EIEIO...Every Day…
Obstacles to Opportunities, Prison to Prep Schools and the Golden Age of Purpose
GSV’s weekly insights on the global growth economy. Join our community of entrepreneurs, investors, executives, educators, and students getting a window to the future by subscribing here:
EIEIO…Fast Facts
Entrepreneurship: 204x – The DPI achieved by Chris Sacca’s $8 million Lowercase Capital Fund I launched in 2010. (Dealroom)
Innovation: 20 mph – The top speed of Dot, DoorDash’s new autonomous delivery robot. (DoorDash)
Education: $94,050 – The annual tuition at New York’s THINK Global School, a “traveling high school where students live and learn in four countries each year, making unforgettable connections between their studies and the world around them.” (kw3)
Impact: $9,557 – The average credit card balance for Gen X Americans in 2024. (Experian)
Opportunity: $17 billion – The amount already deployed by Apollo’s managed funds in the broader sports and entertainment space to date. The firm announced the launch of Apollo Sports Capital on September 29th. (Apollo)
“Whenever you see darkness, there is extraordinary opportunity for the light to burn brighter.” – Bono
“A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.” – Winston Churchill
“Victory comes from finding opportunities in problems.” – Sun Tzu
“Education is the most powerful weapon to change the World.” – Nelson Mandela
There are 8,250,000 people on Earth.
Every day, 225,000 babies are born.
Every day, 105,000 people die.
19,000 people starved to death today and another 2,000 people died because they didn’t have access to clean water.
About 10 billion cigarettes are smoked every day, killing 10,000 people daily. Alcohol related illness takes nearly 2 million people a year.
235,000 mothers die during child birth or over 640 a day.
UNESCO estimates there are 739 million illiterate adults in the World. Approximately $7.2 billion is spent a day on public education.
6.8 billion people are on the Internet with average screen time at 7 hours a day. Over 200 million spent a day on video games.
1.8 billion people are overweight, with 900 million being obese. $430 million is spent a day on obesity related illness out of the $11 billion spent a day on public health.
In America, the most prosperous country the earth has ever known, it’s not nearly as scary as what’s going on in the rest of the World, right?
Not so fast.
Out of 340 million people, 40 million are considered poor with 20 million in “extreme poverty”. Astonishingly, 15% of Senior Citizens are poor with this segment of poverty growing faster than any other demographic.
2 million people in the United States are incarcerated, more than any other country on Earth. Approximately 66% of people released from prison commit another crime within 3 years. 80% of the prison population is made up of high school dropouts with the vast majority of those coming from poverty.
In America, 47 million people use illicit drugs spending approximately $150 billion a year on them. 82,000 people, mostly young adults, died of drug overdoses last year. 55,000 died in the entire Vietnam War.
If you look at almost every major issue facing America and the World today, it comes back to education.
The horrible truth is, despite spending $8 trillion globally on education, far too many of us are being left behind.
Public Schools were supposed to be the great equalizer and while there are a number of great public schools, they are few and far between. In the “Nation’s Report card” a.k.a. NAEP, only ~30% of 12th graders were proficient in Math and Reading.
If you are born into poverty, you have only a 52% chance of starting kindergarten ready to learn at grade level. If you start from behind, it’s next to impossible to catch up. If you are poor, you are 5X more likely to drop out of school and 8X more likely to go to prison.
In the United States of America, if you are born poor, you have a 70% probability of remaining poor. The American Dream is just that, a dream. Effectively, your future is determined by how well you selected your parents.
Obviously, if we want to have a more perfect Union, and sustainable society, we need to not only figure out the K-12 problem but the Zero to Five problem, too. And we need to make prisons into prep schools.
The Internet was going to be the silver bullet by increasing access and lowering the cost, but as we learned during Covid, it didn’t improve the quality. While I’m optimistic in the Internet’s critical role in the future of educating our populace, it’s not enough.
Artificial Intelligence is the double edged sword…where it has the opportunity to dramatically accelerate learning, it can also result in outsourcing our brains to a machine.
The greatest investment opportunities are where there is a problem…the bigger the problem the bigger the opportunity. There isn’t a greater problem or opportunity than how to more effectively educate our populace in a Knowledge Based Economy and Global Marketplace. It makes the difference for an individual, a company and a country.
I believe we are entering the Golden Age of Purpose enabled by the power of the breathtaking technology available at our fingertips.
Finding purpose through learning and meaning through Work.
Make your dash count!
Market Performance
Market Commentary
When the clock struck midnight on Tuesday, September 30th the United States Government shutdown but nobody seemed to notice. The Federal Government spends approximately $7 trillion a year, which is nearly 25% of the overall economy, yet the sun came up in the east again on Wednesday morning.
For the week, stocks continued to rock with the Dow and S&P 500 each advancing 1.1% and the NASDAQ rising 1.3%. Year-to-date, NASDAQ is up 18%, the S&P has risen 14.4% and the Dow is nearly 10% higher.
Artificial Intelligence stocks have been the darlings of Wall Street with sentiment going from throwing caution to the wind to worrying we are in a 1999 type of AI bubble. What has given some credibility to the anxious class has been the outsized performance from AI leaders such as Nvidia (+37% YTD), Palantir (+125% YTD), Oracle (+71% YTD and making Larry Ellison the richest person on Earth), CoreWeave (+237% since IPO), and Snowflake (+45% YTD).
The Technology Empire of Alphabet, Amazon, META and Microsoft are all looking to strike back and will be spending $400 billion in AI infrastructure investment in 2026. Meanwhile, former software heroes such as Salesforce and Workday are struggling to catch the AI beat and have languished.
While it’s always important to have clear sight of the exit, I believe the AI Party has only just gotten started and looking for ways to participate in AI applications and services. Moreover, there is a robust pipeline of new issues that we are expecting to hit the market which contributes to our optimistic stance.
Accordingly, we remain BULLISH. 🐂
Need to Know
READ: Intel and the Rise of US Tech Nationalization | Contrary Research
WATCH: DoorDash CEO Tony Xu & Patrick O’Shaughnessy | TBPN
LISTEN: Richard Sutton – Father of RL thinks LLMs are a dead-end | Dwarkesh Podcast
GSV’s Four I’s of Investor Sentiment
GSV tracks four primary indicators of investor sentiment: inflows and outflows of mutual funds and ETFs, IPO activity, interest rates, and inflation.
#1: Inflows and Outflows for Mutual Funds & ETFs
#2: IPO Market
#3: Interest Rates
#4: Inflation
Chart of the Week
Maggie Moe’s GSV Weekly Rap
Chuckles of the Week
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Connecting the Dots & EIEIO…
Old MacDonald had a farm, EIEIO. New MacDonald has a Startup…EIEIO: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Education, Impact and Opportunity. Accordingly, we focus on these key areas of the future.
One of the core goals of GSV is to connect the dots around EIEIO and provide perspective on where things are going and why. If you like this, please forward to your friends. Onward!
Make Your Dash Count!
-MM