So here’s my slogan: American Owned. (Or Make Americans Owners, or something, we’re working on it.)
We need to make America the place where everyone is an owner, and everyone acts like an owner. We need to make it the place where hard work and risk taking are applauded and rewarded.
The point is this: we need to stop focusing so much time worrying about protecting peoples’ downsides and start spending more time working on getting more people more upside. (View Highlight)
a person’s labor can’t grow exponentially, it can’t possibly keep up with exponential growth, so we need to make sure that it’s as easy as possible for Americans to become owners. (View Highlight)
Kevin told me his parents’ story: entrepreneurs start a small business, grow it, and get it pulled out from under them when the landlord jacks up the rent.
Rising retail rents are one major factor contributing to a general decline in Main Street small business ownership (View Highlight)
withco simply removes platform risk – the risk that they could get everything right and still get kicked out, gives them full ownership of their business, and allows them to capture more of the upside if they succeed. It helps push ownership and upside to the edges. (View Highlight)
Note: Platform risk - building on someone’s platform and they could yank it from you. Twitter de-platforming
Sam would have had to take home more than 5.5x as much as Ingrid each year to match the net worth she achieves just putting her money in the market. That’s a lot of fucking elbow grease. (View Highlight)
The game has moved on. Consumerism can no longer be the primary economic strategy. The labor market is pretty much maxed out, and the gap isn’t closing.
To bring back the American Dream, America needs to make ownership an explicit economic strategy. (View Highlight)
The Sam and Ingrid scenario plays out over and over again. People accept things with no upside – like free services, discounts, or even cash – for things that companies and more sophisticated investors use to generate upside. The gap widens. (View Highlight)
It is wild to me that we live in a country in which state governments run lotteries, which have a negative expected value (EV) and have long been called a “poor tax,” while the federal government limits who can put their money into positive EV vehicles like venture capital funds (View Highlight)
