Experience Stern | News & Events

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- “'Why live in cities?' Mr. Florida asked Wednesday at NYU’s Stern School of Business, where he interviewed venture capitalist Fred Wilson, managing partner of Union Square Ventures and Flatiron Partners. As an investor in firms such as Twitter Inc., MongoDB Inc., Tumblr, Foursquare, Kickstarter and Zynga, Mr. Wilson has played a key role in the emergence of New York City as a tech hub, and also in San Francisco’s rise as an alternative to the startup scene in neighboring Silicon Valley."

As a part of the Conversations on Urbanization series held by NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project, NYU Global Research Professor Richard Florida spoke with Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures in a public presentation on October 9.

Excerpt from Marketplace -- "White says Bernanke’s daring moves kept the economy from going off a cliff. At the same time, he says, Bernanke broke with convention to change the culture of the notoriously cryptic Fed, making it 'a more open, less mysterious place.'”

Excerpt from Scientific American -- "'A pervasive problem around the world is that city governments are not strong enough,' Romer said, citing the example of New York City seizing land from private property owners in 1811 to construct the present street grid. 'Very few city governments in the world can do what New York City did in 1811, and that's what is holding us back.'"

Excerpt from CNBC -- "Twitter's valuation is in the eye of the beholder, Aswath Damodaran of the New York University Stern School of Business said Tuesday. 'I really think it depends on what you call yourself. If you're a trader, then all bets are off. You're betting on price,' he said. 'If you're an investor and you think about value, I think at $20 billion, an awful lot has to go right for that $20 billion to be a break-even, forget about making money.'"

Excerpt from Slate -- "Curbing interest rates for certain classes of popular credit products could save consumers money (cheap credit) or it could merely lead people to be unable to access credit (like when price controls create supply shortages). Sumit Agarwal, Souphala Chomsisengphet, Neale Mahoney, and Johannes Stroebel look at one such regulation—the 2009 Credit Card Accountability Responsibility and Disclosure (CARD) Act—and find that it's saved people lots of money..."

Ellen Seidman, the 2013-2014 Citi Leadership & Ethics Distinguished Fellow and former director of the US Treasury Department’s Office of Thrift Supervision, met with students and faculty this month.

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- "It is easy to be skeptical about disclosure requirements of this kind. Will consumers pay any attention? It turns out that many of them do so. Sumit Agarwal of the National University of Singapore (along with co-authors from the University of Chicago, New York University and the U.S. Treasury Department) finds that the consequence of the nudge was to reduce interest payments by $74 million a year."

Excerpt from The Wall Street Journal -- "Executives in the class will identify and challenge conceptual frameworks about products and pricing that have restricted their creativity and have kept them thinking about business the same way for years. For example, if a cellphone doesn't work, a traditional assumption would be that its battery needs to be recharged. Mr. Williams wants his students to reject traditional assumptions and think in terms of 'unreasonable provocation'—thoughts that will get creative juices flowing. A better question, he says, could be why a cellphone needs a battery at all."

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "There's only really been one platform that I would argue has the most robust revenue model that's been able to charge their users, and that's LinkedIn. LinkedIn gets 53% of their revenue from the tools that recruiters use, 20% from people like you and me who want to InMail more people, and then 23% from advertising, so they're really the only platform that's been able to charge users."

Excerpt from Bloomberg -- “'Bernanke was suggesting in his own way that too much importance is given to gold, it’s too hyped,' said Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics and international business at New York University. 'Gold is not a currency.'”

Dambisa Moyo, international economist, joins Dean Peter Henry and MBA students for NYU Stern’s Block Lunch this fall.

Excerpt from Crain's New York -- "'It isn't possible to sustain the type of growth rate you see early on with startup companies, yet management grows up in an environment where they expect to,' said ­Jeffrey Carr, clinical professor of marketing and entrepreneurship at NYU Stern School of Business, noting that even big companies, such as Apple and Microsoft, can run into problems managing growth."

Excerpt from Seeking Alpha -- "If you are an investor or even a corporate manager, you may believe that these brand name rankings matter little, since all they do is parse the value of a company into its component parts. These rankings do, however, raise interesting questions about the power of a brand name and how it manifests itself in earnings power and in value."

Excerpt from The Economist -- "A 2013 study found that publicly quoted companies where executive compensation is linked to the stockmarket invest considerably less than private firms and are less responsive to new investment opportunities. The authors state that 'our results are most consistent with the view that public firms’ investment decisions are affected by managerial short-termism.'”

Excerpt from WIRED -- "Watson is a thinking machine that needs supercomputers at the moment (this isn’t a theoretical requirement). Google is a retrieval machine with a scalable architecture of massive amounts of simple processors and storage. Together, these IT competencies would provide a formidable combination of a machine that can remember, know, and think. Interestingly, IBM has the capability—despite the reality that IT-based competencies are not easy to replicate—to assemble a “good enough” version of such a search engine. And while Google could probably build a Watson, it would take years to do so, and Google isn’t used to playing catch-up (not to mention this kind of approach goes against its DNA for how it thinks about search)."

Excerpt from Financial Times -- "The correlations between the shocks are time varying and modeled using the dynamic conditional correlation model of Engle (2002)."

Kenneth Langone (MBA ’60), founder and CEO of Invemed and co-founder of Home Depot, joined Langone MBA students for the inaugural 2013-2014 Langone Speaker Series event.

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "I think these guys [at Twitter] have carved out a really nice niche for themselves, and again to go from 30 million to half a billion [in revenue] in three years? This is an impressive company. One of the things to mention: 2,000 employees. They've been hiring 50 people a month for the last three years."

Excerpt from PBS -- "I'm like Warren Buffett. I don't buy something if I don't understand it. And for all I know, the person who created Bitcoins would be like King Henry VIII in Britain, who decided suddenly to double the amount of British money units around, and there was a big inflation."

Excerpt from China Daily -- "'The supply side shifts are important and necessary, but for China not sufficient. The demand and income side restructuring is also a key component,' [Spence] says. He agrees that there should not be major credit expansion to fuel consumption but higher domestic consumption is a fundamental part of rebalancing the economy."

Hosted by the Entrepreneurs Exchange, the Amazon.com Innovation Competition challenges second-year MBA students to create an actionable product or service for Amazon.

Excerpt from Bloomberg TV -- "There are spillover effects [from the government shutdown] on growth, especially in relatively weak areas these days such as Europe, but in the far east as well. So growth is going to slow down worldwide because of the government shutdown. And there is also the impending risk of the debt ceiling not being raised in time."

Excerpt from The New York Times -- "The best science book I read was Adam Alter’s 'Drunk Tank Pink,' which is a really provocative look at how much our behavior is contextually determined."

As a part of the Conversations on Urbanization series held by NYU Stern’s Urbanization Project, Paul Romer, Director of the Urbanization Project, Director of the Marron Institute and Professor of Economics, spoke with Bill Bratton, who formerly served as chief of police of the Los Angeles Police Department, New York police commissioner and Boston police commissioner, in a public presentation on October 2.