"From the 1960s through the 1990s, venture capital was an excellent way to pursue these twin interests. From 1999 through the present, the industry has posted negative mean and median returns, with only a handful of funds having done very well."
https://blakemasters.com/post/24122680868/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-15-notes
"Not all technology is created equal: there is a difference between Pong and the Concorde or, less glibly, between Intel and Pets.com. Microprocessing represents real technological development, peddling pet food on-line, less so. Conversely, things that may be dismissed as fake technologies (Amazon and Facebook occasionally receive this critique) often resolve very challenging technological problems. Among its many innovations, Amazon helped develop intelligent customer recommendations and logistical efficiencies that allow you to order almost anything, anytime, and get it the next day; Facebook developed ways to manage large numbers of connections in a computationally efficient way, create an effective developer ecosystem, and to make it pleasurable to administer your on-line relationships."
"In 1976, when Genentech launched, the field of recombinant DNA technology was less than five years old and no established player expected that insulin or human growth hormone could be cloned or commercially manufactured, much less by a start-up."
I want to know how they measured that productivity per capita. It's hard for me to believe that it hasn't increased by orders of magnitude.
"Often, even great technologies fail to earn the inventors or investors a return (see, e.g., Nikola Tesla)."
"Shockley Semiconductor, Fairchild Semiconductor, and Intel all successfully resolved roughly similar technical problems, but only Intel truly prospered – poor management consigned the other two to “also-ran” status."
"And what does it mean to be contrarian? It does not mean simply doing the opposite of what the majority does – that’s just consensus thinking by a different guise, a minus sign before the conventional wisdom. The problems of reactive contrarianism are the same as those of following the herd. The most contrarian thing to do is to think independently. It is not without its risks, because there is no cover from the crowd and because it frequently leads to conclusions with which no one else agrees."
War & Peace.
https://blakemasters.com/post/23250566538/peter-thiels-cs183-startup-class-12-notes