Why I Support Mitt Romney for President
Filed under: 2008 Election, Government and Technology, Politics and the Internet
This morning Mitt Romney announced his 2008 presidential bid in Michigan. His theme is innovation and transformation. Here is the full text of Romney’s speech from the NY Times.
I’m excited by Mitt’s candidancy and want to publicly declare my support for him. My blog is not a political blog by any means, but it is a personal one, and occasionally I like to express my personal opinions on a variety of topics, not just entrepreneurship.
I like many other candidates as well. Who isn’t fond of Rudy Giuliani for his amazing leadership in the wake of the 9/11 attack? My family will always be grateful to him for his strength and grace. He is a great leader. I’m also very fond of Mike Huckabee, former governor of Arkansas. I appreciate his social conservatism and his optimism for the future. I love his concept of horizontal and not vertical politics.
Mr Huckabee talks of “horizontal” and “vertical” politics. Horizontal politics means the bad old ways: Democrat versus Republican, or liberals against conservatives. Vertical politics means that people forget their differences, and their leaders elevate them as a whole. Mr Huckabee’s two most admirable vertical presidents are John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. The other man from Hope inclined more to the horizontal.
I am supporting Romney because I believe he will be the most capable administrator of the largest government in the world, and that he will tackle head on problems that traditional politicians have swept under the carpet for decades, postponing any solutions because they are afraid of the political fallout for rocking the boat.
Unlike most Washington politicians who are lawyers, Romney is a successful businessman, a turn-around artist, who helped build a very successful investment firm by acquiring and turning around companies and creating new value within these enterprises.
I truly believe that Romney’s approach to governing this nation will be solid and sound because it will be based on tried and proven business, leadership and financial principles, learned from very large-scale real world business experience — experience that no other candidate has.
In a nation that needs a financial turnaround (our national debt is $8.7 trillion and climbing fast — check out this national debt clock). We need a turn around artist, a gifted and articulate leader with a great vision for change and a penchant for surrounding himself with results-oriented people who won’t get embroiled in petty partisan politics, but who will actual make the difficult decisions necessary to solve the problems we are facing.
As an investor, Mitt Romney had to find CEOs who could deliver results and he did. He knows how to identify and attract great people to his team. When he stepped in to save the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, he built a team that turned these games into a huge success, when they had been on the brink of serious disaster.
As the governor of Massachusetts, Romney turned a huge deficit into a balanced budget, while at the same time addressing major health care and educational issues at the state level (where they should be managed.)
I do not want to see the federal government try to solve health care and education issues. It’s extra-constitutional in my opinion, since the Tenth Amendment clearly says, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved for the States respectively, or to the people.”
I don’t believe that a Romney Presidency will be anything like the Bush Presidency. Bush didn’t seem to recognize the difference between what the constitution of a state like Texas allows a governor to do, and what the federal constitution of the United States allows the Federal Government to do. I think there has been a greater expansion of the federal government in education under Bush than under all previous presidents, Democrat or Republican, combined.
Bush also isn’t known for identifying and recruiting the best people to solve the biggest problems we face. He is well known for his deep loyalty to his friends. That just doesn’t work well when you are talking about running a $2.9 trillion budget and playing on the world stage with the highest possible stakes. Your team has to deliver results, or you have to get a new team.
I believe Mitt Romney will form the most effective and efficient team of any president in modern history. I believe the national debt will be attacked head on. Romney will recognize that our nation will become insolvent if we don’t change our current course. He will find a way to reduce the tremendous burden the national debt places on every American.
I believe that his leadership will inspired new solutions in education, energy, and health care, but that they won’t be top down federal government mandates. I think he will be open minded to out of the box thinking and innovation. As an investor, he’s definitely manifest the ability to see where things are going and back the right ideas and people. He’ll do the same as President of the United States.
Warren Buffett (I attended the Berkshire Hathaway shareholder meeting in 2005) compared the United States to a family farm. The family members wanted to live beyond their means, beyond what the normal harvest would support, so every year they would sell off a little piece of property to subsidize their wants. While Buffet is a democrat, and I don’t him to endorse Mitt Romney, I do believe that these two speak the same economic language. They both have rare gifts, and both of them are using their gifts to bless humanity. Buffett’s pledge of $31 billion to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation demonstrates his desire to do good. Mitt’s willingness to subject himself, his family, and his religion to unprecedented and vitriolic attacts, in order to win the presidency and help turn this country around demonstrates his desire to be a public servant.
