Category: Uncategorized

• Global war for good jobs
• if cities/countries fail at creating good jobs, their society will fall apart

Successful cities

• examples
  • San Francisco
  • Singapore
  • Seoul
•  Effects
  • brain gain
  • talent gain
  • job creation

• Country structure
  • Rich tax base depends primarily on companies that create good jobs
  • Tax funds social security
• China GDP to surpass US in 30 years
  • US GDP: USD15 trillion
  • China GDP:  USD 5 trillion

Source of jobs

• Countries
  • Intent – based in behavioral economics as opposed to classical economics
    • stimulated by local leaders
  • behavior economics – science of choice
    • 70% emotional
    • 30% rational
  • classical economics – supply, demand and fiscal policies
  • America’s greatest advantage – Freedom
• Cities – most important solutions are local
  • Big cities
  • great universities
  • powerful local leaders – 10,000 people
    • who to talk to
    • levers to pull
    • faster and better than city council
    • super mentors

Talent types

• Entrepreneurship – optimism and determination
  • 50% traced back to universities
    • smart business models
    • inventions
  • smart business models are more important than inventions/innovation
  • creates new customers
• Managers
  • get employees to work on their strengths
  • a great boss
  • bad manager never gets better
  • listening to customers better and delivering what they want better
    • relationships trumps price

Future generation

• kids drop out when they lose hope to graduate

Further readings

• The United States of Europe

General trends

• knowledge sector will continue to grow
  • shortage of trained managers to direct computers (Peter Drucker)
  • large concentration of workers in low-level dead-end jobs (Jeremy Rifkin)
• Technological displacement in other sectors
• Computers will
  • substitute tasks requiring higher order thinking – like chess
  • not substitute tasks requiring
    • pattern recognition in highly unstructured environments
    • interpreting of what is perceived with schemas or concepts stored in memory
• Standards based reform
  • results of success in Massachusetts Murphy schools
  • move away from facts recall
  • move towards in-depth understanding of complex relationships
  • Massachusetts Common Core
    • literacy through ELA
    • expert thinking through Math

Critical skill sets required in the future

• Expert thinking
  • solving problems with no rule-based solution
  • heavily reliance on pattern recognition
• Complex communication
  • Listening skills
  • heavy reliance on Empathy

To do in the future

• Reorganize work to take advantage of relative strengths of computers and people

External references

• The end of work,Jeremy Rifkin
• Clicks and Mortar, Malcolm Gladwell

• you  don’t need one hundred evidences to know a platypus is a platypus. Just a critical few would be enough
• time is precious resource. If a concept doesn’t not work, move on fast. Don’t waste additional precious time on it
• figure out the critical pieces that would kill the idea and stressed test them
• time wasted in self denial spinning the wheels while refusing to see the truth is precious time that could be spent else where.
• learn to calibrate the executioner aspects (disciplined & focus) with the entrepreneur aspects (critical thinking) of your profile
  • the executioner aspects of your profile will tend to dominat if not kept in check

• Finding the right words is the hardest but most critical thing a founder needs to do in order to vividly capture and express the vision you are aspiring after.
  • the right words elicits the right metaphors and mental context of recipients limbic brain thereby drawing forth the desired emotion
  • sometimes it’s inevitable that the founder sits and serenade himself in a space for years before the vision could be clearly articulated and expressed
• think about the critical missing components that could kill a concept
• It takes time to exhaustively decide its inevitable to invest is an idea
• take a viable strategic corridor and seek variants of that to invest in
  • monetize through parents in K12
• Taking on professional capital before product market fit causes
  • undue stress
  • too much effort to explain to investors why pivot
  • psychological lock in to trajectory
• Moonlighting on the side is a low risk and cheap way to validate/invalidate a concept to product market fit
• don’t see everything as a nail that needs to be hammered
  • do not let building something become a natural reflex
  • seek to deeply understand a problem space before deploying any resources on the solutions side
• seek exposure to uncorrelated markets
• small cap companies are the first to react to a down turn
  • see Russell index versus strong ones like Nasdaq / SNP
• When trying to ride a macro trend, it is more efficient trading commodities than stocks in various companies as you won’t have to deal with micro events specific to the companies.
• When 3 or more person calls you a unicorn even when you are not one
  • its not about you, its about what they all need
  • straddle up and prepare to ride the wave
• the joker profile is less a manifestation of the character of the person playing the role than the underlying organization dysfunction that is being managed
  • Every team has its own set of dysfunctions
  • Questions that can’t be resolved inevitably surfaces to the CEO

Insights

• knowledge of nature gives the ability to go down the long tail for food
• large scale agriculture constrains us to specific food types which are easier to cultivate at scale
• operating at smaller scale frees us up from this constrain
• there are seasons in forest. Forest fire helps reset the season so that end stage vegetation does not establish permanent foothold in any territory
• Seeing clear distinct between function and form allows the ability to freely step off the grid

• ability to see clearly the distinction between function and form
  • Results in cost effectiveness (personal life)
  • results in capital efficiency and high return on equity ( finance)
  • be wary of excessively high debt to equity ratio (finance)
• the ability to coherently frame the present
  • allows the ability to get a glimpse into the future
  • history repeats itself
  • allows the ability to decipher between correlation, causation and luck
• know that nature has its inflection points
  • water above melting point seizes to be solid and becomes liquid
  • water above boiling point seizes to be liquid and becomes gas

