My Book "Hedge", One Year Later

European Straits #134

Dear all,

It’s been a bit more than one year since I released my book Hedge, which is about inventing a new social Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age. Many things have happened over this period, including more than 2,000 copies sold, a few hundred more given away to friends and partners, trips to various countries to discuss the book, and many related pieces of published content.

I’m still behind in what I was planning to work on as a follow-up, notably a series of articles about how entrepreneurs are contributing to inventing this new Safety Net. But I thought this summer issue would be a good opportunity to compile all this Hedge-related content and invite those among you who don’t have a copy yet to buy it 🤗. Please read along and spot the links that interest you 👇

Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

1/ The best way to start is with the three papers that effectively formed the groundwork for writing the book:

• Brexit: Doom, or Europe’s Polanyi Moment? (The Family Papers, June 2016)

• Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit (The Family Papers, September 2016)

• HEDGE: Liberal Institutions for the Entrepreneurial Age (The Family Papers, November 2016)

2/ Then there are a few issues of this newsletter that I wrote to explain why I wrote the book, what it is about, and the strategy for publishing it:

• Hedge: It’s (almost) on! 🔥 (June 2018)

• 🙀 Hedge on sale now!  🎉 (July 2018)

• Releasing Hedge: A few thoughts on publishing 📚 (July 2018)

• Publishing a book in 2018: An update 📕 (September 2018)

3/ More recently, I published two articles to expand on what is in the book:

• Hedge: Inventing a New Social Safety Net (The Family, January 2019)

• 10 Startups Coming to Save the Social Safety Net (The Family, March 2019)

4/ Many friends have supported Hedge with articles and recommendations while also contributing with remarks and critiques. Here’s a selection:

• Re-imagining the safety net—a review of Hedge by Nicolas Colin (Ben Robinson, Aperture Hub, August 2018)

• Thread about Hedge (Martin Schmidbaur, Twitter, August 2018)

• Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age (book review) (Stefano Zorzi, The Hiding Hand, August 2018)

• 🇫🇷 Quelques notes en vrac à propos du livre Hedge: A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age (Perrick Penet-Avez, ONPK, August 2018)

• 🇫🇷 [Mes lectures #1] Hedge – Nicolas Colin (Valentin Decker, August 2018)

• Key idea: The safety net is a hedge (Tim O’Reilly, Amazon.com, September 2018)

• 🇫🇷 Vers un nouveau pacte social pour l’ère numérique ? (Henri Isaac, Medium, October 2018)

• Hedge (Ian Hathaway, November 2018)

• And don’t miss the blurbs by Carlota Perez, Bill Janeway, Kim-Mai Cutler, Azeem Azhar and others compiled on this website: hedgethebook.com

5/ There have been many articles by journalists in various outlets:

• 🇫🇷 Pour un nouveau contrat social à l’heure du numérique (Philippe Escande & Sandrine Cassini, Le Monde, November 2018)

• 🇮🇹 La protezione sociale non è (solo) una questione statale (Andrea Garnero & Stefano Zorzi, Il Foglio, December 2018)

• 🇫🇷 Dans l’âge numérique, perdre son emploi va devenir banal (Christophe Alix, Libération, January 2019)

• Forward to the Past: Nicolas Colin pulls some very old threads to create a new kind of density (Sarah J. Robbins, Hacking Finance, January 2019)

• 🇫🇷 Un nouveau pacte social pour l’âge numérique (Marc Mousli, Nonfiction.fr, February 2019)

• Amid Upheaval in the West, He's Sketching a Social Safety Net 2.0 (Tom Cassauwers, Ozy, February 2019)

• What Will Be There When You Fall?: The Future of our Safety Net (Rachel Alexander and Rey Faustino, New America CA, April 2019)

• 🇫🇷 Adapter la protection sociale à la transition numérique (Marc Mousli, L’Économie politique, July 2019)

6/ I’ve published a few op-eds here and there that relate to what I discuss in the book:

• 🇫🇷 Vers une nouvelle « grande transformation » (L’Économie politique, January 2017)

• If he wins, Emmanuel Macron has to be bold (The Financial Times, April 2017)

• How to fix the welfare state for the entrepreneurial age (The Financial Times, May 2017)

• 🇫🇷 Un nouvel État-providence (L’Obs, August 2018)

• Europe Lagging Behind: It's Not The Safety Net (Forbes, August 2018)

• What Everyone Is Getting Wrong About Low-Skilled Jobs (Forbes, September 2018)

• The Future Of Work Is About Hunting, Not Settling (Forbes, September 2018)

• Technological Revolutions Bring About Fascism. Who Will Save Us This Time? (Forbes, October 2018)

• The Yellow Vests Don't Need Cheaper Gas, They Need A New Deal For The Entrepreneurial Age (Forbes, December 2018)

7/ For those of you who like to listen to podcasts 🎙️:

• Meet the MarketPlace #13: Nicolas Colin & Garrett Cassidy (with Ben Robinson, Temenos Marketplace, September 2018)

• 🇫🇷 ASDN #25 / Nicolas Colin – Hedge – Réenchanter le libéralisme (with Henri Isaac & Nicolas Vanbremeersch, Aux sources du numérique, September 2018)

• Is the Tech Startup Mindset Helping Us or Hurting Us? (with Will Beeson, Rebank, February 2019)

