Andy Kessler

WSJ: Life as We Know It Turns 50

https://www.wsj.com/articles/life-as-we-know-it-turns-50-1543786471

San Francisco in 1968 was littered with flower children, free love and dreams of utopia encapsulated in Timothy Leary’s exhortation: “Turn on, tune in, drop out.” How wrong that was! But out of this purple haze rose that year’s Joint Computer Conference, where an assembly of geniuses wearing white short-sleeved shirts and pocket protectors convened 50 years ago this week. The event shined a guiding light on the path to personal computing and set the modern world in motion.

On Dec. 9, 1968, Doug Engelbart of the Stanford Research Institute presented what’s now known as “The Mother of All Demos.” Using a homemade modem, a video feed from Menlo Park, and a quirky hand-operated device, Engelbart gave a 90-minute demonstration of hypertext, videoconferencing, teleconferencing and a networked operating system. Oh, and graphical user interface, display editing, multiple windows, shared documents, context-sensitive help and a digital library. Mother of all demos is right. That quirky device later became known as the computer mouse. The audience felt as if it had stepped into Oz, watching the world transform from black-and-white to color. But it was no hallucination.

At the time, the data line Engelbart used for the demo probably cost more than 10 grand a month. And he needed an amazing amount of not-yet-invented science to back up his vision: The first internet transmission wasn’t sent until the next year, when a message was sent from a UCLA lab to a terminal at the Stanford Research Institute. The integrated circuit was invented 10 years earlier, but Engelbart would be considered a false prophet today if the microprocessor hadn’t come along a few years later. He saw where the technology was headed and helped to hurry it up.

The coolest thing about this story is that, starting 20 years ago, Doug Engelbart was my next-door neighbor. We would invite him to our parties and get invited to his. At his place I got to meet the tech hall of fame: In the living room I met Ted Nelson, who conceptualized hypertext, and I met the inventor of the disk drive in his kitchen.

One of Engelbart’s biggest influences was Vannevar Bush’s 1945 essay, “As We May Think,” which envisioned a “memex” machine—a portmanteau of “memory” and “index”—that would enhance human cognition. While I chased my kids’ errant basketballs in his backyard, Doug would tell me about this sort of “human augmentation,” arguing that computer science was developing in ways that would aid humans, not replace them. Networks of humans and computers would create a “collective IQ.” He would interlock his fingers to make sure I got the point.

So what have we learned in 50 years?

Read the rest here.

WSJ: Anything Good Takes Exactly Five Meetings

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/anything-good-takes-exactly-five-meetings-1542578334

I was headed out of the office with a stack of papers I spent all week preparing. My boss stopped me at the door and asked, “What are you doing with all that junk?” I was trying to sell a company. “It’s the first meeting, right?” Yeah. “Don’t be an idiot. Leave all that stuff here.” But . . . “Don’t dump it all now. You need something to talk about the next few times you meet.” I looked confused. “Listen,” he told me, “everything good takes five meetings.”

I was mad, but he was right. Everything—and I mean everything—takes five meetings or at least five touch points. Deals, interviews, promotions, club membership, dating.

They have something you want, and you have something they want. But you can’t just come out and ask for it. Like poker, you never lay all your cards on the table. Reveal them slowly. Sadly, no one has the patience anymore.

We were all taught by Blake, Alec Baldwin’s character in “Glengarry Glen Ross”: “A-B-C. Always be closing.” As he berates an entire Chicago real-estate office, he brags, “I can go out there tonight with the materials you got, make myself fifteen thousand dollars! Tonight! In two hours! Can you? Can you? Go and do likewise!”

Two hours? That’s so 1992. A recent Comscore study shows millennials have an attention span of five seconds. That’s less than goldfish. (Sounds about right.) Everyone’s in such a hurry these days. Likes, 1-click buying, retweets, Amazon Dash order buttons, binge watching, keyless ignition.

Slow down!

Read the rest here.

