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No, that is the illusion. The primary thing you need is capital. Money, and lots of it. Then a service and manufacturing economy to support and sustain it. Bu
by blackrock 6y ago
No, that is the illusion.
The primary thing you need is capital. Money, and lots of it. Then a service and manufacturing economy to support and sustain it.
But the most important ingredient, is to be sovereign. And not get invaded for a hundred years, while you build out your economy and institutions.
The last major war on American soil was the Civil War. You can achieve a lot of momentum, when war and invasion is not happening on your territory.
Basically, don’t be poor. And have a lot of nuclear weapons to F! up your opponents, if they dare attempt to invade you.
If you have all that, then everything else will fall into place.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI'm not sure this makes sense as an explanation of tech dominance. Tech is one of the least capital-intensive industries around. The capital required to build Twitter, or Facebook, or Google, arguably even the Internet, was available in many contemporary countries.
- sp527 6y agoEach of those companies solved hard tech problems to scale and also only managed to achieve that scale because of venture capital subsidization (prior to monetization). They also benefited from major human capital involvement. Looked at the right way, they were extremely capital-intensive endeavors. It just came into more play going from “1 to n” than “0 to 1”. In fact, I’m willing to bet that you’ll find lots of examples of 0 to 1s similar to Facebook and Twitter that preceded them but lacked the capital necessary to get to the same scale.
- ponker 6y agoTo have $2 billion available to invest in Facebook you need to have $200 billion laying around to invest in all the Webvans you find while looking for the next Facebook.