As you know, I love operating and investing in marketplaces. It’s been interesting over the years to observe which vertical marketplaces take off sustainably and which fizzle, especially in light of the two dominant horizontal liquidity behemoths: eBay and Craigslist.

The first two times I raised VC money, until success simplified things, it occurred to me how the process really mimics real world dating.

I spent most of 2012 barreling down the path I set in motion in early 2011 (Looking back at 2011, looking forward to 2012), before ultimately deciding to completely unravel my life. I left OLX (Why I am leaving OLX) and I am radically simplifying my life (The Very Big Downgrade).

I decided to radically simplify my life and divide my living expenses by 10! I just returned my house in Bedford, my apartment in New York and sold my McLaren. I gave 75% of my non-financial material possessions to charity and most of the rest to my friends and family.

Given the pace at which Jose and I have been angel investing, it’s not surprising we have now invested in 100 startups! Pitzi, the Assurion of Brazil, takes the prize for being the 100th startup! In fact given my procrastinating in writing this blog post, we are now at 105 startup investments!

Beyond policy changes, the application of technology to public services, health care and education could unleash productivity led growth as it frees up misallocated labor and capital. Government spending ranges from 34% of GDP in the US to 56% in France. Health care spending ranges from 9.6% of GDP in the UK to 17.9% of GDP in the US. Public spending on education ranges from 10% to 14% of GDP. Overall 60% to 75% of the economy has not been touched by the productivity revolution.

Follow on from my last blog post on solving the European debt crisis, I now take a look at the changing focus of healthcare to preventative care and catastrophic insurance and putting consumers in charge of their healthcare decisions.

In 1985, the G-5 nations orchestrated a concerted intervention in currency markets to depreciate the U.S. Dollar, which, they agreed, had become overvalued after the Volker years in a manner that was hobbling the U.S. economy and creating severe global imbalances. The Plaza Accord successfully de-valued the Dollar ~50% over the next two years without precipitating a financial crisis. The problems in Europe are grave enough that they could prompt another global summit of this kind. For such a summit to be effective it would need to include agreement on several elements that have not yet even made it into mainstream conversations. These include...

Should Greece exit the euro and reintroduce the drachma, it would probably fall 50% upon introduction and Greek nominal GDP would probably fall by a similar amount.