Posted on 10/02/2019 6:28:47 PM PDT by marshmallow
Ask Internet entrepreneur and Silicon Valley venture capitalist Reid Hoffman how he decides which companies to invest in, and he’ll tell you he has a simple litmus test to determine whether to give the idea a closer look.
“I want to invest in companies that play to one or more of the seven deadly sins,” Hoffman said. For those a bit rusty, those sins would be: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy and pride.
Hoffman, best known as co-founder of LinkedIn, says the business-professional networking-platform most embodies the deadly sin of greed. “In the end, LinkedIn is helping someone earn more money next year.”
Hoffman’s remarks came at The Common Good in the Digital Age conference, held in a Jesuit curia meeting venue on a narrow side street of Vatican City. The crowd was peppered with Catholic clergy, including a handful of bishops and at least one cardinal. Hoffman’s quips earned plenty of hearty laughs.
“This is a problem we have with the idea of being moral in a business designed to be profitable, and reach billions of people by indulging human nature,” Hoffman said.
Hoffman was joined by executives from Facebook, Western Digital, Mozilla, Accenture, plus top-flight academics and authors, and at least one Nobel Prize winner. Participants are promised an audience with Pope Francis before the three-day conference wraps up on Saturday.
The goal of the event, according to Cardinal Peter Turkson, who opened Thursday’s session, is to discuss ways to make the digital world more moral, and to be a bigger contributor to the common good in society.
“It is said that technology makes the world smaller,” said Turkson, one of the authors of the 2015 Papal Encylical on climate change and protecting the planet, Laudato Sí. “I would like it to be the case.....
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
My goodness, it seems everyone traveled to Italy last month. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, William Barr, Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and others ...
Turkson, one of Vatican’s top promoters of socialism. See his Modesto Memo.
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