The Paradigm

In order to develop an investment strategy, a paradigm--a model of technology change--is indispensable.  Some paradigms--such as the Gilder paradigm--are explicit and explained.  Most investors, though, follow a technological paradigm without knowing it. They respond to a consensus about technology implicit in the media, which is driven by fashion rather than insight.

Within a consensus paradigm, large breakthroughs are impossible.  If everyone expected the breakthrough, it would already inform the market.  Shrinking from technology analysis, therefore, most investment letters seek little advances, incremental gains, picayune profits, excelling the Dow or Standard and Poor's by some modest margin.  They seek new investment opportunities chiefly by running computer programs through databases of financial statistics.

Informed by a systematic vision of technological change, the Gilder team finds ascendant companies through legwork and technical acumen in laboratories, entrepreneurial offices, semiconductor clean rooms, optical engineering centers, and technological investigations around the globe.

Formed in the 1980s, the first Gilder paradigm was the microcosm: microchip companies such as Texas Instruments, Intel and Micron and equipment companies such as Applied Materials that appreciated by orders of magnitude in the Personal Computer Revolution while scores of personal computer companies went bankrupt.

The paradigm of the 1990s was the telecosm: the convergence of fiber-optic-networks and wireless communications. Ascendant companies were Qualcomm, Ciena, Corvis, Global Crossing, Globalstar, Texas Instruments, Xilinx, Equinix, Agilent, and Corning.  Building the new Internet infrastructure, Telecosm companies incurred heavy debts and collapsed in the crash of 2000. Several died. But this painful setback gave alert investors significant gains in the stock market when most of the companies revived early in the new millennium.

The new millennial paradigm combines microcosm and telecosm in a new cornucopian convergence of optical networks and spectronic wireless.  Its first fulfillment came in Asia, in South Korea and China. The Asian advances have been analyzed for subscribers in Gilder Technology Report issues. Some ascendant companies have tripled or more during 2002 and 2003.

Joining them in 2004 and 2005 will be a set of companies currently in stealth or preparing for IPOs. This next generation of paradigm players promises advances that will change the entire landscape of optical, electronic and computer technology.  They will be the focus of the next few years of Gilder Technology Reports.

Don't miss these exciting technological changes--subscribe today!

 

The Editors

George Gilder, Editor in Chief of Gilder Technology Report,is Chairman of Gilder Publishing LLC, located in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. He is also a Senior Fellow at Discovery Institute where he directs Discovery's program on high technology and public policy.

Born in 1939 in New York City, Mr. Gilder attended Exeter Academy and Harvard University. At Harvard, he studied under Henry Kissinger and helped found Advance, a journal of political thought, which he edited and helped to re-establish in Washington, DC after his graduation in 1962. During this period he co-authored (with Bruce Chapman) a political history, The Party That Lost Its Head . He later returned to Harvard as a fellow at the Kennedy Institute of Politics and editor of the Ripon Forum . In the 1960s Mr. Gilder also served as a speech writer for several prominent official and candidates, including Nelson Rockefeller, George Romney, and Richard Nixon. In the 1970s, as an independent researcher and writer, Mr. Gilder began an excursion into the causes of poverty, which resulted in his books Men and Marriage (original version 1972) and Visible Man (1978); and hence, of wealth, which led to his best-selling Wealth and Poverty (1981).

Mr. Gilder pioneered the formulation of supply-side economics when he served as Chairman of the Lehrman Institute's Economic Roundtable, as Program Director for the Manhattan Institute, and as a frequent contributor to A.B. Laffer's economic reports and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal. In the 1980s he also consulted leaders of America's high technology businesses. According to a recent study of speeches, Mr. Gilder was President Reagan's most frequently quoted living author. In 1986, President Reagan gave George Gilder the White House Award for Entrepreneurial Excellence. In 1996 he was made a Fellow of the International Engineering Consortium. The investigation into wealth creation led Mr. Gilder into deeper examination of the lives of present-day entrepreneurs, culminating in many articles and a book, The Spirit of Enterprise (1986). The book was revised and republished in 1992. That many of the most interesting current entrepreneurs were to be found in high technology fields also led Mr. Gilder, over several years, to examine this subject in depth. In his best-selling work, Microcosm (1989), he explored the quantum roots of the new electronic technologies. A subsequent book, Life After Television, published first as a Whittle Communications monograph and then published by W.W. Norton (1992), and updated and republished in 1994, is a prophecy of the future of computers and telecommunications. This book is a prelude to his latest book on the future of telecommunications, Telecosm (2000).

Mr. Gilder is a contributing editor of Forbes magazine and a frequent writer for The Economist, the Harvard Business Review,The Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Over the past several years, he has dismissed many of the most touted new technologies—from HDTV and interactive television to 3DO game machines and CD-I multimedia, from TDMA wireless and Nextel cellular compression to pervasive ATM (asynchronous transfer mode) networks. Embraced instead: All-optical networks, smart radios, Qualcomm digital wireless, Stratacom frame relay, mediaprocessors, Netscape browsers, and Sun's Java programming language.

George Gilder lives in Tyringham, Massachusetts, in the Berkshire Mountains, where he is an active churchman, sometime runner, and with his wife Nini, parent of four children.  

Click Here for the official George Gilder Archives at the Discovery Institute

Dr. Nick Tredennick is Editor of the Gilder Technology Report. He is an advisor and investor in numerous pre-IPO startups and is a member of technical advisory boards for several companies including Ascenium, Impinj, QuickSilver Technology, Terakeet, and the Venture X Group. He is on the editorial advisory board for several technical publications including IEEE Spectrum and Microprocessor Report. He is an IEEE representative to the Engineering Accreditation Commission (EAC), which oversees university accreditation for all engineering programs. He was a member of the Army Science Board for six years and is a registered professional engineer.
Dr. Tredennick was named a Fellow of the IEEE for his contributions to microprocessor design. He has over thirty years experience in computer and microprocessor design, holds nine patents, and has more than fifty technical publications, including a textbook on microprocessor design (Microprocessor Logic Design). He was a Senior Design Engineer at Motorola, a Research Staff Member at IBM's Watson Research Center, and Chief Scientist at Altera. Dr. Tredennick did the logic design and microcode for Motorola's MC68000 and for IBM's Micro/370 microprocessors. He has taught at the University of Texas at Austin and the University of California, Berkeley. He has been a founder of several Silicon Valley startups.

Bret T. Swanson is Executive Editor of Gilder Technology Report and a senior fellow at Seattle’s Discovery Institute. In his four-plus years at the GTR, Mr. Swanson has written about last-mile broadband technologies, 3G wireless, free-space optics, network processors, and advances in analog electronics. In 2001 he created the Friday Letter, a weekly e-mail update including the week’s technology news and special features on technology, economics, and politics, that now reaches more than 150,000 readers. He also writes frequently on technology and economics for The Wall Street Journal editorial page. Currently he and George Gilder are finishing a book on the world economy, heavily focused on technology in Asia. Previously Mr. Swanson was an economic aide to Jack Kemp at the supply-side think-tank Empower America, where he researched and wrote about tax, monetary and trade policy as well as high tech issues such as encryption, telecom deregulation, and Internet taxation. He studied economics at Princeton University.

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