Matthew Gagnon ’09G

In 1998, Eric Janszen ’04 created iTulip.com, a parody website that compared the feverish rise in dot-com stocks to the Dutch flower mania of the 1630s, a time when prices for tulip bulbs reached the equivalent of more than $1 million—then plunged. Today, Janszen writes on issues ranging from global economics to financial markets, and still cleverly debunks market myths.

The United States is still the leader in the invention of new technologies that increase productivity and therefore, generate highly profitable companies. One of the guiding principles to think about with investing is that you are investing in people.

Young investors should do their homework: try to understand what the company does, who their management is, what their market is. Look at companies that are positioned to take advantage of some significant new trend in technology and the economy. It’s a good intellectual exercise.

Spread your money across a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, and commodities, with a more heavily risk-weighted portfolio such as stock index funds that are in technology; that is, stocks listed in the NASDAQ. The NASDAQ has returned, with a lot of volatility, about 12 percent compound growth since its inception in the ’70s. It has a lot of volatility to ride out, but that 12 percent on average is what it has returned over long periods of time.

Start investing early—the younger, the better. I know this is harder for young people today because students tend to graduate from college with a lot of debt. It’s much harder now for students to save money and invest.

Expect big growth in biotechnology. There’ll be massive, mind-blowing developments in our lifetime that will change the ways we think about everything—in a similar way to how the Internet changed the way we think about how we do business—but on a larger scale.

Crisis spurs innovation and invention. Clearly, we’re eventually going to reach a point where there’s far too much demand for non-renewable energy resources. It will drive up prices and create good opportunities for alternatives to fossil fuels and non-renewable energy. We’re already seeing a great deal of investment in this area that’s causing a major shift in the venture capital industry away from the more mature technology areas, and into alternative energy over the last few years, but it’s still in the early stages. There’s been 100 percent growth in venture capital investment in alternative energy over the last couple of years.

There are a lot of things the United States could do. For example, most other countries greatly raise taxes on imported energy and make it very expensive.

One idea I like is what’s called a floating tariff where we would effectively fix the price of an imported barrel of oil at $200 dollars. That pricing trickles through the economy, and the economy adjusts to it. It’s not the end of the world; it simply means we drive smaller cars and make transportation more efficient. If you fix the price, it creates incentives for inventions of ways to solve the problem. You want to have some degree of stability in pricing in order to allow investment in alternative energy technologies to create returns for investors. Then you’ll start to see some significant improvement in development of alternative energy.

Technology veteran Eric Janszen ‘04 is founder and president of iTulip, Inc. (www.itulip.com), a heavily trafficked site devoted to the “contrary market view.” He formerly served as managing director of the venture firm Osborn Capital, as CEO of AutoCell, Inc., Bluesocket, Inc., and as entrepreneur-in-residence for Trident Capital. Janszen’s gifts to UMass Amherst help support the campus’s Tech Innovation Challenge, an annual business and engineering competition. Eric serves on the board of the Massachusetts Network Communications Council and has been the subject of numerous articles and profiles in the business and technology media, notably the Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, USA Today, Boston Globe and the BBC.