#Stuff

We recently travelled to Rotterdam for meetings and to check on some material we currently hold in warehouses there. Every time I go to this wonderful port city, it makes me feel like the merchants of yesteryear must have felt, as we walked through warehouses full of spices, cocoa, copper cathodes, etc.. Even after thousands of years of technological advance, these basic commodities have sustained their level of importance in the global manufacturing chain. As I stared at these rows and rows of basic materials, it made me reflect on the current relative value of “stuff” versus the public value of what most likely will not even be around 6 years from now, let alone 60 years from now (Twitter, snapchat, etc..) One tenth of the market cap of any of these “pixie dust” companies would easily have bought the entire contents of every single warehouse we visited that day.