“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant, I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.” – Mark Twain

“Baseball is too much a sport to be a business and too much a business to be a sport.” – Phil Wrigley, former owner of the Chicago Cubs

“Why not? I had a better year than he did.” – Babe Ruth when asked if he thought it was fair he made more than President Hoover in 1930

Read the full piece, EIEIO…Wide World of Sports here:

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“There are only two types of companies in the World. Those who are great at AI and everybody else. If you don’t know AI you are going to fail. Period.” – Mark Cuban

“In the 21st Century, the Robot will take place which slave labor occurred in ancient civilization.” – Nikola Tesla

“I am not a robot. I have a heart and I bleed.” – Serena Williams

“People wait all week for Friday. All year for Summer. All life for happiness.” – Anonymous

Read the full piece, EIEIO…Working for the Weekend here:

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“Be a fountain, not a drain.” – Rex Hudler

“Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the rest of the Ivy League are worthy institutions, to be sure, but they're not known for educating large numbers of poor young people.” – Robert Reich

”Speech is not violence. Silence is not violence. Violence is violence.”  – University of Florida President Ben Sasse

”In a democracy, we have always had to worry about the ignorance of the uneducated. Today, we have to worry about the ignorance of people with college degrees.” – Thomas Sowell

Read the full piece, EIEIO…Up Schitt’s Creek? here:

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Vinod Khosla (Founder & Managing Director, Khosla Ventures) in conversation with Rich Karlgaard (Editor-at-large, Global Futurist, Forbes) on StageX:

Khosla explores the transformative potential of AI tutors in personalizing education, improving student outcomes, and empowering teachers to focus on the human elements of teaching.

Reid Hoffman (Co-Founder of LinkedIn, Co-Founder of Inflection AI, Partner at Greylock) and Marcus Brauchli (Managing Partner, North Base Media) in conversation at ASU+GSV Summit:

Hoffman shares his insights on how AI can revolutionize education and amplify human capabilities while emphasizing the importance of shaping AI development to be trustworthy and beneficial.

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0:00 Intro to Michael and Brent
0:45 What isn’t going to change?
2:37 Dash Media’s philosophy and growth so far
7:09 Impact of AI in education and the rise of AI tutors
11:52 ASU+GSV Summit and the AIR Show w/ guests Vinod Khosla Reid Hoffman
13:42 Reaction to the first Imagine AI Live conference

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“I never let my schooling get in the way of my education.” – Mark Twain

“Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” – Margaret Mead

“You think education is expensive, try ignorance.” – Derek Bok

“Early admissions programs tend to advantage the advantaged.” – Derek Bok

Read the full piece, EIEIO…Pickle in the Middle here:

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Tune in for an insightful discussion between Amitabh Kant, India's G20 Sherpa, a governance reformer and policymaker responsible for the start-up movement in India; and Michael Moe, Founder and CEO of GSV.

Focusing on India's growth trajectory and the potential of its youth, this fireside dialogue highlights Mr. Kant's views on building a robust education system that combines academic knowledge with skill development while making India a "Vishwaguru" in higher education.

As the brain behind India's start-up story, with 110K+ start-ups flourishing in the country, we learn about Mr. Kant's experience in nurturing an ecosystem that fuels innovation, attracts investors, and lays the foundation for the next big chapter of India's economic story.

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"In the short term, the Market is a voting machine. In the long term, it's a weighing machine." – Ben Graham

"If past history was all there was to the game, the richest people would be librarians." – Warren Buffett

"People bet on the hourly wiggles of the market but it's the earnings that waggle the wiggles long term." – Peter Lynch

Read the full piece, EIEIO…Speed Thrills here:

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In addition to the Income Statement, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flows, a fourth component needs to be incorporated for the Modern Financial Statement…and that’s around enterprises’ Human Capital and Data.

In the Knowledge Economy, the success of an enterprise is directly correlated to the ability to obtain, train, and retain the best talent.

