wac6notes

"He is not being realistic. There is almost certainly not going to be another stimulus program of any magnitude as long as the recovery, anemic though it seems to be, doesn't give way to a 1937-style second depression. And there aren't, in all likelihood, going to be any significant spending cuts; the perfection of interest-group politics will see to that."

"I want to train kids who would have gone into factory work in the past to write and maintain code. Do it as a vocational high school. And then use this lower cost workforce to compete with indian outsource firms"

"It's like Disney, they need to control the experience to give people the level of quality that they expect. If anyone could run around Disneyland dressed like Mickey Mouse or build their own rides, that would ruin the quality and consistency of the experience."

I love this. Great example of how subversive a good extended metaphor can be. You start getting twisted all different directions as you think it through . . .

"One year into Obama’s term we still don’t know whether he has what it takes to get American governance functioning again. But we do know that no speech can do the job. The president must act. Only body blows to the legislative branch can move the country forward."

"As startup company and tax lawyers, we believe that eliminating the capital gains tax on qualified small business stock held for more than five years would create a literal flood of investments into startup companies, which would create jobs and future prosperity.

Why? Because reducing the capital tax rate to zero makes investing in startups tax free, and investors like tax favored investments. And a zero capital gains tax rate is an absolutely screaming deal."

"Most smaller newspapers will go out of business over the next few years, vastly increasing the scarcity of news. If the [NY]Times creates content that is scare and valuable – and remains an essential “business input” – it can have the same success online as the [WS]Journal."

"You can talk about Twitter.com and then you can talk about the Twitter ecosystem. One is a web site. The other is a fundamental part of the Internet infrastructure. And the latter is 3-5x bigger than the former and that delta is likely to grow even larger." 

"[T]here is a real place for investors such as friends and family, angels, small venture funds, customer financing, the whole panoply of financial backers to assist the whole range of companies for whatever scale they should strive to be.  . . . The important thing is to match your realistic company scale to the proper financing source." 

"I will miss his leadership in future Congresses, but I do look forward to working closely with him for the rest of this year on finishing the job of significant financial regulatory reform, to which he is committed, and to which he has already worked to advance."

Some might say this statement is not only frank, but downright disarming. Senator Dodd's version of financial regulatory reform -- unlike Rep. Frank's, as best I can tell -- contains attacks on the means by which tech startups raise seed capital from angel investors.