You must check out this debate between Thiel and Andreesen about whether we’re still innovating.  

Fascinating question to consider, “Are we better off today than yesterday?”  Notes are shared below:

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Will we invent anything this useful again?

We spend $1.4T on R&D

smartphones, stem cell, genetics

Is innovation slowing?

I checked it on 200+ channels on tv, Facebook, Twitter, and the answer is no.

No ones created something as wide sweeping as the lavatory, car, telephone, etc.

Perhaps we’re not living in

Peter Thiel – Founder PayPal, tech investor, philanthropist, entrepreneur, Facebook investor, clarium

Marc Andreeson – Co Founder AH, co created Mosaic, Netscape, 1.4B, growth stage funding for tech, board – HP, bump,

Peter- Agree on many things.

Tech is a good thing, making the world a better place, taking the world to the next level.

Perspective, most people don’t think of Tech as a good thing.  Movies display this.  Why not retreat into a victorian house?

Why is there so much hostility to culture and society.

Tech isn’t delivering the goods it is promising.  Now used for angry birds, sending pics of cats, checking in virtual mayor of virtually no where.

People have always mocked Tech innovation.  But this has a different character, jokes are driven because it is small or trivial.

People are worried there will be no change at all.

Broad indicators.  80% of our generation think the next will be worse off.

Tech cornucopia seems to not trickle down.

How do you actually measure this?

Measurement question.

Deceleration since 70′s, no change in energy, higher prices, oil, bio 1/3 as many patents, clean tech, food, nano technology.

One big exception is the ongoing computer revolution.  Hasn’t dramatically raised living standards, like we’d hoped.

Even if you measure health of computer industry, it falls off in 2000′s after highs in 70-90s. Up 100% in 90′s, Market caps of companies.  Google and amazon, Google and Amazon are worth 2-3x what all other companies are worth.

Must open the possibility that the computer era is dying.  Cisco, dell, hp, oracle, commodities, Microsoft.  Computer rust belt.  Apple even?

Peter is an optimist, thinks we can do a lot better.  Futuristic tech, Ai, Next gen life sciences, cures for cancer, aerospace

Risk averse, regulated to death, talked ourselves into mediocrity.

Marc- Peter is a very original thinker.

Typically agrees with 50% of what Peter says, exactly 50.0%.

Slogan of Founder’s fund- We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 Chararacters.

Flying cars, – many innovations have come true.  Palm communicator, Startrek, they all had iPads in 1967.  We have futuristic technologies.  Laser surgery.  Meal as a pill hasn’t happened.  8000 calories in a pill will knock you out.

Agreeing with Bill Gates – Did Peter really want flying cars?  They would really be inefficient.”  I’d build a thick roof and never go outside.

Very significant changes happening in Transportation happening.  Including advances in technology, Video Conferencing for example, definitely an advance.

140 Characters – Twitter is an easy target, much is trivial on there, but Twitter is instant global public messaging for free.

Big deal for business, news, politics.  Cultural discovery.

New online interaction globally.

IT will play a central in advancing our society.  Communication technology.  Without communication we’d never form into groups. Communication will be the catalyst for collaboration, creation, etc.

Comment on perspective.

Great innovators are well understood now, not widely understood at the time.  Telephone, Edison worked on it, assumption of use case, that telegraph operators needed to talk to each other.  Missed the larger opportunity.  Internet, heaped with scorn from 1977 to 1998.  Peter Lewis, the internet will not be ecommerce, media, etc.  Car, was a trivial toy, JP Morgan said “This is just a toy for rich people” Refused to invest.  Had to have a rich.  UK’s Red Flag Rule- Red Flag in front of automobiles.  Protectionism on the side of blacksmith guild.   PA – All seeing of horses, must immediately, stop vehicle, disassemble, and hide the car until the horses are satisfied.

These inventions will in the future be allowed to be viewed as such.

Thiel- How do you measure?  Accelerating or Decelerating.  Common sense. What facts would you consider we’re still advancing?

