Adam Smith wrote in 1776 that no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient to direct the industry of a nation. A century and a half later, other men turned that sentence into a formal argument. Carl Menger argued in 1871 that value sits in the person valuing, not in the object. Ludwig von Mises argued in 1920 that without private ownership of producer goods there are no exchange ratios for them, and so no way to weigh one use of a ton of steel against another.

David Evans is the founder and managing partner of Sentiero Ventures, an early-stage venture fund outside Dallas that invests in business software where artificial intelligence is the core of the product rather than a feature bolted onto it. Before the fund he was an operator. He has been writing software since the early 1990s, built and sold a national digital signage network, and founded EasySeat, an online ticket resale business that reached the Inc. 500 and sold in 2015.