As we kick off our 5th annual Blockchain Summit on Necker Island tonight, I’m reminded of what a special place this is. Necker island is incredibly well designed for active gatherings that induce collaborative social flow. Gathering great minds together in groups and inducing collaboration by combining deep discussion with active adventures is a fantastic formula both on and off the water. Amazing ideas born here have been been turned into industry leading organizations and companies. Some incredibly innovative ideas have been turned into products here, like this bitcoin mining lightbulb conceived in a lightbulb moment on Necker.
On top of that, you may be surprised that this idyllic setting has been a test bed for innovative tech entrepreneurs to gather, share ideas, and test their mettle, and in this specific case, run a ‘technology stress test’.
Necker Island is a paradise of course — but any island has to step up its game to enable world class communications infrastructure, given that islands are not typically directly connected to the world’s fiber optic telco cable systems.
Data communications to and from Necker Island to the various continents on the planet sometimes has to traverse several carriers and extra router hops as well as wireless microwave radio links that introduce additional delay, to get back and forth to their destinations.
Given that challenging set up, Zoom Video — then just a year old startup that had recently launched a first iteration of it’s product — decided to test its technology for cloud based conferencing in that hard core environment. Zoom became the backbone that day to connect entrepreneurs from around the world into a session that would include multiple people from 5 continents on live video, streaming themselves and their presentations and in one case an HD video, to multiple two way video and audio endpoints.
During the presentations, we measured latency and packet loss from each endpoint and Zoom used those learnings to understand how to tune the mix of audio, video and presentation data when streaming conferences across multiple points with differing latency.
For frame of reference — a typical connection, point to point across anywhere in the USA is likely to not exceed 20 milliseconds. A super long distance connection across the Pacific ocean from the USA to Australia might be 100 milliseconds. As we set up for the test, knowing that At times we’d have entrepreneurs on line from Tokyo, San Francisco, Sydney, London, New York, Mountain View and San Jose. it was daunting to not know exactly what the paths would be for the digital bits to get back and forth across the various points. But we decided to just give it our best just to see what would happen and learn how the technology would handle it. It was not easy! Measured latency was at times over 200 milliseconds — more than 10x the typical US to US delay and more than 2x the long distance delay from the US to Australia! What a minefield for a video test!
That said, it’s pretty hard to be emotionally stressed on Necker — so it was a GREAT place to try this out with a fun and forgiving audience of resilient, hard driving but forgiving entrepreneurs. While there were certainly glitches that presented great learning opportunities — all in all it was a wonderful place to drive this ‘low emotional stress, but high technology stress’ test.
It’s been great to look back at this photo from 6 years ago — of entrepreneurs presenting their startups, literally each just months old, to the group and our special guest, Sir Richard Branson, both live and on Zoom. Some of activity that day was captured in this article posted by Kym McNicholas, almost 6 years ago to the day (June 28, 2013) on PandoDaily. Here’s whats happened to some of companies since that time..
Alexandra Chong, presented her company LuluVise, which went on to break into the Top 10 in the iPhone App Store in several countries. Lulu was acquired by Badoo, and Alexandra has gone on to become the founding CEO of Jacana Life, the leading medical cannabis company in Jamaica 🇯🇲.
Lars Rasmussen, the inventor of Google maps, introduced Canva from Sydney, which was then just a year old . Canva is now is a $100M recurring revenue company leading the world of Cloud based design — and is a profitable company sporting a $2.5 Billion valuation. Lars has gone on to start Weav Music which is changing the way music can be enjoyed in real time.
Othman Laraki, then VP Growth at Twitter introduced an 18 month old “Big Data” company from Tokyo and Mountain View California named Treasure Data. Treasure Data has grown substantially to be a leader in it’s category — to the point it handles in excess of 7 trillion rows of data per month for customers (I stopped counting a year ago so it could be multiples of that now; I had the honor of cofounding the company as Chairman, with Hiro Yoshikawa and Kazuki Ohta). Last fall we were acquired by Softbank’s ARM microprocessor company with an ambitious target set by Masa Son , to be the “iCloud for One Trillion microprocessors by 2030”. Othman Laraki has gone on to cofound and is CEO of Color Genomics, the leader in consumer usable DNA based diagnostics.
And of course — the startup that provided the communications infrastructure for all of us — bringing people together from around the world, with Necker Island as center of gravity for the day… it’s become a hit.
Zoom has gone on to become a company generating over $300M per year in revenue, and is the only profitable tech unicorn 🦄 to list its shares this year. As such Zoom now sports a valuation post its IPO in excess of $25 Billion.
Of course, tech valuations are cyclical and IPO’s can be the tip of the whip. But it’s been amazing to see how our ‘Necker Babies’ from 2013 have grown, and I’m astounded that they now have value together of over $30 Billion! As we kick off this 2019 Necker Blockchain Summit — I’m excited to see what springs forth 6 years from now!
