MIT's Technology Review has a great review of a new biography of Georges Doriot (Wikipedia) by Businessweek Editor Spencer E. Ante entitled, Creative Capital: Georges Doriot and the Birth of Venture Capital. Born in France, Doriot fought in World War I, then studied at Harvard Business School, served as director of the U.S. military's Military Planning Division during World War II as a brigadier general, and in 1946 launched American Research and Development Corporation (ARD) as the first publicly owned venture capital firm.

Doriot's legacy looms large today, even if his name is new to most:

Contemporaneously with ARD's watershed investment in [Digital Equipment Corporation], others began walking the trails Doriot had blazed: Arthur Rock (a student of Doriot's in the Harvard class of 1951) backed the departure of the "Traitorous Eight" from Shockley Semiconductor to form ­Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, then funded ­Robert Noyce and ­Gordon Moore when they left ­Fairchild to found Intel; ­Laurance ­Rockefeller formed ­Venrock, which has since backed more than 400 companies, including Intel and Apple; Don ­Valentine formed Sequoia Capital, which would invest in Atari, Apple, Oracle, Cisco, Google, and YouTube.

Doriot himself would likely have felt at home among today's embattled and outnumbered regulation-skeptics in the technology policy community:

he opposed both the dirigiste political economy of his native France and the tax hikes and anticompetitive laws enacted in the United States under the New Deal. Such regulations, he maintained, arrogated to bureaucrats the function of the markets; their worst feature was that they let government lend money to failing businesses. Ante notes that a former colleague of Doriot's, James F. Morgan, recalled him as "the most schizophrenic Frenchman I've ever met"--devoted to his original land's wine, cuisine, and language even as "the French capacity to make very simple things complicated drove him nuts."

Randall Stross, a Silicon Valley-based technology author, has penned an excellent essay for the New York Times making an argument that many of us here have made in the past: "The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits." That is, tech giants can rise very quickly and attain something approaching market dominance thanks to the power of bandwagon effects and the "winner-takes-all" economics that characterize digital markets in the short-term. But that dominance, Stross rightly argues, is difficult to maintain over the long haul because technology and markets evolve rapidly and new players displace old ones. Mr. Stross notes that IBM is a classic example, but Microsoft is experiencing a similar fate:

two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era. Empirical evidence, however, suggests that he won’t succeed. Not because of personal failings, but because Mother Nature simply won’t permit it.

It's always frustrating to hear calls at the Davos World Economic Forum for "new," "kinder," or more "creative" forms of capitalism. What they usually mean is more bureaucacy, less profit, more "coordination," and thus in the end less actual creativity and kindness. Standard fare for global development bureaucrats. But it's especially disconcerting when the call comes from an icon of creative capitalism himself. Capitalism serves only the rich, he says. We need to mold, shape, and remake capitalism instead to serve the poor.

Utter nonsense, says the excellent development economist William Easterly.

The number of poor people who can't afford food for their children is a lot smaller than it used to be -- thanks to capitalism. Capitalism didn't create malnutrition, it reduced it. The globalization of capitalism from 1950 to the present has increased annual average income in the world to $7,000 from $2,000. Contrary to popular legend, poor countries grew at about the same rate as the rich ones. This growth gave us the greatest mass exit from poverty in world history.

The parts of the world that are still poor are suffering from too little capitalism.

The poor are always the largest untapped market. Capitalists have every incentive to serve large new sets of customers. But more deeply, Davos poverty economists see the poor as consumers who just can't afford things. Capitalism, though, is a system of supply-side production. There aren't "producers" on one side of the equation and "consumers" on the other. No, we are all producers. Each producer exchanges goods and services -- the fruit his labor -- with other producers. Capitalism allows the poor to produce, create, build income and wealth, and thus consume. Massively growing consumption and technological sophistication in newly capitalist nations like China helps proves the point.

Entrepreneurial capitalism doesn't need to be reformed. We just need more of it.