Drift Signal

The Agenda 👇* James Crabtree on India, Asia, and Singapore 🎧👆* Important books about America* Speaking of America, what will become of it?* Lessons from Ant Financial’s IPO having been squashed* The rise of protectionism—in different shapes and forms* A daily newsletter for entrepreneurs by The FamilyToday I’m sharing the second episode of the podcast series syndicated with my wife Laetitia Vitaud’s Building Bridges and our French-speaking media operation Nouveau Départ: a conversation between Laetitia and James Crabtree, author of the landmark book The Billionaire Raj 🇮🇳Frequent readers of this newsletter will remember that I chronicled James’s book in a past edition about What’s Happening in India? The same focus on the rise of Indian tech is present in this podcast, alongside many other topics such as how the pandemic has impacted India and life in Singapore, where James lives with his family.I’m all the more eager to share this conversation as my relationship with James was initiated more than one year ago when I visited Singapore, all thanks to our mutual friend (and James’s former colleague at the Financial Times) John Thornhill, and our very first conversation was on exactly the same topics: the rise of India, life and Singapore, and Asia in general on the global stage.Please listen to the podcast by clicking on the player above 🎧👆 (or downloading it into your favorite podcast app), then share it, and let me know what you think!🇺🇸 A Reading List on AmericaThe polls had barely closed on Tuesday when it was already clear that while Donald Trump may end up being defeated, there wouldn’t be an overwhelming victory for Joe Biden. This quickly led to a cottage industry of “What’s going on in America” op-eds, which, of course, didn’t do much to really clarify the situation.However, that doesn’t mean that insights aren’t available. So I went back into my Evernote to resurface a few of my favorite articles and books that I feel provide the most insight not only on the American psyche, but also the political realignments that are sweeping through the world as it passes into the Entrepreneurial Age.From Polish populism to small-town America to global geopolitics, I think there’s not only something for everyone in the list, but also that they are sources that are extremely complementary. And at the very least, they can provide a deeper dive than we’re accustomed to getting from our daily Twitter feed (although I have enjoyed the joyscrolling that started once the race was called for Biden on Saturday).Find it all in A Reading List on America 📖 🌎 What Becomes of America (and the World)History is full of crises and rebirths; one of the lingering questions from the 2008 crisis has been what, exactly, happened to the rebirth? Despite the recovery of global stocks, lingering resentments and the sensation of stagnation and missed opportunities abound.One theory is that Barack Obama came along too early in the cycle, and thus was unable to be the truly reconstructive figure that the crisis required. That lack of true reconstruction explains the ability that Donald Trump exhibited in driving further wedges between people, both in the United States and around the globe.Now, with Joe Biden having won the election, the question remains: Could he become the reconstructive figure that a crisis calls for? No one would accuse him of being a radical, certainly; but then again, that label wouldn’t have been affixed to FDR in 1932, either.I delve into what history says about what comes next in What Becomes of America (and the World) 🤔🐜 Jack Ma’s Future  I’ve spent quite a bit of time lately thinking and writing about IPOs, as have many others. We all see how IPOs act as a powerful part of a healthy entrepreneurial ecosystem, providing liquidity and rewarding everyone from founders and investors to employees and even pensioners. As such, the planned Ant Financial IPO, which was on track to be the biggest of all time, was highly anticipated.But apparently the CCP has a different take on things. Following Ant co-founder Jack Ma’s speech calling for an overhaul of China’s financial system, the IPO was halted, a move that for now appears to be indefinite. For those of us who dream of having tech giants such as Ant emerge from our local geographies, it’s a development that’s nothing less than astounding.Still, like so much that happens in China it’s difficult for outsiders to know exactly what is going on or what the future holds. But given the CCP’s grip over policy throughout the country, it’s clear that they won’t allow anything, whether a popular entrepreneurial figure or the biggest IPO ever, to derail their strategy for China’s development.I discuss all this and point to some insightful resources in Jack Ma’s Future🔮🛡 You’re The Protectionist!There are many uncertainties in today’s economic and political forecasts, but one trend is quite clear: protectionism is back. Countries around the world are rewriting the rules of global trade, both in terms of specific country-to-country relationships (such as the US vs. France, playing out in big tech vs. big wine) and in more general positions (China’s actions to encourage its industrial development).But while the rising tide of protectionism may be clearly visible, the reasons behind it are much more muddled—even, and perhaps especially, for the countries installing these new policies. There are a few with a clear-eyed view of why protectionism can help their economies; but there are many doing it either in response to longstanding geopolitical relationships or simply because everyone else is doing it.As the history of economic development tells us, those latter two reasons are not advisable. Successful trade policies are always the result of an accurate understanding of where one’s industrial capacities lie, and so many countries today are fooled by memories of or wishes regarding their country’s place in the world.I look at some countries that are seeing clearly and some that are headed down the wrong path in You’re The Protectionist!😤Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!