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There were sheep, and there were wolves, and neither lived forever. You could survive a lot of things, but you couldn’t survive life.
Anyone who claimed life was priceless wasn’t paying attention.
by corralling money from pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, endowments, and billionaires, Sansome could guarantee that a lack of cash would never stand between those under his wing and the futures they sought to realize.
“At Human Capital, we don’t bet on technology. We don’t even bet on companies. We bet on people.”
The truth is that organizations are just a bunch of people trying to move in the same direction, and technology is just the way that people do things. Special relativity didn’t change the world. Einstein did.
We find the best people in the world, figure out what makes them tick, write them checks, and give them free rein to do what only they can do.”
He didn’t just want to be able to break into any computer system. He wanted to create a rolling permanent record of everything on every computer system on the planet—a private mirror of the entire history of the entire internet and every device that had ever connected to it so that he could reach back through time to dredge up whatever secrets the past might offer to tighten his grip on the future.
We all know that stories spread, sometimes apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than straight sharing and reproduction is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cultural daisy-chain.
Most people thought of disease as a biological problem. If the right doctors and scientists tried hard enough, they could fix the body like a programmer debugged code. But epidemiologists knew firsthand that social dynamics often trumped microbiological dynamics. A society was only as strong as its systems were resilient.
