The Secret Formula
There’s a theme that has been brewing ever so deeply within my mind.
I consume what I think is a lot of content. I’ve realized a couple of things. The deeper you go into an area, the more you find out that the seemingly wide expanse of information and possibilities is connected by a few key people. Highly specialized and productive work has a tendency to find its counterparts. The best outcome of me falling into the rabbit hole that can be Twitter, Youtube, and Medium (never Facebook🤔) is finding those people and articles that represent a wholly new perspective from the ones that I’ve been learning through.
Words of the Wise
Thus far there are a few words that I keep coming across, that you might have heard of. If actually examined in detail, they represent more than the surface level buzzwords they’re presented as. These words include AI, Emerging Tech, Mental Models, Personalization, Abundance, Exponential Technologies, Innovation, Invention, Biotech, Uber-ification/the On-demand Economy, the 5th Industrial Revolution, the 3rd wave, the Future, Super Forecasting, Saas, Technium, and many others.
Most of these words are strategies and approaches to dealing with specific problems and reflect our desire to categorize the present. From Stewart Brand I’ve learned that it’s often good to think about the meta of the matter, the machine that builds the machine, or find a simple unifying theory. For me, the most compelling approaches to becoming a participant of the emerging economy have come from Ray Kurzweil, Peter Diamandis, Alan Kay, and Horace Dediu. I believe there is much to be learned from each of these individuals. However, I also believe that the masters can only be trusted for so long and will take a stab at unearthing their biases while encouraging them to take their secret formulas from the bench to the bedside.
The Formulators
Ray Kurzweil
I first ran into his rigorous assessment of exponential technologies through his work in the book The Singularity is Near. His methodical approach to making predictions based on the rate of change of technology leads to predictions like AIs having human level intelligence by 2029. His methods are clear. I have yet to find someone with a similar approach, despite the fact that the book was published in 2005 and he’d been making predictions even before then. As an individual relative to the general population Ray is an outlier. However, I wonder how much an outlier he is compared to other futurists and their predictions. He is currently working as a Googler on Google Brain which is pretty cool.
Peter Diamandis
I stumbled upon Peter Diamandis via a This Week in Startups episode. I’m pretty sure I hesitated listening to the episode a couple times because I thought it might be boring. I remember listening to the episode the first time and thinking the guy was pretty crazy. Later, I stumbled upon Singularity University and realized, “Oh snap!” this is THE SAME GUY. Peter is synonymous with the word Abundance. An abundance mindset emphasizes harnessing the positive direction of reality relative to the perceived ails that our hyper-connected world brings. It is also the title of a book he wrote with Steven Kotler. I’ve heard so many VC’s, entrepreneurs, and even Obama use the term. I would attribute a large majority of its current use to Peter & Steve. I am currently reading his book BOLD. It is a playbook for the modern entrepreneur that describes technologies that you should be aware of and dives into the tactics and strategies for building communities, crowdfunding, and ultimately abundance-conscious businesses. He co-founded Singularity University. Singularity University is a community of people who are harnessing theories and optimism of exponential entrepreneurs, like Peter, to solve difficult important problems. Another concept of his that I like is the idea of super-credibility. When starting a new business, Peter surrounded himself with the knowledge and people that would ensure that his endeavor would be perceived as extremely credible when launching.
Alan Kay
I learned about Alex Kay via Startup Grind this past weekend. The gist of his talk on how to invent the future (below) resonated with my thinking on the subject. He draws from his experience working on the “original inventions” with other researchers in the Xerox Parc of the 1960s . Subsequently, he believes their model based on building whatever is necessary to materialize a vision given funding can still work today. He also emphasizes using today’s most expensive computational powers to simulate the solutions to technology problems in the future. I was genuinely amazed by the quality of the GUIs presented in his talk. I consider him one of the OG’s of silicon valley. One of the ideas he clarifies is object oriented programming. OOP today is very different from its original creation. OOP within their GUIs meant that all functionality of UI was customizable, extensible, and instantiable. You have to see it and compare it to the watered down UI’s of today. Maybe less is more, but it is also less interesting.
