Be Wary of “Stupid Advice”

#Silicon Valley

Vinod Khosla: Be Wary of “Stupid Advice”

Peaks:

1. If you actually believe something, you try your best to make it happen. It doesn’t always happen, but it happens most of the time.
2. A 90% chance of failure is not a problem if there’s a 10% chance of (earning) 100 times your money.
3. The only people whose advice to an entrepreneur is worth heeding are those who have worked at a startup.And most VCs haven’t done that, so they give stupid advice. You know, if you got out of business school and joined a VC firm and grew up and eventually became a partner, you haven’t learned what it’s like to be in a startup

Infographic: Must-Listen VC and Startup Investor Podcasts

Peter Thiel and Reid Hoffman hit Shanghai to talk mafias, unicorns, and China

Peaks:

1. China is like-the US, it’s a challenge because it’s a big-market, so it’s hard-to-get traction, but in China or the US, once you get traction it becomes a very powerful base to expand. In Silicon Valley, people are underestimating China and many larger Chinese companies will try and scale for the rest of the world.
2. At Paypal they had to constantly confront death from factors like banking and the wrong business model, and they were always worried that competitors like Visa and MasterCard would shut it down. They had to fight tooth and nail for the business to survive and it wasn’t easy, so people in the Paypal Mafia gained the specific experience of dealing with these struggles and fighting for survival.

The people in Google or other companies may have a different experience and aren’t as paranoid for survival, Hoffman said, but maybe the intensity of their technology gives them a different useful characteristic.

#Millennials

Millennials Are Destroying Banks, And It’s The Banks’ Fault

Peaks:

1. Millennials are rejecting home ownership across the land. Millennials aren’t buying crap anymore, destroying businesses that, well, sell crap. Millennials are changing the workplace to be, I kid you not, more friendly to “millennial values.” Millennials this, millennials that, and those are just some of the stories published this week on this critical, hot-button issue.
2. If the big Wall Street banks fail in this new environment, it won’t be because they failed to bring millennials into the fold. It will be because they will have failed to innovate for all of their customers.

#Bitcoin

#Tech

I am Joi Ito, Director of MIT Media Lab - Ask Me Anything! * /r/IAmA

Peaks:

If Bitcoin should use an increase in block size to increase the number of transactions per second is an important debate. More importantly, how this decision is made will be a good example of how the community of developers, entrepreneurs, miners, and users will continue to collaborate on major changes to bitcoin core.

Over the last few months there has been a rich discussion through blog posts and open email chains. The MIT Media Lab Digital Currency Initiative is happy to host an open forum where a discussion can take place in person and online with the goal of coming to a satisfactory conclusion by the participants.

While it might take some trial and error to figure out exactly how this could work, we’re happy to support the community in this way if they think it would be helpful to come to a conclusion on this topic and use this model as an example for future discussions.

#Leader

The look of a leader

#Thinking

For American pundits, China isn't a country. It's a fantasyland.

Peaks:

People telling these tales aren’t interested in complexities or, really, in China. They’re making domestic arguments and expressing parochial fears. Their China isn’t a real place but a rhetorical trope, less a genuine rival than a fairy-tale bogeyman.