WSJ: Big Brother Isn't Watching You

https://www.wsj.com/articles/big-brother-isnt-watching-you-1541361909

Hardly a week goes by that I don’t run into people who, when I ask how they are doing, tell me they’re worried about authoritarianism. Living in California, my impulse is to ask if they’re worried about the state’s one-party rule. But before I can get that out, the complaints begin: Trump, Facebook , Google, police state. Uh boy. Pot-dispensary paranoia?

This fascist-behind-every-tree thinking isn’t helped by the tech industry. Apple CEO Tim Cook told privacy commissioners in Brussels last month that personal information “is being weaponized against us with military efficiency. Today, that trade has exploded into a data-industrial complex.” Mr. Cook was poking at Facebook and Google and calling for more regulation.

In high Silicon Valley style, former Facebook security executive Alex Stamos took to Twitter to criticize Mr. Cook’s hypocrisy: “Apple uses hardware-rooted [digital rights management] to deny Chinese users the ability to install” virtual private networks. That means iPhone users in China can’t avoid their government’s censorship and surveillance. Fear mongers in the U.S. worry about authoritarianism, but in China it’s real. Anyone caught resisting there gets a mark on his not-so-proverbial permanent record.

In 2014 China began rolling out a Social Credit System, aiming for nationwide implementation by 2020. Like the FICO financial-credit system in the U.S., scores come from hundreds of data sources, but in this case those sources include more than 200 million cameras that monitor citizens’ behavior. Debtors end up on blacklists, unable to take trains or stay in luxury hotels. Some who have refused to join the military have been locked out of universities.

There are also “red lists” of good citizens, who are entitled to perks like skipping lines at ferries and not paying a deposit to rent bikes. Every man, woman and child must adapt to the government’s social pressure—or else. As the Dead Kennedys sang in 1979: “It’s the Suede-Denim secret police / They have come for your uncool niece.”

Is authoritarianism a rational fear in the U.S.?

Read the rest here.

WSJ: A Universally Bad Idea

https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-universally-bad-idea-1540147422

Bad ideas just won’t die. Ronald Reagan’s goal was to “leave Marxism and Leninism on the ash heap of history.” But they keep coming back, albeit in different forms. Of today’s bad ideas—from net neutrality to open curriculum and living wages—the most dangerous is the universal basic income.

For twisted reasons, Silicon Valley, the embodiment of meritocracy and incentives, thinks universal basic income will be the next great economic force. Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes is helping to fund a UBI pilot program in Stockton, Calif. He even wrote a book about the idea—something about 1%-ers paying money via tax credits—hardly original.

He’s not alone. Barack Obama has recently expressed interest in the idea. So have Bill Gates, Richard Branson, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Marc Benioff and others in Silicon Valley. Why? I figure it’s their misplaced guilt about patriarchal dominance over workers displaced by automation. That’s a triple crown of bad excuses.

The enthusiasm seems infectious. In July, Chicago Alderman Ameya Pawar told the Intercept, “We need to start having a conversation about automation and a regulatory framework so that if jobs simply go away, what are we going to do with the workforce?” It wasn’t a long chat. This summer, Mr. Pawar introduced legislation for a pilot program that would give $500 a month to 1,000 families. Think of it as a new version of walking-around money. Never mind that Chicago can’t even afford to fund its public-employee pensions.

It sounds eerily similar to startup incubator Y Combinator’s Basic Income Project Proposal. It’s the harebrained idea of the organization’s president, Sam Altman. A thousand lucky folks would receive $1,000 a month for as long as five years. Another 2,000 would form a control group and might get $50 a month for their troubles.

WSJ: Think You’re Smarter Than Your Boss?

 https://www.wsj.com/articles/think-youre-smarter-than-your-boss-1539546566

Oct. 16 is National Boss Day, a Hallmark holiday if there ever was one. It’s a funny holiday, because almost all employees hate their bosses or at a minimum think they can do the job better. CEOs are especially reviled—slightly above cable installers and just below lawyers on the Rodney Dangerfield “no respect” totem pole.

