Singularity University is a star gazing experience. And you’ll need time to connect the dots.

After 10 weeks in Mountain View, I’m back to France and HEC Paris (where I am the lucky entrepreneur in residence).

A few months ago, I won a full fellowship to live quite a unique experience along with 79 students : attend Singularity University for the summer program (the « GSP »). Now it’s over and as my friends and family, you might ask… «so, how was it » ? So many ideas. So many people. So little time to share during the program. Here’s why, along with other fellow alumni, we’ll be sharing one idea per week for the next ten weeks (here’s the second).

Singularity University is neither about Singularity nor a University, it’s more like a star camp.

Singularity won’t give you a valid degree and is not focused at all on the singularity. It’s more a community of optimistic entrepreneurs and doers willing to use tech to solve huge scale issues.

If you look at it a bit differently, think about star gazing. Someone points a star and tells you the story around it: it is indeed far but the more you look at it, the more you understand you had never really seen it nor never imagined so much could be around it. The more you focus on it, the more you get curious and you want explore it. The more you want to explore it, the more you imagine what behind it. Nanotech, robotics, AI, optogenetics… every single topic is a new star you discover through entrepreneurs (often in your own class) and speakers at ‘SU’.

You are humbled every single day by what you discover, and for stars, what better place than NASA could this take place ? NASA Ames, this amazing ghost city we called home for a couple of months, is now shelter to many startups (… and a revamped McDonald’s turned into a Moon lab). Wait, space startups?! What the heck you’d think. Yet many things happen in space and many of them have a direct impact on Earth. Here’s 4 of the impacting facts that I discovered (I owe a lot to fellow Brian Lim for this):

• International space zone starts where ‘sovereign airspace’ stops: precisely at a 100 kilometers above sea level… which means you can take any kind of picture from there (and explains why ‘startup’ Planet Labs raised so much money so quickly).
• If satellites stopped, you’d no be able to take money out of ATMs (as they all depend on GPS). Planes would also probably fall, the internet stop and the world’s communication freeze.
• Today, it costs $15,000 to send a kilo in space but a big chunk of this cost is due to the non-reusability of launch structures (where SpaceX is massively changing the game).
• Space is already saturated in terms of radio communication so we use laser broadband as it’s limitless and way more powerful.

Learning about space is a step-after-step process that will lead you to many “aha!” moments. Just as the Little Prince left its B612 asteroid to explore all the surrounding planets around him, you’ll have to pick a direction and a purpose. Interestingly, it could lead also you to better understanding his final destination : the Earth.