• Entrepreneurial Liberalism ft. Nicolas Colin (for patrons only—with Colin Mortimer, The Neoliberal Project, March 2019)

• A Greater Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age (w/ Nicolas Colin) (with Nikolaj Groeneweg, French Tech Asia Pacific, March 2019)

• Tech for the Safety Net: a conversation between One Degree Founder & CEO Rey Faustino and Nicolas Colin (One Degree, April 2019)

• Government, Technology, and The New Social Safety Net with Nicolas Colin (with Erik Torenberg, Venture Stories, Village Global, August 2019)

8/ Obviously there are a few videos:

• 🇫🇷 Wemind Talk avec Nicolas Colin, auteur de Hedge (Hind Elidrissi, Wemind, September 2018)

• HEDGE: Nicolas Colin (Co-Founder @The Family) & Sandro Gianella (Public Policy @Stripe) (The Family, October 2018)

• 🇫🇷 HEDGE : Un nouveau contrat social à l'ère du numérique, avec Nicolas Colin (The Family, November 2018)

• 🇫🇷 Numérique, économie, modèles sociaux : débat avec Nicolas Colin (with Adrienne Brotons, Fondation Jean-Jaurès, December 2018)

• Nicolas Colin: “HEDGE” (Talks at Google, May 2019)

9/ Don’t miss this series of short promotional videos produced by our friend Miranda Bertram:

• Hedge: A New Safety Net for the Entrepreneurial Age

• From the Old to the New Working Class

• The Future of Work: Hunters and Settlers

• Unions: Exit Rather Than Voice

• What’s a Tech Company?

10/ Finally, if you’d like to get your copy or offer it to a friend, here are the links, depending on where you are:

• 🇺🇸 United States ➡️ Amazon.com

• 🇬🇧 United Kingdom ➡️ Amazon.co.uk

• 🇫🇷 France ➡️ Amazon.fr

• 🇩🇪 Germany ➡️ Amazon.de

11/ Let me conclude with a piece of news: I’m happy to announce that a French version of Hedge will be published in February 2020 (tbc) by Odile Jacob (who’s also Barack Obama’s publisher for the French market—just sayin’ 😜). The provisional title (and my favorite to this day) is Nos jours heureux, Un nouveau contrat social pour l’âge entrepreneurial. It’s a direct reference to the legendary Programme of the Conseil National de la Résistance, which was to post-WWII France what the New Deal was to modern America. We’ll probably have a series of conference in Paris and elsewhere in France in the run up to the publication. Stay tuned (at least if you read French 😉🇫🇷)!

🎙️ It’s already listed above, but I recently recorded a podcast with our friend Erik Torenberg of the venture capital firm Village Global. It’s a very long listen (I thought Erik would cut it, but that didn’t happen) and I’m rarely happy with myself in podcast, but I’ve actually received good feedback, so please give it a try! Here it is: Government, Technology, and The New Social Safety Net with Nicolas Colin.

🔮 Our friends at Point Nine Capital in Berlin are hiring a Research Associate. The idea is to have someone full time on researching industries and writing blog posts & reports about the interesting trends happening as software is eating the world. As written by Louis Coppey in the following blog post, it’s an opportunity to become the Benedict Evans of Europe 😜.

• Here’s what Louis wrote about the job: Do you have what it takes to be our next oracle?

• And the job ad is on the Point Nine website.

🇨🇳 Finally, for those of you who are fluent in Chinese, here is an interview I gave to He Qian, who covers the European tech scene for the leading newspaper in Mainland China The People’s Daily. It’s an in-depth discussion of how Europe could position itself in the global digital economy:

• Here’s the original version in Chinese: 数字经济转型：欧洲人拒绝硅谷模式 中国案例带来积极启发

• And here’s a very rough translation in English using Google: Rise of the Digital Economy: Europeans Reject the Silicon Valley Model While China Brings A Different Kind of Inspiration

Here are the various newsletters which I sent prior to or after publication of Hedge to explain the project of writing the book, follow up on related discussions, and share a few extracts of the manuscript:

• The Dark Ages of Financialization (March 2017)

• The Future of Trade Unions (May 2017)

• The Future of the Welfare State (May 2017)

• Fixing the Welfare State Is Not About Neoliberalism (May 2017)

• Where Are Entrepreneurs on Health Care? (June 2017)

• The Future of Trade Unions (Cont'd.) (September 2017)

• Can Technology Help Avert World War III? (September 2017)

• Introducing the "Great Safety Net" (February 2018)

• Consumer Credit in the Entrepreneurial Age (February 2018)

• Solving the Housing Problem: Hunters and Settlers (March 2018)

• The Corporate World in Retreat (March 2018)

• China: A Greater Safety Net in the Making (April 2018)

• Uber and the Future of Work (May 2018)

• The Safety Net: Insurance To the Rescue? (July 2018)

• O’Reilly’s Foo Camp: Assessing the “Tech Backlash” (August 2018)

• Discussing the Future of Work With the Royal Society of Arts (September 2018)

• Talking About "Hedge" with European Audiences (October 2018)

• My Stay in the Bay Area (November 2018)

• Expanding "Hedge", and Working on European Tech (January 2019)

• The Future of Education (July 2019)

Warm regards (from Normandy, France),

Nicolas