Bill Simmons monologue

I really enjoyed listening to Bill Simmons' podcast dated April 3 (in which he also interviews Wesley Morris). Bill is the founder of Grantland and is one of my favorite sports writers. He spends the first 40 minutes of this podcast discussing his writing career, and how hard it was for him in the beginning. It is really rare to listen to someone describe in such detail every turn his career took. Great stuff.

Negative Yields

From the Wall Street Journal, and other sources: We are living in the midst of historic financial times. While that may not sound exciting, it is highly unusual and virtually unprecedented for bond yields to fall below zero. What does that mean? It means that a lender of money agrees to pay an interest rate to the borrower, for the luxury of lending him money. Read that last sentence several times until it sinks in.

Business is Faster Than Immigration

From Bloomberg, a great story about Mike Krieger, a native of Brazil and a graduate of Stanford in 2009. Upon graduation, he got a temporary work visa thru a job at Meebo, a software startup. Meebo immediately applied for a H-1B visa on behalf of Krieger, hoping to keep him working in the US. The process wasn't an easy one, and took a year before he was granted one. Meanwhile, over the course of a few weeks, Krieger created a web app now known as Instagram, which he launched in April 2010. Two years later, he sold it to Facebook for $1 billion.

Clean Tech Ahead of Schedule

From Bloomberg, a new study reveals that battery costs are falling faster than originally expected. The study, published in Nature Climate Change, finds that battery costs for electric vehicles has fallen 14% per year, and is now at a cost level first predicted to be achievable in 2020.

Replacing SWIFT

From Bloomberg: Each year, over $900 billion is transferred across borders by banks that are members of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, aka SWIFT. This non-profit coop includes over 10,800 banks, and is the bloodstream on global commerce. It was founded in 1973, and is showing its age. Errors and fees and aging technology make SWIFT a prime candidate for disruption. Enter Earthport, a London-based payment system that works in the cloud and offers banks an alternative method of moving money across borders.

An Alt School Approach

From a recent A16z podcast, I learned about the Alt School network of schools in northern California. This network of private "micro-schools" seeks to leverage online learning with small classroom sizes to educate children outside of the standardized testing approach. Since the school has minimal administration personnel and physical buildings and plant to maintain, it is hugely scalable. This prevents their high quality teaching approach from being exclusionary, which is often the case for private schools. It keeps costs down and leaves teachers with enormous autonomy.

A Company Hiring 50,000 per month!

As discussed in the Bloomberg interview with Bill Maris, one of Google Venture's investments is Uber. Unbelievably, it was discussed that Uber is currently hiring 50,000 new drivers worldwide EACH MONTH. For perspective, the entire US economy has a good month when it hires a net 300,000 new people. Uber is an incredible job-creating machine, like no other in the history of the world.