Romney’s ability to raise money for his campaign (click here if you’d like to donate), to get key endorsements, and to build a campaign team in every key state, is indicative of his administrative abilities. His poll numbers are strengthening in Iowa, New Hampshire, and elsewhere, including his “three home states” (Utah, Michigan, and Massachusetts).
Most voters still know little or nothing about Romney, but as his name recognition increases, as the online search volume about Romney continues to grow, more and more people will come to appreciate all that he offers in this campaign to turnaround the country. It’s happening already. He looks and talks and acts like a president.
I am tremendously excited for the 2008 campaign, the most open campaign in fifty years, with the most diverse field of candidates in history. Everyone will have unprecendent access to online information about every candidate, to most of their speeches (in text, audio and video format) and with more information about their track record than ever before.
I am not looking forward to all the attacks that will inevitably come at each candidate, especially the front-runners. I wish we could have a “kinder, gentler” blogosphere. But I know that is a vain wish. We live in a very polarized country (the red states and blue states and all that) and politics fires up a lot of people to do and say a lot of things they normally wouldn’t do or say.
But rather than attack, I encourage bloggers to try to be positive, to support the best ideas from all the candidates, and to elect a president that will lead this country in the right direction.
I encourage everyone to take a very close look at Mitt Romney, whose great capacity to solve problems and create value for stakeholders will help build an America that we can be proud of. An American that will remain a great nation with strong families and communities, stay competitive in the face of unprecendented challenges from Asian economies, and once again provide leadership to the world to rally together in times of crisis, when our enemies attack.
I believed in Reagan and I believe in Romney, and I’ve struggled to believe in between.
(Note: thanks to all my readers who corrected my earlier post about the national debt being $8.7 billion, instead of trillion. A silly mistake. If it were only $8.7 billion, Warren Buffett could have retired the debt by himself. But it’s 1,000 times worse than that. The national debt clock shows that each family/household in the United States would be responsible for $138,497 of that debt–a bit less than the median home price in this country.
Sweden opens embassy in Second Life
Filed under: Disruptive Technology, Government and Technology, International Business, Online Community, Virtual Worlds
http://www.thelocal.se/6219/. This article says Second Life is approaching 3 million users, a third of them having joined in the last 60 days. A lot of companies are jumping on the Second Life bandwagon, but this is even more interesting.
Imagine being an embassy employee assigned to interact with people in Second Life. Embassies are so large, imposing, and intimidating–they don’t welcome visitors to come in and just chat. This virtual Swedish embassy may be the best opportunity in world history for an embassy to “get to know its customer” through casual conversations with potentially hundreds or thousands of people each day.
Next headline to look for: 2008 Presidential Campaign for _________ opens office in Second Life, welcomes all visitors to come and meet the candidate.
Google is rumored to be building their own immersive world and may be buying AdScape to become a player in in-game advertising.
I’m not a fan of Second Life yet (although Jeff Barr is helping me realize how real business can actually be conducted in the virtual world, not by just wandering around, but by planning events or attending planned events). But as these kinds of online worlds start attracting businesses and governments and millions of new users, there will definitely be business opportunities opening up left and right for savvy entrepreneurs.
As a former Dungeons & Dragons player (I quit cold turkey at age 13 or 14 after a full year addiction) I can see the appeal of games like World of Warcraft, Everquest, and now SecondLife, which some people don’t call a game, but which certainly has a lot of appeal for gamers. As an entrepreneur, I see huge opportunities emerging here. In business, you need to go where the eyeballs are, and if million join immersive 3D worlds, then you better find a way to play there.
I think a Google immersive world built on Google Earth will be far more interesting than Second Life, and I hope the rumors are true.
Search U.S. Patents with new Google patent search
Filed under: Disruptive Technology, Free stuff for entrepreneurs, Government and Technology, Intellectual Property, Online Community, Online Content
For nearly 20 years I’ve dreamed of an easy to use search engine that would index all US Patents and make it easy for any inventor or entrepreneur to do sophisticated patent research.
