Entries Tagged 'economics' ↓

Steven Schwarzman is the CEO of the Blackstone Group, a multi-billion dollar money management firm. He is worth billions of dollars, and isn’t afraid to spend his money lavishly:

He often spends $3,000 for a weekend of food for Mr. Schwarzman and his wife, including stone crabs that cost $400, or $40 per claw.

Mr Schwarzman pays a lower tax rate than police officers, firefighters, soldiers, doctors, and teachers. This is the due to the fact that money managers’ “carry fees” are treated as capital gains instead of ordinary income.

Last week the House passed a bill that would partly close this loophole. Sadly, with few exceptions, VC’s are lobbying against this bill, arguing it would hurt innovation, small businesses, and lots of other good stuff.  As one prominent VC recently said:

[H]aving those higher taxes be levied against venture capital investments in small businesses strikes me as self-defeating when it is the single largest job growth area.

The argument seems to be that this tax will hurt small businesses. The phrase “small business” is chosen deliberately by VC lobbyists: most people, when they hear it, think of hard working immigrants pursuing the American Dream. In reality, the only thing this bill will hurt are money managers. As Fred Wilson says:

Changing the taxation of the managers will not reduce the amount of capital going to productive areas. The sources of the capital; wealthy families, endowments, pension funds, and the like, will still put the capital in the places where they will get the highest after tax return. And these sources of capital, if they are tax payers, will still get capital gains treatment on their investments in hedge funds, buyouts, and venture capital. And the fund managers will still have to compete with each other to get access to that capital and their incentives will still be to produce the highest returns they can produce, regardless of whether they are paying capital gains or ordinary income on their fees.

As Fred also argues, removing this tax break will encourage more people to go into jobs that produce tangible goods:

We have witnessed financial services (think asset management, hedge funds, buyout funds, private equity, and venture capital) grow as a percentage of GNP for the past thirty years. The best and brightest don’t go into engineering, science, manufacturing, general management, or entrepreneurship, they go to wall street where they will get paid more. And on top of that, we have been giving these jobs a tax break. That seems like bad policy. If we force hedge funds and the like to compete for talent on a more level playing field, then maybe we’ll see our best and brightest minds go to more productive activities than moving money around and taking a cut of the action.

Fred is absolutely correct. For me, though, removing this loophole just comes down to basic fairness. A fireman who runs into burning buildings shouldn’t pay a higher tax rate than a financier sunbathing on a yacht eating $400 crabs.

When having the “open vs closed” debate regarding a technology platform, a number of distinctions need to be made. First, what exactly is meant by “open.” Here’s a great chart from a paper by Harvard professor Tom Eisenmann (et al).:

(Eisenmann acknlowledges the iPhone isn’t fully open to the end user – in the US you need to use AT&T, etc.  I would argue the iPhone is semi-open to the app developer and mobile app development was effectively closed prior to the iPhone. But the main point here is that platforms can be open & closed in many different ways, at different levels, etc.)

The next important distinction is whose interest you are considering when asking what and when to open or close things.  I think there are at least 3 interesting perspectives:

The company: Lots of people have written about this topic (Clay Christensen, Joel Spolsky, more Eisenmann here).   In a nutshell, there are times when a company, acting solely in its self-interest, should close things and other times they should open things.  As a rule of thumb, a company should close their core assets and open/commoditize complementary assets. Google’s search engine is their core asset and therefore Google should want to keep it closed, whereas the operating system is a complement that they should commoditize (my full analysis of what Google should want to own vs commoditize is here). Facebook’s social graph is their core asset so it’s optimal to close it and not interoperate with other graphs, whereas marking up web pages to be more social-network friendly (open graph protocol) is complementary hence optimal for FB to open.  (With respect to social graphs interoperating (e.g. Open Social), it’s generally in the interest of smaller graphs to interoperate and larger ones not to – the same is true of IM networks).  Note that I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with Google and Facebook or any other company keeping closed or trying to open things according to their own best interests.

