“I have observed that both optimists and pessimists seem to leave this world in the same way—but optimists lead better lives.” The quote is from late Israeli statesman Shimon Peres, but I first encountered it while reading the memoir Valley Boy by the outsize venture capitalist Tom Perkins, who adopted it as a personal mantra.
I thought of Perkins, who founded one of Silicon Valley’s most iconic VC firms and was an accomplished yacht racer, after reading Read Write Own, the new crypto book by another, less flamboyant venture capitalist, Chris Dixon. You can read my full review here, but the gist of Dixon’s book is that the internet today is badly broken as a result of Big Tech monopolists, which is true, but that a solution is at hand if we rebuild the web using blockchain technology. This might or not be true, but it is certainly, well, an optimistic view of things.
Such optimism is not a natural outlook for journalists, in…
