In Defense Of Capitalism

The Economist this week has a good analysis on the future of capitalism. Yes, we’re amidst a crisis, and yes, things went out of control, but in building any sustainable complex system, there will always need to be rounds of debugging involved. Overall, I’m still in favor, as the Economist is as well, of Capitalism. This crisis, I view as a debugging process, which will take out a bunch of the broken code in the system, and in the long run, the world economic system will emerge stronger as a result.

What I still cannot stomach, however, is Obama’s anti-business, anti-free trade, anti-globalization, big government, unlimited spending policies. It is clear that Obama has never managed a P&L. That is scary.

It is disappointing that the American political system does not provide opportunities for experienced executives to run the country. Black messiah, war hero, or Hockey mom, these people have no credibility for running a business. And whether you like it or not, as someone quoted (also in the Economist this week), the Business of America is Business.

Obama will, in all likelihood, win the election on Nov 4. I hope capitalism will not undergo a major set-back in the process.

Anatomy of Innovation: Exodus Founder B.V. Jagadeesh (Part 6)

SM: How did you plan your exit from Exodus?

BVJ: Towards the end of my tenure at Exodus I started making a lot of investments in other companies. As part of the CTO duties I met with a lot of people who would come and pitch ideas. We were one of the big successes of the time. There were a lot of people looking to us for mentorship and funding. >>>

Don’t Buy Stocks Too Soon

Here’s a good article that discusses why even though stocks are cheap right now, it still may be too soon to buy, as the market will probably get substantially worse, before it gets better.

In general, I share this point of view. For those of my readers who have asked why I am not recommending buying stocks like eBay, Yahoo! and a host of others, this pretty much summarizes the broad guiding thought: they will likely fall further.

In summary, be ready to buy, but don’t buy quite yet. But when you do buy, I stand by many of my recommendations from before the recent crisis. I still recommend SunPower, Akamai, Polycom, Rim, Nokia, Autodesk, Qualcomm, Concur, SuccessFactors, ERI, etc. but with the caveat that the macro conditions are still driving stocks down right now, and we have not hit bottom yet.

Forbes Column 08: OLPC’s Last Billion

This week Zero-In focuses on Nicholas Negroponte’s One Laptop per Child (OLPC) and how it has segmented the market to focus on the last billion. Many have written about OLPC’s choices, including that to make the laptop a duel-boot system and include Windows, instead of keeping it entirely open source … blah blah blah … I say, “Who cares?”

Anatomy of Innovation: Exodus Founder B.V. Jagadeesh (Part 5)

SM: What year of your story are we at now?

JVB: 1997. That is when we saw the hyper growth. >>>

Anatomy of Innovation: Exodus Founder B.V. Jagadeesh (Part 4)

SM: Did anybody else mirror your concept of what was essentially an Internet datacenter?

JVB: Nobody had this concept. This was in 1995, at the exact same time the dot-com companies started to emerge. Hotmail, map companies, and other started to take bud. We started to become the de facto standard for hosting those companies. We raised about $3.5 million for a Series A to let us support these companies. >>>

Oct 21: Web 3.0 Product Strategy Roundtable With RWW On DimDim

Calling all entrepreneurs! On Tuesday, October 21 at 11am PT/2pm ET, I will host a Web 3.0 product strategy roundtable online in collaboration with ReadWriteWeb, using Dimdim, the free, open source web conferencing platform. During the 60-minute session, entrepreneurs are invited to pitch me their product ideas in a 3-minute presentation. I will review the material in real time and provide 3 minutes of feedback on the plan.

The session is open to 500 people but only the first 10 to sign up have the opportunity to pitch. To register and find specific submission details, please click here. >>>

Deal Radar 2008: Fotolia

Today’s Deal Radar company is New York-based Fotolia, a microstock photography site. The site offers quality images at low prices and is stiff competition for traditional stock photography sites such as Getty and Corbis as well as microstock photography sites such as iStockphoto and SnapVillage. >>>