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William Janeway

lines on the record: 111
first: 2018-08-23
most recent: 2018-08-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Those lines are just waiting. So, you know, but I think that is something I had to learn by doing. Learn the hard way in the job.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Certainly of building a great company and of exploring where they can invest this cash flow for the future. They've been brilliant acquirers of relevant technology. Sure.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. They can afford to make upstream investments in science that other companies are not able to. They're supposed to take their cash, any extra cash they have, and use it to buy back stock. So I think that there's a challenge here because By and large, I actually do think that Sergei Brennan and Larry Page have done a pretty damn good job.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There can be, you know, you can see that at Google and a Facebook with all that's going on at Facebook, because they're exempt from real governance by stockholders.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but that's not the case when you're talking about founders, you know, whether it's Elizabeth Holmes who owned 99% of the voting shares.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can see there's been this sort of shift in the terms of trade. They used to say the golden rule is he who has the gold rules.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I guess when I first started, I didn't perhaps have enough appreciation that the terms of the relationship with the entrepreneur matters so, so much. And one of the things I worry about now.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Broaden your outlook and look for the great novels. I'll tell you, if more people had read Trollop's The Way We Live Now, which is about a fraudster, operating in the context of financial speculation about technology 150 years ago, you know, we might not, we'd have had fewer people would have followed Bernie Madoff. Right, right.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, in a way, I've already given it. You know, half of all the male undergraduates at Stanford are taking computer science. I think more than that at MIT. You don't have to tell them take computer science. What I would say is... along with your computer science, along with your AA, read history, read the history of economics, but also of politics.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the final reason was it turned out that the IBM data center was no longer a rich, vibrant, growing market. It was stagnating. It was declining. That lesson was worth all the money we wrote off in ECsoft because it said now's the time. Now we can go at IBM.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And we were, well, but we were stuck supporting the product without the techies who'd built it. Or three, halfway in between, they could be bought by computer associates, a really big, ugly company at that time. And that was the worst of all. And one of each, at least one of each happened.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Those companies in the US, there are three things that could happen to them, the people we were licensing product from. One, they could grow up and succeed and get big and want to take their products back. They could fail completely.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Between doing a project as a service company and walking away and selling a product that you are responsible for and you have to support is chalk and cheese. Very different. Totally different. Second.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they had perceived it was kind of a hole in the market. In the US, you had a host of new companies, software companies, that were delivering tools for making it easier and more efficient and more productive to use a big IBM machine. And their technology, their products, didn't get to Europe because they were too small to build a European channel. So the idea was we would get together, we would buy a set of to the IBM data centers spread across all of industrial Europe, just the way it was in the US. And then we would bring into them products that we licensed from those American companies. And that way we would build a pan-European business. It was called EasySoft. There were three entirely separate independent reasons why this was a really bad idea. The first was”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More than one learning by failing. Well, I'll tell you the story's in the book. When we were working how to invent, one of the passages towards investing in helping IBM cease to be a monopoly? Came through a company that we started right around 1990, 1989, 1990. This was when the European community, the single market was created. And we hooked up with a couple of American entrepreneurs who knew the European computer, commercial computing industry really well.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, I read a lot of academic papers, and that's one of the reasons I teach the course in a way, it forces me to stay up with the literature. And you know, something we haven't talked about, but this is a message I want to deliver. 2008 was a crisis. It was shocking, and it almost brought the world economy down. But for economics as a discipline, for finance as a discipline, it was the gift that keeps on giving. It has shocked those disciplines out of a kind of complacent assumption that the market will always deliver the right answer reliably and with resilience, and it is generated a body of growing body of much more realistic and relevant. Academic work based on a shift of focus from pure theory towards empirical analysis.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then, on the other hand, I read a Harvard historian Sven Beckert. Wrote a book on the cotton industry, the cotton textile industry, which came out about five years ago or so. It is an amazing examination of the first global industry, again, an industry which critically depended on the power of states. Create the sources, the raw cotton coming in. And the dynamism of entrepreneurs and speculative capital.