Posts Tagged ‘Peter Thiel’

“We aim to take market share and usurp, but we’re very much operating within the system.” ~ Vlad Tenev

In 2013, Vlad Tenev launched the “Robinhood” platform to democratize financial markets. So what common ground does the Bulgarian-American entrepreneur share with Entitled Opinions host and humanist Robert Pogue Harrison, who claims that teaching, thinking, and writing about cultural history has been his lifelong vocation?  

The Stanford professor made a guest appearance on Tenev’s half-hour podcast series “Under the Hood” to explore the connections. Here’s an obvious one: the CEO also started at Stanford, where he envisioned a trading platform to encourage young investors by not requiring minimum accounts or charging commissions. You can listen to the conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

The fugitive “Robin Hood” was another link. Tenev suggested that Robin Hood’s intent was to democratize resources, adding that “he wanted to open up the forest and have it not just the purview of the king, but open for everyone to hunt.”

Harrison, the author of Forests: The Shadow of Civilization, drew an analogy between the outlaws’ Sherwood Forest and the markets of Wall Street, adding, “Your platform is trying to get the underdogs or the least privileged into a system which traditionally enriches the already rich.”

Both men also share an interest in the work of the late French theorist René Girard, who taught at Stanford for decades. Girard said society’s last taboo is envy, which drives today’s social media. Recalling Girard’s most famous protégé, the early Facebook investor Peter Thiel, Harrison observed, “Facebook is a machine of engendering envy, and people keep upping the ante of how happy they are, how beautiful their kids are, and how wonderful their vacations and meals are. You enter into this mad mimetic escalation of self-representation on one hand, and the envy of your friends and rivals on the other. “ Yet Tenev noted that Robinhood also started with social media, allowing people to interact in ways unimaginable a decade before.

“In our capitalistic society, there’s not just one king. There are several kings. They are the banks, the corporations, the hedge funds, the investment bankers.” ~ Robert Pogue Harrison

The recording of the conversation is over at the Los Angeles Review of Books here.

More potent quotes:

“In our capitalistic society, there’s not just one king. There are several kings. They are the banks, the corporations, the hedge funds, the investment bankers.” ~ Harrison

“You can’t just throw prudence out of the equation altogether.” ~ Harrison

“Do these trading platforms have a declared sense of responsibility in caring for the investors who use it? How does one go about trying to protect the users?” ~ Harrison

“Your Robinhood platform is not revolutionary because it’s not trying to overthrow.” ~ Harrison

“You can’t just throw prudence out of the equation altogether.” ~ Harrison

“We aim to take market share and usurp, but we’re very much operating within the system.” ~ Tenev

Even though the Book Haven lives in the heart of Silicon Valley, I generally avoid the sphere of computer nerds and techies, except when I need my Macbook Pro repaired or I’m battling a spam attack. But every so often, I get something that sends me into this brave new world.  So it was with yesterday’s news on Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard.

It began when I received a Facebook message from Artur Rosman at 6 a.m.: “Happy news, a techie link picked up your book excerpt that we ran earlier this year. It has 1,700 hits today so far. You’re going to crash our site!”

He was referring to the introduction to Evolution of Desire, which was excerpted on a Notre Dame University journal as “Golden Thoughts from a Nuclear Age” here. The techie link was an unknown website to both of us, but that’s what Wikipedia is for. I looked up Hacker News there:

Hacker News is a social news website focusing on computer science and entrepreneurship. It is run by Paul Graham‘s investment fund and startup incubator, Y Combinator. In general, content that can be submitted is defined as “anything that gratifies one’s intellectual curiosity”.

The site was created by Paul Graham in February 2007. Initially it was called Startup News or occasionally News.YC. On August 14, 2007, it became known by its current name. It developed as a project of his company Y Combinator, functioning as a real-world application of the Arc programming language which Graham co-developed.

Paul Graham turns out to be kind of a big deal. Computer scientist, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, author and essayist.

But meanwhile, back in Indiana, Artur was beginning to panic. The numbers kept climbing minute by minute. He was pondering whether he should take the page down quickly so the server wouldn’t go boom. It didn’t, but meanwhile it quickly racked up 2,700 visits in a few short hours.

Faithful Book Haven reader George Jansen, who runs a terrific blog 20011 (we’ve added it to our blogroll), also saw us on Hacker News. “I was going to post about this on my own blog, but then figured that you should get first dibs.” We let him go first.

Postscript: Speaking of signal honors, I received this Facebook comment, from another gentle reader, Marianne Bacon: “Cynthia, we are re-reading your book. Aloud. I am absorbing much more deeply and we are both loving it!”

A memorial service will be held Tuesday, Jan. 19, at 2 p.m. in Stanford Memorial Church for the renowned French theorist René Girard, who died in November at age 91. We have written about him so many places on the Book Haven, it is hard to know where to begin, but you might try here and here and here and here. We’ve even written about the memorial service before, a month ago here. Consider this a final reminder.

Prof. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Peter Thiel, and René’s son Martin Girard will be among those speaking at the service.

A reception will follow at the McCaw Hall at Arrillaga Alumni Center at 326 Galvez on the Stanford campus, from 3 to 5:30 p.m.

The renowned Stanford French professor was one of the 40 immortels of the prestigious Académie Française. René Girard joined the Stanford faculty in 1981.

He is the author of nearly thirty acclaimed books, including the provocative and seminal Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961), Violence and the Sacred (1972), and Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978). His last major work was Battling to the End (2007).

He died at his Stanford home on Nov. 4 at the age of 91, after long illness.

Read the full obituary here.

The Stanford Memorial Church is one of the easiest places to find on the Stanford campus – you can see it as you drive down the campus’s landmark Palm Drive. The century-old building has been called “the University’s architectural crown jewel.” The Arrillaga Alumni Center is a few minutes away on foot, and I’ve been promised there will be signage (plus a lot of other people heading in the same direction).

Arrive early to find parking. And bring an umbrella. It looks like rain.