This is a significant shift from the Industrial Economy, where it was the return on property, plant, and equipment that generated more significant financial returns.

50 years ago, the four largest companies in the world sold at a median book value of 1.6 and a Market Cap Per Employee of $83,391.

Today, the world's four largest companies by market cap sell at a median price to book of 16.4X and a Median Market Value Per Employee of $11.2 million. In other words, the Price to Book is 10X higher, the employee count is 1/2, and the market cap per employee is over 100X higher today vs. 50 years ago.

As a leading indicator of future revenues and enterprise value, certain employee metrics deserve integration. These include revenue per employee versus cost, investment in training and development, turnover, and internal advancement versus external hiring, to name a few. We measure R&D spending as an indicator of future growth and sustainability and argue that measuring investment and “return on people” is logical too.

Click below to read this week’s full piece: EIEIO...Talent Wars

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“I want big, strong American companies.” - Charlie Munger

“A republic. If you can keep it.” - Benjamin Franklin

“North is still north.” - Clarence Thomas

“America is great because she is good. If America ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” - Alexis de Tocqueville

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The best offense is a great defense. In ’s recent speech at Shift’s Defense Ventures Summit, she delivered a bold and brilliant articulation of the case for American Dynamism.

We agree with Warren Buffett and the late, great Charlie Munger that you should never bet against America. After all, as Jamie Dimon likes to say, the United States has the best hand ever dealt any country on this planet, ever.

But to whom much is given, much is required. Boyle's timely call to action emphasizes the risks we face. Many among us seem to be doing all they can to squander our hard-earned success by shunning the very values that fueled it. We wrote a newsletter on this topic back in April and it was one of our most well-received editions: EIEIO…Believe in Something.

When nihilism abounds and despair runs rampant, builders get chastised and optimists get shouted down. You win a war against America by suppressing the innovation and entrepreneurial spirit that has made the USA the shining city upon a hill.

“You win a war against America when you greet builders with suspicion. When your instinct is to destroy the weirdos doing new things on the frontier.”

To the entrepreneurs and the pioneers charting new frontiers, we urge you to press onward. Ignore the boos, they usually come from the cheap seats anyway.

Failure to remember who we are, where we came from, what holds us together, and where we are headed is how this spectacular American experiment falters. Reconnecting with our values allows for continued, uncapped prosperity in the greatest country in the history of the world.

– MM

See the video below for Boyle’s full speech (which starts at 2:50). Trust us, it’s worth the watch.

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The following was written by Katherine Boyle for .

Two years ago, I made a bold prediction, which is actually a bad thing for a venture capitalist to do because we’re so often wrong. During the Reagan National Defense Forum, I tweeted “Time is Running Out with Silicon Valley.” We needed to figure out how to get the Department of Defense to transform its laborious, unproductive procurement process. If they didn’t, start-up companies with breakthrough ideas were going to abandon military defense and move to more fruitful areas of technology. We had to move faster. We had to act with urgency. Because American defense—and the defense of our allies—depended on us.

And then just a few months later, that prediction became a moot point: Russia invaded Ukraine and reminded us why defense technology is not merely something to debate in theory. We were living in a new geopolitical reality. Time wasn’t running out. The sand was at the bottom of the hourglass. History had begun again, and we understood we were entering a new, violent age that would look different from the recent past.

In that narrow window before the world changed, I also wrote a thesis for a new category of technology company. At the time, this felt somewhat controversial, maybe even a little shocking, to my friends in San Francisco. In the essay I stated that my firm Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest venture capital firms in the world, was unabashedly and proudly declaring its unanimous support for America. That we were betting on America. And that this wasn’t a marketing gimmick or some ESG-adjacent nonsense, but a strategy. We’re in the business of value creation. Of taking bets on things that get very big, very fast. We concluded that America and our allies are best off when we’re building technology companies that support the national interest.

