Been a bit occupied with audiobooks for the past few months, getting back into the podcast grind… here are this week’s recs!
Monday: The Peter Drucker Forum / Booms and Busts with Carlota Perez. Part II of the interview, here.
Everything today feels so frantic.
Ads telling you about a MUST WATCH VIDEO. BREAKING NEWS alerts. Notifications in general as apps desperately compete for a slice of your attention. CEO’s obsessed with short term metrics at the expense of longterm value.
Carlota Perez’s insight is very refreshing in today’s FOMO culture. Carlota takes the long view of history and technology, looking at centuries rather than decades. Her theories have provided a foundation for Fred Wilson and his fellow VCs at Union Square Ventures, the Gartner Hype Cycle, and other influential VCs and entrepreneurs.
History doesn’t repeat, but it definitely rhymes and Carolta puts a fascinating structure in place to understand where we are technologically and where we’re going. Lose your shirt in the dotcom boom or bitcoin? Turns out these frenzies and busts are necessary for technological advancement. During these frenzies, money flows in and the infrastructure is built for the technology to flourish in the future. This happened everytime. With canals, with steel, with the automobile, and with information/communications technology.
This two part podcast is a good start. For more, check out the below links. Or, buy Carlota’s book, Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages. It’s on my bookcase and next in the queue.
Carlota’s website, here.
From Fred Wilson –
Quick take on the theory: The Carlota Perez Framework.
Fred Interviewing Carlota at the 2011 Web 2.0 Expo, here.
Jerry Neumann’s comprehensive post on Carlota’s theory: The Deployment Age.
Alright, that’s a lot for Monday, but it’s worth digging in as much as possible.
Tuesday: A16Z / Software Programs the World.
In 2011, Marc Andresseen announced that Software is Eating the World. 7 years later, it’s impossible to disagree. In 2016, he refreshed his thesis in his podcast Software Programs the World.
Wednesday: Slow Burn: A Podcast About Watergate / Episode 1: Martha.
Huge shoutout to Leon Neyfakh and Slate for this 8 episode dive into Watergate. It’s gripping. No matter what you know about Watergate, or think you know, Leon’s right that it was “stranger, wilder, and more exciting that you can imagine.” I listened to the first few episodes and am glued to my earpods. After recently watching All the President’s Men for the first time, the release of this podcast came at a great time for me.
This is the creative listen for the week since it weaves the true story together in such a compelling way.
iTunes link, here.
Thursday: Waking Up with Sam Harris / # 117 Networks, Power, and Chaos – A Conversation with Niall Ferguson.
I’ve been reading about networks and platforms lately, with this book on platform business models of note: Modern Monopolies – What it Takes to Dominate in the 21st Century Economy. Humans have always gathered into social networks – it used to be the town squares and now it’s on platforms like Facebook. Interested to see what Niall has to say about these ancient and modern networks.
To round out this week’s focus on networks, no better man to end with than the namesake of Metcalfe’s Law. The two laws dominating technology today are Moore’s Law and Metcalfe’s Law. Metcalfe’s describes the phenomenon known as network effects. This is what makes Facebook, Google, Airbnb and other networks so sticky. It basically says that each additional user of a product/services makes it more valuable for all other users. Think of telephones, they aren’t very useful if only 100 people in America have one. But as that number grows, the telephone becomes more and more valuable. For networks, this leads to a winner-take-all-dynamic that makes it very hard for any one to compete.
Looking forward to going to The Source on network effects to learn more.
Happy listening!