economic risks
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Until now we have ignored risk aversion. The Bernoulli brothers were the first to suggest a tractable way of representing risk aversion. They pointed out that an explanation of the St. Petersburg paradox might be that people care about expected utility instead of expected income, where utility is some concave function, such as the logarithm. One of the most famous and important models in financial economics is the Capital Asset Pricing Mod...more
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Estrin explains how it is difficult to reach critical mass in a tough economic environment, which prevents startups from growing enough to compete. She gives a personal example of Precept attempting to enter the market, but not reaching critical mass by the time Microsoft entered the market as well.
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Jeff Raikes, group vice president of Productivity and Business Services (PBS) at Microsoft Corporation, explains his own background and how being open to opportunities helped him become the only undergraduate from the Engineering Economic Systems department at Stanford.  Plans change as opportunities arise, he says. He also recommends entrepreneurs look for a job they love.
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Our understanding of the economy will be more tangible and vivid if we can in principle explain all the economic decisions of every agent in the economy. This lecture demonstrates, with two examples, how the theory lets us calculate equilibrium prices and allocations in a simple economy, either by hand or using a computer. In future lectures we shall extend this method so as to compute equilibrium in financial economies with stocks and bon...more
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Martin Eberhard talks about his first lesson - Do Something Meaningful. Martin believed that he would be successful only he worked on something that he really cared about. He believed that providing a solution to oil consumption was an issue that needed attention. He talks about how he began his journey by building a solution to this immensely important world economic problem.
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England's economic success peaked in 1300 amidst a riot of architectural excess and was followed by a series of disasters which lasted much of the fourteenth century. Yet against a catastrophic background English architectural individualism flourished and out of radically changed social structures an architectural consensus emerged.
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After bringing together the best team, raising money in tough environments, and establishing and living by core values, says Worthington, Fluidigm focused on launching the product. The product development went much faster than anyone could have hoped and soon they had a product with many important features, including an immediate economic benefit to the customers, he notes.
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The economic concept of game theory can be readily applied to evolution and behavior. By analyzing encounters between organisms as a mathematical "game," important information such as fitness payoffs and the proportions of "strategies" played by each group within a population can be inferred. While oftentimes these games are too simplified to apply directly to actual examples in nature, they are still useful models that help convey importa...more
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Roizen talks about her experience in taking venture capital. She learned that if one can use venture funds judiciously to raise the inflection point, then it makes sense to do it. For her, it was an economic decision. Other reasons to take VC money involve credibility issues. Customers want to see that you have partners and money in the bank to prove that you will be around, she says.
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Things aren't ever as good or as bad as we think. Today (2002) is one of the best environments to be an investor. The last three or four years were not a lot of fun--if Khosla went to someone to build a reasonable business, the response he would get was that another company was willing to give more money for less work. He would have to explain that the role of a VC was to help companies develop a real economic model and to give an honest v...more
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It is not only a personal tragedy to be born or to acquire blindness in early life but also a major socio-economic problem. Tragically many cases are preventable. Professor Gilbert will explain why children become blind and how programs instigated worldwide treatment and prevent blindness.
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Estring talks about how it is important for entrepreneurs to think in terms of cycles. There are many different kinds of cycles, such as economic and technology cycles, she notes. Silicon Valley, in the last decade, seems to have forgotten about cycles. We began to believe that everything was up, and nothing would come down, she adds.
