Gore Joins Kleiner Perkins

Read in a WSJ article that Al Gore is joining as a partner with Kleiner Perkins to focus on energy and climate change investments. He said he will donate his salary and all his earnings to the environmental group Alliance for Climate Protection. Although he didn't say whether he would commit his earnings from future Kleiner investments (where the real money comes in anyway). It's really interesting the type of career switching this guy has been able to do. Vice President, U.S. House of Representatives, U.S. Senate, state senate, Nobel Peace Prize winner, activist. Admirable guy ... although I have to admit that I voted against him.

Comments

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...

Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano

I found this opinion piece ( Democrats aren't innocent bystanders ) interesting on how both Democrats and Republicans share responsibility for polarizing the electorate and undermining some of its faith in democracy. It references two other posts that were pretty good as well: The Disease of Delegitimization The Weimarization of the American Republic The second article is really long and heavy on history. But given all of the comparisons people make between the current times and those of post-WWI Germany, I found it interesting to dive in to understand where the comparisons are coming from and how close we really are. The short answer is that we aren't that close (phew). Seems like post-WWI Germany was incredibly fragile. This was a good excerpt that summarized it: So, unlike the 60s, you have a dynamic in which both sides are behaving like radicals, in which the establishment isn’t yelling “stop,” and in which oikophobia is more evenly distributed, relative to its Boo...

A Possible Solution to the Mortgage Crisis

Came across this one on Mankiw's blog as well (... someone has been stealing my WSJ's each morning before I can pick them up outside). Martin Feldstein, a professor at Harvard and chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors for Reagan, had an opinion article in the WSJ yesterday that outlined a possible solution to the mortgage crisis. Criteria for the plan is: don't shift burden to taxpayers, don't force banks to eat all the losses, and create an incentive for homeowners to stay in their homes. The idea is that the US government would provide loans to homeowners up to 20% of their mortgage amount, with a 15 year pay-back period and adjustable interest rate based on the two-year treasury note. The whole thing would be funded by selling more two-year treasury notes. This would obviously not stop anyone from walking away from their home if they have negative equity, but it might prompt those that are worried about that scenario happening to them in the future to sti...

Power Pal

Search This Blog