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A picture of a bleeding hand comes up. This doesn’t look good, says Sandy, not turning round to the screen. This is an employee’s hand. He was working on the conveyor belt. When the belt stopped he put his hand inside the mechanism to adjust the slipped belt. The belt started moving again. There was a lot of screaming. This accident could have been avoided. Most accidents can be avoided.
Don’t step on the pallets.
Always wear cut-resistant gloves when using cutting blades.
Lift correctly.
Anyone who doesn’t lift correctly doesn’t just harm themselves. Sick days harm Amazon.
Sandy repeats: We’re not saying all this for our own amusement.
You trot after Norman as he leads you around the hall. Two forklift drivers accompany your group, disappearing between the shelves, popping up again at the end of an aisle, blocking the way, joking around with Norman, who sends them away: Haven’t you got anything better to do?
Not much up today, one of them says.
I’ve got plenty to do though, Norman says.
You watch your working time melt away, but you also register with interest that working time is allowed to simply melt away at Amazon, that there isn’t a light that goes on some place in the company to signal wasted working time to a supervisor and order immediate countermeasures. So this is what you make a mental note of: between the shelves, in the empty halls, beyond the lead desks, outside of the glass container they want to demolish soon, where the more important bosses and planners sit at their desks, working time is allowed to melt away; there are places where you can be slow.
rau Bertram starts crying. You notice how porous all fate is and you understand the leap into hoping. Hoping for the deus ex machina, hoping for a superhero or anyone, really—all that’s perfectly understandable here in the stairwell with your quietly weeping neighbor Frau Bertram, but five minutes later and three floors higher it’s already forgotten. The whole welfare thing, you think, perhaps a person could manage it somehow. It must be possible. A person could regard it as a profession they’re performing, something that’s not pleasant but at least doesn’t require forty hours’ attendance a week. So you’re considering becoming a welfare recipient and replacing the global corporation with the welfare office. You call out in my direction: I’m going to champion the activity of receiving welfare as a recognized profession. You act the militant but it’s nothing but circular motions in your underchallenged head, which has had nothing to do while your body was recovering. As a precaution, you lie down uncovered beneath the open window and shiver with cold, hoping to extend the length of your illness and get more time to think. But your body disappoints you, drives you beneath the covers after only ten minutes, preferring to warm up. You know the way to the welfare office from people’s stories, you know you can get there without changing trams.
Perhaps the thing that makes you happy is even the specific aspect of the strain, the concentration of all strain upon the body that you’re now heading back to. Right now—or not yet, or not any more—you aren’t ready to reject this form of effort outright, this effort that challenges only the body and leaves out the mind and its possibilities and especially the possibility of choice. You think you might be able to change something about the work or make something possible, and you think it wouldn’t need all that many changes, in theory. You wish you could organize the work in such a way that it wasn’t fatal. Yet this wish isn’t accompanied by specific ideas, and as soon as you have an idea to put into practice you see an army of head-shakers and brusher-offers before you, around you, and above all inside you, all of them saying: Nonsense, that won’t work. This army inside you is what you have to get past. Presumably you weren’t and aren’t—outside of this book—a person with armies standing at attention inside you, but that’s different now.
But there are other, larger lessons to glean as well. As you’ll learn in this book, most venture firms invest money on behalf of larger institutional asset managers, like university endowments and retirement funds. Most of these asset managers use a formula to determine how much money to allocate to different types of investments, including the high-risk, highly-illiquid sector of venture. (This approach to portfolio construction was pioneered by David Swensen at Yale, whose methods have been widely adopted, as you’ll read about in chapter 2). What that means is that the amount of resources our society currently invests in innovation is based on the percentage of assets that need to be invested according to this formula, rather than on the number of investable opportunities that exist. When too much money is chasing too few deals, there’s only one possible result: Because we have too few entrepreneurs, we can’t put enough money to work. Instead, it’s wasted on bidding up the prices of the few available assets rather than funding the kinds of organizations that are actually needed. The problem is even more pressing when you consider it from a diversity point of view. Not only are there not enough startups, but the ones that do exist aren’t nearly wide-ranging enough to build the kinds of companies our present and future call for. Possibly for the first time in history, we’re talent-constrained instead of capital-constrained. Scott’s book is an important step in making the opportunity to build a venture-scale business available to everyone so we can change that. The information about how to seek out and secure funding shouldn’t be limited to an elite club. Every startup is about a single idea, but taken together, all startups have a common purpose as well: to shape a better world for all of us. And a better world is one in which everyone is represented and served well by the companies and systems we create.
in other words: increasing financialisation creates increasing demand for 'entrepreneurship'
Entrepreneurship is inherently a risky endeavor, but it is absolutely essential to the American economy. Successful venture-backed companies have had an outsize positive impact on the US economy. According to a 2015 study by Ilya Strebulaev of Stanford University and Will Gornall of the University of British Columbia, 42 percent of all US company IPOs since 1974 were venture backed. Collectively, those venture-backed companies have invested $115 billion in research and development (R&D), accounting for 85 percent of all R&D spending, and created $4.3 trillion in market capitalization, which is 63 percent of the total market capitalization of public companies formed since 1974. Furthermore, specific to the impact on the American workforce, a 2010 study from the Kauffman Foundation found that young startups, most venture backed, were responsible for almost all of the twenty-five million net jobs created since 1977.
lol
I moved back to Silicon Valley to work for Lehman Brothers. Lehman, of course, was later a victim of the global financial crisis, suffering an ignominious bankruptcy in September 2008. My job at the time, in addition to being an all-around grunt, was to help life sciences companies raise capital, go public, and make acquisitions. Those were noble things to do, but for the fact that despite the raging bull market in technology in Silicon Valley, the investor appetite for life sciences was largely dormant.
was it??? a victim????
If you and I both think that Apple is a great stock to buy, we can both decide to buy it. Of course, if one of us is a really big buyer, the act of buying it might move the price such that my price might be different from yours (depending on which of us gets there first). But regardless, the general investment opportunity of buying Apple stock is available to each of us, independent of what the other does. The stock market is a democratic institution open to anyone who has money and a brokerage account.
hilarious
When Marc and Ben first started Andreessen Horowitz, they described this founder leadership capability as “egomaniacal.” Their theory—notwithstanding the choice of words—was that to make the decision to be a founder (a job fraught with likely failure), an individual needed to be so confident in her abilities to succeed that she would border on being so self-absorbed as to be truly egomaniacal. As you might imagine, the use of that term in our fund-raising deck for our first fund struck a chord with a number of our potential investors, who worried that we would back insufferable founders. We ultimately chose to abandon our word choice, but the principle remains today: you have to be partly delusional to start a company given the prospects of success and the need to keep pushing forward in the wake of the constant stream of doubters.
There is a story that Queen Isabella of Spain was the first true VC. She “backed” an entrepreneur (Christopher Columbus) with capital (money, ships, supplies, crew) to do something that most people at the time thought was insane and certain to fail (a voyage) in exchange for a portion of the to-be-earned profits of the voyage that, while probabilistically unlikely, had an asymmetric payoff compared to her at-risk capital.
If you attended Harvard Business School, you may have read about a similar early VC-like tale here in the States in the 1800s—the whaling industry. Financing a whaling venture was expensive and fraught with risk but, when successful, highly profitable. In 1840s New Bedford, “agents” (today’s VC equivalent) would raise capital from corporations and wealthy individuals (today’s limited partners) to fund ship captains (entrepreneurs) to launch a whaling venture (startup company) in search of asymmetric returns that were heavily skewed to the top agents, yet often plagued with failure. Thirty percent of voyages lost money . . . .
mask off moment lol