Juan Enríquez Cabot (born 1959) is a Mexican-American academic, businessman, author, and speaker. He is currently the Managing Director of Excel Venture Management.
We traditionally in this world didn't have enough calories to feed all of us and had huge famines, not just in Africa, but had them across India, across Southeast Asia, and across China. Because of Borlaug's work at Simit and because of this we have huge excess, until very recently, in agricultural produce and the prices went through the floor.
There is a massive ecosystem that has to get built that looks like a biosphere. And the various parts of that biosphere better be there.
One of the things that really worries me, in part about Mexico, in part about Latin America, and in part about the Hispanic population in the U. S. and Canada. It's the lack of awareness of this whole science world.
One of the lessons that I hope people will take out is the extreme dependence simply on the financial sector is really dangerous.
It's not completely inconceivable that someday you'll be able to download your own memories.
If I had a wand and could put statues in different places, one of the statues would go to a man who just died, called Norman Borlaug, who came up with the Green Revolution.
It is important that New York, in addition to its fashion, and finance, and tourism, and communications infrastructure, also begin developing venture infrastructure that's for real.
As countries appear and disappear, then I began to ask, what makes countries successful? And it turns out, after a long slog through geographies and ethnicities and all kinds of variables, it's the ability to adapt and adopt, what Darwin talked about.
We have to get serious about living within our means.
If you had a front row seat at the Renaissance, you would have seen Machiavelli come by plotting, and you would have seen murders in the streets, you would have seen violence, you have seen people burning books and it would have looked like the world was a horrible place, but that's where all these incredible stuff we're still living with comes out of.
Anytime you bring a really powerful new technology to market there are multiple implications. You start changing the relative position of countries.
The thing that keeps me most awake is the desire and curiosity to learn more.
It's such an extraordinary time to be alive that you just don't want to miss it. I mean, it's a really neat historical period.
It's not fear that keeps me up. I mean, every generation has thought, this is the worst generation; the world's going to hell in a hand basket. The reality is, people are living longer, and they're living better.
When I grew up, I simply didn't have mentors that said, "Science is important. Science helps you build a country. Science makes a country powerful. " And that's such a simple thought, but when you think about what's powered Taiwan and Korea and Silicon Valley and Cambridge.
Try to live without something digital - without digital code for about two hours, very hard to do if you're awake.
The Americas has been a relatively stable continent. The last truly new border we have is Panama in 1903.
Cities are magical things. You know the energy in them. You have to walk the streets in any borough here and you can see between what was in this city in the 1970's and where it is today and how much more energy there is and how much more just sheer.
The thing that's really important to understand is, the last thing an empire traditionally does is drive itself into bankruptcy. You've seen that with the great empires.
As from the 1970's onward, digital code started to drive the global economy, now life code is beginning to be the fundamental driver of the global economy over the next 10, 20, 30 years.