Guess I should have tweeted 51 times. Dow Jones plunges >1,000 points as volatility kept markets in its grip.

— Shervin Pishevar

In the early days of this month, as the Dow rocked, swayed, and reversed all the gains it made this year, Shervin Pishevar on the financial future of the country, entrepreneurship, and globalism. As the co-founder of Virgin Hyperloop and an investor in Uber and AirBnB the prolific, successful visionary had plenty to say.

41/ Giants built on monopoly frameworks will fall. As they should. That’s how evolution works. All old forests burn to make room for the new

— Shervin Pishevar

Pishevar’s poetic tweets couldn’t have materialized at a more poignant time.

We’d just started hearing the warnings. Inflation. Rising interest rates. Credit account deficits. As government leaders and businesses alike heralded a massive corporate tax cut, one couldn’t help but wonder when the markets would slow, correct, and maybe even make a dramatic, terrifying reversal.

Just yesterday, like a flash, Pishevar’s predictions . Stocks plunged more than 1,000 points. Treasury auctions underwhelmed. He drew a direct line from President Trump to the roller coaster ride of the markets. “Presidents should not be cheering the stock market”, he extolled. In other words, let the markets do their work.

Tweeting amidst the chaos, Shervin Pishevar included a screenshot and a chart of how much the Dow dropped in a tiny amount of time:

In ½ hour, 500 points. In 15 minutes, 300 points. The specter of volatility showed its face, with Pishevar predicting a sub 20,000 Dow-even by the end of the week.The jitters will most likely continue and Pishevar will be proven right, once again.

In the midst of his Tuesday Tweetstorm, just before he broke from the social network to eat dinner, Pishevar made an even more somber prediction: Not only would the market lose its 2018 gains, it would shed 6,000 points and erase all its gains from last year.

The financial world would, in some ways, straighten itself out. Balance would be restored. Scores settled.

This long line of social media declarations was a look into the deep, complicated thoughts of a man who , a proud incubator who travels the world for business meetings, and an unashamed believer in the spirit of American entrepreneurialism.

He was someone on the ground. Someone who could read the tea leaves. 

As the co-founder of Sherpa Ventures, Pishevar has significant bonafides, hand-picking Silicon Valley winners and plucking tech founders from the ramen-eating life of bootstrapping to the whirlwind, monied existence of Bay Area darlings. From millennial favorites Slack and Tumblr to Rapportive, Dollar Shave Club and TaskRabbit, Pishevar’s portfolio illustrated that he was more than an investor, he was clairvoyant.

But in this long thread of tweets on a Monday and Tuesday, he weighed in on more than the stock market. He dropped wisdom on what he knew about the world within in his orbit.

50/ We might not see another Uber or Airbnb scale business for 10+ year unless the Modern Ma Bells are restrained from their absolute power.

— Shervin Pishevar

Indeed.

Slow to grow their networks and ham-stringed by local regulations, we’ve seen the endless, empty promises of cable companies and phone providers on bringing fiber and lightning-speed internet to suburban hamlets all over the country. Today, when 7-year-olds have mobile phones and coffee makers pass data to the cloud, the system is bursting at the seams.

But it didn’t stop them from throttling. Slowing the flow of data. Innovation was being strangled at the mercy of an algorithm, and new, fertile ventures were becoming harder and harder to find.

Pishevar, notably, invested in AirBnB and Uber instead of Ma Bells. For AirBnB, he undoubtedly saw a new twist on an old problem – expensive hotel rooms that came equipped with industrial coffee makers and bloated, tax-laden bills. For Uber, it was the pain of waiting 30 minutes for a taxi in the rain, and then being charged an arm and a leg just to travel a few short miles.

Both Uber and AirBnB moved so fast, . But ultimately they could do what every startup investor dreams of. They could scale.

Naturally, this wasn’t the first time Pishevar was right. He had the know-how and financial foundation to make major predictions, as an elite member of the UN Foundation’s prestigious Global Entrepreneur’s Council. His place on the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, a virtual factory for Nobel Peace Prize winners, gave him even more gravity as a truth-teller.

Part of Pishevar’s prediction storm was a nod to globalism, where Silicon Valley is more than a physical place, but an idea. But not just any idea, an idea that’s gone viral, powered and hastened and propelled by entrepreneurship.

38/That shift has to do with a revolution in stateless digital currencies unleashed across the globe over next coupl decades.

— Shervin Pishevar

It’s a picture of a world that at least when it comes to innovation and talent, has gone borderless. The slog and expense of chasing down an H1-B is becoming almost that quaint story told to grandchildren. The Talent was staying put in their own countries, confabbing virtually on late-night Zoom meetings, not in courtyard-style offices, not in co-working spaces, not in common areas.

In a way, it’s a high-tech workaround that completely sidesteps the current, contagious nationalism in America.It is no longer a case of “If you build it, they will come”, but rather, “don’t waste the expense, we’re staying where we are.”

At approximately 3:15 pm on February 6, Pishevar put down his phone. He had dispatched precisely 50 tweets, tackling billion dollar exits, cryptocurrency, and the big 5 US monopolies: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft.

Some tweets were pensive, others ominous, but almost all of them, controversial. And in Pishevar’s world of entrepreneurial disruption, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

 

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