This is an awesome 1 hour video that I watched over and over just to make sure I absorbed all the points from the awesome serial entrepreneur himself—Marc Andreessen. If I had more time, I’d transcribe it.
Posts Tagged ‘stanford’
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders: Marc Andreessen
Sunday, May 16th, 2010Roll with uncertainty
Saturday, November 14th, 2009A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),
“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.
And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.
Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.
In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,
Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?
A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.
Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World
“What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20″
Saturday, April 4th, 2009I have been a longtime fan of Tina Seelig, and her talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I was 20″ that she originally gave to some West Point grads. The podcast is here, a high-level summary here. I’m excited to find out today that she’s now making that into a book! (preview available) SIGN ME UP!  I’m a big fan of that book – and _highly_ recommend it to anyone 
Go Tina!
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Tom Siebel on problems to focus on – if you’d like to change the world
Monday, February 23rd, 2009Tom Siebel (from fame of Siebel Systems) identifies the next opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Using surfing as an anology, these are the waves in the horizon—you have to paddle hard and fast now before it reaches you. The IT wave has already floated us far. And although IT will still play a large role in solving these problems, these are the broader world problems that need to be solved (technology is just the conduit for the solution).
The big problems are .. *drumroll*:
- food
- water
- healthcare
- energy
Counterintuitively for most technologists, these are all “lower in the stack” type problems. Why? Because more people are living longer/child mortality rates improving (thanks to advances in health care), hence an aging population – with inadequate health care infrastructure, especially in China.
Here are some notes from the Mark Logic CEO’s blog (that I mostly cut-and-pasted here, thanks to Dave Kellogg for actually transcribing):
- He (Tom Siebel) did a long riff contrasting the period from 1980 to 2000 with what he anticipates in the period from 2010 to 2030.
- The 1980 to 2000 period was a paradise of government policies, efficient capital markets, and a free flow of capital to information technology that ultimately created a $1T information technology industry.
- IT growth was 17% CAGR from 1980 to 2000. From 2000 it grows, he says, with GDP at a rate more like 3%. “The party here is over.”
- “It’s done. Tell me the next step that’s a replacement technology. Right now it’s all bells and whistles.”
- The big picture from 2010 to 2030, he says, is (1) increased government regulation, (2) exponential population growth, (3) aging population, (4) increased demand for healthcare (of which 85% of an individual’s lifetime consumption is spent in the last year of life), and (5) energy scarcity.
- It took from 8000 BC to 1750 AD to grow the world population to 1B. In 2008, it’s 6.5B. In 2028 it will be 9B. (Says the guy next to me: “and they’re all going to need to buy things — how is this bad?”)
- These trends make for the following opportunities: (1) food, (2) water, (3) energy, and (4) healthcare.
- Per-capita energy population is increasing exponential. So if you combine exponential population growth with exponential per-capita energy consumption, you end up with energy demand that is — pardon the expression — exponential squared.
- He then discussed the concept of peak oil, an idea that I’d heard of but that I hadn’t known was postulated in the 1950s by an engineer at Shell. By 2020/2030, says Siebel, this gets to be a real problem.
- He then said we have two choices: drill / drill / drill or invent / invent / invent.
- He then discussed two initiatives he’s working on: (1) an Energy-Free Home Challenge that is soon to be formally announced, and (2) a new company called C3 that he was involved in founding.
- The Energy-Free Home Challenge is a contest with $20M in prizes paid for by the Siebel Foundation (2007 annual report here). The goal is to find a way to build houses that consume net zero energy at the end of a year, built with no more expense than traditional construction methods.
- C3 (which I think is related to the acronym carbon-conscious consumer) is a new company, run by Siebel veteran Pat House, that will make enterprise software to help companies manage their carbon footprint. The company started by calling together a panel of 29 experts during the summer of 2008. “Deliberations were concluded 12/08.” C3 was founded last month, in 1/09. Operations will begin in 2/09. The product spec will be completed by summer 09. And — if I heard correctly — they will have demonstrable product one quarter later in fall 09. (And one heck of a development team if they can actually build a product in a quarter.)
- C3′s goal is to help companies “monitor, mitigate, and monetize” their carbon footprint. I tried for about 15 minutes to find a website for the firm and failed. If you find one, let me know via a comment and I’ll link it here.
- Almost to the point of comedy Siebel strained to not position C3 as an information technology company, despite the fact that it will sell enterprise software. “C3 is an energy tech company.” “IT is incidental to C3.” “C3 will not have an IT rate of growth.” (How quickly they turn.)
Check the entire podcast for the entire story with stats.