• This current progress – hardware, software and network at their core
• took generations to improve and modification
  • Moore’s law
• When you can measure what you are speaking about, and express it in numbers, you know something about it; but when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind, Lord Kelvin
• Search terms volume increase positively correlates with housing sales and prices three months from now
• data and statistics is the sexy job for the next 10 years
• Innovation: recombining of existing things in new ways
• 5 – 7 years before full productivity of firms making investments
  • time required to make complementary investments
• Of importance in the forthcoming age
  • ideas not things
  • minds not matter
• Technological unemployment – two competing school of thoughts
  • don’t worry things will sort themselves out – Daron Acemoglu and Hames Robinson
  • need to worry – John Maynard Keynes
• study hard using technology and all other available resources or MOOCs

Two main barriers to AI

• Polanyi’s paradox – we know more than we can tell
  • we are really good at taking information through our 5 sense
  • we are really good at spotting patterns
  • we are very bad describing how we do it
• Moravec’s paradox –
  • easy to have machines behave like adults and do complex things
  • impossible to give them perception and mobility of one year old

References

• Why the west rules – For now, Ian Morris
• The New Division of Labor, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane
• The age of spiritual machines, When computers exceed human intelligence, Ray Kurzweil
• The Nature of Technology, Brian Arthur
• Why nations fail, Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson
• Economic Possibilities for our grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes
• Academically Adrift: limited learning on college campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa
• How college affect students, Ernest Pascarella and Patrick Terenzini
• Brain gain: rethinking U.S. immigration policy

Key points

• Polanyi’s Paradox: We know more than we can tell – Michael Polanyi
• GO as the main benchmark for intelligence
• mastering Go with deep neural networks
• utilizing the crowd

Trends

• Machine: getting to human level intelligence
  • versus human mind
• Platform: Facebook and AirBnb dominating their verticals with none of the traditional assets
  • versus products
• Crowd: crowd sourcing of ideas and value
  • versus core – knowledges, processes, expertise, and capabilities companies have built over their supply chain

Machine Age phases

• Phase 1: take over large amounts of routine work. mid-1990s
• Phase 2: stuff of science fiction, performing non-routine work like self-driving. now

Machine versus human

• Psychology – Daniel Kahneman
  • Fast thinking (intuition)
    • used as data point
    • show it lots of examples and give it frequent and rapid feedback about accuracy
  • Slow thinking (deliberate)
    • come to conclusion with it but taking data point from intuition
• Proposed reversal:
  • machine take human judgement as input
  • instead of machine presenting data to human for judgement
• Kids learn with no priorly defined rules
• entrepreneurship very rewarding to individuals and societies
  • Machines not very good at large scale creativity and planning
  • humans are really good at it

Platform

• Unbundling of offerings
• Curation counters the corruptors
  • reputation system
  • keep out bad and encourage good
• High reputation beats high similarity – stranger-danger biases
• Information asymmetry leads to market breakdown

Crowd versus Core

• new knowledge is constantly created
• new knowledge slow to enter into core
• Need core principals for crowd to come together to build things of great value
  • openness
  • noncredentialism
• core is often mismatched for the problems its most interested in
  • knowledge comes from domain far away from problem itself
• unbundling of the firm
• managers fall back on process of iteration and experimentation
  • avoid biases and judgments
• how technology is used is more important than how easy it is to access it

References

• The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies
• Why Fintech who kill Banks?

Fun facts

• Silicon Valley first appeared in print in 1971

Insights

• Alan Kay: In the history of art, the most powerful work in any genre is not done by the adults who invent it, but by the first generation of kids who grow up in it
• Engelbart: Original intention of AI was to increase the capacity of human to tackle a complex situation for his needs
• The mythical man month
• Talent critical mass is important for any technology movement to succeed

Behavior

• when a new tool alleviates a pain, people in pain rapidly adopt and restructure their workflows around the tool
• Threshold of impatience – beyond which people run out of patience with the machine
• Tinkerers feel the urge to custom things to their own needs

Monetization

• While getting paid for tinkering is unimaginable at first, expecting to pay eventually becomes the norm

Disruption

• Why new entrants from the fringes of a domain cause disruption?
  • Incumbent fall in love with their existing technology – sunk cost fallacy
  • new entrants
    • do not have psychological and infrastructural legacy
    • lack resources

Different hats, different views

• Paradigm shifts
  • batch processing computers versus interactive computers
    • people who think in terms of water fall versus
    • people expects interaction from computers – Spacewar the first computer game
  • after reading Copernicus, when first looked up from a different Earth to a different Heaven
• Lick: Psychology brings fresh perspective to computing versus mathematics and engineering
  • seeing computers in relation to the workings of the human brain
  • rather than an exercise of pure technology
  • enhancing and enriching human creativity
• Being a visionary and a director are two different things
  • management needs to be taken seriously as a job
  • don’t just invent the future, go live in it
• Object-Oriented Programming: Sometimes it takes years of exploration before we can clearly define what something is
• Financial guys (Wall Street) will always have problems quantifying the intangible

Importance of marketing

• Computer wizards don’t necessarily understand marketing. Mega profile weakness
• customer needs might not be what you imagine:
  • Apple’s spreadsheet versus STAR’s word processing
• Jobs took the Alto display and used it for his Apple products

References

• Augmenting the Human Intellect: A conceptual framework, Engelbart
• Symbiosis, Lick
• Some moral and technical consequences of automation, Norbert Wiener, Science 131 (1960)
• The Passing of a great mind, Life, February 25, 1957
• I am a mathematician: The Later life of a prodigy, Norbert Wiener
• Dark Sun: The making of a hydrogen bomb, Richard Rhodes

• 80/20 rule – vocabulary
  • 20% Of words are used to convey most of the knowledge
  • 80% of the words are domain specific
• 80/30 rule – conglomerate
  • 20 percent of business units bring in 80 percent of reported profit
  • 20 percent of business units bring in 80 percent of reported losses