What Your CEO Is Reading: Bitcoin or Bust in Venezuela
By Tom Loftus
Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, General interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications.
Bitcoin mining in Venezuela. One consequence of blockchain’s growing acceptance across boardrooms has been the sharp drop in coverage of bitcoin miners and their homegrown, digital meth-lab-ish operations. But in Venezuela, where currency is weighed by the wheelbarrow, bitcoin mining has emerged as a way to put food on the table, literally. By “turning socialism against itself,” tech-savvy Venezuelan’s are tapping the country’s price controls on electricity to run computing intense operations. As Reason’s Jim Epstein explains: “Since bitcoin mining is a process, in effect, of converting the value of electricity into currency, Venezuelan miners are engaging in a form of arbitrage: They’re buying an underpriced commodity and turning it into bitcoin to make a profit.” Earned bitcoin is traded through online intermediaries for dollars which can be used to buy Amazon.com Inc. gift cards used to buy food from services like Amazon’s Prime Pantry, he writes. Authorities are not happy and bitcoin miners are vulnerable to shakedowns by the country’s secret police force.
Lessons from Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Valley’s first startup. Ur-Silicon Valley player Hewlett-Packard not only helped establish the region as a technology hub, but through its HP Way management philosophy, supplied the germ for every profit-sharing, talent-driven, collaboration-obsessed, fully stocked fridge-supporting tech startup to follow. But after decades of success, leadership went as stale as the company’s “daily doughnut breaks,” originally established to encourage conversation. Bad acquisitions and also sex and spying scandals followed in the 1990s. A new book, Becoming Hewlett Packard: Why Strategic Leadership Matters, by former executive Webb McKinney, offers lessons for today’s tech executives, MIT Technology Review’s Peter Burrows writes. “Today’s companies are stacked with tech-savvy executives and venture capitalists,” Mr. Burrows says, “but they need to do a better job of bringing in new blood, given the rate at which these companies are moving into new industries.”
How a grad student found spyware that could control anybody’s iPhone. Vanity Fair takes a deep dive into zero-days and smartphone jailbreaks. And while U.C. Berkeley PhDs and human rights activists scarcely have the appeal of VF’s usual staple of D-list Euro royals and Ibiza DJ’s, its not for lack of trying by reporter Bryan Burrough. “This is a James Bond story,” a security expert tells Mr. Burrough. “The guys who did this are James Bond villains, evil arms dealers attacking dissidents in the real world. It’s real. It’s true. This is finding cyber-weapons being used against someone in the real world. Before, people only suspected this might be out there.”
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