⚠️ It would be difficult to find any business on the planet that hasn’t been affected by COVID-19, and my firm The Family is no different. As early as last March, we saw that moving 100% online was a necessity, as the large in-person events we’ve had over the past 7 years aren’t going to be possible anytime soon. But moving 100% online is also an opportunity to truly expand to become an entity that boosts startups no matter where they’re located.* In particular, we realized that today, contrary to back in 2013 when Alice, Oussama and I founded the firm, we now have access to top-notch investors from around the globe, meaning that the fundamental requirement for having a successful Demo Day is now in place.* In this context, we’re working toward the first batch that will go through the new, improved, 100% online version of The Family. And to count that down, me and my fellow directors (Alice, Oussama, Balthazar and Mathias) are writing a daily newsletter, where each day one of us relates a startup lesson that we’ve gleaned over the past years.* We’ll send 5 editions a week (one by each of us) over the course of 7 weeks—that is, until Christmas 🌲 If you’ve already received the first two editions, great! If you haven’t, you can read them (and subscribe) at The Family Substack. From Is Trump Still in the Flow? (September 2020):  The flow has very much to do with people wanting to get rid of Trump and his erratic approach to the presidency. This is how I interpret Biden winning the Democratic nomination: US voters are just exhausted; they don’t aspire to Elizabeth Warren’s grand plans or Bernie Sanders’s socialist revolution as much as to simply turning the page and seeing Trump gone.All recent editions:* A Reading List on America—for subscribers only.* What Becomes of America (and the World)—for subscribers only.* Jack Ma’s Future—for subscribers only.* You’re The Protectionist!—for subscribers only.* The Gig Economy. IPOs in Europe. Silicon Valley Politics. Countries Are Different.—for everyone.* Each Country Is Different—for subscribers only.* Debriefing Our IPO Panel—for subscribers only.* Inflection Points in Silicon Valley Politics—for subscribers only.* IPOs: Will the Next Generation of Founders Choose to List in Europe?—for subscribers only.* Feminist Cities w/ Leslie Kern. America. Rebooting Businesses. Construction.—for everyone.European Straits is a 5-email-a-week product, and all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!From Normandy, France 🇫🇷Nicolas This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.driftsignal.com/subscribe

The Agenda 👇* Launching a podcast with Laetitia Vitaud. This week’s guest: Leslie Kern 🎧* Software will eat construction, too—one day* Turning incumbents into tech companies* The main difference between Europe and America* And no, it’s not about more or less regulation* The Family Affairs feat. Mathias Pastor* My podcast conversation with Mehdi Yacoubi🎙 As I announced last week, my wife Laetitia Vitaud and I have decided to launch an English-speaking podcast series together and to syndicate it across a network of newsletters. That includes Building Bridges, the mothership for this series, as well as Nouveau Départ (our French-speaking family media operation, where transcripts will be published in French), Laetitia’s own Laetitia@Work about the future of work, outlets to be launched in German and Spanish, and European Straits, of course, since it’s all promoting a European point of view on global affairs.* We have an impressive series of interviews coming up with Laetitia as a host (including with James Crabtree, Vaughn Tan, Bruno Macaes, Mariana Mazzucato, Hilary Cottam, and many others), and I’ll take my turn hosting in a few weeks! Stay tuned 😎The inaugural episode, which you can listen to by clicking above 👆, is a fascinating conversation between Laetitia and Leslie Kern, a Canadian author whose book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-made World (2020) we both found particularly inspiring.* Leslie is an associate professor of geography and environment and director of women's and gender studies at Mount Allison University in Canada.As Laetitia wrote last week,With the pandemic and much political, economic and social chaos, 2020 generated lots of questions about cities, urban life, and activism. Many people wonder whether cities still have a future. I’m sure they do. But maybe more so if they are “feminist cities”. And that’s why Leslie Kern’s ideas are even more relevant than ever.She is “proud to call [herself] a feminist geographer”. Twenty years ago, people may have mocked the idea that geography could be sexist or feminist. Today more people understand that urban planning does indeed have consequences on gender equality, and that we need to take more diverse points of view into account to make housing and infrastructure better for all.It’s a conversation that resonates a lot with topics I’ve been exploring for a long time: urbanization, how jobs concentrate in densely populated areas, why that’s correlated with software eating the world, and why it calls for inventing a new social safety net for all those workers in proximity services. Leslie’s vision of “feminist cities” isn’t that different from the one I developed in my book Hedge, in which designing institutions for service workers in large cities was a central idea.(Credits: Franz Liszt, Mephisto Waltz, S.514-extract from the album Miroirs by Jonas Vitaud, NoMadMusic.)💻 Why Software Has a Hard Time Eating Construction 🏘One promise of the Entrepreneurial Age is that innovation brings better products to more people for lower prices. And yet some industries resist that formula. In an industry like healthcare, that’s because the end user isn’t actually usually in a position to choose or even fully understand their care. In an industry like construction, it’s because there’s a large portion of SMBs in the value chain, with both those providers and end users being quite resistant to standardization.At one time, I thought that could perhaps be an opportunity for the emerging tech giants. Google’s purchase of Nest back in early 2014 could have been the first step toward a full-stack construction operation, with Google lowering prices by pushing builders into adapting their practices in order to be part of a “Google Builders” network.Needless to say, that hasn’t happened yet. But startups around the globe are still trying to crack the prefab puzzle, especially now that COVID-19 is playing its recognized part in accelerating emerging trends. There have been labor shortages in construction for years, a situation that’s only becoming more acute during the pandemic.I got into the details in Why Software Has a Hard Time Eating Construction. 