EIEIO...Reunite
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EIEIO…Fast Facts
Entrepreneurship: 65% – the percentage of small businesses in the US that are profitable. (Hubspot)
Innovation: 32% – The portion of global R&D expenditure that comes from the U.S., more than any other country. (American Association for the Advancement of Science)
Education: 270,000 – the number of teaching posts currently filled by underqualified teachers in the U.S. (Teachers of Tomorrow)
Impact: >180 zettabytes – The amount of data the world will have produced by 2025. (Grepsr)
Opportunity: 52% – The percentage of bachelor’s degree holders who are unemployed a year after graduation (Strada Education Foundation)
We wrote the following EIEIO during the Olympics three years ago. Despite the brutal animosity through a Presidential election that focuses on what divides us as opposed to what unites us, the Olympics is a miracle drug that brings us together as a Country. Sports are a powerful way to foster camaraderie, develop friendships, and promote peace.
“I don’t like that man. I must get to know him better.” - Abraham Lincoln
I grew up in the suburbs of Minneapolis. Not quite Lake Wobegon but besides how cold it was, a pretty easy place to live.
My parents divorced when I was young and initially, like most kids, lived with my Mom. For a variety of reasons including driving my Mother crazy, I switched to living with my Dad in High School.
The biggest problem with the new set up was my Mom and Dad lived in different towns and different school districts. My social network and all the teams I played on were in the old neighborhood, and high school wasn’t the right time to reboot all of that.
Somehow, we were able to get the respective school districts to look the other way and I just commuted to my old school...Minnetonka, home of the Mighty Skippers (Lake Minnetonka is the inspiration behind the ferocious nickname).
The town my Dad lived in was Edina…the Hornets...which coincidently is Minnetonka’s chief rival. All of my friends and I HATED Edina. They were arrogant. Spoiled. Overrated. Kind of clueless. Soft. They were CAKE EATERS.
My Minnetonka friends felt sorry for me having to be in such a horrible place with such horrible people.
A funny thing started to happen as I was toggling between the two communities. I was bumping into the Edina jerks around town...at my siblings' ball games, restaurants, church, gas stations, etc...and started to think they weren’t so bad. I actually started hanging out with some of them and having them over to the house to play poker.
My friends thought something was wrong with me. Maybe I had been brainwashed? Or had started to eat cake?
What was amazing was that Minnetonka and Edina were basically the exact same communities. Essentially same race, same religion, same family education, same household income. Indistinguishable other than a 15-minute drive between each campus. Yet, if you spoke with people at either school, you would have thought they were as different as Mars and Venus.
I enrolled at the University of Minnesota where I had the privilege of being on the football team...The Golden Gophers. Our team had diversity of race, backgrounds, and family wealth but we loved each other like brothers. One Dream, One Team.
But you go one state over to the East, the Wisconsin Badgers were a bunch of boozer “cheese heads”, anybody who would go to Madison had to be either a communist or didn’t know their head from their tail. And one state to the South? Forget it. Iowa was the place you went if you were a farmer or a felon.
After meeting people over the years who were Badgers or Hawkeyes, they actually seemed like “normal” people and cared about the same kind of things I did. In fact, when events like the Rose Bowl occurred, pitting the Big 10 Champion against the Pac-12 Champion, we’d always root together for the Big 10 team over the “flakes” from the West Coast.
Every four years, the Olympics has Team USA fighting for Gold Medals against our enemies and frienemies, with our whole country brimming with pride and giving each other high fives when one of the heroes makes it to the middle podium and they play the Star Spangled Banner. That’s the great thing about sports, it brings communities together and celebrates what we have in common, not what is different.
We just had a Presidential Election that felt more like a Civil War than a democratic process to select the leader of our Country. Nearly 75 million people voted for the guy who lost, which is 5 million votes more than any previous winner.
Long gone are the days when they weren’t “Red States” or “Blue States”, but just “United States” – we’ve become a Country of Labels. “Progressive”, “Conservative”, “Coastal Elites”, “Flyover Flintstones”, “Woke”, “Racist”, “Misogynist”, and on and on.
There are 332,115,132 people in the United States and not only scientifically is our DNA basically the same, but something like 332 million of us want the same things.
We want to LOVE and BE LOVED.
We CHERISH freedom. Freedom of speech. Freedom of religion. Freedom to travel. The freedom to own property. The freedom to marry anybody you want to.
We BELIEVE in democracy. One person, one vote. And in the importance of being a society that respects and obeys laws created by our representatives.
