Disqus - Latest Comments for Gabriel Griego

Re: Default To Public

Gabriel Griego — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:50:57 -0000

Great examples of the value of public interaction. I have been fascinated to see this happen at our company, Wesabe (which Fred's company has invested in - full disclosure), primarily because our community deals with personal financial issues, which are extremely sensitive. When I first joined a year ago, I like many others, was skeptical that quality financial advice could come from public interaction, and we still get that skepticism from people who haven't visited our forums. Yet, time and again we hear from members what a difference the advice makes for them, and interestingly enough, not only on a functional level. They also talk about the emotional support they get from the feeling that they're "not in it alone". For many people it seems that it still "takes a village" to help them get through it. Tom Sawyer indeed.

Re: Default To Public

Gabriel Griego — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 18:58:23 -0000

Interestingly enough there is quite a bit of public disclosure of personal data going on in the discussion forums. It's not quite "defaulting to public", but in a discussion titled "How much debt do you have and how fast are you paying it off?" hundreds of new members have been posting their personal data on debt, spending and income over the past nine months. It seems to serve as a sort of beginning point or inspiration for people to embark upon their own get out of debt expedition. I'll bet that if we provided members a tool to select "default to public" for certain aspects of their data, many of them would take advantage of it.

Re: Selflessness vs Selfishness

Gabriel Griego — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 02:27:24 -0000

You're right Fred, but it's a higher ideal than most people can handle, and generally speaking, their genetics won't allow them to think any other way. We've risen to the top of the food chain on this planet, in a relatively short amount of time, by being both highly competitive and intelligent. We've evolved into our planet's greatest competitors, and it starts at the individual level. Unfortunately we live in a closed system, and we will eventually have to figure out how to cooperate or we're going to ruin our planet and our species in an even shorter amount of time. There are signs that we are moving towards being more cooperative, and technology is certainly helping in that regard. I just hope we can figure it out qucikly enough to make a difference.

Re: When Greed Is Good

Gabriel Griego — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 10:20:41 -0000

I attended a UC Berkeley symposium with 4 economics and 1 business professor a few months ago, and they put this in historical perspective as well. Their perspective though wasn't the S&L crisis, instead it was the Great Depression, and their collective thinking went something like this. In the 1920's the government's reaction was to clamp down on the markets, putting strict regulations into place, and not stepping in to rescue financial institutions. The professors seemed to agree that didn't work, so their advice was generally what we are seeing now ... government should step in to shore up market confidence and infuse capital where needed, and re-regulate where needed, but not to overdo it.

I am by no means an expert in this, and am not advocating any position, I just wonder which history lesson we should be learning. And I wonder, when we look back on this 80 years from now, we will have gotten it mostly right, or mostly wrong?

Re: When Greed Is Good

Gabriel Griego — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:31:57 -0000

Clearly I did no justice to their talk and probably should have included this link anyway: https://www.law.berkeley.edu/alumni/backtoboalt...

Re: When Greed Is Good

Gabriel Griego — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 11:47:09 -0000

Uh, sorry, the above link is for a similar, though different, talk. Here is the one I attended:
http://www.law.berkeley.edu/files/bclbe/2008100...

I promise to be more careful next time :-)

Re: Free preview of Wesabe advisor Ramit Sethi’s new book!

Gabriel Griego — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 18:34:22 -0000

Hey Laimis,
I totally appreciate your concern, but rest assured we are not passing on anyone's email to Ramit. We are doing all the emailing and management of the email list, same as we do for the Wesabe newsletter. Also, when you sign up for the free chapters you are only signing up for that, not the Wesabe newsletter. If you want to sign up for the Wesabe newsletter you would still need to go to your profile page, which you can do by clicking on your user name in the upper right, under all the pictures. Let me know if you have further questions on it.
Thanks!
Gabriel

Re: Inside Wesabe

Gabriel Griego — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 14:18:28 -0000

David,
Thanks for the nice comments. It was great to meet you and get a chance to show you around Wesabe. As the relative new guy here at Wesabe it's been great to get to know the Wesabe community through the Groups forum. I am constantly amazed with the quality of information being shared. And now that we have had a few Wesabe members stop by, I must say I am even more impressed with the quality of folks who are part of the community.
All the best,
Gabe