The industry: When I say “what is good for the industry” I mean what ultimately creates the most aggregate industry-wide shareholder value.  I assume (hope?) this also yields the maximum innovation.  As an active tech entrepreneur and investor I think my personal interests and the tech industry’s interests are mostly aligned (hence you could argue I’m talking my book).  Unfortunately it’s much easier to study open vs. closed strategies at the level of the firm than at the level of an industry, because there are far more “split test” cases to study.  What would the world be like if email (SMTP) were controlled by a single company?  I would tend to think a far less innovative and wealthy one. There are a number of multibillion dollar industries built on email: email clients, webmail systems, email marketing, anti-spam, etc.  The downside of openness is that it’s very hard to upgrade SMTP since you need to get so many parties to agree and coordinate.  So, for example, it has taken forever to add basic anti-spam authentication features to SMTP.  Twitter on the other hand can unilaterally add useful new things like their recent annotations feature.

Here’s what Professor Eisenmann said when I asked him to summarize the state of economic thinking on the topic:

With respect to your question about the impact of open vs closed on the economy, the hard-core economists cited in my book chapter have a lot to say, but it all boils down to “it depends.” Closed platform provides more incentive for innovation because platform owner can collect and redistribute more rent and can ensure that there’s a manageable level of competition in any given application category. Open platform harnesses strong network effects, attracting more application developers, and  thus stimulates lots of competition. There’s some interesting recent work that suggests that markets may evolve in directions that favor the presence of one strong closed player plus one strong open player (consider: Windows + Linux; iPhone + Android). In this scenario, society/economy gets best of both approaches.

Society:  I tend to think what is good for the tech industry is generally good for society.  But others certainly have different views.  Advocates of openness are often accused of being socialist hippies.  Maybe some are.  I am not.  I care about the tech industry.  I think it’s reasonable to question whether moves by large industry players are good or bad for the industry.  Unfortunately most of the debate I’ve seen so far seems driven by ideology and name calling.

From far away, things that are very different look alike. I grew up in a family of musicians and English professors. To them, the entire financial industry seemed corrupt. When I worked in finance – first on Wall Street and then in venture capital – I saw that the reality was much more nuanced. Some finance is productive and useful and some is corrupt and parasitic.

Most financial markets start out with a productive purpose. Derivatives like futures and options started out as a way for companies to reduce risk in non-core areas, for example for airlines to hedge their exposure to oil prices and transnationals to hedge their exposure to currency fluctuations. The sellers of these derivatives were aggregators who pooled risk, much like insurance companies do. The overall effect was a net reduction in risk to our economy without hampering growth and returns.

Then speculators entered the market, creating more complicated derivative products and betting with borrowed money.  This was defended as a way to increase liquidity and efficiency. But it came at the cost of making the system more complicated and susceptible to abuse. Worst of all, these so-called innovations increased the overall risk to the system, something we saw quite vividly during the recent financial crisis.

Venture capital is a shining example of capitalism just like Adam Smith pictured it, where private vice really does lead to public virtue.  Consider, for example, two of the largest areas of venture investment: biotech and cleantech.  Here we see the best and brightest – top science graduates from places like MIT and Stanford – devoting their lives to curing cancer and developing new energy sources.  These students may be motivated by good will, but need not be, since they will also get rich if they succeed.

A strong case can be made that the financial industry needs significantly more regulation, particularly around big banks and derivatives markets. But it would be a tragic mistake to create regulations that hinder angel investing and venture capital.  From the outside, VC and Wall Street might appear similar, but the closer you get, the more you understand how different they really are.

There is a widespread myth that search engines have taken profits away from news websites. A few months ago, Rupert Murdoch said: “Google has devised a brilliant business model that avoids paying for news gathering yet profits off the search ads sold around that content.”

The reality is that news is a lousy business. Period. Even Google doesn’t make money on it. For example, here are Google’s search results for the phrase “afghanistan war”:

Notice there aren’t any ads on the page. This is because ads for “afghanistan war” generate such low revenues per query that Google doesn’t think it’s worth hurting the user experience with a cluttered page. Google can afford to do this on news queries (along with many other categories of queries) because their real business is selling ads on queries where the user likely has purchasing intent. Big money-making categories include travel, consumer electronics and malpractice lawyers. News queries are loss leaders.

It’s an historical accident that hard news categories like international and investigative reporting were part of profitable businesses. The internet upended this model by 1) providing a new delivery method for classified ads (mainly Craigslist), 2) increasing the supply of newspapers from 1-2 per location to thousands per location, thereby driving the willingness-to-pay for news dramatically down, and 3) unbundling news categories, making cross subsidization increasingly hard.

