Sorry for confusion; Berlin this weekend (walks, long walks), then Moscva Next Tuesday-Friday to defy both weather & terror.

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To find these investments, Khosla explained some of his operating principles: Don’t trust forecasts. Don’t believe the experts. And invest in companies that have a 90% probability of failure.

Khosla is working on a paper called the Black Swan Thesis of Energy Transformation. Just as Nassim Taleb spelled out in his book The Black Swan, Khosla believes that something improbable, impactful and retrospectively predictable will happen to change the way we use energy. An important ingredient: it needs to scale and meet the Chindia (China and India) price. Cell phones have already been adopted at an incredible scale in India such that there are twice the number of people in India with access to cell phones than people with access to toilets.

Risk is a hugely important element in Khosla’s strategy. “I tell my guys, only bring me tech stuff that has a 90% probability of failure.”  His point: if you have enough companies with a high chance of failing, most will fail but one will success and be the winner. “My willingness to fail gives me the ability to succeed,” he said. “I don’t mind failing but when I do succeed, it better be worth succeeding.”

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This is from November 2010.

Nassim Taleb explains why we should expect “unexpected” economic events

Nassim Taleb, the former Wall Street trader who published a book called The Black Swan back in 2007 speaks out on the economic crisis. Nassim Taleb was born in Lebanon, and lives mostly in New York. The book argues that most economic models fail because they don’t take into account rare, high-impact events that wind up driving history. (Taleb calls these events Black Swans.) The argument came out looking pretty good after the 2008 financial crisis. The short version: Get rid of debt. This is about 20 minutes.
Source: From Planet Money, Deep Read: Nassim Taleb (The Black Swan Guy) from August 18, 2010

Music includes Money for Nothing, Bad Moon Rising, Baker Street, Earth Anthem, Ob La Di, We’ll Meet Again, We are the Champions, This Land Is Your Land

Download the Entire Program 97.6 MB

Play Program: 4 segments totaling 106.7 minutes

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Russia Forum, Moscow, Feb 2-5, 2011 NNT has this on his talks and seminars page: http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/scheduledseminars.htm

Going to Moscow this week-end. The only problem is the weather preventing slow walks.