We believe a strong America means a strong world. A safer world. A more civilized world, which is a term we should use more. And that technology is the backbone of maintaining this order and civilization and always will be.

We called this movement American Dynamism. In the investing business, it’s all about calibrating risk and sometimes taking bets that others don’t see. But this bet was and is so obvious. It might have just taken a little bit of moral courage to say the word America out loud.

But others have said it. The great investors will tell you: one of the few certainties of the last 150 years has been the growth and dynamism of the United States. Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger, at their recent annual meeting in Omaha, repeatedly reminded their investors “never bet against America.” Buffett reminded the crowd that a young country like ours started out with half of one percent of the world’s population, and just 247 years later, here we are commanding 25 percent of the world’s GDP.

“A miracle,” he called it. That’s an oddly religious phrase for an investor, but an accurate one. Jamie Dimon prefers a poker analogy: that America has the best hand ever dealt to any country on this planet, ever. Whether it’s our geography, our universities, our peaceful neighbors, our natural resources, the rule of law, our work ethic, innovation in the core of our bones, the widest and deepest financial markets, and the best military on the planet. We will have this last item, he said, “for as long as we have the best economy.”

America is destined to win.

So why are we starting to fear that this miracle is now on shaky ground? Why do we sense we’re encountering the greatest global unrest since the Cold War? That we’ve entered the most precarious moment in our lives?

Because deep down, we know how you win a war against America.

• You win a war against America when we stop innovating. When we become scared of technology, and the drive that resides deep in our bones. When we cease to be the world’s exporter of innovation and cede that role to China, or to global consortiums of dunces.

• You win a war against America when you greet builders with suspicion. When your instinct is to destroy the weirdos doing new things on the frontier.

• You win a war against America when old companies become too big to fail and ensure that the little ones around them are squashed instead. When we trust age more than we trust vitality, when everything is old—from our infrastructure to our industrial base to our political leaders—because we’ve conquered and discouraged the new.

• You win a war against America when our identities become more important than our duties to each other. When we turn inward and focus on our neuroses rather than on the needs of our families and our communities. Around fifty years ago, sociologist Philip Rieff called modern man “psychological man” in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, noting that psychological man “is likely going nowhere, but aims to achieve a certain speed and certainty in his going.” In 50 years, our new neuroticism is now a meme that mocks men who would rather build things and do things than go to therapy, an ethos we used to celebrate in this country.

• You win a war against America when we believe the doomer memes and stop thinking life has meaning at all. When our faith in everything is broken: a recent Wall Street Journal poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the very things that used to define our national character—have eroded in the last 25 years. Less than thirty percent of people say patriotism is important to them, down from 70 percent two decades ago. Religion, having children, and community fared the same. You win the war against America when it’s nihilism all the way down.

• You win a war against America when our great cities are ruled by crime rings. When businesses are shuttered because security is meaningless theater. When our police are derided. When good people are driven out by bad policy.

• You win a war against America when fentanyl pours across our borders, manufactured by an adversary that still remembers the Opium Wars, and delivered by cartels that have no respect for human life. One hundred thousand of our countrymen and women are dead every year in a silent epidemic that’s being met with a collective shrug.

• You win a war against America with toys like TikTok that give our adversaries direct access to the anxious minds of teenagers. You win a war against America when you invest billions of dollars in the CCP’s tech ecosystem and pretend that’s just the way business works.

• You win a war against America when you have us both-sidesing terrorism. When “nuance” and “it’s complicated” gets in the way of condemning barbaric enemies who slaughter children in their bedrooms as they plead for mercy. You win a war against America when we no longer believe in good and evil, civilization and destruction, just fine people on both sides.

• You win a war against America when many in our media and universities seem more aligned with the propaganda of Hamas than the interests of this country. When we forget about hostages because the news cycle thundered to some other Current Thing. You win a war against America when the debate is no longer about security versus privacy but our modern and more dangerous debate of security versus grievance.