Tom Siebel – Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace
Mobile data adoption on the rise
Saturday, July 26th, 2008Some mobile data trends (numbers + commentary):
- Total mobile data revenues for 2007: US$157 Bil
- Total mobile data revenues for Q1 2008: >US$49 Bil, 42.7% y-o-y increase. Of this, non-SMS data made up approx US$17.46 Bil (35.6% of total data revenues)
- Mobile data revenues is now almost 20% of mobile operator total revenues
- 40% of world’s data revenues come from APAC (>US$20 Bil in Q1 2008)
- Fastest growing is EMEA, which despite only representing 2% of world’s data revenues, is growing at 91.7% y-o-y to US$927 Mil. This acceleration is aided by the 321% y-o-y increase of HSPA subscribers
- Operator that generated highest non-voice revenues this quarter is Japan’s NTT DoCoMo (US$3.6 Bil), overtaking China Mobile (US$3.5 Bil)
- As a % of overall revenue, Filipino mobile operator Smart Communication is the world’s market leader, and the only carrier to depend on non-voice revenues for > 50% of its income *I wonder how much of this is attributed to microfinance and mobile payments i n that region, hmm ..
And as always, I’d like to extrapolate some meaning from raw numbers, so let’s go.
Obviously, the trend clearly indicates that your cell phone is becoming more of a general purpose computing device (like your desktop PC, as opposed to a single-purpose device that makes phone calls only), with more rich features that PCs don’t have (e.g. GPS and accelerometer), and it’s all hooked up to the wonderful internet.
Action items: First, we have to get out of the habit of thinking of cell phones as desktops, because the use-cases are completely different; treating them as such is the clearest way to die. Second, with mobile devices becoming more powerful (computationally, Moore’s law), having more storage (cost of storage trending down, Moore’s law), internet connectivity improving (coverage, speed, cost, again, Moore’s law), and throw on top of that added new hardware features (GPS, accelerometer, etc) .. this sounds to me like having richer and more powerful tools in a technologist’s problem solving warchest — so bring on the problems, bring on the opportunity.
I chuckle as I write this because this reminds me of what Stanford University’s president John Hennessy once mentioned in an interview, about his prediction of what would happen in mobile technology down the road:
- Information at any where, at any time, on any device
- A user experience that works well, independent of what that information is: Be it a Google map, stock listing, web site, email, etc. Making that convenient and natural, and seamless
- Imagine walking in a brick and mortar store and wanting to buy a product. I want to look up my phone and do a price comparison on the product and know what people are saying about it. I want to do that in 5 seconds. Today, I have to open a browser, visit a review site, search, etc. (too much work)
The iPhone is clearly one of the pioneers in making that happen, especially with the iPhone app store. I have previously commented on why I think the iPhone app store is very much Apple’s competitive advantage, and as much as I root for Google’s Android, it remains to be seen how the Android incarnations would address the iPhone platform threat.
With mobile carriers having trouble increasing revenues from voice, you betcha they are thinking of every single way to make money from mobile data. I have also previously written a rant about iPhone/AT&T’s data pricing strategy (there’s nothing wrong with the strategy per se, I’m just a price-sensitive geek at heart).
Now’s a good time to be a mobile app developer .. there’s money already being pledged for the BlackBerry platform (US$150 Mil) , Google Android platform (US$10 Mil), and the iPhone platform (US$100 Mil). I can see mobile carriers snapping up these mobile app startups to further bolster their mobile data revenues. Technology IPOs are almost non-existent today, much to a Silicon Valley VC’s annoyance, so exits via acquisition to a mobile operator would make sense for mobile app startups.
I’m passionate about innovation and problem solving with tech, and I can’t wait to see more new applications in mobile given these trends. The question I try to ask myself given these stats above are, “what else is possible today that wasn’t yesterday?” Think it about it.
If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
–Søren Kierkegaard
To go off on a slight tangent, it’s interesting to note that a Filipino mobile operator is the world’s market leader in depending on non-voice revenues. I wonder how much mobile payments contribute to their revenue stream, and how much of that is related to microfinance. If anything, I think that could be a classic BoP example because it would illustrate another example to bust the myth that corporations cannot make a significant and sustainable profit in selling to the poor.
If I was all the other mobile carriers looking to make more $ from mobile data, I’d be watching this Filipino carrier, Smart Communications closely to glean some lessons.
Click here for the full story of the stats above from cellular-news, and regional breakdown of revenues.
And I’ll end this blog post with vivid taste of possibilities for mobile — a very cool Android project in the making called Enkin. Do check it out!