The internet exposed hard news for what it is: a lousy standalone business. Google arguably contributed to this in many indirect ways, including by helping users find substitute news sources. But the idea that Google takes profits directly from newspapers is simply misinformed.

It is almost religious orthodoxy in the tech community that “open” is better than “closed.” For example, there have widespread complaints about Apple’s “closed” iPhone app approval process. People also argue Apple is making the same strategic mistake all over again versus Android that it made versus Windows*. The belief is that Android will eventually beat the iPhone OS with an “open” strategy (hardware-agnostic, no app approval process) just as Windows beat Apple’s OS in the 90’s.

With respect to requiring apps to be approved, consider the current state of the iPhone platform. There are over 100,000 apps and thus far not a single virus, worm, spyware app etc. (I don’t count utterly farfetched theoretical scenarios). As a would-be iPhone developer, I can report firsthand that the Apple approval process is a nightmare and should be overhauled. But what’s the alternative? Before the iPhone, getting your app on a phone meant doing complicated and expensive business development deals with wireless carriers. At the other end of the spectrum: If the iPhone OS were completely open, would we really have better apps?  What apps are we missing today besides viruses?

With respect to the strategic issue of tightly integrating the iPhone/iPad software and hardware, a strong case can be made that Apple’s “closed” strategy is smart. Clay Christensen has given us the only serious theory I know of to predict when it’s optimal for a company to adopt an open versus closed strategy for (among other things) operating systems. The basic idea is that every new tech product starts out undershooting customer needs and then – because technology gets better faster than customers needs go up - eventually “overshoots” them. (PC’s have overshot today – most people don’t care if the processors get faster or Windows adds new features). Once a product overshoots, the basis of competition shifts from things like features and performance to things like price.

The key difference today between desktop computers and mobile devices is that mobile devices still have a long way to go before customers don’t want more speed, more features, better battery life, smaller size, etc. Just look at all the complaints yesterday about the iPad - that it lacks multitasking, a camera, is too heavy, has poor battery life, etc. This despite the fact that Apple is now even building their own semiconductors (!) to squeeze every last bit of performance out of the iPad. Until mobile devices compete mainly on price (probably a decade from now), tight vertical integration will produce the best device and is likely the best strategy.

*It’s worth noting that Steve Jobs wasn’t the one who screwed up Apple. Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976. He was pushed out in in May 1985 when the company was valued at about $2.2B. He returned in 1996 when Apple was worth $3B. Today it is worth $187B.

Sarah Lacy has a very interesting post on TechCrunch where she conjectures that the internet is finally starting to disrupt Wall Street. I’d love nothing more than to see Wall Street get nailed by the internet the way, say, publishing and advertising have.

While I agree on the big picture, I disagree with some of her specifics. She cites Mint and Square as examples of startups that potentially disrupt Wall Street. As I see it, these companies have merely built nice UI’s to Wall Street: Mint connects to your banks and Square to Visa and Mastercard and the bank that issued the credit card. If people at farmers’ markets use credit cards instead of cash, that means more money for Wall Street, not less.

I would argue the best way to try to disrupt Wall Street is to look at how it currently makes money and attack it there. Here are some of the big sources of revenue.

1) Retail banks. Retail banks make money on fees and by paying low interest rates on deposits and then doing stuff with those deposits (buying stocks, mortgages, issuing credit cards, etc) that gets them a much higher return. To disrupt them you need to get people to stop depositing money in them. Zopa and Prosper are trying to do that. Unfortunately the regulatory system seems to strongly favor the incumbents.

2) Credit cards. Charging 20% interest rates (banks) and skimming pennies off every transaction (Visa and Mastercard) is a very profitable business. Starting a new payment company that doesn’t depend on the existing banks and credit card companies could be disruptive. Paypal seems to have come the closest to doing this.

