Category: Entrepreneurship

Elon Musk Is a “Free Speech Absolutist”

(p. A1) Twitter Inc. accepted Elon Musk’s bid to take over the company and go private, a deal that would give the world’s richest person control over the social-media network where he is also among its most influential users.

. . .

On Monday [April 15, 2022], a day after The Wall Street Journal first reported that a deal was close, Mr. Musk tweeted to indicate that he wants the platform to be a destination for wide-ranging discourse and disagreement.

. . .

(p. A6) Mr. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” said in a recent interview at a TED conference that he sees Twitter as the “de facto town square.”

For the full story, see:

Cara Lombardo, Meghan Bobrowsky and Georgia Wells. “Musk Strikes Deal to Buy Twitter.” The Wall Street Journal (Tuesday, April 26, 2022): A1 & A6.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 25, 2022, and has the title “Twitter Accepts Elon Musk’s Offer to Buy Company in $44 Billion Deal.”)

Diamond to Teach Economics of Entrepreneurship Seminar in Fall 2022

Prof. Art Diamond, Economics
College of Business Administration
University of Nebraska Omaha
Seminar Meets in Mammel Hall 116
Fall 2022, Tuesdays, 6:00 – 8:40 PM
First Session: Aug. 23, 2022

ECON 4730-001, ECON 8736-001

Some Questions to Be Discussed:

• How can policies encouraging innovative entrepreneurship help us create a more dynamic growth economy with more and better jobs, more and better innovations, and more choice and opportunity?
• Are innovative entrepreneurs smarter, or more courageous, or less risk-averse, or more intuitive, or more determined, or more frugal, or more arrogant, or more hard-working, or greedier, than the rest of us?
• Can economic historian John Nye defend his claim that successful entrepreneurs are “lucky fools?”
• What is the role of entrepreneurship in the process of economic dynamism, and what is the role of economic dynamism in making our lives longer and better?
• Would labor be better off in an economy in which innovative entrepreneurship is encouraged?
• Why did economist Will Baumol believe that too much higher education can discourage successful innovative entrepreneurship?
• Can unbinding entrepreneurs in medicine bring us more cures and longer lives?

Dreaming Often Is Nonlinear Problem-Solving

(p. A15) Antonio Zadra and Robert Stickgold, two of the world’s leading researchers in the science of sleep and dreams, have written a remarkable account of what we know and don’t know about this mysterious thing that happens during the night.

. . .

To many, dreams are prophecies, implanted in our brains by God or angels; to others, they exist to encode our memories of the previous day, to others they are simply random neural firings.

. . .

The weight of the evidence supports a more elaborate, nuanced and wondrous version of the memory-encoding hypothesis. Messrs. Zadra and Stickgold have designed a conceptual model they call Nextup (“Network Exploration to Understand Possibilities”), using it to describe the progression of dreams throughout the four sleep stages and their different functions. They debunk the common myth that we only dream during REM sleep and show that, in fact, we are typically dreaming throughout the night and in nonREM sleep states. They tie all of this into the brain’s “default mode network,” in which our minds are wandering and, often, problem-solving. When we’re awake, our brains are so busy attending to the environment that we tend to favor linear connections and thinking; when we allow ourselves to daydream, we solve problems that have distant, novel or nonlinear solutions.

For the full review, see:

Daniel J. Levitin. “Destination Anywhere.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 6, 2021): C7.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review was updated March 5, 2021, and has the title “‘When Brains Dream’ Review: Night Shift.”)

The book under review is:

Zadra, Antonio, and Robert Stickgold. When Brains Dream: Exploring the Science and Mystery of Sleep. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2021.

Unknown Theodore Judah Mattered More Than Famous Leland Stanford in the Success of the Central Pacific

(p. A15) . . . Mr. De Wolk insists that his subject paved the way to a postindustrial revolution. “The way virtually every man, woman, and child in the world would live would be altered permanently,” the author writes. “All because of Leland Stanford’s life.” Nonsense.

The story that Mr. De Wolk tells is of an undistinguished man who had no success on his own as a young adult. But he did have the good fortune of having brothers who set him up with a wholesale grocery shop in Sacramento, Calif. More good luck came his way when Huntington, at the time a fellow shopkeeper, and two other local merchants hatched a railroad company—even though none of them had any railroad experience—and invited Stanford to join as a partner. The vast sums of capital that they would need would be mostly supplied by 30-year bonds issued by the federal government, which also awarded enormous grants of land, gratis.