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I read a lot of history. I read a lot of history. I've been just stumbled on an extraordinary book that I should have known existed, and I wish I had because I sure would have used it in my book, and I will be using it in my economics course at Cambridge. It's called Funding a Revolution It was published in 1999 at the peak of the internet bubble by the National Academies of Sciences. It's a detailed, granular report on each program through which the United States government created the digital revolution. It's not for everybody, perhaps. I found it riveting because you had the people, the names, the programs, where they came from, where they went”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which was the predecessor. He was an investor in scientific data systems, which was another one of the first generation minicomputer companies. It was bought by Xerox. It was the first billion-dollar exit in the history of the venture capital industry. And of course he was, along with the venture arm of the Rockefeller family, he was the original investors in Apple. I hope”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back in the day, oh, yeah, sure, in addition to Fred, one of the most phenomenally successful venture capitalists ever was Arthur Rock.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And to interact with somebody who was deeply engaged in understanding the dynamics of the financial system, and as you say, how stability breeds in stability, how confidence becomes overconfidence, becomes over-lending, and leads to a crisis. And that is going to have an impact on the real economy. It's not just happening off there on the markets. And that was a huge, huge benefit, of course, going into the world of the last 15 years.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But I got to know Minsky. Brilliant guy, right? Right. And he came east. He wound up at Leon Levy's Institute at Bard College. And I used to go there in the late 80s and sort of play hookie from venture capital. But it gave me the chance to think.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Stability begets instability. Right. And he never put it into math, which made it hard for him to be accepted. But by the mainstream economists, who...”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“was a maverick renegade. He'd gotten his doctorate at Harvard under the great Joseph Schumpeter. But he didn't follow, he refused to follow the new line of efficient markets.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But then in the mid-80s, when I was really engaged in this new swinging world, Through my cousin, who was out in St. Louis, he'd been at Monsanto, I met one of the most remarkable figures in the second half of the 20th century, Hyman Minsky.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now, 45 years ago, he and I connected, we collaborated effectively. There's a lot about that in my book. He was a tough guy, and he used to tell me that I was really good at admitting my mistakes. And I used to tell him that the only compliment he ever gave me was he never offered me a job.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fred came from the back streets of Brooklyn. Went from Brooklyn College to Harvard Law School, joined actually one of the leading Catholic law firms in New York and discovered he was a terrific turnaround artist and put together the financing for the second successful minicomputer company Data General.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got to give one of them up. So that was the end of the marathon. That was the end of the marathon Critical influence in my perspective, as I say, was Fred Adler.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And ex smoker. And then I made this fundamental decision because on the one hand, I was joining Warburg Penkis after I'd been serving out my contract, after we'd sold the Eberstadt firm. And I knew that was going to be a full time job. And on the other hand, My wife was running a consulting business, and I had worked out that if we really wanted to have a kid. Staying in the same city as her doctor suggested was probably a useful enabling. And so we were going to have a kid. And I decided that You could have a full-time job. You could try to be a decent parent. And you could run competitively at the club level in New York. Two out of three. Right.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, let's see. I guess the most important thing that you probably don't know is that when I was 45, I ran a 119 half marathon in the 59-minute 10 miler. And then that was the summer.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know that as a fact. I like the concept. It certainly was. There was a sense there that public investment for the public good was legitimate, appropriate, and whether you called it, you didn't have to call it socialism, it was just, it was for the public good.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“and giving it as a gift to subsidize the building of the transcontinental railroads. We built the interstate highway system We built it under a Republican president. By the way, the legislation was called the National Defense Transportation Act. It was legitimate because they designed it so that every bridge was high enough. That a transporter carrying an atlas first generation intercontinental ballistic missile could be driven along the interstate and that made The investment in the public transportation network for the country made it politically legitimate”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How they describe, but you know, that's what going back into that history of the Defense Department and DARPA and Silicon and software and microprocessors and the internet. That's why it's so important. Going back to the history of how we tied the nation together with transcontinental railroads by taking 9% of the land area of the lower 48 states.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you, I'm not born to be. I don't practice as a political prognosticator. You can read all about that in so many different places. I have those I respect, those I don't respect. But I will say this, and this I think I have some expertise in, if you're going to maintain, if a nation is going to maintain leadership, in taking science, deriving from it, working technology, and converting that technology into job-creating, profit generating, real business, then one player in that game has to be a legitimate, honest, functioning government.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you go through it, you'll see that there's program after program people and initiatives and conferences and all that. Now, after looking at that, now go and look at.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, that's, and you know, how long this persists, how long we have, I got to share with you because I know you know how to read the net. One of the more maybe most frustrating things you can do. Right now, let's go to Google, type in the letters OSTP. That stands for Office of Science and Technology Policy. And you'll see whitehouse.Ostp.gov. If you bring that up Well, I'll ask you to just let it sit there on the Google screen.