To Get Truly Rich, Read Philosophy
To get truly rich, read philosophy.
Being a boring, balding middle-aged man running a small business, I have tended to notice, but not pursue, topics that may pop up on LinkedIn or among my Delphi country managers and founder members.
One of those topics is INNOVATION (always in big caps!).
Everyone said it was important, and I know several CEOs who pay handsomely for an expensive advisory agent on innovation.
Like sand inside my swimming trunks I was irritated not being able to figure out if there was any validity to these searches for INNOVATION - but I felt it was probably not worth investigating.
Things changed when I bought The Contrarian by Max Chafkin, and like a “bolt from the blue”, I suddenly realized what it was that had been bugging me - especially in Japan, where “innovation” at least the founder-led kind, and especially its lack, is portrayed as being tied to low risk appetite, domestic bias, insufficient and inadequate CEOs, salaryman VCs, personal guarantees for loans and other practical slash tactical issues.
My dear reader(s), reading this book made me realize that the obstacle to innovation in Japan and also Europe is essentially political. It’s not a business issue at all.
The Innovation paradigm today is defined as the technology out of Silicon Valley, and its complex ecosystem. This ecosystem has decided how we shop (Amazon), socialize (Facebook, WhatsApp), understand the world around us (Google & YouTube), develop our businesses (LinkedIn), and pay for it all (PayPal and Stripe).
The “guru” of them all - Peter Thiel.
He actually founded PayPal, was an influential early stage investor in Facebook, was allied
to the founder of LinkedIn, and took stakes in OpenAI, SpaceX, Airbnb and Lyft.
In my doubtless useless estimation, he is… struggling here to find something big and bonkers enough here… the Galileo of the modern world, with a twist of Christopher Columbus.
Galileo almost destroyed the papacy with his discoveries, and Columbus did something everybody told him was impossible. Have fun finding your own historical equivalents.
Now, Thiel is, was and forever will be primarily driven by a fanatical ideology.
The software products he/they spawned were tools to further that ideology. The investments into the tools built the future that the founders desired, and thus made the investments insanely (as a Brit, I find the sums of money made in the US otherworldly - no pun intended, although it would be quite a good one given Elon Musk’s inter-planetary ambitions and Thiel’s fascination with Tolkien’s elves) profitable.
Do you see what I mean?
It’s a feedback loop.
You decide how people should live based on your vision of the world, create that world, make the old world obsolete, and then sell us what we need to survive.
It doesn’t strictly matter to my broader point which ideology we are talking about.
The point is that the wellspring of these business transformations is political.
While I quite innocently use PayPal today to pay our occasional speaker, Chafkin informs me that Peter Thiel invented PayPal to revolutionize the relationship of the citizen to the state. Like the proponents of Bitcoin, he wanted to avoid national taxes and government interference.
Interestingly, the stooge who actually wrote the code, Max Levchin, is a bit player in all this. He could code, but where was the vision, dummy?
While Japan tries (or pretends) to encourage innovation by high-profile, lavishly funded events like SusHi Tech, it brought a smile to my face to imagine the powerful and often unaccountable bureaucrats of Kasumigaseki allowing private sector businessmen to brazenly challenge the dominance of the state.
It’s perfectly possible to do this in the US, if you are rich and determined enough, as Chafkin describes, because the legal system permits such challenges. Thiel got contracts from the US military only because he initially sued them for refusing to consider his bids.
Thiel’s efforts are crowned by the double presidency of Donald Trump, whose anti-immigration, anti-woke, establishment-busting, and (sporadic) anti-tech policies were all thought up by Peter Thiel as early as the 1990s at Stanford University. (Thiel is anti-tech when it comes to Google, but pro-tech when it enriches him (like Palantir) or supports his libertarian ambitions, like X).
Japan and Europe, and even the UK, just don’t function like this.
The mechanisms for accumulating political power are quite separate to business riches.
Richard Branson has very little impact on British politics. James Dyson did spend money on Brexit, and so did the founder of Wetherspoons, a chain of cheap pubs.
A few rich Brits funded a right-wing news channel.
Boris Johnson and David Cameron are very interested in money but they go into politics and then make money subsequently from their speaker fees and dodgy Australian businessmen.
This is “small beer” compared to how Thiel has one foot on both horses (well-hung stallions, obviously - he doesn’t do mares) as he gallops towards world domination.
In Japan, the only really rich man I know of is Masayoshi Son. His life was entertainingly reviewed by Lionel Barber, and beyond his experience of racism, he does not seem to have a political bone in his body. As Barber points out, he is at base, a crazed and addicted business gambler, albeit a brilliant one.
I think Son also tried to “create the future” through the sheer size of his bets - but, my friends, he never tried to suborn the Japanese political system. By avoiding politics, Son has failed to accumulate the kind of power which would guarantee the sustainability of his success. He is always one bet away from ruin, because he has not embedded his philosophy in the warp and weft of the world around us. Really, he’s just been following the Americans. (I want to clarify that I think this is a good thing, but not as much as you might think).
The difference is that these are third or fourth tier players compared to Peter Thiel (I concede Son is second tier). They are great managers or speculators, but not philosophers - philosophers who want to change the political framework we live in.
These Brits made money first, often the old-fashioned way in retail and finance, and then got interested in politics. With Thiel, it was always politics first.
The Nazis (I am so sorry to bring them in, it’s just that everybody knows about them!) invented the household radio to live-stream propaganda. They invented the VW Beetle and the motorways as dual-use technologies, and to engage with their working class and lower-middle class base. These were world-class innovations and they were not tools of personal enrichment.
To sum up: business innovation in the US came from political radicalism. Personal enrichment is for pussies.
Where does this leave you, perhaps a foreign founder in Japan?
Well, you need to find a Japanese political patron who sees in your product something which will advance his fanatical political vision. He (maybe a “yellow nationalist”) will finance you, change the regulations in your favour, and convince everyone that you are a FORCE FOR GOOD. But remember, he will be in the driving seat. It will be a highly lucrative but unequal partnership. You may end up separating weeping mothers from their children, so steel yourself!
Alternatively, you are doubtless a smart guy but you were misled into doing a STEM subject. This, sadly, only sets you up for being “the stooge”, like poor Max Levchin.
If you want to become the BOSS, you could sit down, read lots of books, and come up with your own vision of the world, and then find the engineer to partner with…
Success is not guaranteed. Thiel was lucky because people were blaming the 2008 fiasco, its long aftermath, and never-ending wars on both Republicans and Democrats.
Just at the right time, Thiel offered them a revolutionary intellectual vision to provide a compelling and well-ordered narrative for their frustration. Rather like Marx did for Lenin and Stalin, maybe.
But don’t worry - even if your venture does not propel you to the moon (again, no pun intended!) living as a middle-aged small business owner definitely has its compensations; at least you don’t have blood on your hands.
