Ideas Are The Economy
The most important asset any nation has are the people with creative
ideas. No ideas = no growth. Plain and simple. It’s the one thing that
is missing from EVERY economic stimulus plan I’ve seen.
For example, imagine that Bill Gates and Paul Allen decided to open a
store selling electronics parts instead of having an idea that software
should be sold and the PC would become popular?
Imagine that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had continued to hack around
phone boxes or simply went to work for HP instead of inventing the Apple
computer?
Imagine that George Lucas decided to become a comic book writer instead
of creating Star Wars (yes, it was just an idea at one time).
Imagine that Nintendo caved in on the video game console wars and
dismissed the idea of the Wii: PS2 won anyway, right?
Imagine if Google had said “well, Alta Vista is king and Yahoo already
owns the user? so let’s accept the job offer from Oracle.”
Imagine if Larry Ellison had conceded databases to IBM, after all Big
Blue already had several decades headstart and billions of cash.
Imagine if eBay’s Pierre Omidyar had said “Onsale is better funded and
backed by Kleiner Perkins, maybe I’ll just stay at General Magic.”
Imagine if Walt Disney had said to his brother Roy: “we’ve failed
numerous times, nobody wants a talking mouse.”
Ideas can build and destroy value.
The #1 way for any government to boost their economy is invest in people
with ideas: entrepreneurs.
Imagine if each city created its own mini business incubator where
entrepreneurs could incubate their ideas, create new companies, create new value, create new jobs, create new liquidity.
Imagine if the U.S. government invested $500 billion into a national
program to spawn entrepreneurs to turn their ideas into value.
What you would see would be value creation on the magnitude that venture
capital or Wall Street could never enable.
You would see an economy growing double digit.
You would be part of this.
It’s possible.
In the UK, the government announced a $1 billion venture fund. More
governments need to start thinking ahead and become more efficient in
stimulating their economies.
The #1 way is through investing in people with ideas.
The #1 thing Obama’s economic plan is missing is an investment in you.
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