Startup America

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Think of the U.S. government as a once-dominant, lean, high-flying company that grew too big, too bloated, too bureaucratic, too unimaginative. It's Kodak or Circuit City—a dominant player caught napping amid an obvious technological transformation. This snooze-and-lose reality is partly driving the governing and economic pace, tone and policies of President Trump's White House. A theory that binds President Donald Trump with leading innovators, especially Elon Musk, is that you can bring tech and business talent and techniques together to take a wrecking ball to broken ideas and/or processes or entire agencies. Musk, Marc Andreessen and a growing chorus of entrepreneurs and tech CEOs are fusing their "founder mode" mentality with Trump's desire for fast growth. You have Silicon Valley's best and brightest battling for bigger roles in reshaping government. Almost every CEO wants a slice of the action. Whether you're a skeptic or fan, consider not what a policy wonk would do, but rather how a tech CEO would shake things up if their company was deep in debt and slow in execution.

  1. Simplify, simplify, simplify.
  2. Cut costs. 
  3. Bet big. You can't cut your way out of this crisis. The only palatable solution: explosive growth. Not 2% or 3%. Twice that. Marc Andreessen has argued publicly this rate of growth is possible if you stack government attention and staff correctly. The big bets would be on AI, space, new domestic energy sources, crypto, and U.S. businesses doing this work at home. GDP growth of 1% would amount to about $290 billion.
  4. Break stuff. Musk bluntly warned before the election that big cuts and change in government inevitably cause "temporary pain." Politicians typically hate inflicting any pain on voters — hence, your deficits! But any business leader who shuts down products or lays off people knows it's the price of growth.
  5. Ignore the whiners. What holds back CEOs and political leaders is the same thing: fear, fear of bad headlines or big revolts. But Trump's pain threshold is higher than anyone we've seen in public office. So you could see him enduring it if convinced it will juice his numbers. Musk is a living reminder that a lot of bad press does not equate to failure. Often, it's the opposite.

Startup America