• You win a war against America when you can no longer speak freely in the land of free speech. When we consume more than we create. When we attack capitalism, the engine of our growth, as though we don’t deserve and shouldn’t celebrate the fruits of our building.

• You win this war against America silently, methodically, and without firing a single shot.

  ---

But the good news is we know how to fight back. And we’re here because we heard the call to build against these dark forces we face. We know technology is the escape hatch from a nihilistic world. That democracy demands a sword and sometimes we have to use it to defend ourselves, our allies, and civilization.

Some have been critical that we named this movement American Dynamism, but I’ll tell you, never have two words in the investing community meant so much and stood for real, civilizational truth. We often focus on America—the obvious beneficiary of our building. “American” was meant not only as a symbol of what we build for but the unseriousness we reject, a global elite that would be so foolish as to have Iran chair a UN Human Rights forum. America is order—the order we want, the order our allies want. And we shouldn’t be afraid to say that.

But even more important than our choosing the word America is the word Dynamism, the teleological end of technological supremacy. We aren’t American defense, or defense tech, or hard tech, or deep tech, or military tech. Those are means to the end we aspire to—but what is that end?

Dynamism is growth, movement, momentum, and opportunity. In his techno-optimist manifesto, Marc Andreessen wrote, “We believe everything good is downstream of growth. We believe not growing is stagnation, which leads to zero-sum thinking, internal fighting, degradation, collapse, and ultimately death.” Dynamism is life. And we embrace dynamism and the values upon which the country was founded because they are true and worth defending. Dynamism makes America the country people want to be from, to immigrate to, and to build a life, career, or company in.

Alexis de Tocqueville described America as many things, but he was struck by the insatiable spirit of American dynamism and opportunity:

The American lauds as a noble and praiseworthy ambition what our forefathers stigmatized as servile cupidity. In America, fortunes are lost and regained without difficulty, the country is boundless and its resources inexhaustible. . . . Boldness of enterprise is the foremost cause of its rapid progress, its strength, and its greatness. Commercial business is there like a vast lottery by which a small number of men will continually lose, but the State is always a gainer.

The State is always a gainer. America always wins.

So how do we ensure we continue building dynamism? How do we win a slow and methodical silent war?

Well, it takes will and it takes courage.

Every day I talk to smart young people who want to work in tech or become founders. And I ask them a simple and obvious question—one that should be instinctual to answer. Not about their revenue goals or their product or how they’re going to scale a team from 5 to 50. But a more essential question: What do you believe? Why will people follow you? I might as well ask: What is your creed? What will you shout from the rooftops even if you’re maligned for it?

We don’t win a war against bad ideologies unless we know who we are, what we stand for, and where we’re headed. And if we lose this silent war—the ultimate war for American ideals—it’s not because we don’t have the know-how to build missiles and hypersonics and attributable systems and drone swarms. It will be because we doubt our inheritance. Because we doubt the beauty and nobility of what we’re building. Because we doubt that American Dynamism is true and the key to a safer, more prosperous civilization.

Katherine Boyle is a venture capitalist and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. She is the co-founder of the American Dynamism practice, which invests in companies building to support the national interest. Follow her on X @KtmBoyle. 

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EVERYTHING.

In his opening keynote for last month's 2023 GSV Leaders Summit in Nashville, Tennessee, Michael Moe walked through the past, present, and future of the global education landscape.

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Investing in emerging growth companies takes a strong stomach. Often, conventional wisdom is against the idea.

The term “groupthink” was popularized during the Vietnam Era. Essentially, it describes how smart people, when together, make really dumb decisions.

Groupthink typically occurs when people become preoccupied with what the group consensus is, and that obsession overrides the motivation to assess situations objectively. 

Opportunity will always be on the edge. There is always a growth market somewhere and big opportunities that are being ignored by the masses.