As an employee of Folio Corporation in the late 1980s, my job was to index huge data collections, such as AICPA content, all the IRS publications, and the US Code for our reference publishers who licensed our search engine technology. We looked at patent data several times, but it was never a project that actually got a sponsor.
With its introduction of Patent Search (in beta), Google has taken another large swath of content and made it more accessible and useful than ever before.
This will be a tremendous boon to inventors and entrepreneurs. Patent attorneys will still have to help the lay person understand what they are finding; but like individuals who do online medical research before going to the doctor, the individuals paying the patent attorneys will be more active in the conversation and more intelligent. Patent law will be less of a secret art and more open to all of us. I think this will have significant positive ramifications to business and entrepreneurship.
For information entrepreneurs like me, check another project off my list of things to do. Google is taking over the information world one large step at a time. Earlier this year Provo Labs kicked off a project to index all the SEC documents that are critical for anyone in the stock market to understand. We were able to easily download and index a large number of public filings. We did it because like the USPTO.gov site, the SEC.gov site is horrible, and all the SEC search engine sites that used to be free (during the bubble) have switched over to subscription models. Like my friend John Bresee says, an advertising model could be disruptive to these companies.
Judd Bagley suggested we launch our annual and quarterly reports search engine under the name 10qverymuch.com. So we bought that domain. But like some of our other vertical search engine ideas, we didn’t get very far along with this project. I’m glad we didn’t attempt a patent search engine; and now I’m just wondering when Google will launch it’s own SEC fillings search engine.
The SEC recently awarded $54 million in contracts, primarily to Keane, to update its Edgar database system over the next few years. I’m not sure that was necessary. Why not let one of the Google employees do this on their 20% time?
Okay, the overhaul is probably still needed; but if part of the contract is for a public-facing search engine upgrade on the SEC.gov web site, that would be completely unnecessary because Google will do this sooner or later.
I would hate to be Edgar Online right now, with Google on the prowl to index all the world’s content and make it free. Imagine the hit to the EDGR stock if and when Google unveils its SEC search engine. Ouch.
I would also hate to be 10kwizards.com, a company that I have admired.
I’m glad that Provo Labs didn’t fully fund and develop an SEC search engine, a plan which I blogged about in February, because there is no doubt in my mind that someone at Google is working on this right now.
It’s like trying to be Encyclopedia Britannica with Wikipedia around. What in the world would you do to survive? I just don’t think it’s possible.
Fortunately, for internet entrepreneurs, Google is great at search but not yet so good at community. And that leaves opportunities for information entrepreneurs who empower people to connect with each other as well as with the information they need.
But the window will close quickly. Google’s acquisition spree continues and its two latest purchases, JotSpot and YouTube are squarely in the community space. They join earlier acquisitions Pyra Labs (creator of Blogger.com) and Dodgeball, which gave Google the world’s largest blogging network and a mobile application for social networking.
Clayton Christensen, speaker at the first Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco (I can’t remember if it was 2004 or 2005) said that technology entrepreneurs had to add value to the LAMP stack (Linux, Apache, MySQL and Php) and all the other open source software and web services that are freely available by doing something innovative on top of the stack.
This is really good news for entrepreneurs. Milions of dollars of development work has already been done for us, and we just have to add something new on top of the stack, in order to create value for customers.
With information entrepreneurs, I think we need to accept the fact that Google and other companies will be indexing virtually all the data in the world and providing most of it for free to everyone. As Christensen says, we’ll have to build something valueable on top of this free stack of data. It might be organizing it in a particular way, or building online communities around it, or providing online learning that takes advantage of the free information, or providing tools that help people utilize it and apply information better in their daily work, such as mobile or smart apps that are location aware or sensitive to what you are doing, so they intelligently bring the right information to you at the right time.
I believe there are more opportunities than ever before for entrepreneurs. They’re just a few notches higher on the value stack than they used to be.
New Jersey Backing Up Angel Investors
Filed under: Angel Investing, Government and Technology
New Jersey has a new economic development program that guarantees up to 1/3 of the investments made by angel investors in startup companies. More details here. Members of the Jumpstart angel investing network (a pretty forward looking group) are the first to receive this government guarantee, for a $285,000 investment in software company Knowtions. Interesting concept.