Popular opinion insists that chief executives are greedy: CBS’s Les Moonves paid himself $69 million each of the last few years to air “NCIS” reruns. Or heartless: Amazon’s Jeff Bezos paid meager wages until a tight labor market forced him to raise them. Or scheming: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook know our wants and desires. Or truth-challenged: Investors in Elizabeth Holmes’s Theranos learned that the hard way. Or plain clueless, like Lehman’s Dick Fuld and just about every other CEO.

But where would we be without them? Despite an industry of business schools, management books and seminars, nobody can teach you how to be an effective boss, leader or entrepreneur. They’re all self-taught. I’m always impressed when one is actually successful.

Most of investing is analyzing management. When I ran an investment fund, my partner and I would visit a dozen-plus CEOs a week in their offices. One rule of thumb was that if they closed their door, it was because they didn’t want their staff to catch them lying to us. Silly, I know, but it worked more often than you’d think. We’d grill them on their organization—how many people report to them directly, how soon after the quarter closes do they get accounting numbers, who signs off on contracts? The answers didn’t mean much; we were more interested in how the CEOs answered—confused, confident or hubristic—and seeing how good a handle they had on their teams.

We learned that running a company is like driving a tank down the middle of the road, except there are no windows so you can’t see the road. There are dozens of levers and knobs to adjust the tank’s direction. Your team works together to drive this machine as efficiently as possible with the fuel (capital) on hand. You’re doing fine until you sense a giant tree right in your path, and you make a million small decisions in short succession as your team scrambles to adjust the levers and knobs to get around it safely. Oh, and unknown to you, a few members are plotting a mutiny to oust you.

It’s not easy.

WSJ: Lessons From an ’80s Trade War

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lessons-from-an-80s-trade-war-1538950192

An extra two grand for a Harley Hog because of steel tariffs? We can’t be wimps in the world of trade, but tariff wars are never good. I would know: I was in the middle of one. In the mid-1980s, when Donald Trump was in casino mode and hosting prizefights, the Japanese were knocking out U.S. memory-chip makers.Hitachi instructed salesmen to “quote 10% below their price. If they requote, go 10% again. Don’t quit until you win.” The company later claimed it was never official policy, but the Japanese controlled 90% of the market for some crucial chips. Something had to be done, right? Well, no. Bear with me.

In early 1986, President Reagan’s Commerce Department cited Section 301 of the Trade Act of 1974 and ruled that the Japanese were selling chips below cost. The administration threatened dumping duties of up to 146% on Japanese memory chips. Never mind the oversupply and industry recession. To avoid duties, Japan came to the table and signed an agreement to limit exports and increase U.S. market share in Japan. Sounds like the current tariff tiff with China?

Here’s where things got weird. The chip recession continued, and the Japanese didn’t live up to the agreement. At the time, I was a 20-something Wall Street analyst, way over my head, running around the world tracking all this. In early 1987, I figured out the U.S. government was going to do something big: impose duties on computers, TVs and other products that use chips. I alerted every investor who would listen, but no one seemed to care. At a boxing match I met a reporter from the New York Times. I laid out the whole story to him. (Sorry, I didn’t know anyone from the Journal at the time.) He told me it wasn’t his beat but he’d look into it.

Sure enough, the Times ran a front-page story quoting me. And another the next day. I was sitting in my office, probably playing Tetris on my computer, when a producer from Ted Koppel’s “Nightline” called. I remember it went something like this: “I know you are very busy, but I was hoping we could send over a camera crew to talk about dumping.” I didn’t know much, but I was the expert! I thought of a good quote before they came. The interview lasted 30 minutes, but one line made it to national TV: “We can’t be wimps in the world of trade.”

I still believe that’s true, but duties and tariffs are a fool’s game. Memory chips are a notoriously low-margin commodity business. Intel got out of the memory business. So did AT&T . I’m still not sure why it was making chips in the first place.

Getting out of the dynamic random-access memory market, which Japan was dominating, was the best thing that ever happened to U.S. semiconductor industry.

WSJ: The Company Implosion Pageant

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-company-implosion-pageant-1537724159

Minimal sales, an unproven business model, huge losses—and a multibillion-dollar valuation amid a booming stock market. Sound familiar? Dozens of companies could fit this description today. But I’m thinking about Webvan, the online grocery company that went public in November 1999. Its leaders scaled a flawed business until it failed, blowing through $830 million and declaring bankruptcy less than two years after its initial public offering.

