Alphachat: The power of talk and mythical startup valuations

Alphachat is available on Acast, iTunes, and Stitcher.

An episode guide and some relevant links for this week’s show:

Sherry Turkle wants you to put down your phone and talk to someone

The MIT professor and clinical psychologist stops by to discuss her new book, Reclaiming Conversation: the Power of Talk in a Digital Age. We talk about how always-on digital connections are making it harder for people to have conversations, whether with family, friends, romantic partners, classmates or co-workers, and why you keep your smartphone out of your bedroom at night.

Sherry has been studying our relationships with technology for years – you might also be interested in her last book, Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other.

Are Silicon Valley valuations mythical?

Leslie Hook and Sujeet Indap dig into the gap between how tech companies are valued in private and public markets, and why the shine may be coming off some of the so-called “unicorns” – startups that are valued at over $1bn.

Leslie wrote a fine analysis of just how difficult it is to sort through “marketing numbers” and a complex structure of investor guarantees to judge the true value of companies like Uber, Airbnb and Square. From her story:

These multi-share class structures, along with the lack of a liquid market for private shares, have made it almost impossible to calculate an accurate valuation for many start-ups. Even investment professionals whose job it is to assess the value of private shares in their portfolios admit that they cannot do this with 100 per cent certainty.

In a private company, unlike in public markets, each class of share commands a different price because of the protections that come with it. In Square’s case, the headline valuation figure of $6bn assumes wrongly that all shares could command the highest share price.

For further reading, check out our west coast editor Richard Waters’s take on investors’ wild valuation rides.

Esther Duflo on foreign aid and global poverty

In this short excerpt from the full length Alphachatterbox interview (available here), Cardiff asks development economist Esther Duflo about the impact of foreign aid on addressing global poverty.

Books and other longform recommendations

• Sujeet Indap: America’s Bank: The Epic Struggle to Create the Federal Reserve
• Leslie Hook: Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future
• Emiliya Mychasuk: My Brilliant Friend, the first volume of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels
• Shannon Bond: Aziz Ansari on Acting, Race and Hollywood (New York Times op-ed)

What are you reading, watching or listening to? We’d love your recommendations – as well as feedback, questions and suggestions for what you’d like to hear on the show. Call us at 917-551-5012, or send us an email or voice memo to alphachat@ft.com