. . .

The most important person in the company’s founding was altogether excluded from the quintet at the top: Theodore Judah, a young man in his early 30s and the only one among the leadership who had any real experience building railroads. Judah’s surveys of the Sierra Nevada led to the discovery of a feasible passage at Donner Pass. It was Judah’s presentation to prospective investors that emboldened the Sacramento shopkeepers to go into the railroad business.

For the full review, see:

Randall Stross. “BOOKSHELF; Leland Stanford: Life and Myth.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, October 28, 2019): A15.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date October 27, 2019, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘American Disruptor’ Review: The Life and Myth of Leland Stanford.”)

The book under review is:

De Wolk, Roland. American Disruptor: The Scandalous Life of Leland Stanford. Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2019.

Crispr Gene-Editing Tried Against Cancer

(p. D4) Doctors have for the first time in the United States tested a powerful gene-editing technique in people with cancer.

The test, meant to assess only safety, was a step toward the ultimate goal of editing genes to help a patient’s own immune system to attack cancer. The editing was done by the DNA-snipping tool Crispr.

The procedure was feasible and safe, early results indicate, but whether it is fighting the disease is unclear. Only three patients have been treated so far, and the longest follow-up is nine months. All three patients are in their 60s, with very advanced cancers that had progressed despite standard treatments like surgery, radiation and chemotherapy.

“The good news is that all of them are alive,” said Dr. Edward A. Stadtmauer, the section chief of hematologic malignancies at the University of Pennsylvania Abramson Cancer Center. He added, “The best response we’ve seen so far is stabilization of their disease.”

For the full story, see:

Denise Grady. “Editing Genes in Bid to Fight Cancer.” The New York Times (Tuesday, November 12, 2019): D4.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Oct. 7, 2020 [sic], and has the title “Crispr Takes Its First Steps in Editing Genes to Fight Cancer.”)

Bennet Chose Pig’s Heart Since “It Was Either Die or Do This Transplant”

(p. A3) A man who had the first transplant to replace his human heart with a genetically-modified pig’s heart without immediate rejection died Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, two months after the groundbreaking surgery.

. . .

While Mr. Bennett only lived with the pig heart for a couple of months, Dr. Parsia Vagefi, UT Southwestern Medical Center’s chief of the division of surgical transplantation, said people shouldn’t view the transplant as a failure and that he hopes it serves as a “new beginning” for xenotransplantation.

“I think what this shows is just the enormous amount of progress that’s been made and hopefully it’s just the beginning that we continue to grow on,” he said.

Mr. Bennett wasn’t eligible for a more typical heart transplant because he didn’t comply with doctors’ orders or attend follow-up visits. Several transplant centers—including the Maryland one—declined to list him for the chance to get a human heart, according to David Bennett Jr. , Mr. Bennett’s son. He also didn’t regularly take his medication, the younger Mr. Bennett previously said.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration had granted Mr. Bennett’s operation emergency authorization on New Year’s Eve. “It was either die or do this transplant,” he said the day before his surgery, according to the University of Maryland Medicine. The handyman and father of two called the transplant his “last choice.”

For the full story, see:

Allison Prang. “Pig-Heart Recipient Dies 2 Months Later.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, March 10, 2022): A3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated March 9, 2022, and has the title “The Patient Who Received a Pig Heart Dies Two Months After Transplant.” The first two sentences after the ellipsis appear in the online, but not the print, version.)

Stewart Brand Read Rand and Koestler, and Inspired Steve Jobs

At the end of Steve Jobs’s famous commencement address at Stanford, he quoted Stewart Brand’s famous advice at the end of his Last Whole Earth Catalog: “Stay hungry. Stay foolish.”

(p. A15) When I first met Stewart Brand at an upscale ideas festival, I expected to engage with an aging beatnik or hippie, the tree-hugging, whale-saving environmentalist I associated with the “Whole Earth Catalog”—that ’60s-era collectanea of books, resources, tools, technologies and assorted products that became the bible of a techno-utopia DIY movement focused on self-sufficiency, education and ecology. But I found Mr. Brand more like Elon Musk than Timothy Leary, and was astonished to witness him make the best argument I’d ever heard for including nuclear power in plans to replace fossil fuels.

