New York City Innovation
When we think of where innovation happens in the USA, there is no question that Silicon Valley comes to mind first. But it looks like Mayor Bloomberg – with the help of Stanford, entrepreneurs, and various VC firms – may make it so New York City comes to mind second, in front of the Kendall Square/Cambridge area and Research Triangle Park in North Carolina.
Mayor Bloomberg came and spoke at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research yesterday. His talk/argument on why NYC is and could be a great hub for innovation included:
- NYC is America’s largest college town, with over 600,000 students. Many universities are under renovation and expansion, including Columbia’s new biomedical research campus.
- New York has significant unused waterfront, warehouses, and old tracks on the west side of Manhattan. With subway construction planned there, it could help attract a wave of innovative companies.
- The NYC Entrepreneurial Fund will pair private VC dollars with public government dollars to help jumpstart innovation – the first public/private pseudo-VC of its kind in any major city.
- Incubator programs, which will help researchers and innovators commercialize their technology, have been created in a range of industries.
The big downside of NYC is the lack of technical talent. A good engineer can live in Silicon Valley and never have to move for the rest of his life irrespective of acquisitions, failings, and buyouts, but only a great engineer can do the same in a place like New York. While there are some great early startups in New York (Hunch, Etsy, Foursquare, etc.), the number isn’t nearly as high as Silicon Valley.
I’m hoping that this changes with the increased focus on entrepreneurship, the possibility of a Startup Visa, and the influx of investment dollars from existing VC firms opening NYC offices (like Accel) and from traditional investment banks trying their hand in later stage venture capital (like Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase). Oh, and Stanford potentially opening a graduate R&D and innovation “lab” for information technology in NYC wouldn’t hurt either.
TEDxTeen, Age-Old Problems, Innovator’s Myopia
This April 2 in New York City, I will be giving a talk at TEDxTeen, with the especially timely theme, “The Age of How.” As the program notes, with every passing day, we become more connected with the rest of the world, access to technology becomes greater, and knowledge transfer becomes easier and easier. Every generation is able to take the learnings and best practices of the previous generation more quickly than ever before, and build upon them.
Yet still, age-old problems – cancer, Alzheimer’s, pollution, unsafe water, poverty, war, religious and ethnic tensions – have remained problems for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. It requires “new age thinking” to effectively tackle them.
I will be talking about escaping the “innovator’s myopia,” highlighting how we should think about problems if we truly want to create disruptive change rather than merely bandage up their symptoms. I am hoping that this will inspire “new age innovation,” led by a generation that, for the first time in history, has the world’s knowledge perennially at its fingertips.
Kavita Ramdas Takeaways: Empowerment, The Circle, Lady Gaga
Kavita Ramdas, the brilliant, sari-laden, well-spoken, and remarkable former CEO of the Global Fund For Women held a fireside chat yesterday in my residence’s lounge. I have been impressed with her ever since her answers at the 2008 Stanford Roundtable on Leadership for the 21st Century. A few notes from her chat yesterday that I found particularly compelling:
- Our relative position, as a country, should not be important. We should not view ourselves as standing at the head of line trying to stave off competition, with poorer countries at the back. We are a circle of countries, and in a circle, it is much harder to let your counterpart starve, suffer unemployment, endure conflict, etc.
- “Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed” – Gandhi. While capitalism has many benefits, there need to be other criteria of what defines a ‘good company’.
- “Power can be given, not taken” – therefore, ’empowering’ someone is a misnomer. We can never really empower someone, but can only set up the environment or can only give them the tools for them to empower themselves.
- As the world is becoming more and more connected through technology, we are becoming more tribal. We need to truly listen to those who are “different” than us (despite the fact that they all listen to Lady Gaga, eat McDonalds, and like the same sports) to understand who they are, what moves them, and what issues they face. We should come in with the mindset of “I don’t know anything about you”, not “here is what we think”.
- The USA probably wouldn’t like it if 10 women from Afghanistan told us how to dress, so it’s tough to justify why they should listen when we do the same.
Mobile Printing
The digital world and the physical world have merged in tremendous ways over the past three years. Computing power has become nearly ubiquitious, mobile phone usage is often more pervasive than access to clean sanitation in the developing world, and technologies like Sixth Sense, GPS, and Red Laser are moving us that much closer to eliminating the line between what’s digital and what’s physical. They are also making us that much more dependent too, with many formerly tangible services (phone books, travel agents, journals, and even financial transactions) being moved completely online.
But one connection that still hasn’t mobilized or changed in a meaningful way is printing from computers or mobile phones. Dominated by large, public, dominant companies of the early 2000s (HP, Compaq, etc.), printing hasn’t changed much. Color printing, laser printing, and wireless printing have all happened within the last 5 years, but the actual hardware has remained the same: large, stagnant, and immobile.
Beign able to take laptops and iPhones on trips and into meetings are revolutionary, but if we need to print something and aren’t in our home or office, they are pretty useless. Often, the only time college students, who study all over campuses, need to come back to their room’s desk is to plug their USB cable into their laptops to print.
We need laptops or iPhones with the ability to print small amounts of paper directly out of the laptop or phone itself. Although this may slightly bulk up the design of laptops and be impossible in products like the Macbook Air, I bet cartridges and other components could be designed cleverly enough to make the change hardly noticable.
Mobile printing could be a small addition that could disrupt the printing industry completely. In fact, it could almost eradicate it like cell phones have done to landlines.
