believe that 1 hit idea is like 1 in 10 at best. Even VC knows that (or should know that). Why were they so busy trying to incubate the same idea multiple times during the dot.com days?… They knew as well as everyone else it’s about execution, not about the idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. It’s all about execution and most of the ideas will fail during execution…Some just take a 4th or 5th round of funding or a bridge loan before it’s declared dead.
Antivirus SW is perfect example in that it would not exist completely if Microsoft O/S wasn’t full of holes. You don’t have some MBA dude that has an idea that thinks “wow, MSFT is really buggy, my business plan is going to create patches and detectors for security flaws in MSFT products”. Someone is going have to be able to identify the “problem” and how to “solve it”. (Or in some cases, someone is going to create a problem and solve it…Irony, this is what MSFT does by creating a buggy O/S and also offering to sell you AV software…Lol…I’m still figuring out how gullible consumers are about that one). You can’t solve the problem or even identify it, if you don’t know what you’re doing.
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So the only people deluded are the ones that worship at the alter of the new VC crowd that now prey upon gullible Govt pension fund managers and figure out how to fleece taxpayers. But they may create high paying jobs, what the heck do I know?
Isn’t it bad enough that Student loans/grants provide over 80% of revenues for the for-profit universities that provide “passion degrees” that won’t pay the student loans?
Or that Fed Loans are causing tuition rates to go up 10% a year (no inflation here)
Or that health care subsidies are causing health care cost to skyrocket without any additional benefit? In fact, many medical procedures such as colonoscopy and stents have NEVER been proven to be scientifically better then less invasive, cheaper forms of treatment. But why conduct a study when you lobby Govt to force HMOS to pay most of costs? Is the USA most corrupt? You decide.
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I couldn’t agree with you more about Vulture Capitals. But, heh, frankly, my startup costs were too low needing a full fledge vc. Plus the greedy basters weren’t interested in single digit growth. Fine by me, nice angel investors took care of that, nor did they really understand what I wanted to do. Nor did I really want them to either.
Big R&D projects HAVE to be funded by the government. Because most of the time they won’t turn a buck. Most of the the technology advances have been from DOD, from the point of military weapons,etc. Spread spectrum (basis for CDMA came from the military use..Raytheon I believe).
I’m not following how you think this is relevant to people’s education.
As far as the U.S. government being corrupt. Yes…Being the most corrupt? Are you serious? You have any idea of the sort of things that go on overseas?
I won’t go into painful details about what can go one but if you have countries that has secondary economies larger than the primary one, how can the U.S. possibly be the worst?
Regarding innovation: why I keep saying the fat lady hasn’t sung is somewhat ironic, based on experiences dealing with some of these places that have two economies….there’s a fine line between what constitute gray market consumer electronics and what I mentioned the main “white market” players I mentioned above does. You’re going to trust me on this one, but there are multiple players in the secondary market that are driving invocation much more so the primary market players…Namely, because they can get the the market faster than their white market counterparts, and often with more features than their white market counterparts, such that the white market players end up copying in the copier. It’s a big business for parts suppliers that can’t play in tier 1/2/3 businesses, and those gray market CO’s, and enabled by open source, which coincidentally is also so cryptic/obscure, that very few people know top to bottom. You can put two and two together how innovation happens and the interesting relationship between gray and white. Problem is, very few people can put this shit together. Definitely not your run of the mill MBA with no technical knowledge, no operational experience, no project management experience, and no understanding of the intricate cultural details.
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So I may not know Jack, but I’ve met people who do and I can tell difference between innovation and Govt handouts.
BTW, did I ever mention that I once met Spielberg in Santa Monica, but the dude wouldn’t give me a break. Well, I coulda been an actor, but I wound up here, spilling dirty laundry.[/quote]
Well, I think you know a lot of things , just not necessarily about how certain businesses and countries work.
Great you met Spielberg. I haven’t met too many myself….I shook hands with Pat Buchanan in a bathroom in Syracuse one time when i was in college. When I told my parents, my mom asked me if I remembered to wash my hands before leaving….I’ve never been a big fan of celebrity myself…expect maybe asian porn stars..I’d like to think I try to control my own destiny…
