• 2021
• Working Paper

Business interaction with the U.S. government, historically based on securing industry or company special interests at the expense of the public god, has enabled and furthered government dysfunction. Gridlock within the American political system has precluded the enactment of badly needed policy solutions, which exacerbates Americans’ declining quality of life, as measured by the Social Progress Imperative’s Social Progress Index. In previous work with Katherine Gehl, I explain that the U.S. political system operates as a duopoly, which enables unhealthy competition based on ideology rather than policy solutions. I now expand on this thesis to explore the complicity of business, which is the main funder of the U.S. political system, in enabling duopolistic competition, which has worsened citizen quality of life and harms U.S. competitiveness, and the overall business environment. Put simply, government is not working for anyone. Encouragingly, business is beginning to accept its responsibility to society. The very nature of business competition is shifting, as companies work to address social and economic needs through profitable business models, thereby creating shared value.

• 2021
• Working Paper

We study the participation of nascent firms in open-source communities and its implications for attracting VC funding. To do so, we exploit unique data on 160,065 US startups linking information from Crunchbase to firms' GitHub accounts. Estimating a within-startup model saturated with a host of relevant fixed effects, we show that startups accelerate their activities on the platform in the twelve months prior to raising their first financing round. The intensity of their involvement on GitHub declines in the twelve months after. Remarkably, startups intensify those activities that rely on external technology sources above and beyond the technologies they themselves control. Applying machine learning to classify GitHub projects, we find that the most prevalent among these external activities are related to software development, data analytics, and integration. Our results indicate that VCs and renowned investors are the most responsive to these activities.

• June 2021
• Case

In March 2021, Amnon Shashua, co-founder and CEO of Israel-based Mobileye, was preparing to meet with Intel’s new CEO, Pat Gelsinger, to review plans for the future. Mobileye had been acquired by California-based Intel in 2017, but still operated independently. Mobileye was the global leader in vision technology for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) with a 70% market share and $1 billion in revenue. However, for Shashua, ADAS was just the first step towards his dream of leading the autonomous vehicle (AV) revolution. It was this vision that led Intel to acquire Mobileye for $15.3 billion. Shashua’s challenge was that consumer AVs were still years away due to concerns over safety, regulation, cost, and consumer acceptance. A nearer term use case for AVs was the robotaxi market—fully autonomous, driverless taxis. Shashua and his team were excited about the potential of robotaxis to change the future of mobility, projecting that the market would grow to $160 billion globally by 2030. Mobileye believed that it could generate at least $15 billion in annual robotaxi revenue by the end of the decade. Equally important, Shashua viewed robotaxis as a necessary first step toward consumer AVs. Mobileye could use its experience in robotaxis to improve AV technology, address regulatory challenges, and build high definition maps. The long-term question facing Mobileye was whether to: 1) invest billions of dollars to build-out a global, vertically integrated robotaxi business; 2) use robotaxis as an opportunity to learn and then revert back to a horizontal supplier of AV chips and software; and/or 3) do both? During most of Intel’s history, the company had been a horizontal semiconductor company which avoided vertically integrating into its customers’ businesses. Should Shashua make the case that it was time for a change—and Intel should run a full-stack vertical robotaxi company? Each strategic choice had different capital requirements, risk profiles, and margin opportunities. Shashua needed to decide which direction to recommend to Gelsinger.