Webvan wasn’t alone. Who can forget Naveen Jain, CEO of directory company Infospace? He declared in 2000: “The nonbelievers will be converted when we become a trillion-dollar company.” The stock peaked at around $1,300 a share in March 2000. It then fell to about $3 two years later as investors soured on the company amid accounting irregularities.

There are plenty of great companies being created today, but it’s late in the cycle. Venture capitalists are funding questionable businesses they pray will scale. It’s hard to call the absolute peak, but the brew is frothy. As Groucho Marx in “The Cocoanuts” said of Florida real estate: “You can have any kind of a home you want. You can even get stucco. Oh, how you can get stuck-oh!” Who will be this cycle’s Webvan, eToys, Pets.com?

Honorable mention: Tesla. Forget Elon Musk’s $420-a-share buyout tweet. Unlike Google or Facebook —which deliver virtually zero-marginal-cost services—Mr. Musk actually has to make cars. Many Teslas still appear to be made by hand. Tesla lost $718 million last quarter and had negative $1.8 billion in cash flow through June, with debt due soon. Cash is available, but at what cost?

Harry Lange, who ran Fidelity’s Magellan Fund, once told me his rule of thumb for valuation: Divide a company’s market value by 10 and see if it eventually can make that in annual net income. Tesla is worth around $50 billion. To make $5 billion, it has to produce and sell a million cars a year with a $5,000 after-tax profit. That’s a stretch, especially with hundreds of competing electric-car models already announced.

First runner up: WeWork. 

WSJ: Lehman: Political and Personal

https://www.wsj.com/articles/lehman-political-and-personal-1536524375

Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008—left to twist in the wind by Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson. Ten years after, is Wall Street safe from another financial meltdown? Banks, pulling in record profits, appear to be in pretty good shape. But something seems wrong, as if the lessons of the financial crisis already have faded.

That’s only an intuition, so I called someone who would know—the former CEO of Lehman Brothers. No, not Dick Fuld, one of the public faces of Wall Street’s collapse. Instead, I talked last month with Bryan Marsal, of Alvarez & Marsal, who led Lehman for the three years after its bankruptcy. 

I asked Mr. Marsal why Lehman was allowed to fail and what lessons were learned. He responded with two words: political and personal. What made business or economic sense wasn’t considered. Mr. Marsal explained that Mr. Paulson “had no standing in the Lehman bailout decision but seemed to dominate the entire process.” The Bush administration already had bailed out Bear Stearns five months earlier, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac the week before. Using taxpayer money to bail out perceived Wall Street fat cats had become very unpopular.

Why was Mr. Paulson channeling Ralph Kramden? The Treasury secretary, Mr. Marsal thought, “should have taken a back seat and let the pros from the Federal Reserve drive the bus.” Plus, as a formerGoldman Sachs CEO, “Paulson simply didn’t like Dick Fuld, and he had run out of patience.” It didn’t help that in 1998, when Long-Term Capital Management needed bailing out, Wall Street got together and everyone kicked in, except Mr. Fuld’s Lehman.

On Sept. 9, Mr. Paulson told a group of CEOs about Lehman, “There’s no government money here.” Shortly thereafter, taxpayer money went into Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley , Citigroup and others. It seems Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke grabbed control of the bus from Mr. Paulson after the almost instant contagion and carnage from the Lehman bankruptcy. Withholding a bailout was a mistake. A subsidized merger or an orderly bankruptcy would have made more sense. 

Why is this so important? Today there is nothing stopping the political and the personal from trumping rational economic decision-making in the next crisis. 

WSJ: The Chip That Changed the World

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-chip-that-changed-the-world-1535311622

Sixty years. But how much longer? In 1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby —from Great Bend, Kan.—created one of the greatest inventions, a great bend, in the history of mankind. Kilby recently had started at Texas Instruments as an electrical engineer. Most everyone left on a mandated summer break, but he stayed in the lab and worked on combining a transistor, capacitor and three resistors on a single piece of germanium. On Sept. 12, he showed his boss his integrated circuit. At a half-inch long and not very wide, it had ugly wires sticking out, resembling an upside-down cockroach glued to a glass slide.

