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Aceleração das Startups

so… this happened…

Juntou-se em debate Alexandre Santos (Bright Pixel/SONAE IM), Maria Moura Oliveira (UPTEC), João Pedro Fernandes (BERD) e Nuno Soares (INOVA+) para discutir a transição de programas-quadro europeus no âmbito de I&I e o crescimento de oportunidades direcionadas para as startups europeias, cada vez mais com foco no acesso a capital e nas fases de demonstração para a aceleração na entrada no mercado.

De acordo com os representantes das startups e o centro de inovação, estes instrumentos de financiamento representam não só uma oportunidade de internacionalização, através da disseminação e visibilidade em canais comerciais, como de networking para venda de serviços e/ou produtos a outra empresas. Apontam-se, no entanto, como aspetos-chave de sucesso a importância da seleção das calls e montagem de projetos sólidos, assentes no envolvimento de organizações com reconhecimento europeu na fase de piloto. Alerta-se ainda que para as start-ups é vital que as candidaturas estejam alinhadas com a sua estratégia de curto e médio prazo.

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the changing value of money

Interesting read that took me back to my economics degree.

In a nutshell, if you do not have the time to read this…

Long on Gold

Be careful with holding USD – it’s reserve currency attribute might be now even more at risk.

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Most people don’t pay enough attention to their currency risks.  Most worry about whether their assets are going up or down in value; they rarely worry about whether their currency is going up or down.  Think about it.  Right now how worried are you about your currency declining relative to how worried you are about how your stocks or your other assets are doing?  If you are like most people, you are not nearly as aware of your currency risk and you need to be.

So let’s explore that currency risk.

All Currencies Have Been Devalued or Died

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Read the article

 

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building times

Marc Andreessen just wrote recently a great post about what society (US centric) should be doing differently… He is one of the best Venture Capitalists in activity and with a great view of what we need to tackle in our collective future.

In a word: build

In a couple of more words: if we build what is really needed – more and better housing, transportation, hospitals, universities / schools for all, we as a society will evolve.

The article itself – click here

Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.

Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.

Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*…

read the rest…

 

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the unleashing power of marketplaces

In this new normal, I think that marketplaces will be even more important and crucial to our collective way of living…

Thank you, Bill Gurley for a great post that now with more than one year of existence is even more relevant to read carefully at the always interesting blog called Above the Crowd!

What new marketplaces are still missing in to cater our collective needs?

Bread baking marketplaces? 😉

Digital Learning marketplaces for kids?

A small teaser…

Money Out of Nowhere: How Internet Marketplaces Unlock Economic Wealth

A post from February 27, 2019: 

(*) Benchmark is/was an investor in companies labeled with the asterisk.

In 1776, Adam Smith released his magnum opus, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, in which he outlined his fundamental economic theories. Front and center in the book — in fact in Book 1, Chapter 1 — is his realization of the productivity improvements made possible through the “Division of Labour”:

It is the great multiplication of the production of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. Every workman has a great quantity of his own work to dispose of beyond what he himself has occasion for; and every other workman being exactly in the same situation, he is enabled to exchange a great quantity of his own goods for a great quantity, or, what comes to the same thing, for the price of a great quantity of theirs. He supplies them abundantly with what they have occasion for, and they accommodate him as amply with what he has occasion for, and a general plenty diffuses itself through all the different ranks of society.

Smith identified that when men and women specialize their skills, and also importantly “trade” with one another, the end result is a rise in productivity and standard of living for everyone. In 1817, David Ricardo published On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation where he expanded upon Smith’s work in developing the theory of Comparative Advantage. What Ricardo proved mathematically, is that if one country has simply a comparative advantage (not even an absolute one), it still is in everyone’s best interest to embrace specialization and free trade. In the end, everyone ends up in a better place.

click to read the rest