Horace Dediu
After listening to an a16z podcast, I was autoplay-forwarded to an Analyze Asia podcast where Horace was talking about startup strategy. A few videos and articles later I realized that he worked with the Clay Christensen Institute. Horace’s insights into startup deals with the evaluation of technology development over time. I am reminded about Bill Gross of Idealab’s statement that timing is the most common reason for startup failure. Horace looks at the various technology S-curves and correlates each with market entrants’ domination of the technology. He comes to a concluding question, asking, how does the behavior of a firm during the evolution of a market affect their ability to dominate it? The prototypical case for good behavior is Apple. Horace is well known for his ability to harness previous data to project their sales figures. He claims that this information is more predictable because it is based on the Innovator’s Dilemma / Solution and the linear portion of a technology’s S-curve. The more difficult parts of the S-curve to predict are the beginning and end.
Simplicity Transcends
The Secret Formula is super simple.
Elementary schools around the country are now teaching the 7 habits originating from Stephen Covey’s book, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”. You may have heard of them. Alas, I never got this structured approach to life in grade school, but the secret formula harnessed by Ray, Peter, Alan, and Horace is summarised in the 2nd habit.
- Be Proactive — You’re in Charge
- Begin with the End in Mind — Have a Plan
- Put First Things First — Work First, Then Play
- Think Win-Win — Everyone Can Win
- Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood — Listen Before You Talk
- Synergize — Together is Better
- Sharpen the Saw — Balance Feels Best
The statement “Begin with the end in mind” has many flavors to it. You may have also heard of “Reverse engineer your end state and work backwards”, or “Reason from first principles”. Whatever your chosen flavor, the devil is in the details.
The details are what differentiate the formulators. Ray’s approach focuses on mapping the exponential nature of any technology that can be sufficiently digitized. Peter’s focus is less on predicting tech. It is more along the lines of understanding tech’s development and building communities to develop it over time. Alan is most explicit in his approach, suggesting simulating the problem solution space on future-current compute power. Horace’s model is a work in progress for predicting the nonlinear portions of the technology adoption S-curve.
Uncovering Theoretical Weaknesses
After watching many of their video interviews and talks, I found a few flaws in their armor. Some may view them as features.
- Repetitive — Most of their videos don’t change in substance over time. This is good because that means their theories are robust enough to withstand hype cycles. This also means that the presentation content, although tailored to the event, may not incorporate the most up to date information. This is an interesting challenge all presenters have to face which requires repeated reinvention.
- Access — Luck occurs when preparation meets opportunity. You cannot take away the hard work that these individuals put into refining their theories, but one always has to consider the awesome opportunities they were provided. The outliers phenomenon is real.
- Focus — Each individual works to realize multiple aspects of their theory-predicted future. You’ll find that they are an extremely invested expert in one area, though. They do attempt to systematically spread and challenge their thinking through their work with entities like Singularity University, the Viewpoints Research Institute, and the Christensen Institute. One has to question if they’re pushing for greater scale or are content with their deep work + “theoretical entity” setups.
Critiquing the successful requires judging what they value based on incomplete information about their actions. It’s unfair because of their achievements, but can be worth it if critiques encourage greater impact.
Open Secrets Enable
My current favorite example of open progress is the Tensor Flow machine learning framework by Google. By releasing a user-friendly version of their internal tools the improvement of ML algorithms is accelerated by the broader community. Likewise, if better-packaged, each of these individual’s frameworks for understanding the world would improve appreciably. Beyond the improvement of the frameworks, framework hybridization, and feedback, is the improvement on society when their frameworks are used to solve newer exciting problems.
What does that look like? You tell me, in the comments. Stay posted for further thoughts.
