Author: petersoc

‘If at first you don’t succeed, it doesn’t matter that you tried.’

Discussion of the role of entrepreneurial failure at the New York Times: Already-successful entrepreneurs were far more likely to succeed again: their success rate for later venture-backed companies was 34 percent. But entrepreneurs whose companies had been liquidated or gone bankrupt had almost the same follow-on success rate as the first-timers: 23 percent. In other…

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Disrupting Progress

When did ‘innovation’ stop being a dirty word? How does progress occur? The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial…

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Was the Eiffel tower intended to be an artificial moon?

August 11th, 1881: foundations laid for 237ft high San Jose Electric Light Tower. January 28th, 1887: foundations laid for 1,063ft high Eiffel tower. Was this a case of copyright infringement? for a brief and literally shining moment early in the days of human-harnessed electricity, the future of municipal lighting was glowing orbs suspended high above…

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Meet the New Economy, same as the Old Economy

Confidential internal Google and Apple memos […] clearly show that what began as a secret cartel agreement between Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Eric Schmidt to illegally fix the labor market for hi-tech workers, expanded within a few years to include companies ranging from Dell, IBM, eBay and Microsoft, to Comcast, Clear Channel, Dreamworks, and London-based…

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