Internet under and over estimated.  Look at market cap.

Transportation and Twitter – Traveled, seen it slowed, but we could be on the cusp of a dramatic improvement. How do we 10-60 accelerated, 70-10 decelerated.

Might take longer than we think.

How do we differentiate what’s not happened, vs what’s on the cusp?

Fundamental lack of innovation in energy. Close proxy for GDP growth.

Will it dramatically impact standards?

1930′s, moved to CA, movies, aviation, innovation started here.  Finance centered here.  How big is Tech enough to save?

Marc-

Energy and Transportation.

Energy, tremendous innovation, stalled out by governmental intervention/regulation.  Innovation in solar and wind

Direct subsidies 500B worldwide. Foreign policy and 3T in wars around oil.

Clean tech gets to 2x because of subsidy imbalance.  Can’t come down the price curve, volume.  Solar has, is coming down.  Government must stop subsidizing oil and gas.

3 advances in Transportation, advances in electric cars, Tesla.  Low unit volumes, can’t imagine what they come down do.  Self driving cars, google and Mercedes has them.

Optimization, smartphone based getting out of traffic.  Waze – Peer to peer traffic data, knowing right now.  Rebalancing routes now.  Impacting flows.  Allow all to use this.

Stanford is incentivizing here.  Can balance roads and bridges here.  Computers in cars.  Cars are being optimized, sharing cars, uber, lyft.

High quality telepresence, will commoditize quickly.

Government is in the way.

Tech will solve the concerns.

Peter- Been said for a while.  At what point do we become skeptical? We have been regulated for stuff, not bits.

Engineering, has not advanced because we punish them.

Computer science and financial advances are exceptions.

Tremendous decelleration.

Is tech enough to save us?  Self driving cars?  Who’s liable? hangups in our risk averse society.

Time lag.

A century before these advances hit.

Massive advances in tech, displacing labor.

Peter- How long is the lag?  Wages 22% 73-2013

No robot sitting there, 92 people on Forbes list, where did they make money, 11 people talked about – Gates, Bezos, Zuck, 25 people who made it in mining, farming, etc. Lack of innovation.  Not talked about.

Is there stuff going on that are imbedded in Patents?

Wages.

Economic data.

Tech Companies, market caps summed.  See a big drop off in last 13 years.

Must triangulate.

Too critical of incipient things, or make them too relevant.

US one bubble after another. Tech, housing, finance, government, now have a credit crisis.  When present doesn’t live up to past expectations.

1850 to 1970 work hours went down, average people.

What evidence would you need to convince you that your position is wrong?

Marc- Macro – Input – # of scientists and engineers in the world.  2.1 M science and eng degrees in 2000, 3.7 in 2008, enormous take off in ed, researchers 2.9M 1995 to 3.9M to 5.7 in 2007. If those fell, that would have an impact.

Per Cap GDP – over long sweep, follows Moores Law, exponential curve. 1871 $300 to $45k in US, see crises as squiggles.  Sustained drop would cause panic.

Imagination component – If we stall out in creativity, scientific papers? loose.  Patents? – Patent system is fundamentally broken.  Prank the patent, lost the ability to see difference between innovation, or copy.

Peter- Broad economic data.  Areas of innovation.

Increases in life expectancy, decelerated but if they increased that would indicate otherwise.  If it decelerates more that would be an indicator.

Cultural Component – 100x as many scientists as in 20′s, not that good an indicator, 50% of scientific articles turn out to be incorrect.  Lost enterprise,

Imagination is important.

Science Fiction moves where technology is a good thing.  Star Trek, retread movies.  If we stopped hating tech, used imagination to produce science fiction.

Emerging markets.

Peter- Huge movements, kind of blotting away.

Globalization of VC, but efforts have mixed success.  Global arbitrage, Groupon of China, Japanese Zynga.

Innovative companies are centered in SV, but far behind.

Look at Israel, Scandanavia, Canada- Semi developed.

Will this accelerated progress grow?