Timing and Valuation
I met with a friend, the CEO of a very cool Internet startup in San Francisco who had just closed his Series B. In the current “bubble” of Internet company valuations, I was surprised at the valuation of his growing, hot, revenue generating company. As someone who generally thinks prices are too high in today’s Internet deals, his wasn’t as high as I thought it should and could have been.
As a comparison, a new competitor in the same space just closed their Series A. This competitor is doing less than 1/10 the revenue of this CEO’s company, doesn’t have as developed of a product, yet raised their Series A at the exact same price as the Series B of the first company.
So what happened? Was the competitor’s price too high? Almost definitely. Why? Apparently, they had one of the best pitches most investors have ever seen and had created an amazing hype around the business, engaging two top VCs in a bidding war. But was the CEO’s company undervalued? Almost definitely too.
It turns out that this CEO had gone out to raise the follow on financing too late. He was presenting to firms only six weeks before his company was going to run out of cash. In fact, the price would have been even lower if another VC had not come in and bid up the price to the current level. Generally, with the exception of the stories of VCs not letting CEOs leave pitches without taking a check, it takes VCs at a minimum at least 3 weeks from beginning to money in the bank. And that’s assuming the company is perfect, the valuation is spot on, and nothing goes wrong.
The lesson: it may seem obvious, but seems to be forgotten when CEOs are heads down trying to run their companies. CEOs generally want to start fundraising as late as possible so they can show as much progress as possible, which should value the company higher. But sometimes they start too late. CEOs of young companies should be sure to start fundraising at least 3 months before money is going to expire, with a target of closing at least 1.5 months before, or else risk getting hit on valuation to save the company.
Lessons from Discussion w/ Stanford President Hennessy
As part of a group, I was invited to a lunch discussion with Stanford President John Hennessy earlier today. He is on the boards of Google, Cisco, Atheros, and the Daniel Pearl Foundation; was the founder of MIPS; and just sat down with President Obama last week.
Key takeaways/viewpoints of his that I found interesting:
- One thing that makes America great is that failure is not fatal. However, it can also be its weakness, as that is fundamentally what caused the financial crisis.
- Politics have moved away from the Jeffersonian ideal of it being a step away from your “normal”career. It has become a full time career for people and that is troubling.
- Authoritarian leadership doesn’t work in any great company.
- One of the most important character traits of his that made him President was that he was always honest, but gentle, especially when delivering bad news.
- Reputation is critical. It is like a flame: easy to build up, but once extinguished, it is tough to light again.
The Return of the Professional Athlete Role Model
It seemed like the past five years, all we heard off the field was sports athletes in jail, getting arrested for alleged rape, dog fighting, taking steriods or drugs, and sending lewd photos.
Michael Vick. Ben Roethlisberger. Brett Favre. Plaxico Burress. Maurice Clarrett. Mark McGuire. Kobe Bryant. And the list goes on and on and on. It seemed life half of the NFL or NBA was on probation, in a lawsuit, or at some point had a run-in with the police. And it felt like half of the MLB was on steroids after the Mitchell Report came out.
Professional athletes, once role models to almost every kid who dreamed of playing under the bright lights of Madison Square Garden or in the snow at Soldier Field, suddenly became the definition of crime, thuggery, and poor values.
But as I’ve started to recently hear more stories like the Eagles flying from LA to NYC to get the back of a bullied kid or Mark Sanchez befriending an 11 year old with rhabdomyosarcoma, I’m starting to believe that the trend may be reversing. The NBA Cares initiative, the MLB teaming up with the Susan G. Komen foundation to swing pink bats for breast cancer, and the NFL’s Tribute to the Troops are examples of the organizations’ focus on restoring league-wide images of peace, goodwill, compassion, and benevolence.
Small actions, but they speak volumes for the return of the professional athlete role model. And while there is a ways to go, I’m optimistic and very happy to see these steps.
No More Cars
A hundred years ago, New York City had a manure problem. The average horse produced between fifteen and thirty-five pounds of manure and it piled the streets. It was a huge health hazard due to the disease, it was a large nuisance, and it was growing. People began thinking of better manure removal and cleanup solutions, even trying to burn it.
Meanwhile, Henry Ford, in southeastern Michigan, produced the Model T. He revolutionized transportation and eliminated the manure problem.
I see the the future of transportation as similar. Part of the current hype is around cleaner, more efficient transportation systems: perhaps we need cleaner vehicles, electric vehicles, and hybrid vehicles. Perhaps the right fuel isn’t our current natural gas, but some sort of cellulosic based ethanol. Perhaps we need narrower cars to fit more on the road, similar to Commuter Cars.
Or, perhaps, our transportation system, once again, has become outdated. As our populations continue to increase, we will continue to see more traffic jams and gridlocks, perhaps even more to the extent of last summer’s 60 mile long gridlock in China.
Dirt roads became paved roads after the Model T. In 50 years, perhaps the paved roads could be upgraded once again: to include powerful magnets. Perhaps the future of transportation is not in cars, but in some sort of magnetic levitation system that can cleanly, safely, and quickly transport a large number of people.
It’s something to think about, especially as large cities known for their traffic problems—Mumbai, Jakarta, Beijing, and Sao Paulo—continue to experience population growth with limited infrastructure change.
Sparing Skype
I’ve finally begun! The main purpose of this blog is to spare my loved ones incessant Skype messages, text messages, phone calls, or emails about various articles or topics I find interesting and instead to post them here. If you derive some value out of this, then even better.
Investing. Venture Capital. Inspirations. Social Change. Development. Sports. Gambling. Music. Hotels. Chipotle. Everything.
Hope you enjoy!
Innovations & Inspirations 