We WANT our children to have a better life than our own. Which means better standards of living, better education, and better and fairer opportunities. To help people less fortunate than ourselves. Nobody in a country as prosperous as the United States of America should be hungry, not get the medical care they need or the quality of education they deserve. We need to respect the elderly and take care of our Veterans.
We want to feel safe and know that there is law and order. We want to feel protected from a hostile government or terrorist group from harming our Country and citizens.
We want to believe there is no limit to what we can accomplish. Your success isn’t determined by how well you selected your parents, it’s determined by your hustle, determination and smarts. The American Dream needs to be REAL.
The question remains...how do we achieve the objectives that almost all of us want? Teddy Roosevelt said the biggest risk to our Democracy is seeing people as “the other” instead of “us”. Well, if Teddy was right, we need an attitude adjustment urgently.
Racism is evil and I believe there are 332 million people in the United States who agree with me. I also know there is unconscious racism, just like there is unconscious sexism, and other biases that come from ignorance which while unintended, have a devastating impact on having the society we all aspire to have.
There was a famous experiment completed by Jane Elliot, a small-town third-grade teacher in Iowa, after Martin Luther King was assassinated. To teach her students about racial bias, she split the class into children with blue eyes and children with brown eyes. She told them the brown eyes students were smarter, faster, and better than those with blue eyes.
She then gave the brown-eyed students privileges. They got to go to lunch earlier, stay at recess longer, and sit where they wanted to sit. Rapidly, a division occurred between the two groups, with fights breaking out and the blue-eyed students being treated with disdain. In fact, upon noticing that Ms. Elliot had blue eyes, one of the brown-eyed students remarked, "If she had brown eyes, maybe she would have been a principal or superintendent."
The next Monday, Ms. Elliot told her students she had made a mistake and actually it was the blue-eyed students who were smarter, faster and better and they got all of the privileges. Notably, the blue-eyed students did not display the same instant arrogance as the brown-eyed students because they had lived in the other's shoes for a week.
The Blind Audition study conducted by Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin and Princeton University’s Cecilia Rouse in 2000 showed that preventing selectors from seeing whether an auditioner was male or female increased the female's odds by 50%.
Nobody would seriously argue that a system with conscious or unconscious bias is fair or acceptable. However, establishing the right approach to achieving equality requires a collective conversation.
We need to listen and be respectful of people who have different opinions than ourselves. If anybody for a minute thinks freedom of expression is a quaint idea that was tolerable only before we had such an enlightened ruling class, check out what happened to Alexei Navalny last week in Russia. Putin’s most prominent opposition leader was immediately jailed upon returning to Moscow after returning from Germany where he has spent the past five months recovering after being poisoned.
How about the Civil Servant in Thailand who was sentenced to 43 years in jail for sharing information critical of the monarchy online? In China, soon to be the largest economy in the World, being the wealthiest businessperson has its disadvantages if you have a complaint against the regime (see Jack Ma). Last week, Ma emerged after being put in the penalty box for a few less-than-kind observations about Beijing. Of course, this pales in comparison to having the "wrong" religion, as in the case of the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, against whom, according to our State Department, China is committing genocide.
People are talking about a “reset”…I’m not exactly sure what that means. Some are saying that people with the wrong views need to be “reprogramed”…I do know what that means. What I think we need to do is “reunite”…and become the United States of America. We need to celebrate the many blessings we share and work together to create a more perfect union…which will always be a work in progress.
Market Performance
Market Commentary
Not exactly the lazy days of Summer, stocks were volatile last week and headed downward.
For the third week in a row, the major indices fell “led” by NASDAQ dropping 3.4%, and the Dow and S&P 500 each falling 2.1%.
Reasons for the poor stock performance included disappointing results from the so-called “Magnificent 7” and economic data which all of a sudden showed things might not be as rosy as previously had been conventional wisdom.
Apple continues to seem out of step with the tune of times, and said its AI integration would be delayed. META reported revenues up 22% and confidence about its future outlook but also said it was continuing to up its CapEx to be a player in the AI Arms Race.
X, the company formerly known as Twitter, said revenues were off more than 50% from a year ago.
While the negative performance of stocks last week could be seen as cause for concern, our view is that it’s natural and healthy for continuing the overall upward trend. Moreover, we believe we will continue to see a broadening of participation in positive performance. We remain BULLISH.
Need to Know
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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
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Maggie Moe’s GSV Weekly Rap
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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
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