Marc- Number of Public Companies in US 8800 in 1997, to 4100 in 1997. Countries 164 in 1990, to 190-206 depending on who you ask in 2012.  Opportunity for international innovation.  Countries choose what they want to revolutionize.  Opportunities to differentiate through regulatory structures.

Peter – Is there an opening for de-reg?  What point could FDA lose stranglehold on global drug market?

Andreessen and Thiel debate whether we’re still innovating | PandoDaily.

I love asking advice.  Sometimes great, encouraging and lifegiving… other times, harsh, painful and ends in soul searching.  Check out these gold nuggets in an article for FastCo by Grace Nasri, good stuff:

8 SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS GIVE THEIR YOUNGER SELVES LESSONS THEY WISH THEY’D KNOWN THEN

EXECS AND INVESTORS FROM PANDORA, IDEO, ANDREESSEN HOROWITZ, SOUNDCLOUD, AND KLEINER PERKINS, AMONG OTHER MASTERS OF DISRUPTION, SHARE THE WISDOM THEY’VE GATHERED ON THE WAY TO THE TOP.

Looking at the success trajectories of today’s disruptors–from Pandora cofounder Tim Westergren to Wikipedia’s Jimmy Wales–it’s easy to think that they had everything figured out from a young age. But many of today’s success stories learned lessons later in life that they wished they had known as they were beginning their careers. The eight investors and entrepreneurs below share the advice they wish they had gotten in their early twenties.

Tim Westergren: Avoid the risk of not trying and the regret of wishing you had.
Tim Westergren, the founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Pandora, said if he could offer his younger self one piece of advice, it would be to realize from an early age that it’s far more haunting to live with the regret of having not followed your instincts–even when those instincts required a diversion from the beaten path–than to have followed your gut and failed. Luckily for Westergren, he was one of the few who did follow his passions and that pursuit led him to found a company with a market cap of $2.5 billion.

“Be sure to ‘notice’ ideas when you have them. Stop. Take the time to consider them seriously. And if your gut tells you they’re compelling, be fearless in their pursuit,” Westergren said. “For most people, the idea of chasing a personal passion or being entrepreneurial is simply something they don’t think of themselves doing. We’re so programmed to walk well-trodden paths. But, we live life only once. So, rather than avoiding the risk of trying, avoid the risk of not trying. Nothing is more haunting than thinking, ‘I wish I had…’.”

Jimmy Wales: Spend wisely early in life so you can achieve the financial independence to follow your dreams.
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia–which according to its own Wikipedia page is a collaboratively edited online encyclopedia–said the advice he would share with the younger generation is to be strategic and thoughtful with expenses at an early age so that you can afford to pursue your passions.

“I think one of the things that most 21-year-old people should do is to recognize now that you can make life choices which control your expenses, and that controlling your expenses is one of the most crucial steps toward the kind of financial independence that you need in order to follow your dreams in the future. Whether it is a change of job, or an entrepreneurial dream, the less you NEED to spend each month, the easier it is to follow those dreams. There are several rules of thumb that can help with this, but one of my favorites is to never go into debt to finance any kind of luxurious consumption. Only go into debt if necessary for some kind of investment, like student loans, for example.”

Bill Ready: Surround yourself with great people and be fearless in pursuit of game-changing ideas.
Bill Ready, the CEO of Braintree–the mobile payments platform for online and mobile commerce that counts companies like Uber, Airbnb, and Fab as clients–shared two key pieces of advice that he wish he had known when he was younger.

“There are two main things I wish I had known when I was 21,” Ready said. “Back in the late 1990s when I was a 19-year-old engineer at Netzee–much like other bright, young, ‘hot-shot’ engineers today–I had this sense that I knew everything, and I didn’t realize the importance of really listening to those who were more experienced. What I have realized since then, is that one of the most important things you can do is to surround yourself with great people, and to listen to them. The second piece of advice I would give is to be fearless. Don’t be afraid to pursue revolutionary ideas, and don’t hold back simply because you’re going up against seemingly unconquerable competitors in your market space. At Braintree, many of our competitors are huge, established companies in the market with market caps in the billions–but we’re not afraid of going after them.”

