Posts tagged WeWork
Unicorn valuations are bad for your health -- the Prisoner's Dilemma of WeWork and Magic Leap
Unicorn valuations are bad for your health -- the Prisoner's Dilemma of WeWork and Magic Leap

Why are high valuations bad? You've heard me talk about how the trend of Fintech bundling, and the unicorn and decacorn valuations led by SoftBank and DST Global, are creating underlying weakness in the private Fintech markets. Of course, they are also creating price compression and consolidation in the public markets (e.g, Schwab/TD, Fiserv/First Data) across sub-sectors. But public companies are at least transparent and deeply analyzed. Private companies have beautiful websites, charismatic leaders, and impressive sounding investors. Often when you look under the hood, it's just a bunch of angry bees trying to find something to sting.

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philosophy, venture capital, game theoryLex SokolinSoftBank, DST Global, WeWork, Magic Leap, Snap Inc, Apple, Google, Brex
Ok, Boomer -- a meme for the broken political economy
Ok, Boomer -- a meme for the broken political economy

Chlöe Swarbrick, a 25-year old climate MP was presenting her climate change case to the New Zealand parliament, and was heckled by an older audience member. Without missing a beat, she acknowledged and dismissed the challenger with a pithy “Ok, Boomer.”

The recording has since gone viral, inspiring everything from merchandise to Vogue articles. While the incident isn’t the source of the phrase “Ok, Boomer”, today it is the most well known manifestation. So what does the phrase mean? If you are inclined to more colorful language, see Urban Dictionary. But the meaning is obvious on its face — Gen Z is dismissing utterly and without consideration the judgment and protestations of society's elders on multi generational issues like economics, climate change, and social norms.

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generational change, macroeconomics, microeconomics, narrative zeitgeist, philosophy, civilization and politics, social & communityLex SokolinBoomer, Gen Z, Millennials, SoftBank, Uber, WeWork, OYO
You don't get to cheat just because you like to win -- on WeWork, Politics, and Fintech
You don't get to cheat just because you like to win -- on WeWork, Politics, and Fintech

Feelings and emotions at industry events matter. The narrative at the more traditional conferences is that Fintech innovation is just incremental improvement, and that blockchain has struggled to bring production-level quality software and stand up new networks. This isn't strictly true -- see komgo, SIX, or any of the public chains themselves -- but the overall observation does stand. Much of Fintech has been channeled into corporate venture arms, and much of blockchain has been trapped in the proof-of-concept stage, disallowed from causing economic damage to existing business.

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DAOs, decentralized finance, venture capital, philosophyLex SokolineToro, Defire, Actus Protocol, komgo, SIX, SIBOS, WeWork