Mark Cuban pointed out on his blog last week that President Elect Obama has made his first mistake: he failed to appoint a single entrepreneur to his economic advisory team, when it is clear that "entrepreneurs that start and run small businesses will be the propellant in this economy." He suggested that the new President should "ask the people who are actually starting new businesses what they need," so that the government doesn't adopt policies that will backfire by hurting entrepreneurs.

This morning I watched a 1 hour documentary on the Biography Channel about Sam Walton, the founder of Wal-Mart, who by 1985 was the richest man in the United States. It was especially interesting to see how he grew up during the Great Depression, and how many of his values and goals were shaped by watching his father eek out a living during the depression.

I'm having a hard time sleeping lately. I keep waking up at 3 am or 4 am feeling compelled to investigate the root causes of the national and global financial crisis we are experiencing. I don't have a lot of time, because I'm also running a startup company, but I have to carve out some time if I want to be part of the solution as we try to fix our government and our country, and get it back on track. I've got to become better informed.

I have several books now on derivatives trading, and I have come to believe they truly are "financial weapons of mass destruction" as Warren Buffett called them in 2003. I think unbridled use of OTC derivatives is the primary cause of the worldwide economic melt-down. The Wikipedia article on derivatives is a good starting point.

Like you, I have been alarmed by what is happening in Washington and on Wall Street.

I have spent many hours over the past few weeks trying to understand the causes of the financial crisis that the world is facing today.

I've purchased 4 books on the subject, researched extensively in the Congression Record from 1994 on, studied what Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger his partner have been saying about derivatives for years, and more. I am trying to understand root causes and possible solutions. And I have come to the firm conclusion that the proposed bailout will cause even more problems than it is trying to solve, and that it would be the biggest step towards socialism this country has ever taken (and we have taken lots and lots of little steps.)

Please share this with others.....

Charlie
Munger in Poor Charlie’s Almanack,
Expanded Second Edition, 2005-6, pp. 125-128

Warnings About
Financial Institutions and Derivatives

Recently, my team identified 189 high-traffic web sites that we want to approach in the coming months with a very innovative partnership opportunity. We think we can increase their web site traffic and that our proposal makes a lot of sense.

The other day I noticed an new feature on Google Docs. When I tried to created a new document, it gave me the option of creating a Form.

I was curious, so I started playing around with it and realized that Google Form is a simple, powerful, and free way to create online surveys which can be emailed to anyone or embedded in a blog or website. All the responses are captured in a Google spreadsheet, and charting features make it easy to see the results.

I remember when I first learned about LinkedIn.com, and was the 4th person to sign up for it in Utah County. Soon I got into a competition with two friends to see who could end up with the most (real) connections. I finally won that competition, but we all ended up with hundreds of connections. But I remember when one of my friends knew they were losing on the connections number that they claimed to be winning on "endorsements." They changed their key metric, so that they could claim that they had actually won.

A few months ago, after feeling the initial rush of getting a million users of our Facebook app We're Related in just 29 days, I set up a Facebook group with an admittedly dumb name: Utah CEOs With a Facebook Strategy. It now has 488 members. We met a couple of times in Provo earlier this year. Jason McGowan and Michael Jensen from our team at FamilyLink.com shared with about 30-40 attendees how to build an app that is viral and can scale, and I tried to pump the Facebook opportunity as well as I could. I'm a true believer in what Facebook did with their Platform, as you will see from my original blog post the day they announced it, back in May 2007, when I predicted that Facebook would become the world's leading social network.

Tuesday night the Boston Celtics won the NBA World
Championship (4-2) by beating the Los Angelels Lakers by 39 points in game six
at Boston Gardens.

The Celtics won only 24 games last year, but this year
experienced the single biggest turnabout in NBA history, after Danny Ainge
orchestrated two major trades last summer, bringing Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen
to Boston.

Danny Ainge is my favorite basketball player/coach/general
manager of all time. While most people will agree with me that Michael Jordan
is the greatest NBA player in history, and it is popular to say, “I want to be
like Mike,” personally, I’d rather be like Danny.

This morning at a very small press conference in Kansas City at the National Genealogical Society annual conference we made a very large announcement.

In fact, we announced something that I have personally hoped for and dreamed of for more than a decade.

Today we announced a partnership between FamilySearch and FamilyLink.com to publish the Family History Library Catalog -- the largest single database of genealogy sources in the world -- in Web 2.0 fashion.

This means that individual genealogists, librarians, archivists, and others from around the world will be able, when the Catalog 2.0 comes online in the coming months, to enhance and extend the value of the catalog. Users will be able to add new sources that are currently in the library catalog, and thus extend its scope of coverage. They will be able to improve the source descriptions, and even rate and review sources as to their usefulness.