. . .

Although many contemporaries dropped acid for the pure experience, Mr. Brand said he took LSD (and other psychedelics) because he hoped they would accentuate his appreciation of beauty, especially that found in the photographic skills he was developing. For him psychedelics were a tool of creativity: “When you design a tool,” he wrote in 1971, “the best you can do is fashion a prototype and hand it over to the local evolutionary system: ‘Here, try this.’ ”

His model was Arthur Koestler’s “bisociation,” the blending of unrelated concepts into something new. Mr. Brand’s ability to discern unlikely complements, along with the organizational skills he’d honed in the military, helped bring numerous projects to fruition: His imagination had him bounce from one to the next; his pragmatic propensities put them into effect. Decades after the “Whole Earth Catalog” project, for example, Mr. Brand published “Whole Earth Discipline,” which proposed integrating nuclear power, geoengineering, genetic engineering, wildlife restoration, species protection and other environmental technologies aimed at creating a sustainable future for life on Earth. He’s a solutions guy, not a New Age guru—his ability to convene like-minded innovators has resulted in the WELL (Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link), the Global Business Network for futurists and business leaders, the Long Now Foundation, and Revive & Restore, a project to bring back extinct species like passenger pigeons and woolly mammoths.

As for Mr. Brand’s politics, he’s off the spectrum, mostly identifying as a small-l libertarian (he read Ayn Rand at Stanford), committed to bottom-up democracy, with an aversion to orthodoxy of any sort, which means he must adapt when the marginal becomes the mainstream, as in his shift from environmentalism to conservationism, from organic foods to GMOs, and from anti- to pro-nuclear power.

For the full review, see:

Michael Shermer’. “BOOKSHELF; A Man In Whole.” The Wall Street Journal Tuesday, March 29, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 28, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Whole Earth’ Review: A Man in Whole.”)

The book under review is:

Markoff, John. Whole Earth: The Many Lives of Stewart Brand. New York: Penguin Press, 2022.

“Seems Ethernet Does Not Work in Theory, Only in Practice”

(p. A21) David Boggs, an electrical engineer and computer scientist who helped create Ethernet, the computer networking technology that connects PCs to printers, other devices and the internet in offices and homes, died on Feb. 19 [2022] in Palo Alto, Calif.

. . .

In the spring of 1973, just after enrolling as a graduate student at Stanford University, Mr. Boggs began an internship at Xerox PARC, a Silicon Valley research lab that was developing a new kind of personal computer. One afternoon, in the basement of the lab, he noticed another researcher tinkering with a long strand of cable.

The researcher, another new hire named Bob Metcalfe, was exploring ways of sending information to and from the lab’s new computer, the Alto. Mr. Metcalfe was trying to send electrical pulses down the cable, and he was struggling to make it work. So Mr. Boggs offered to help.

Over the next two years, they designed the first version of Ethernet.

“He was the perfect partner for me,” Mr. Metcalfe said in an interview. “I was more of a concept artist, and he was a build-the-hardware-in-the-back-room engineer.”

. . .

Before becoming the dominant networking protocol, Ethernet was challenged by several other technologies. In the early 1980s, Mr. Metcalfe said, when Mr. Boggs took the stage at a California computing conference, at the San Jose Convention Center, to discuss the future of networking, a rival technologist questioned the mathematical theory behind Ethernet, telling Mr. Boggs that it would never work with large numbers of machines.

His response was unequivocal. “Seems Ethernet does not work in theory,” he said, “only in practice.”

For the full obituary, see:

Cade Metz. “David Boggs, Co-Inventor of Ethernet, Dies at 71.” The New York Times (Tuesday, March 1, 2022): A21.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Feb. 28, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)

John List Shows Limitations of Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs)

(p. A15) John List’s “The Voltage Effect” is marketed as a generic business title on how and whether to scale up an idea or product. Mr. List, an economics professor at the University of Chicago, explores why some ideas attain “voltage” and catch fire while others die out. This angle suggests that it will be another book about how to turn that great invention in your garage into the next Hewlett-Packard. But Mr. List is far too thoughtful to write something gimmicky or simple.

. . .

