All posts tagged: optimist

QPR’s Martí Cifuentes: ‘I’m an optimist. I don’t have any magical recipe’ | QPR

QPR’s Martí Cifuentes: ‘I’m an optimist. I don’t have any magical recipe’ | QPR

Published by skeptic

“In life and football there’s always some kind of risk, isn’t there?” Martí Cifuentes says. The Queens Park Rangers manager is thinking about his unusual journey and remembers the difficult early days at AAB Aalborg. “When I went to Denmark it took six official games for me to win,” the 41-year-old continues. “The headline in the main sport newspaper was ‘The worst coach ever in the history of the Superliga’.” The barbs washed over Cifuentes. “I am very used to being inexperienced, too young, whatever,” the Catalan says. “I’m just a very optimistic person. I don’t have any magical recipe.” What Cifuentes has is an adventurousness that has carried him through a managerial career that began when his mentor, Manolo Fernández, asked him to coach the under-19s of Sabadell, historically the third best side in Catalunya. “What is this?” Cifuentes thought. He was 21, playing at a low level, and assumed he would not go into coaching for another 15 years, but Fernández wanted to fast-track him. “He saw I could understand the game when …

Alexis Ohanian says he’s a ‘techno optimist,’ despite social media’s impact on society

Alexis Ohanian says he’s a ‘techno optimist,’ despite social media’s impact on society

Published by skeptic

Does Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian have regrets over his creation? The entrepreneur and founder of venture fund Seven Seven Six, speaking at an event at the University of Virginia, espoused a fairly negative view of the current social media landscape and the creator economy — an environment where he says, everyone has “been so trained and conditioned now to just get the likes and retweets, get the upvotes…I wish I could be more optimistic about it, but we’re seeing it play out before our eyes.” Still, he ultimately described himself as a “techno-optimist” — an apparent nod to a16z General Partner Marc Andreessen’s recent diatribe where he claimed technology could solve all our problems. “Guilty as charged,” Ohanian said, during his interview with Kara Swisher. “I do think that pendulum will swing back. I think even swifter than we realize.” The war in the Middle East may even be the tipping point, he theorized, as it’s now “abundantly clear” that we need something better to figure out the world than the platforms we have today. …