While I’m very Bullish on the advancement for humanity that generative AI presents, it’s not going to be for its creativity by itself – it’s an Index Fund…..or an aggregator of conventional wisdom.

Click below to read this week’s full piece: EIEIO...There’s No Place Like NEOM

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Human history began in the Middle East…hopefully it won’t end there.

It was no coincidence Hamas, Iran and Co. staged their assault when they did. After the game-changing Abraham Accords between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, there was a pathway formed towards normalized relations with a number of Gulf States, with Saudi Arabia at the top of the list.

The Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, MBS, has spent the past 6 years on a $500 billion development project called NEOM.

The site covers an area of more than 10,000 square miles (about the size of Massachusetts), and enjoys a strategic location within a 6-hour flight for 40% of the world's population. Clearly a response to the success of Dubai as a “hub” for commerce, innovation and entertainment, NEOM has the leadership, blank canvas, and ambition to be a game-changer.

It’s important to note that while NEOM is 1,000 kilometers from Riyadh, it’s just 100 kilometers from Israel.

We'll be watching closely, but given the enormous progress Saudi Arabia has made to advance its society and its opportunity to be the center of the World of the 21st century, we have hope that the combination of the Invisible Hand and the Iron Fist will come together to bring peace and prosperity to the Middle East. 

Click below to read this week’s full piece: EIEIO...There’s No Place Like NEOM

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These are the three pillars of the framework we use to identify companies and ideas that ignite human flourishing. 

The subcategories within these pillars drive outcomes in longevity, purpose, and learning. From injury prevention, to mentorship marketplaces, to educational video games – we believe massive growth is on the horizon. 

Click below to read this week’s full piece: EIEIO...Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

You either get better or you get worse. You never stay the same. 
This truth applies to both people and businesses. 

When incumbents become complacent and stagnate, they get overtaken by disruptive challengers who stay focused on growth no matter the conditions.

To win the race, entrepreneurs and investors must remain systematic and strategic towards our objectives and disciplined, humble and accountable with our attitudes. 

Read and subscribe to this week's EIEIO...Green With Envy to understand why there is no substitute for disciplined leadership. 

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EIEIO...Green With Envy

GSV’s weekly insights on the global growth economy. Join 22,000+ readers getting a window to the future by subscribing here…

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3 years ago · Dash Media

Geniuses make complex things simple. Mediocre people make complex things more complex.

Peter Lynch of Fidelity showed how a companies stock over time was essentially 100% correlated with its growth. Accordingly, the secret to success is focusing on investing in companies with the highest earnings growth for the longest time.

Read and subscribe to this week's EIEIO "Dow 1,000,000" to see our annual analysis of the top performing stocks of the past decade, and to learn the simplest recipes for spectacular success in the public market:

From Alexander the Great to Ponce De Leon, the Fountain of Youth has been on adventurers’ bucket list to avoid “kicking the bucket."

Today, the global wellness market is $4.4 Trillion (that's Trillion with a T).

The combination of Silicon Valley’s persistent interest, innovation, and investment have the space primed for hyper growth. 

Read and subscribe to this week's EIEIO "Forever Young" to dig deeper into the megatrend of Longevity:

I vividly remember the first time I understood the true power of the Internet. 

I had my own “we’re not in Kansas anymore” moment when my then 7-year-old daughter Maggie went on Amazon by herself and used my credit card to order “the Babysitters Club.”

Shortly thereafter, Maggie and her younger sister Caroline demonstrated the power of eBay to me by “bidding” for Beanie Babies.

That was 1997. Today, eBay is a 22 billion dollar business, and Amazon’s market cap currently hovers at $1.5 trillion. 

If you want a Window to the Future, study young people. Morgan Stanley just released their 5th annual "Ask the Interns" Survey with nearly 600 respondents.

The report starts with “to our interns: investors should listen to you.” 
We completely agree.

To see what they had to say, read this week's newsletter, "Teach Your Parents Well"