3) Proprietary trading. A big trend over the last decade is for more of big banks’ profits to come from “proprietary trading” – which basically means operating big hedge funds inside banks (this trend is one of the main causes of the financial crisis and why the new “Volcker rule” is potentially a very good thing). For example, most of Goldman Sachs’ recent massive profits came from proprietary trading. Basically what they do is hire lots of programmers and scientists to make money on fancy trading algorithms.  (Regrettably, I spent the first four years of my career writing software to help people like Goldman do this).  Given that the stock market was flat over the last decade and hedge funds made boatloads of money, the loser in this game are mostly unsophisticated investors (e.g. my parents in Ohio). Any website that encourages unsophisticated investors to buy specific stocks is helping Wall Street. Regular people should buy some treasury bonds or maybe an S&P 500 ETF and be done with it. That would be a huge blow to Wall Street.

4) Trading. The more you trade stocks, the more Wall Street makes money. The obvious beneficiaries are the exchanges – NYSE, NASDAQ etc. There were attempts to build new exchanges in the 90’s like Island ECN. The next obvious beneficiaries are brokers like Fidelity or E-Trade. But the real beneficiaries aren’t the people who charge you explicit fees; it’s the people who make money on your trading in other ways.  For example, the hot thing on Wall Street is right now is high frequency “micro structure” trading strategies, which is basically a way to skim money off the “bid-ask spread” from trades made by less sophisticated investors.

5) Investment banking. Banks make lots of money on “services” like IPOs and big mergers. A small way to attack this would be to convince tech companies (Facebook?) to IPO without going via Wall Street (this is what Wit Capital tried to do). Regarding mergers, there have been endless studies showing that big mergers only enrich CEOs and bankers, yet they continue unabated. This is part of the massive agency problem on Wall Street and can probably only change with a complete regulatory overhaul.

6) Research. Historically, financial research was a loss leader used to sell investment banking services. After all the scandals of the 90’s, new regulations put in stronger walls between the research and banking. As a result, banks cut way back on research. In its place expert networks like Gerson Lehrman Group rose up. LinkedIn and Stocktwits are possible future disrupters here.

7) Mutual fund management. Endless studies have shown that paying fees to mutual funds is a waste of money. Maybe websites that let your peers help you invest will disrupt these guys. I think a much better way to disrupt them is to either not invest in the stock market or just buy an ETF that gives you a low-fee way to buy the S&P 500 index.

This is by no means an exhaustive list and I have no idea how to solve most of these problems. But I’d love to see the financial industry be one of the next targets of internet innovation.

In Clay Shirky’s brilliant essay “Newspapers and thinking the unthinkable” one line stood out to me as odd:

“The Wall Street Journal has a paywall, so we can too!” (Financial information is one of the few kinds of information whose recipients don’t want to share.)

It is true that The Wall Street Journal is one of two newspapers (along with the Financial Times) that seems to have been pretty successful getting people to pay. It’s not clear why Shirky thinks people don’t want to share financial information. Hopefully he doesn’t think business people want to keep the Journal to themselves to keep some competitive advantage. Pretty much everyone in finance and business that I know reads the Journal every day – no one would seriously consider anything in there a competitive advantage. People send Journal links to each other all the time. It is background knowledge that everyone is expected to know.

The reason people are willing to pay for the Journal has nothing to do with their unwillingness to share or pirate financial information. It’s quite simply the fact that the Journal is a valuable business input that can’t be found anywhere else. Most people, when presented with something of value that is scarce and reasonably priced, don’t pirate (especially when they can charge it to their business). The revenue-maximizing price of any good – including digital goods – is determined by value and scarcity, not what it costs to produce it.

The fact that the cost of distributing newspapers is dropping to near zero only affects the price of newspapers if the content is commoditized. The problem the New York Times has isn’t that people are willing to share or pirate their content.  It’s that with the advent of the internet, competition for general news went from one or two per market to thousands per market. (The other big blow was classifieds getting decoupled from newspapers).

Most business people I know consider the Times an essential daily read, not just for its business and finance news, but also its section A news and op-eds. If you are a running an operating company or investment firm you want to know not just narrow business news but the broader context of what’s happening in the world.

Most smaller newspapers will go out of business over the next few years, vastly increasing the scarcity of news. If the Times creates content that is scare and valuable – and remains an essential “business input” – it can have the same success online as the Journal.

One of the amazing things about the internet economy is how different the list of top internet properties today looks from the list ten years ago.  It wasn’t as if those former top companies were complacent – most of them acquired and built products like crazy to avoid being displaced.

