Top 20 things I learned at Davos 2015

Davos 2015 is over, and I’m on the long plane ride home now from Zurich to Los Angeles. It was a totally amazing week for me, meeting so many new people and learning so many new things and – most of all – getting inspired in so many new areas.

I shared the top 10 things I learned in the first 2 days earlier, and those are available here:

Here are the top 10 things I learned in the last two days:

1. I learned that LED lighting has been making huge and continuous strides in cost reduction, as well as increasing the amount of lumens per lamp, so that over time, LEDs could cut our energy use by 80%. I always knew that was one day possible, but I hadn’t realized how close we were getting.

2. I learned that there are 10 million people who own Bitcoin, but that most of them are just holding onto it. 9 million of those 10 have never done a transaction. All the transactions are being done by 1 million people. But I also learned that Gold is even more biased. There’s $10 Trillion worth of gold in the world, but almost none of it is ever used for transactions. Also on Gold, I learned that ½ of all the world’s Gold is in just one country – India.

In the past year, the value of Bitcoin has gone from about $1200 to about $250 today, but over the past 5 years, it was still the best performing currency in the world.

3. I learned in a session on global planetary threats that infectious diseases have caused more deaths than all wars AND natural disasters combined. I also learned that if we had a pandemic today like we had in 1918, with today’s population, 1/2 billion people would die.

4. I learned from Physicist Larry Krauss from Arizona State University that if we could make a computer that equaled the full power of a brain today, it would take 10 Terawatts to power it. ALL the power used by the entire planet today is about 15 Terawatts. And our brain – an ordinary human brain – consumes only about 10 watts!

5. I learned from Ian Bremmer that the youth (15-24 year old) unemployment rates in Europe are staggering.

Germany 8%

UK 20%

France 24%

Italy 40%

Spain 57%

Greece 58%

6. I learned that Emma Watson (from Harry Potter) is using her celebrity power to really drive a great cause forward.

It’s called HeForShe and it got a great response. The goal is to drive female empowerment and more gender equality. You can read more about it here:

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/jan/23/emma-watson-at-davos-women-need-to-be-equal-participants?CMP=share_btn_tw

7. I learned that of all of the Fortune 500 companies, fully 40% of them were founded either by immigrants or children of immigrants. That’s a pretty amazing percentage.

8. I learned that only 30 cities have received fully HALF of the $5 trillion directly invested in commercial real estate over last decade.

9. I learned that all the people on earth today are about 7% of ALL the people who have EVER been alive in all of history.

10. I learned how serious the security / hacking issue has become. John Chambers from Cisco declared that EVERY company and EVERY country will be hacked – over time. Here’s what he said below:

He then said, “I believe problems with security and hacking will go up exponentially this year. If you think last year was bad, this year will be worse.”

I hope some of these insights are illuminating to you, and it will be interesting to see which of these trends continue, and if some of these that are predictions play out. I would love your feedback and thoughts, and feel free to share this so we can have the widest discussion. Thanks! Sincerely, Bill

This article is published in collaboration with LinkedIn. Publication does not imply endorsement of views by the World Economic Forum.

To keep up with Forum:Agenda subscribe to our weekly newsletter.

Author: Bill Gross is the founder and CEO of Idealab.

Image: Aerial views of the mountain resort of Davos, Switzerland where the World Economic Forum holds its Annual Meeting.