The close relationship between Hoffman and the White House isn’t just about his being a major political donor. He and others like him have something more powerful than money to offer: a way for officials to connect with the largest possible audiences. In the nineteenth century, the bosses of political machines served this role; in the twentieth, it was media barons, especially in broadcasting and newspapers; in the twenty-first, it is people who have created vast online social networks.
.. Everything about Reid Hoffman—his business, his political activities, his philanthropy, and his social life—is based on a premise about how the economic world will work from now on. In the decades immediately after the Second World War, people thought about the economy in terms of corporations, government agencies, labor unions, and so on; middle-class Americans often aspired to a life spent at a big organization that offered job security, health care, and a pension. Beginning in the mid-nineteen-seventies, this social order fell apart, as economic life became much more uncertain and more favorable to Wall Street than to Main Street. The idea that companies should be run primarily to keep their stock price as high as possible came to the fore, the goal of lifetime employment faded, and bright people who wanted business careers were more attracted to finance than to industry. It was at this time that the growth of middle-class incomes began to slow, and inequality began to increase.
.. Mike Maples, Jr., estimates that of the roughly thirty thousand tech startups a year, only ten will wind up representing ninety-seven per cent of the total value of all of them, and one will represent as much value as all the others combined.
A rigorous study of twenty years’ worth of Silicon Valley startups by two economists—Robert Hall, of Stanford, and Susan Woodward, of Sand Hill Econometrics—found that almost three-quarters of company founders who get venture funding (a category that represents only a small minority of those who try to get venture funding) wind up making nothing. Venture capital is overwhelmingly oriented toward speed, big ideas, and the quest for the obsessive, super-smart, rule-breaking entrepreneur-hero.
.. it helped establish a number of lasting principles. One is extreme adaptability. PayPal began as a security system for the PalmPilot. It evolved into a system for processing transactions on eBay
.. when the passage of the Patriot Act severely damaged PayPal’s second line of business—handling cash transactions for gamblers—Hoffman helped arrange a quick sale of PayPal to eBay.
.. In 2006, LinkedIn decided to make all profiles partly public, so that when you type someone’s name into a Google search, that person’s LinkedIn profile is one of the top results.
.. These dreams may never be fully realized. But what if they are? Hoffman and LinkedIn represent the distilled essence of Silicon Valley’s vision of the economic future. People will switch jobs every two or three years; indeed, the challenge is to prevent them from switching more often.
.. It’s assumed that what everybody really wants is to quit and create a startup ..
.. “I’m trying to get politicians to understand that solving this problem is about facilitation of a network, as opposed to”—sarcastically—“the New Deal.”
.. Thus far, among the Presidential candidates, he has had private meetings with Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush, but has not made up his mind whom to support for President.
.. “I have an algorithm,” Hoffman said. “If it’s a good place, order the special. If it’s a bad place, order what they can’t screw up.” They ordered the special.
.. Could you imagine a system that decided it would be better to eliminate human beings? You could make an argument. You’re screwing up the climate, you’re killing off other species.”
.. There will be some people who think whatever’s right is to let the next step in evolution play out. That’s a scary thought.”
Gregory Fenves recently got a big promotion, from provost to president of the University of Texas at Austin. A raise came with it. Instead of his current base of about $425,000, he was offered $1 million.
.. Another of those deals came to light late Tuesday night, when The Wall Street Journal reported that Yale University had paid its former president, Richard Levin, an “additional retirement benefit” of $8.5 million after he retired from his post in 2013. The Journal characterized this as an “unprecedented lump-sum payment” for a college president and noted that Levin’s annual compensation package during his final years at Yale was already over $1 million.
.. How do you defend the transfer of teaching responsibilities to low-paid, part-time adjuncts when the president is sitting so pretty? How do you cut administrative costs, which indeed need cutting? How do you explain steep tuition increases, mammoth student debt and the failure to admit more children from poor families?
How do you summon students back to the liberal arts and away from mercenary priorities?