The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.”  This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory. This theory starts with the observation that technologies tend to get better at a faster rate than users’ needs increase. From this simple insight follows all kinds of interesting conclusions about how markets and products change over time.

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. The first telephone could only carry voices a mile or two. The leading telco of the time, Western Union, passed on acquiring the phone because they didn’t see how it could possibly be useful to businesses and railroads – their primary customers. What they failed to anticipate was how rapidly telephone technology and infrastructure would improve (technology adoption is usually non-linear due to so-called complementary network effects). The same was true of how mainframe companies viewed the PC (microcomputer), and how modern telecom companies viewed Skype. (Christensen has many more examples in his books).

This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes. Obviously, products get better inasmuch as the designer adds features, but this is a relatively weak force. Much more powerful are external forces: microchips getting cheaper, bandwidth becoming ubiquitous, mobile devices getting smarter, etc. For a product to be disruptive it needs to be designed to ride these changes up the utility curve.

Social software is an interesting special case where the strongest forces of improvement are users’ actions. As Clay Shirky explains in his latest book, Wikipedia is literally a process – every day it is edited by spammers, vandals, wackos etc., yet every day the good guys make it better at a faster rate. If you had gone back to 2001 and analyzed Wikipedia as a static product it would have looked very much like a toy. The reason Wikipedia works so brilliantly are subtle design features that sculpt the torrent of user edits such that they yield a net improvement over time. Since users’ needs for encyclopedic information remains relatively steady, as long as Wikipedia got steadily better, it would eventually meet and surpass user needs.

A product doesn’t have to be disruptive to be valuable. There are plenty of products that are useful from day one and continue being useful long term. These are what Christensen calls sustaining technologies. When startups build useful sustaining technologies, they are often quickly acquired or copied by incumbents. If your timing and execution is right, you can create a very successful business on the back of a sustaining technology.

But startups with sustaining technologies are very unlikely to be the new ones we see on top lists in 2020. Those will be disruptive technologies – the ones that sneak by because people dismiss them as toys.

Mary Meeker’s presentation this year on internet trends was all about mobile. Inasmuch as data-heavy research report from a major investment bank can be said to have a “climax,” it was probably these slides:

The assertion seems to be that there is something special about the mobile internet that compels people to pay for things they wouldn’t pay for on the desktop internet.  It is this same thinking that has newspapers and magazines hoping the Kindle or a tablet device might be their savior.

It is certainly true that today people are paying for things on iPhones and Kindles that they aren’t paying for on the desktop internet. Personally, I’ve bought a bunch of iPhone games that I would have expected to get for free online. I also paid for the New York Times and some magazines on my Kindle that I never paid for on my desktop.

But longer term, the question is whether this is because of something fundamentally – and sustainably – different about mobile versus desktop or whether it is just good old fashioned supply and demand.

I think we are in the AOL “walled garden” days of the mobile internet. Demand is far outpacing supply, so consumers are paying for digital goods. I don’t pay for news or simple games on the desktop internet because there are so many substitutes that my willingness to pay is driven down to zero.

What are the arguments that the mobile internet is sustainably different than the desktop internet? One of the main ones I’ve heard is habit: digital goods providers made a mistake in the 90’s by giving stuff away for free. Now people are habituated to free stuff on the desktop internet. Mobile is a chance to start over.

I think this habit argument is greatly overplayed. The same argument has been made for years by the music industry: “kids today think music should be free” and so on. Back in the 90s, I bought CDs, not because I was habituated to paying for music, but because there was no other reasonably convenient way to get it. If tomorrow you waved a magic wand and CD’s were once again the only way kids could buy the Jonas Brothers and Taylor Swift, they’d pay for them. It’s the fact that there are convenient and free substitutes that’s killing the music industry, not consumers’ habits.

As the supply of mobile digital goods grows — the same way it did on the desktop internet — consumers’ willingness-to-pay will drop and either advertising will emerge as the key driver of mobile economic growth or the mobile economy will disappoint. I was going to buy a Chess app for my iPhone this morning but when I searched and found dozens of free ones I downloaded one of those.  At some point there will be lots of Tweetie, Red Laser, and Flight Control substitutes and they too will be free.

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