Alexander Ljung: Realize the power of simplicity.
Alexander Ljung, the cofounder and CEO of SoundCloud–the popular audio platform that has raised more than $63 million in venture funding, according to CrunchBase–shared the importance of learning the power of simplicity in today’s complex world.

“In recent years, T.S. Eliot’s reported quote–‘If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter’–has stuck with me when making numerous decisions specifically around leadership, design, and product. The advice I would offer my 21-year-old self is to remember that it takes more mental (and sometimes physical) bandwidth to create something simple or communicate something complicated in basic terms, but ultimately, that’s a lot nicer for the user experience,” Ljung said. “It’s not about building every feature or understanding everything the first time around. It’s about creating the best, tailored experience for your community and company. I’d remind myself of the importance to leverage design as a decisive advantage and to not be afraid to challenge people to break down their knowledge into easily digestible, clearer statements.”

Philippe Courtot: Focus on what makes you truly happy.
Philippe Courtot, the CEO and Chairman of Qualys–the enterprise cloud security firm that went public last year–emphasized the importance of doing what makes you happy; pursuing what actually makes you happy ensures that you’ll put the needed energy, time, and resources behind your work.

“If I had one piece of advice to give my younger self it would be to stop doing what makes you unhappy and focus on what makes you truly happy,” Courtot shared. “This philosophy, strongly advocated by the Dalai Lama, seems simplistic but its power lies in the fact that it forces you to reflect on what is really important to you and not be distracted by what other people think. If I could give myself one more advice it would be to not be afraid of trying. This builds on the first piece of advice, as we can only learn what makes us happy or unhappy through our own experiences.”

Bing Gordon: Work as hard as you can, and then work harder.
Bing Gordon, a General Partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers–who counts Twitter, Spotify, and Path in his portfolio of investments–was frank in his advice. Ultimately, hard work is what is going to make you successful. That, and the added benefit of having an influential mentor to help guide you on the path to success, is the combination that will get you to where you want to go.

“I’ve always regretted that I didn’t start working in business until I was 28 years old,” Gordon shared. “After decades of hiring college grads, I’ve learned that the people who get the most opportunities also start fast. They overachieve from the very beginning. They ask the best questions and always seem to have good ideas. As one Hollywood producer once said, ‘Work as hard as you can and then work harder.’ But the number one piece of advice I would share is to recruit a mentor. Find someone you admire who is at least one generation older, and has no direct authority over you. Lack of context and perspective can cost you months and years–with a bad career choice, an unwise relocation, short-term negotiating posture, and, generally speaking, sophomoric thinking. Jeff Brenzel, Dean of Admissions at Yale, has the best advice on how to recruit a mentor: ‘All professors desire acolytes; so carry their favorite book of theirs under your arm, and go introduce yourself with a question about their book.’”

Paul Bennett: Take the time to listen.
Paul Bennett, the Chief Creative Officer at IDEO–the highly creative global design consultancy that has done work for clients from Samsung to GE–said the one piece of advice he wished he had known in his early twenties, was to focus on listening rather than rushing to come up with a quick, yet uninformed, response.

“Listen more,” Bennett advised. “For most of my twenties I assumed that the world was more interested in me than I was in it, so I spent most of my time talking, usually in a quite uninformed way, about whatever I thought, rushing to be clever, thinking about what I was going to say to someone rather than listening to what they were saying to me. Slowing oneself down, engaging rather than endlessly debating and really taking the time to hear and learn is the greatest luxury of becoming older.”

Scott Weiss: Surround yourself with leaders in your field.
Scott Weiss, a Partner at Andreessen Horowitz–who counts Platfora, Quirky, and Skout in his portfolio–emphasized the importance of learning in the workplace, and pointed out that smaller companies are great places to learn and grow.