In January 1959 Bob Noyce, another Midwesterner, was keeping busy at Fairchild Semiconductor in Palo Alto, Calif. He deployed a photographic printing technique—the planar process, which uses glass as insulation—to deposit aluminum wires above silicon transistors. Without the messy cockroach-leg wires, the integrated circuit, or chip, became manufacturable.

In March 1960, TI introduced the Type 502 Flip Flop—basically one bit of memory for $450. A few weeks later, Fairchild announced its own. The U.S. Air Force used them in 1961. So did new computer companies and even NASA in its Apollo rockets. One bit turned into four, then 16, then 64. This started the shrink, integrate, shrink, integrate, rinse, repeat motion that’s still going strong today. This relentless cost decline creates new markets out of nothing.

In 1965 Fairchild research chief Gordon Moore wrote a now-famous article for Electronics magazine, “Cramming More Components Onto Integrated Circuits.” Today known as Moore’s Law, the article’s thesis was that chips would double in density every 18 to 24 months. By 1969, the 3101 64-bit memory chip shipped at $1 a bit. We’ve come a long way. Your iPhone probably has a trillion bits at picocents a bit. Kilby received the Nobel Physics Prize in 2000 and credited Noyce, who had died a decade earlier, in his acceptance speech. You have to wonder what took the Nobel Committee so long.

Integrated circuits are the greatest invention since fire—or maybe indoor plumbing. The world would be unrecognizable without them. They have bent the curve of history, influencing the economy, government and general human flourishing. The productivity unleashed from silicon computing power disrupted or destroyed everything in its path: retail, music, finance, advertising, travel, manufacturing, health care, energy. It’s hard to find anything Kilby’s invention hasn’t changed.

Now what?

WSJ: Warner’s Plan to Ruin the Internet

https://www.wsj.com/articles/warners-plan-to-ruin-the-internet-1534110172

Virginia Sen. Mark Warner made millions in the murky world of government-issued cellular licensing. He parlayed his riches into a governorship and U.S. Senate seat. Today, from his perch as vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Mr. Warner has produced a 20-point plan to take on Facebook ,Google and other tech giants with “potentially insuperable competitive advantages over new entrants.” Insuperable! Of course most of his proposals would end up locking the big guys in place while freezing innovation.

No matter. The shallow-analysis pundit class jubilated. Mr. Warner and Democrats could “crack down on Big Tech,” “tame social media,” and “knock Silicon Valley into shape.” Woo-hoo. The cheerleaders’ only complaint is the lack of a 21st proposal: breaking up the tech giants. Still, Mr. Warner wants to show that techland has gotten too big for its breeches and that the center of power radiates from the Hill—not the Valley. But he forgets that there’s one market to rule them all.

Good luck getting through Mr. Warner’s 23-page report. It’s filled with impossible-to-implement mandates (identify bots), silly bromides (addressing the safety and security of at-risk individuals), and dangerous power grabs (updating Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act). If even a handful of these proposals become law, faceless bureaucrats would control the internet instead of energetic entrepreneurs. No one would win under this new internet. And compliance costs would be so massive that no new startups would emerge.

Mr. Warner appears to have a John Kerry-like admiration for the power of European Union regulators. Europe’s stringent General Data Protection Regulation was one of the biggest power grabs in recent history and has lighted a fire under U.S. legislators hoping to emulate it. It would be a huge mistake. GDPR almost assures that no new innovations will come out of Europe.

And the Continent is already feeble—of the top 100 global technology companies, only 13 are in Europe. Bet you can’t name three. Heck, half are local consulting companies that shouldn’t even count. Why set up a company in Europe when the rules are so bent toward excess expense and certain failure? An American GDPR would turn the U.S. into Europe, making America’s technology industry french toast. But that’s one of Mr. Warner’s goals.

Consider the sop to lawyers.