YouSaid · the spoken record

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

“A little torching, but in a very different way. But I'll come back. That's a good point. Let's hold that thought. What you could see at Xerox Park were computers being networked together with special functions that they could be optimized for, while the machine in front of you was designed to be helpful. It was mapped to how people work. And it was much too expensive. And Xerox management back on the East Coast couldn't get their heads around the notion of making the kind of high-risk long-term investments so companies like Adobe and 3Com were founded by people who left Xerox Park.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It gave me the unfair advantage of seeing that computing computers were not, which were dominated by the IBM mainframes. With a second center in the digital equipment minicomputers and the competitors with digital equipment, these were very centralized systems. They had dumb terminals, green screens. You couldn't do any local work. Everything went back to the mainframe or the mini computer to be processed. It was a very rigid, inflexible. And of course, because each of these systems were proprietary. If you were a digital equipment customer, let alone an IBM customer, you had to buy everything from them. And believe me, they made money on that.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“because all the important variables of the economy, from interest rates to exchange rates to inflation rates, had just been blown out of the historical database. Well, I found these young guys, and I got a message. The message was, hey, this is what computers are interesting about. It's not just being a flexible typewriter or being a faster or more flexible adding machine. You can build simulations and explore the behavior of the world. That got me interested in computers. From there, the first wave of artificial intelligence, the first wave of the hype for artificial intelligence, that got me out to Xerox Park, the kind of the haven for the most creative people in the computing world, thanks to a friendship with John Seeley Brown, who was on his way to becoming director of Xerox Park. I got immersed ahead of the game, a kind of kind of unfair advantage in seeing where computing was going to go.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. But the young guys at MIT who'd been caught up in this, they learned a big lesson. And they set out using computers to build very detailed, very granular local models of economic behavior. And I stumbled on these guys as I was trying to find out how to think about and how to handle the consequences of the first oil crisis, which blew up all the econometric models. They were useless.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You know, it's funny, it was actually a crossover from being an economist to being a venture capitalist. In the mid-late 70s, when I was a kid on Wall Street, I was really interested in the kind of longer-term strategic issues around the economy. There had been a big fiasco, one of the first attempts to use computers to model the economy, not just model the world. Came out of MIT and was kind of a fiasco. It was called The Limits of Growth Study for the Club of Rome.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Build that's right. Locomotives, it's just code. Very mobile. They're very mobile. Second, however Not reported earnings so that, but what happened to that cash flow, and this is something again about the nature of the stock market, that cash flow has overwhelmingly been devoted. Apple being the most extreme example, stock buybacks and dividends. Not raising wages for workers, not investing in the new stuff, but putting more money in the pockets of stockholders, which is a rational response of management, particularly when they're stockholders who are increasingly index funds. are necessarily very short term oriented, and the executives are also short-term oriented. Hey, we eliminated the agency problem by tying their compensation to the stock price.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First, I think that's correct. I don't think the on average is about 18%, not 35%. Particularly the digital companies that can move their cash flows and their assets around buy keys on a computer.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Where in the trenches of venture capital that I evolved in through joining an extraordinary firm whose core competence was understanding the science-based industries. Chemicals to pharmaceuticals to electronics to computing. I discovered that what I learned at Cambridge as an academic economist was directly relevant to trying to frame the sort of decisions and the sort of ways of protecting yourself, your investors, and the entrepreneurs you are backing from the necessary ignorance of operating at the frontier of technology.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And right across the whole economy, the rational expectations hypothesis said government can't have any lasting impact on the economy because people in the economy will react and offset whatever it tries to do. In any case, I decided that at the ripe bold age of 27, I could not take this stuff and spend my life pumping it into the brains of innocent undergraduates. So I went on what I talk of as my 35 year sabbatical.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You got it. But by the time I finish my doctorate and was thinking I would pursue a course in economics, it turned out that economics was converting itself for a long generation into a kind of mechanical process of cranking out the efficient outcome on the assumption that everybody knew everything.”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, actually, it's a closer connection than I knew at the time it would be. When I got to Cambridge, I was studying under the students, the top students who had been taught by John Maynard Keynes. And I wrote my dissertation for Richard Kahn, who invented the multiplier as a way of looking at the impact of government spending or taxes on the macroeconomy. But all of the work that I did there, everything I learned there, was about decision-making under conditions of uncertainty. Decision making by investors, workers, consumers, businessmen, politicians who cannot know what the full consequences of their actions are going to be”
2018-08-23 · Masters in Business · William Janeway on What's Needed for the Innovation Economy · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source