“The Voltage Effect” is a fine business book, though in many ways it works better as a meditation on the shortcomings of our increasingly data-driven world. The business community and academia have been taken over by data science. Mr. List seemingly argues that good and helpful data analysis may not scale well. It takes tremendous skill and talent to distinguish a scalable idea from one that is doomed to flop when you are working with a limited set of data and have an incentive to overhype your results. Data is the new currency; companies are presumed to have an unfair advantage if they have access to more of it. What gets less attention is the shortage of people who know how to make sense of statistical experiments and generalize them to a larger population.

The fields of business, policy and economics have all become enthralled with Randomized Control Trials. These are statistical experiments in which researchers take two populations: a “treatment” group that may be given cash or some other incentive and a “control” group that is not given anything. Researchers then observe any difference in outcomes from the experiment to make policy recommendations. RCTs can be a useful tool. But taking Mr. List’s lessons to heart, you see how limited they are.

Even the best-designed experiment may not give you insights that scale. For example, studies have found that it is more effective to give people cash in Kenya than to distribute aid through arcane development programs. The mantra in the development community has become “just give people money.” But just because cash is better than aid in Kenya, it doesn’t necessarily mean that a Universal Basic Income will work well in California.

For the full review, see:

Allison Schrager. “BOOKSHELF; Do We Have a Winner?” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, March 28, 2022): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 27, 2022, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘The Voltage Effect’ Review: Do We Have a Winner?”)

The book under review is:

List, John A. The Voltage Effect: How to Make Good Ideas Great and Great Ideas Scale. New York: Currency, 2022.

Executive Chose “Exciting” Entrepreneurship, and Failed

We read the stories of those who choose entrepreneurship and succeed. The stories of those who choose entrepreneurship and fail, are less often told. Those who fail do not always regret their choice, nor should they.

(p. A21) Alex Mandl was a leading contender for the chief executive job at AT&T Corp. in 1996 when he defected to head a wireless-telecommunications startup that became Teligent Inc.

. . .

Heading a startup, he said, was “the most exciting thing to do.”

Teligent had ambitious plans to undercut prices of traditional phone companies by setting up a microwave network that would beam voice and data to business users via rooftop antennas. But Teligent had technical problems, losses piled up and investors fled. Mr. Mandl resigned as chief executive in April 2001, shortly before the company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Executive Risked Career on a Startup.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 2, 2022): A21.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date April 1, 2022, and has the title “Alex Mandl, Who Gave Up a Top AT&T Job to Lead a Startup, Has Died at Age 78.”)

Discoverer of Catalyst Role of mRNA Had Trouble “Getting His Work Published”

(p. B12) Sidney Altman, a molecular biologist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for sharing in the discovery that ribonucleic acid, or RNA, was not just a carrier of genetic information but could also be a catalyst for chemical reactions in cells — a breakthrough that paved the way for new gene therapies and treatments for viral infections — died on April 5 [2022] in Rockleigh, N.J.

. . .

HAs seems to happen so often in science, Dr. Altman stumbled upon his discovery. “I wasn’t looking for what I found,” he said in a 2010 interview with Harry Kreisler at the Institute for International Studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

He had studied how a small RNA molecule, called transfer RNA, carries genetic code to make new proteins. Some of the code is not necessary, so an enzyme cuts it out before it is used.

Then, in 1978, Dr. Altman began studying an RNA-cutting enzyme from E. coli bacteria that was composed of an RNA molecule and a protein. He managed to separate the two pieces and test them to see how they reacted in the enzyme process. Much to his surprise, he discovered that the protein did not perform as an enzyme without the RNA molecule. He later discovered that the RNA molecule could be the catalyst, even without the protein.

The finding ran completely contrary to what at the time was established theory, which held that it was the proteins that were the catalysts in enzymes.

The discovery of what are now known as ribozymes was so radical that Dr. Altman had trouble getting it accepted.

Joel Rosenbaum, a professor of cell biology at Yale and a colleague of Dr. Altman’s, told Chemistry World magazine that when Dr. Altman first tried to get other scientists to accept his research, “the community of molecular biologists, including several at Yale working on RNA, did not want to believe the work.”

“He had a hard time obtaining invitations to speak at scientific meetings and, indeed, getting his work published,” Dr. Rosenbaum said.

For the full obituary, see:

Dylan Loeb McClain. “Sidney Altman, Who Stumbled on a Breakthrough in Genetics, Dies at 82.” The New York Times (Saturday, April 16, 2022): B12.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated April 18, 2022, and has the same title as the print version.)