The Invisible Hand’s Visible Swarm
Unseen forces shape our economic landscape, but what happens when these invisible hands become a visible swarm? Let's delve into the intriguing interplay of market dynamics, exploring how collective actions can influence economic outcomes in unexpected ways.
The path to radical progress begins with moderation
Extreme optimism and fatalistic pessimism may seem to be stark opposites, but they both end in apathy
- If things were sure to improve or bound to collapse, then our actions would not matter one way or the other
- Individual actions matter deeply, but given enough time, the free market is shockingly good at directing those individuals’ actions and money at tackling the right really hard problems
- The next decade is going to see unimaginable developments in health, space, economic design, VR, energy, and beyond
- There will be winners and losers at the individual company level. Certain industries will take longer to develop than others
- On a decade-scale and beyond, the market will somehow figure out how to put tremendous resources towards the biggest challenges
Space In Fount and the Body’s Magical Future
Space exploration in the United States had been stagnant for decades when Elon Musk launched SpaceX in 2002
- SpaceX did the near-impossible over the course of two decades in order to finally attract the swarm
- By laying out his vision and plan, he was able to attract the most adventurous and passionate part of the swarm to help make it a reality
web3
The swarm explains why web3 is so controversial. To some, it’s Fast on steroids.
- To others, it looks like the ultimate swarm hack: a product with money baked in, designed to attract talent and capital despite having no real impact.
- Scams and other challenges of web3
- UX issues, mini-bubbles in categories like DAO tools, high transaction costs, etc – are classic cynic traps. By pointing at them, they’re only directing the swarm to solve those problems, like those fun dancing tarmac traffic directors
An Invisible Swarm
Entrepreneurship is the invisible hand directing capital and talent towards solving problems
- The biggest challenges attract a swarm of talent and capital that grinds them down until they’re largely solved
- This should mean more volatility as the swarm moves faster and faster, but it should also mean that we’re knocking down problems at a higher and higher rate
- How does the swarm know what to attack?
- Different problems sending out pheromones to attract the swarm
- Over time, the swarm attacks, the volume and types of people and capital each problem attracts evolves, and the problems that attract and hold the swarm’s attention will undoubtedly get fixed
A Formula for Optimism
The swarm is attracted to big problems and has proven its ability to solve them
- Companies come and go, technologies get hyped up and fade away, but eventually, the swarm smooths out problems until the sexiest, most challenging things are just boring, normal industries
- Extreme optimism doesn’t necessarily lead to apathy
- We need to do everything possible to let the swarm attack the biggest problems
Climate In 2007, Kleiner Perkins Partner John Doerr said, “Going green is bigger than the Internet. It could be the biggest economic opportunity of the 21st century.”
The 2006 period is often referred to as the first wave of the “greentech bubble”
- Greentech investing attracted a swarm of entrepreneurs, and those entrepreneurs got to work building new solutions and scaling deployment of existing ones, and over the past decade, the cost of energy from renewable sources has come down dramatically
- Today, a new climate boom is underway
- People like Chris Sacca are hacking the swarm for good by realizing that this is a problem that needs to be solved, and that there’s no better way to solve a problem than by attracting the swarm
- Climate tech investing didn’t grow as fast as venture capital as a whole did in 2021, but I suspect that’s going to change
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