Senator Clinton Hires Experienced BLogger
Filed under: 2008 Election, Blogging, Government and Technology, Politics and the Internet
The New York Times reports that Senator Clinton’s campaign has hired an experienced political blogger. The 2008 Presidential Election is going to heat up the blogosphere in the next two years. But I’m really afraid most of the candidates won’t actually do it right. I’m afraid they’ll try to use the web as a top-down communication tool, and not a giant listening device and organizing device that actually empowers citizens to be involved in government. The Dean campaign really energized voters, most of whom are dissatisfied with both political parties. (According to Joe Trippi’s book, the number is 70%.) The web offers hope for politics and government, but only if it is used in the right way.
After I finished Joe Trippi’s book in July 2004 (which ought to be required reading for every political candidate in this country) I wrote this impassioned post about how the internet will affect politics and government. It may be one of my best posts ever. Unfortunately, our political social networking site iCount was never fully funded or fully developed. So it sits today as a site that aggregates political feeds. Fortunately, Phil Windley has kept it alive. When Provo Labs has more bandwidth, perhaps we should revitalize it.
I hope to see the day when most elected officials and political candidates in this country have their own blog and actually write their own posts and read feedback from their constituents. I would love to see them continually in touch with the people they represent and serve.
My hopes for our political future are inspired by my own personal experience at MyFamily.com, where I was in touch in a remarkable way with millions of customers. One of my favorite things to do at MyFamily.com was to write daily surveys on any imaginable topic to see what our users thought about things. We had about 100,000 users logging in each day back in 2001. And we had a pop-up survey that came up whenever someone logged in. So we could get 6-8,000 responses per day on one or many surveys.
I wrote more than 300 surveys in a one or two year period. I knew what my customers thought about digital cameras, genealogy, languages classes, cooking, hobbies, how many yearbooks they had in their homes, what genealogy software they used, their plans to buy a new computer, how many had high-speed internet, scanners in their homes, how many relatives they kept in touch with, where they planned to vacation next summer, etc, etc, etc. And those are just a handful of the survey topics that I can remember off the top of my head.
I could write a survey, post it, and within a few hours have more than 1,000 responses. It was amazingly powerful! I felt completely in tune with my customers needs, wants, desires, plans, thoughts and feelings. (To supplement the quantitative feedback from these surveys, we did weekly phone calls with actual customers and we read emails and listened to calls in the call center for qualitative feedback.)
(The only thing close to this feeling that I’ve felt since is from blogging. But the feedback I get is on a much smaller scale. I can’t wait to have 10,000 blog readers a day and a survey tool that will allow me to do the same thing. I love to know what people think about new ideas. But that may never happen.)
Imagine if every elected official could get 1,000 responses from constituents on any question that came up. A personal, instant poll. And imagine if they could write their own survey questions, point to it from their blog, and get the survey results in hours as well as comments on their blog to provide them with texture.
The web provides this power. The question is, will any candidate embrace it and use it in a way that empowers the rest of us and could create the most energized campaign in history?
Read my 2004 post and tell me what you think about all this. Which candidate do you think will be the darling of the blogosphere in the 2008 election?
Buffett and Gates Team Up To Solve World Problems
Filed under: Government and Technology, History, Philanthropy
I noticed two interesting articles in the NY Times today. The juxtaposition made me think.
One article says up to $2 billion in taxpayers money has been wasted in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. It gives several examples of how money has been misspent.
When the government steps in to manage any program, especially when it tries to do it quickly (in response to the public demand for relief!), I think it is inevitable that fraud and corruption and mismanagement will result in squandered funds. The government is simply not as efficient as the private sector. And when waste and fraud happen, everyone blames everyone else. (Except no one will blame the public for demanding the Katrina funding in the first place.)
Contrast this with the personal responsibility that Bill Gates will be taking for the $31 billion donated by Warren Buffett to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. One of the goals of the Foundation is to find cures for the 20 leading diseases in the world. Gates will be leaving Microsoft in 2008. Imagine the good he and Melinda can do with $61 billion. Imagine how carefully they will invest these funds and measure the impact that their investments are making.
The Times reported how seriously Bill Gates is taking this donation from Buffett.
Later in the exchange, which was in front of 200 philanthropy executives, scientists, students and a few reporters, Mr. Gates got in his own reflection on the partnership. “It’s scary,” he said. “If I make a mistake with my own money, it isn’t as big as making a mistake with Warren’s money.”
