Andy_G11

I suspect that the negative responses come mainly from people who regard selling as something that other people do. I certainly thought that marketing was quite an easy thing to do before I set up my own business and built my own products and had to try things like Google ads, SEO rankings, cold calling, networking, content creation, making deals, and more. Painful.

The fact is that we cannot get away from selling. Going for an interview - tart up your CV and sell yourself. Going on a date - sell yourself. Want to convince a jury - sell your case. Wanting to upgrade your property - sell your house. Build a product or deliver a service - sell it: even if it is genuinely the best on the market that people should know about, you have to crack open the market and you will likely have to work against resistance.

This perspective is strongly endorsed by Pikkety's work, which shows that returns on capital outperform returns on labor. Further, there is a trend for higher levels of capital to not just produce proportionately higher returns, but also higher percentage returns. E.g. Harvard's endowment fund earns a higher percentage return than the smaller endowment funds of other universities. This disparity may be because higher amounts of capital allow owners to not only employ more skilled financial resources, but also to cherry-pick investments and negotiate superior returns to an extent that is not possible for owners with less capital. The disparity in returns on capital vs labor result in a concentration of capital in fewer hands (inequality) and this is linked to reduced overall productivity. Piketty proposes a tax on capital (not just on a capital gain, but on the balance) to reverse this. This is undermined by the fact that it is regarded as an impossibility (politically), kind of like proposing that we all just learn to levitate to do away with polluting aircraft.

Excel is extremely accessible, which is both a strength and a weakness. People who are complete noobs are quite happy to open up Excel and pull together some logic and data with very little regard for the constraints of the tool. Then they can save it and email it to you and you can work with it. It is the epitomy of 'move fast and break things'. Try getting them to pull together a quick JavaScript file to show you what they are thinking... Whichever way Excel develops, I hope that it doesn't put off the noobs from their penchant to have a go because as much as there is the possibility for the tool to go horribly wrong, elevating it out of reach of the layman would be worse.

Society is currently not ideally structured to realise much of human potential (setting aside how some individuals with immense initiative will nevertheless succeed). Piketty has described how wealth concentration arises and is perpetuated and has drawn a link to reduced overall productivity. He has also proposed a wealth tax to circulate cash and resources to combat stagnation and inequality - your tax proposals on capital seem similar. A change in the distribution of income across society might lead to an uplift in the origination and development of new concepts and ideas, but to tackle some ideas will still demand hubs of resource concentration in some fields, e.g. CERN, pharma labs, space exploration, quantum computing, etc. Perhaps enabling many more nuclei of independent development will result in a snowballing effect which will ultimately create more of these large scale resource hubs, but even so I think that there will have to be an adjustment in the collaborative protocols we use to really significantly increase the growth, development and employment of talent and potential that is latent and currently wasted. Still, a great and relevant article.

Did you and your accountant review the shareholders' agreement thoroughly before finalising the fundraising with the new investors?

Cool - a chance to vent. Well, here's my helpful suggestion: maybe they should get the people who position the log out buttons for some websites to place the exit buttons on zoom or refresh buttons for forms - log outs are generally in the last place on a menu that is hidden off screen. Sometimes you have to right click somewhere for the option to appear. Or even Google 'how do I log out of XYZ?' to work out how to log out. For these sites, the pre-launch user group testing probably has a threshold of 60 seconds for new users to work out how to leave & if the bulk of test subjects manage to do it in under that time, it's back to the drawing board.

If non-fungibility is just a constraint of current technology protocols, and these protocols could be extended in time to allow exchange of larger swathes of tokens of different degrees of dissimilarity then the only things stopping this at the moment would seem to be demand - is that right? I.e. if Joe owned a uniquely verifiable, exchangeable and trackable piece of code, and so did Mary, then both of these codes could be pooled on the same market no matter how they differed within the constraints allowed by the protocols for verification, exchange and tracking?