Pi People — mobile changing lives, fox or hedgehog and our banks future disappearing before our eyes
The second Pi People event at our Shoreditch office was another corker of a night. Pi People is our regular series for people in the business of designing and growing digital products, services and businesses, and this time around we were joined by the awesome speakers Daniel Fogg COO of BuffaloGrid, Kim Szelong Creative Technologist here at Adaptive Lab and Stevie Graham Founder of Teller, along with a packed crowd of industry folk from places like ?What If! Innovation, Ocado, Sapient and Hyper Island.
In one evening we discussed mobile “changing the fabric of society” with Daniel, the ultimate question of “should I be a fox or a hedgehog?” with Kim, and we all had our minds blown (and saw our bank’s future breaking down before our eyes) through live coding with Stevie.
We’re holding our next Pi People event on Thursday 21st January with Jane Murison, Head of UX and Design at BBC Future Media, Devin Hunt Co-Founder of Lyst and Partner at Founder Centric, and Jason Mesut, experienced Designer and Founder of Resonant Design. Register your interest to attend at events+pi@adaptivelab.com and if you need more convincing then check out the videos and write up of our last event below.
Daniel Fogg
COO of BuffaloGrid
The Unknown Unknown
Daniel’s talk centred around military theory and hardware startups, and to begin, Daniel gave us a stripped back insight into BuffaloGrid. They provide mobile power to the off-grid world (1.3 billion people, of which 750,000 own a mobile phone) in India. This single piece of data alone leads us to ask the questions of where are they getting the power to charge these mobile phones and where does the coverage come from. Most of the cell towers in the developing world exist off-grid, they’re solar and diesel generator powered. BuffaloGrid act like a petrol station by distributing hubs. These hubs are solar powered, completely cashless and GPS connected. The majority of their customers are under 25, with the same motivations as we do; they want to buy a nice phone, watch TV, wear some cool clothes — they’re young, poor and connected. India was an obvious first country to land in with having an estimated 290 million people living off-grid and around 30% of the global market for off-grid mobile usage.
The question at the tip of all of our tongues by this point was “how did you get here?”
Daniel’s use of military theory today stems from his early career where he worked remotely from London serving clients in Afghanistan for a company called Track 24, a battlefield, crisis and risk management company, for 2 years — “real world Command and Conquer”. He then spent time in Iraq with Ardan, the security and intelligence firm, in Syria on holiday and living in the UAE and Pakistan working for Isobar, the digital marketing agency, a move which made sense to him at the time but no-one else. This was followed with a return to London and time spent working with James Haycock, Adaptive Lab’s Founder and MD.
“Throughout the last 10 years, there has been a weird combination of working in weird markets with really complicated technology.”
Daniel then moved onto describing some of the stuff he is using to inform how they work. Military strategy is centred around logistics; “amateurs talk about tactics, experts study logistics”. If you have a thing, group or project in the middle of nowhere then you’re dealing with physics; you can’t just teleport something in there, you must move a thing or person from one place to another. This logistics chain becomes crucial. “No line of code can transfer an engineer here [the middle of nowhere] in an hour”.
When you’re dealing with these hugely complicated systems, all you can do is nudge things along and cross your fingers, hope it will work and hope that it has output. This is a lot of what Daniel and BuffaloGrid are doing with their team of deep specialists and broad generalists. They have product designers, country managers, electrical engineers, all with varying backgrounds and areas of expertise. This venture has been an amazing opportunity for Daniel to confirm what he was taught years ago when working with ex-special forces people, that is “if you’ve got a small group of good people you can achieve anything”, and this really applies to startups.
“When you’re doing something really weird, there is no template, you’re doing something new everyday and you’re learning on a daily basis about the strange stuff you’re doing and in many ways you are creating a new reality.”
Making a phone call can simply save lives. A connection can help to overcome the barriers of having no emergency services in your immediate village. It can change the fabric of society. “Most of the world does not look like San Francisco. If you can imagine a city from Heathrow to the Olympic Park in Stratford and draw a circle around, there are around 10 million people within this in London. In this same area in Mumbai lives 22 million people.” If we look at people per square kilometer, this means there are 10 times more people living in the same space in Mumbai. This brings countless technological and design challenges which then exist on a daily basis, and a need for products and services to manage the behaviours of these powerful money spending consumers. BuffaloGrid’s attitude “charities aren’t going to solve these problems, build a company to do it instead”.
Kim Szelong
Creative Technologist at Adaptive Lab
“Should I be a fox or a hedgehog?”
Kim’s talk resonated with many of us that evening. She discussed a question which has been debated time and time again and one which has personally led her astray. “Should I be a fox or a hedgehog?”, a generalist or a specialist. The idea stems from a paper written 50 years ago by Isaiah Berlin which describes two types of people that exist, the hedgehog and his single viewpoint of the world, for which he solves problems for, and the fox who has a variety of experiences that he draws upon to solve it’s problems, who can’t boil everything down to one single idea.
A fox can market himself to a much broader audience, he has many skills and specialties, and broader knowledge, so is always deemed employable, especially within the multi-disciplinary teams which exist today and are so desired. The hedgehog is a master in their speciality, they know their work inside out, have a really streamline process, and once they find their market fit, find it really easy to sell themselves in.
“A philosopher is a person who knows less and less about more and more, until he knows nothing about everything. A scientist is a person who knows more and more about less and less, until he knows everything about nothing” — John Ziman
Kim shared with us her experience of having 16 jobs in the last 10 years, of which many did overlap — her average time spent in each wasn’t 8 months! She has also spent a lot of time pursuing educational passions. In her mind, she’s no doubt a fox.
Being a fox has resulted in a lot of criticism for Kim. From school, where the educational system here in the UK favours a generalist path, through to her early career. But at the end of the day she “just likes to learn new things”.
Enter oddly shaped people. There are I people, T people, Pi People and then there’s the Cone people. Kim now believes that no-one can be programmed one way or another. “These terms may come across as a little gimmicky at first, but if we really look at them and think about them, all it’s really saying is we shouldn’t be one way or another.”
“We draw from people around us and it’s draws us out wide, and the human need to be good at something pulls us up tall.”
Kim eventually found her inner hedgehog, programming. It challenges her and feeds her desire to keep learning every day. So now, she’s not just a generalist, she’s a generalist with a speciality, a speciality that she loves. “I’m even looking to specialise within my speciality!”
Her role here at at Adaptive Lab feeds her inner generalist. Her role is ever evolving. She’s grateful of her huge list of hobbies and interests, of the criticism she endured. “The realisation that we shouldn’t feel the need to be one way or the other brings us a lot of freedom into the way we work. It brings along a whole bunch of new expectations from us.” It leads the ‘foxy’ hedgehogs out there to reach a place that feels comfortable and then in the next moment be asked, and often want, to step outside of this comfort zone. So why does Kim keep doing it? These different interests still interest her and following these passions is always going to keep her interested and going, and on top of her game. And instead of fighting it, she has sought out somewhere that allows her to grow in both directions.
For more information on Pi People or to register your interest please email us at events+pi@adaptivelab.com.