📲 Rebooting Businesses for the Entrepreneurial Age Back in the early days of The Family, we were always thinking about different ways to kickstart the European startup ecosystem. One idea centered on how to turn legacy businesses with known assets into modern companies using technology to deliver the top-notch services that customers are now accustomed to. We even went through a long due diligence process on a major Paris-based retail franchise to see if it was possible.The thing we realized, though, was that such an operation actually crosses three different streams in today’s financing world: buyout firms, turnaround firms, and venture capital firms. And since each of those specialities exist independently of one another, it’s not exactly clear how one can acquire the backing to pull off a true reboot. I was reminded of this while listening to a recent podcast discussion with a prominent value investor who goes by the pseudonym of Modest Proposal on Twitter, where the subject was how to grow tech-driven business models in “heterogeneous services” industries such as on-demand home services.Read more in Rebooting Businesses for the Entrepreneurial Age.🛣 Europe Is a Base, America Is a DestinationIf you want to quickly see one big difference between the mental picture we all have of Europe vs. the US, just ask yourself one question: How many Europeans do you know who moved away to live in the US for a significant amount of time, and how many Americans do you know who have moved away to live in Europe (or elsewhere)? If you’re like me, the first number is pretty big, while the second is quite low. And after 30 years of closely studying the US, I think that the concept of a base vs. a destination explains a good deal. Europeans know that they can leave Europe to go pursue opportunities elsewhere, always having a base to return to whenever they want. But Americans have already reached their destination, with internal immigration being the only option available on their mental map.Still, things are changing. The US is becoming less welcoming to immigration, which drastically changes its historical positioning. It also will affect long-term economic growth, as countries that are less open to new arrivals soon find themselves in a demographic trap. And some of the “escapism” that Americans tend to indulge as a response to having reached their destination is becoming quite alarming, even dangerous as they play the “Trump and an autocratic state” game. You can keep going in Europe Is a Base, America Is a Destination.👮‍♂️ Fewer Regulations in America?One thing that the US certainly doesn’t lack, and which we’re likely to see coming into action in the wake of next Tuesday’s Election Day, is lawyers. And the legal profession is at the heart of a very common misconception, namely that there are fewer regulations in the US than there are in Europe.In fact, the US simply has produced more lawyers per capita than virtually any other country, and so Americans see it as normal to have a lawyer navigating the maze of regulations for them (a maze that changes depending on which of the 50 states you’re dealing with!). This wasn’t always the case. In fact, it was in the 1970s, that moment marking the turn toward global free trade, the supposed deregulation of the Reagan era, and financialization when the US began producing more and more lawyers, from the roughly 300,000 who were around in 1970 to over 1.2M by 2010! Needless to say, it would seem that if the US really was a freedom paradise unencumbered by regulations, the country wouldn’t be producing all those lawyers.I go further into the discussion in Fewer Regulations in America?Sounds interesting? Subscribe to European Straits and let me know what you think!⚠️ My colleague and fellow director at The Family Mathias Pastor just announced a new series of talks with inspiring founders, called The Family Affairs. He explained the thinking behind it all and talked about his first three guests in his Substack publication Published Draftshere. 🎧 I was pleased to be invited onto the podcast of Mehdi Yacoubi, co-founder of Lifetizr. We took a look back at why I wrote my book Hedge, the current geopolitical context, the great fragmentation and more —listen to it directly on Apple Podcasts. From Adieu to Old America (April 2020):I love the US as a nation and it’s still hard for me to accept the fact that we Europeans and Americans don’t have much in common anymore. Even worse, I have invested quite a lot of time and resources over the past 20 years in getting to know the US better, figuring out how the US and Europe can complement each other, and developing a network on the other side of the Atlantic. So when things happen that point to that whole investment now becoming worthless, I have both losses to recoup and wounds to lick.All recent editions:* Fewer Regulations in America?—for subscribers only.* Europe Is a Base, America Is a Destination—for subscribers only.* Rebooting Businesses for the Entrepreneurial Age—for subscribers only.* Why Software Has a Hard Time Eating Construction—for subscribers only.* Value Creation Is The Key To Everything—for everyone.* Does Every Country Need Their Own DARPA?—for subscribers only.* On Trains and Geography—for subscribers only.* Round 2 on Liquidity & Exits—for subscribers only.* Is Going Global Still a Thing?—for subscribers only.* Venture Capital Is Hard—for everyone.European Straits is now a 5-email-a-week product; all essays are subscriber-only (with rare exceptions). Join us!From Normandy, France 🇫🇷Nicolas This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.driftsignal.com/subscribe