If you’re a founder building a business during these uncertain times, you probably have one question on your mind: How will we get through this recession? While no one can predict the future, we can reflect on the lessons we’ve learned from past downturns to help founders navigate their path forward for the long term.…
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Venture capital investment in Europe is slowing down — but it hasn’t stopped. In March, €2bn was raised by European startups, and there were 108 rounds above €2m, according to data analyst Dealroom; around a 33% drop in activity from January. April is looking likely to be even slower — yet hundreds of term sheets are still…
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Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party…
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As founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world’s largest hedge fund, Ray Dalio (MBA 1973) is well known for his ability to forecast the future. Dalio—whose foundation has committed millions of dollars to improving connectivity and providing laptops to Connecticut students in need—took a moment to share his thoughts with NPR’s Morning Edition on how the ever-increasing wealth gap could be addressed…
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The intuitive insight that would save Chrysler in the 1990s came to Bob Lutz, then the company’s president, during a weekend drive. On a warm day in 1988, Lutz took his Cobra roadster for a spin. As he raced along the roads in southeastern Michigan, he tried to relax, pushing aside what critics had been…
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I was talking recently to a friend who teaches at MIT. His field is hot now and every year he is inundated by applications from would-be graduate students. “A lot of them seem smart,” he said. “What I can’t tell is whether they have any kind of taste.”Taste. You don’t hear that word much now.…
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The Psychology of Human Misjudgment, a speech given in 1995 by legendary investor Charlie Munger, opened my eyes to how behavioral psychology can be applied to business and problem-solving.Munger, for those of you who haven’t heard of him, is the irreverent partner of Warren Buffett at Berkshire Hathaway. He’s offered us such gems as: a two-step process…
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Year after year, Jeff Bezos and his Amazon juggernaut have claimed bigger and bigger chunks of a growing and sweeping collection of industries — electric vehicles, cloud computing, movie making, and gourmet foods. But now Amazon has improbably also become the most central economic player in the country apart from the Fed itself — the omnipresent channel for what…
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There is a stereotype that cat people are generally women who live and die alone with their cats. I find, like most stereotypes, there is some truth to this. The cat people of cat people are … bat people. It all started with a simple tweet.Twitter is a bipolar lover (I have some experience here) in that you…
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Last July as he was working at home, Kanye West conceived of an idea that struck him as genius: the perfect hoodie. Slightly cropped at the waist, heavy as a winter coat, it would be like comfort food, biblical in its ability to soothe but futuristic in its reach. In a color like flax or…
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