I had a chance to moderate a great discussion with Chris Hughes, the economist and cofounder of Facebook, about his new book Marketcrafters: The 100-Year Struggle to Shape the American Economy, along with Eddie Fishman and Jessica Brandt. The book examines attempts by both sides of the political aisle to shape or manage markets for political or social ends across many industries – finance, healthcare, pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, aviation, and others. We looked at examples where these efforts had worked well (e.g. the Federal Reserve), where they hadn’t (e.g. government involvement in healthcare) and what lessons could be drawn from history (e.g. the importance of institutional accountability and responsiveness to ever-changing markets). We reviewed recent attempts to shape technology markets (AI, semiconductors) to help achieve geopolitical goals and shared perspectives on how likely they were to be successful. You can listen to the whole discussion here.
Being Wrong Quickly and Clearly
This is a great piece of advice that Dylan Parker, co-founder and CEO of Moment, gave to other entrepreneurs in our recent podcast discussion:
Make very clear, very focused, very all-in bets. The most important thing is that you can be wrong, as long as you are wrong quickly and clearly.
Moment is a fixed income infrastructure provider that is off to a very fast start. They made a decision to swing big and try to land whale customers early in the company’s development given how much more advanced their product was than existing fixed income infrastructure. This is something that often doesn’t make sense for startups, as large customers take up immense amounts of time, and it’s often better to hone your product on smaller customers where the stakes are smaller. But given the strategic significance of these customers for Moment and the high demand for new fixed income infrastructure that resulted from the jump in interest rates in 2022, they made a very clear, intentional bet as to whether they could land one of these customers early in their development. It turns out they could, they did, and they now have done so several times. That early bet made a huge difference in the company’s growth trajectory.