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly right. And that's what this new edition of my book is really trying to deliver and to deliver to audiences that include those disruptors. It will be better for our whole system, and it'll certainly be better for us to have a better chance of responding to the Chinese challenge, which ain't going away. Of course, this comes at a peculiar moment in American history, in American politics.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there is now a giant political pushback. You know, big tech is a target. Some of it has been invited by a kind of arrogance that goes with, as I say, it goes with the territory of being the source, the leader, the manager, the driver of transformational technology into the economy. It will be best for everyone if there's a more deeper understanding of the world that is being disrupted, not just understanding of the forces of disruption. And frankly,”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And certainly the throw weight in terms of insight, foresight that Tim has demonstrated over a long generation. And by the way, let me just flag his book with the amusing title, WTF, What's the Future? Is a great guide to reading the digital revolution as it has unwound, as it has evolved over the last couple of years, last 20 years. Tim has exactly what I'm talking about, a deep interest in the history and not just the technical history, but the cultural and political history that we are transforming. And you know, this is not the first time that there's been a political backlash from new technology. William Jennings Bryan, the populist movement at the end of the 19th century, was a response to the railroads.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, I'm at more than one remove away from this. I'm not running a portfolio and I haven't for years. But I do stay tuned in. In particular, you mentioned in introducing me. I'm Tim O'Reilly's outside director at O'Reilly Media. Tim is just”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They bought an apartment Exactly. That's a completely legitimate. So my point here is only that in addition to all the STEM discipline, science, technology, engineering, mathematics that we all focus on as the secret for the future, a little more teaching and history. Little more even reading relevant historical novels, a little learning about the political, the evolution of regulations in particular domains, particular regimes could be very helpful for the entrepreneur, or at least their financial investor who's trying to give them a strategic sense of where to bob and where to weave and how to maximize the likelihood that their transformational technology will convert into long-term economic value.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Be denied exactly right. Barry, I think you're absolutely right. But the point is exactly that you need, and it took, Uber has, and Airbnb has been doing a better job of understanding that each local market that they go into has to be evaluated in its own terms with its own history and adapt thereto. And not all the regulations, a lot of them are, but not all the regulations are monopolist, rent-seeking. There's a reason why if you're having people stay in your apartment, you ought to have a fire extinguisher. Fire escape? Yeah, something like that.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they have a standing in the culture That's just different in kind. So, what happens when these disruptive, which are much more efficient economically, no question about that. and much more efficient technologically, but they run into these frictions, these political and regulatory frictions. It slows things down. Now, if you're promising to change the world and you have investors investing in you in pursuit of that 30, 40, 50% rate of return that comes from a successful revolution, and you get delayed by a year or two. But it just kills the present value. Of that hope for home run future. So it feeds back into the investment proposition that you're looking at today and you're trying to value today.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it also brings up, however, another aspect of where the digital revolution is. I thought it was attacking the authority of the state. Well, of course, a lot of that's happening at the local level. I'm not now talking about grand strategy. Or the future of the planet and climate change and all that. The problem here, and this is a problem for investors, is that too many of the genius entrepreneurs who know that they are creating a new world have zero interest in understanding how we got to this world that they're disrupting. What that means is that again and again and again, they pay no attention or they dismiss the existing ecosystem, which includes regulatory but not just political and state regulations, practices, culture. A black cab driver in London is not the same.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Contaminated blood. Right. But what I'm more interested in, and what I think is much more significant, is that these digital platforms and marketplaces, they are disruptive. They are creating opportunities for commerce on a radically different basis”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Med te Barry talked to any hematologist in the world and they will tell you it. I'm not a hematologist and I don't play one on television, but I do know some very good academic ones. You cannot run the full panel of bloods that they do when they put that needle in your arm.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Henry Kessinger and George Soldz. If you're ever given an investment opportunity where you have two members of the board who are former secretaries of state in their 90s in their 90s.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In September 2008, you couldn't scrape two nickels together. The perception of it is a sort of self-validating process. There's so much money around today that we can assume it will always be around until guess what? It's not. That's where I think the real challenge for the entrepreneurs and the core investors in these unicorns because the process of learning how to generate, to pay your bills, because your customers are giving you more money than you're paying out To serve them, that is a really hard discipline to learn. And if you're being able to raise $1 billion, $2 billion, $3 billion a year giving up almost no control, giving up minimal amounts of ownership, minimal dilution.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Liquidity comes in. Remember the liquidity in the buyout market in 2006? You remember that buyout of the Texas utility company, Electric Utility Company, what was it, $40 billion?”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Whatever it was. Reality distortion field. It certainly is a fact that there is a huge amount of money around. Now the two things to say about that. One is the thing about liquidity is the more you need it, the less there is.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source