If Worldhistory.com had an editorial page (we don’t yet) and could highlight the most important news stories, the ones that will make it into tomorrow’s history books, I would wager that the Bill Gates retirement story and the Warren Buffett $31 billion donation will be key factors in some future textbook’s chapter on how the world’s major diseases were eradicated. This is an incredibly exciting story! I can’t wait to watch it unfold.
I applaud Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates for these bold moves and I wish them well in their new focus on philanthropy. I’m especially excited that Melinda Gates mentioned microcredit in her discussion of the Foundation’s goals, since it is such a promising approach to alleviating poverty in the developing world.
Rural Broadband Penetration Too Low
A friend forwarded to me a good article from the Rural Policy Research Institute on the need for broadband availability in rural communities and the frustrating lack of private sector initiative to provide it.
I am spoiled by the fiber-to-the-home initiative where I live in Provo as many Utahns are with UTOPIA. Our state and communities will benefit enormously by low cost broadband access. As I met with rural economic development leaders and entrepreneurs, access to broadband is a big issue for rural communities.
As Jefferson couldn’t “live without books”, I can’t live without books or broadband. In fact, in 1995 when I first discovered that the internet would be my most important tool for business success, I bought a satellite dish (a DirecPC dish) from CompUSA and have had high speed internet ever since. This was way before DSL or Cable was available in Provo. DirecPC is now part of HughesNet, the largest satellite internet access provider.
So my advice to rural communities is to try to get your county and city planners to realize that the economic benefits of rural broadband are significant, and that investing in this can do a lot for economic growth. Have them study public and public/private initiatives. But at the same time, take personal initiative to make sure you can get broadband somehow or other to your workplace if not to your home.
Speaking of high speed internet, I’m just switching from my T-Mobile wireless card (I think it gives me about 150kbit access) to a Verizon 1MBit network, so that my laptop access can be several times faster. I had the T-Mobile Merlin card, which was really slow, then upgraded to the EDGE network, which is better, but I understand Verizon is now the fastest network.
Annual Report from China
Filed under: Government and Technology, International Business
The economic growth in China continues to be high, 9.9% according to Premier Wen Jiabao’s 2005 report. The goal for GDP growth in 2006 is 8%.
It is interesting for me to read a document like this that is so full of Soviet style language and formality but the news that is being reported in that language is so positive. Most of the Soviet era documents that I read while a Russian major in the 1980s were attempts to make a really bad situation sound great.
But the Chinese reality is a fast-growing economy and unprecedented global competitiveness. So to see that couched in government language like this is really strange for me. It still doesn’t quite compute for me (a conservative free marketeer) to see Five Year Plans actually working. Are they working because all the Chinese leaders are engineers (and not lawyers like here) and because information technology enables central planning to somehow work; or is the Chinese economy growing in spite of the Five Year Plans from the central government?
Political bloggers may get federal protection
Political bloggers may get federal protection
Some members of Congress are trying to make sure bloggers have freedom of speech and are not subject to Federal Election laws like PACs.
Can you imaging a blogger being arrested and convicted for doing something online (like supporting a candidate) because they spent some money to build out their site or create a podcast or video endorsing a candidate?
According to CNET:
“The FEC is under court order to finalize rules to extend a controversial 2002 campaign finance law to the Internet.”
Congress better pass this legislation before the courts start restricting our free speech.
Web 0.01 – Engelbart’s 1968 oNLine system being built in 2006! | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com
Web 0.01 – Engelbart’s 1968 oNLine system being built in 2006! | Web 2.0 Explorer | ZDNet.com
I just noticed ZDNet is recruiting a lot of new bloggers and they are promising to pay for consistent quality writing.
Also, this post about Doug Engelbart is really fascinating. I got my start in the computer industry in 1988 when my brother Curt hired me at Folio. He had been attending hypertext conferences for a few years and I read all transcripts from those conferences and so I became familiar with the pioneers in this space, including Engelbart. (This is also where I first became acquainted with Jakob Nielsen, now a world renowed web usability expert. He was big in the hypertext world.) So I’m interested in following the new Hyperscope project that has NSF funding and a blog to go along with it.
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