Author Topic: The South Florida Boutique Economy  (Read 1165 times)

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Offline CWEvans

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My personal approach to BitShares reflects the market that I operate in here in South Florida.

Whereas, Silicon Valley is organized around the interests of venture capitalists, who are always on the lookout for the next winner-take-all ten-bagger; and Wall Street, home of the largest stock market in the world, is organized around the interests of investment bankers, who are always on the lookout for firms large enough to take public; South Florida, which has been rated among the top regions in the USA for concentration of the entrepreneurial personality, is organized around the interests of entrepreneurs.

In Silicon Valley and Wall Street, startups are the product; in South Florida, entrepreneurs are the suppliers.

Although the headquarters of some household brands are located in South Florida—e.g., Burger King, Carnival Cruise Lines, DHL International, Office Depot, Ralph Lauren, Spirit Air, Tiger Direct, and a few others—one does not expect to see an Apple, Exxon, IBM, or Intel start here.

Financial services, logistics, and tourism are South Florida's strong suits, rather than bleeding-edge engineering and software development. The second-largest tourist attraction in Florida after Disney World is a shopping mall west of Ft. Lauderdale, and our Home Depot stores have export departments!

We see this in the startup culture here, where we are more likely to see 10,000 small and medium-size Boutique Economy firms (a term coined by Angelina Pluzhnyk) with 1,000 customers each, rather than a Cult of the Colossal enterprise (a term coined by Wilhelm Röpke) with 10 million customers and 9,999 broken hearts strewn across the landscape. Forbes, Fortune, and Time are unlikely publish photographs of South Florida CEOs on their front covers, but each of those obscure CEOs is master of his or her small or medium-size domain, and each wakes up every morning his or her own boss.

Although the spiders, snakes, alligators, hurricanes, and psychotic tourists have taught us to be rather hard-hearted, you rarely will hear one of us say something like, "Second Place is the first loser."

One of the things that attracts me to BitShares is a similar vision of letting 10,000 experiments run, each with its own blockchain to stand or fall on its own luck and merits. Granted, the initiators of some BitAssets will have rather grand visions—BitUSD, BitBTC, BitGold, etc.—but just as interesting could be BitTrentReznor'sNextSongCollection, BitGuatemalanLightRoatedCoffee, BitBatesMotelRoom, and who-knows-what-all-else.

I am not as concerned about getting to sit at the Cool Kids' Table at Bitcoin conferences, as I am about getting young men and women in economically under-served regions—local and worldwide—to embrace these weird, new, 21st Century technologies and stand as equals in the increasingly integrated global marketplace. To those who sneer, "Yeah, but it doesn't scale..." I respond, "Yeah, but there's 6 billion of them..."

Something like 85% of the world's population does not have bank accounts, but an increasing proportion of them have smartphones. In the same way that they leapfrogged from unwired to wireless, they are about to leapfrog over antiquated banking, capital, and credit incumbents to whatever the heck this stuff is that we are working on.

Just speaking for myself here, but if I can get one Haitian teenager in North Miami to buy hot sauce from someone in Ghana using BitHotSauceFromGhana001 and then sell it to a hipster at a 1,000% markup, I will consider my job done, when others 'steal' his or her business model and do the same with other small-label commodities from other parts of the world.
« Last Edit: February 15, 2014, 05:38:33 pm by CWEvans »