Baby Carrots: January 15, 2017 Snippets
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Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen a number of announcements from tech organizations, both here and abroad, around investments in job creation initiatives for the near term:
Amazon to create 100,000 new jobs in US in next 18 months | Spencer Soper & Jing Cao, Bloomberg
Softbank’s $100 Billion investment fund starts to take shape | NYT Dealbook
Alibaba’s Ma meets with Trump to talk about creating jobs | Selina Wang, Bloomberg
They’ve been called publicity stunts, distractions, or worse — bribes directed towards the incoming administration. But there are a few additional ways we can think about it. Let’s consider a few starting points of view:
Tech companies are amassing a lot of power, while being increasingly accused (fairly or not) of killing jobs. From the government’s standpoint, you certainly want to encourage and reward the economic growth, innovation and progress that they’ve driven forward. But you also would like to establish a meaningful carrot and stick setup for the future, yielding more levers you can pull for give-and-take job creation down the road. From the tech giants and their shareholders’ point of view, you have great interest in seeing that the checks and balances you’ll be subjected to in the future don’t become European-style handicaps to “promote competition by levelling the playing field”. No one wants that.
One way frame these recent job announcements, therefore, could be as a kind of tax. Imagine for a minute if the government announced something like the following: “All companies that generate over this many billion dollars of profit or free cash flow per year ought to pay a corporate job tax, which isn’t paying the IRS money but rather creating additional jobs. You can create them any way you want, and have them do anything you want, provided it’s real bona fide incremental job growth. You might as well have these jobs be as useful to you as possible, since the employees and their output will go to your balance sheet. If you fail to comply, you’ll face penalties; but if you successfully do so, we’ll let you thrive.” It’s a bit of a ridiculous idea, but there are some elements of win-win around that compromise. Of course, it quickly falls apart when you consider the practicalities of passing and enforcing such legislation. But maybe, in the real world, it doesn’t have to be a law at all. What may be emerging instead is a spontaneously occurring, early genesis of an industry norm.
The modern tech industry, we must remember, is only just entering it’s “adulthood”. While there have been high-profile clashes between tech and the government before (Microsoft’s antitrust case comes to mind), there hasn’t been nearly as much time for industry norms between businesses and the government to evolve as with, say, the oil and gas industry or the financial services industry. What we’re witnessing right now may well be the early public volleys at the start of such a multi-decade grand set of compromises. It’s a sign the tech industry is growing up, for better or for worse, and is establishing conventions around how exactly the carrots and sticks will be used. Like it or not, these kinds of things may simply happen as industries mature. The questions we might need to ask next seem to be: does this work for an industry whose core raison d’être is breaking rules, disrupting itself, and a perpetual push towards decentralization? How effective will these compromises even be, in the face of truly ownerless and open-source initiatives? When everyone claims they hold the sticks and carrots, does anyone?
First up, a quick warning about a very sophisticated Gmail phishing attack that, if you haven’t seen already, you should take note:
Wide Impact: highly effective Gmail phishing technique being exploited | WordFence
Notable letters from investors:
Outlook for 2017: Paradigm Shift | Henry McVey, KKR
“Expert Opinion” | Howard Marks, Oaktree Capital
Medium: a play in three acts
The mind-blowing AI announcement from Google that you probably missed | Gil Fewster
You requested someone with a degree in this? *holds up hand* | nafrondel
Orthogonal solutions:
How the Navy spend decades on bioluminescent plankton | Sarah Laskow, Atlas Obscura
Why big data and algorithms won’t improve business strategy (for most companies) | Simon Wardley
Two untenable solutions to the arrow of time | Adam Strandberg, The Lagrangian
Feats of music:
Stage Oddity: the story of David Bowie’s secret final project | Michael Cunningham, GQ
David Byrne on not being afraid to fail | with Brandon Stosuy, The Creative Independent
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/happens-algorithms-design-concert-hall-stunning-elbphilharmonie/
Momentum:
The first trillion dollars is the hardest: iOS reaches a new milestone | Horace Dediu, Asymco
The irreversible momentum of clean energy | Barack Obama, Science
Five reasons I am hopeful about Africa | Bill Gates
Takeout attempts:
The man who’s trying to kill dark matter | Natalie Wolchover, Wired
When the feds went after the hedge fund legend Steven A Cohen | Sheelah Kolhatkar, The New Yorker
Other reading from around the Internet:
Chan Zuckerberg institute builds political muscle for philanthropic work | Mike Isaac, NYT
Timing and infrastructure | Kanyi Maqubela
Should social science be more solution-oriented? | Duncan J Watts, Nature
Notes from a fireside chat with Punit Soni | Daksh, Cennest
Bill Gates on China, foreign aid, and vaccination | Gideon Rachman, Lunch with the Financial Times
In this week’s news and notes from the Social Capital family, we have a new partnership announcement to share. Glooko, fresh off their merger with Diasend late last year, has entered into a partnership with Danish health care heavyweight Novo Nordisk:
Glooko, Novo Nordisk team on personalized digital diabetes care | Neil Versel, MedCityNews
Novo Nordisk teams up with Glooko for digital diabetes management | Heather Mack, MobiHealthNews
The partnership creates a winning combination of Glooko’s powerful and easy to use diabetes management consumer tech products plus Novo Nordisk’s complimentary content, broad customer base, and market leadership. It comes at the right time, as public health studies continue to show diabetes as both the largest and fastest-rising source of personal health care spending in the US. From a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association: More resources were estimated to be spent on diabetes than any other condition, with an estimated $101.4 billion spent in 2013. Prescribed retail pharmaceutical spending accounted for an estimated 57.6% of total diabetes health care spending, whereas an estimated 87.1% of spending on diabetes was incurred by those 45 and older.
If you’d like to be part of the solution, Glooko is currently hiring for a number of open positions in Mountain View including Software Engineering, Data Analyst, Research Director, and Marketing. Please check it out, and forward along to anyone who might be interested.
Have a great week,
Alex & the team at Social Capital