“Whatever vocation you decide on, track down the best people in the world at doing it and surround yourself with them. Aim high and be ridiculously persistent. Your happiness is at the intersection of your passions and learning from great people. Working at a big company sucks–avoid it. Smaller companies are 10 times better for learning. Be generous with your time and money–it has an amazingly fast payback. Be in the moment with everyone you love–and this frequently means tuning out work completely. And drive slow in parking lots.”

8 Successful Entrepreneurs Give Their Younger Selves Lessons They Wish Theyd Known Then | Fast Company | Business + Innovation.

Great article by Tim Ferris on Content.  His comments about building evergreen content and Google stickiness are intriguing.  Also, I had to post these two quote analogy’s:

As Warren Buffett once said, “Should you find yourself in a chronically leaking boat, energy devoted to changing vessels is likely to be more productive than energy devoted to patching leaks.”

That said, if you’re operating in a CPM-ruled world, you might have other near-term pressures, but I’m building a snowball the size of continents. The catch: it sometimes moves at a glacial pace. Big things take time, but that’s OK — almost nothing can stop a glacier from moving once it reaches critical mass.

via A Few Thoughts on Content Creation, Monetization, and Strategy.

Check out this article on how people read Job Ads.  Definitely something to consider when structuring content on your website.  Great article by Lauren Weber in the WSJ: 

How We Really Read Job Ads – At Work – WSJ.

The Psychology Of Scoring That Meeting

As soon as a deal goes up on Groupon, a deal-of-the-day coupon website, it is listed with the words “Limited time remaining.” An hourglass shows how much time is left before the deal disappears from the site while other banners remind you of the “Limited Quantity Available.”

Why all the reminders about the limited time and quantity? They serve to remind consumers that this deal could disappear forever at any instant. Each one is an asteroid headed straight for the deal. And that fear of losing the ability to get a deal – even if it’s for an average Italian dinner or trip that customers doesn’t reallywant to go on – drives people snatch them up before the asteroid strikes.

This is the idea behind psychological reactance theory, the premise of which is that people hate losing freedoms and opportunities. The theory predicts that people will value threatened freedoms and opportunities more due to their perilous status and will act to preserve them.

Over and over again, market research has found this to be the case, even if the “freedom” that is threatened is just the opportunity to buy 2 bags of chips for the price of one.

A famous example is the banning of laundry detergent containing phosphates in Miami. Due to the law, Miami residents rated the banned detergents as “gentler,” “more powerful on stains,” and easier to pour. They even set up “soap caravans” to smuggle in the detergents from counties where it was still available. A ban on a product that few people cared about suddenly resulted in it being seen as superior and people going to great lengths to purchase it.

While marketers use this principle to overwhelm people with “limited time only” offers, it has many applications. One potential use is to help you score an important meeting.

Let’s say that you are trying to meet with someone prominent in your field who you either do not know or do not know well. You’ve tried before, but the individual has noted that it is a busy time, not responded, or otherwise been evasive. How can you better your odds?

Following reactance theory, you can make it clear that there is a narrow time window for this meeting to happen. Let the professor you respect know that the deadline to decide on a graduate school is May 1, and that you would value receiving their advice before then. Or say (preferably truthfully) that you are only in town for a few days, or that you hope to discuss your product before it ships on x date.

It may not work. The luminary could still be too busy, or he or she may not care.

But if they have any inclination to meet – whether to hear about developments in their field or to feel good about helping young members of their discipline – it will raise the value of meeting in their eyes. According to psychological reactance theory, they will be motivated not to lose the opportunity, however small, presented by that meeting.

And that may be the difference between benefitting from their advice and gazing longingly at your inbox for a reply.

via The Psychology Of Scoring That Meeting.

Got to meet Steve Blank at SXSW this year, funny I was starstruck as anyone, meeting that guy.  You’d have thought I met a hot movie star or a star athlete.  Steve Blanks input in to the StartUp community has been awesome.  Check out this article then go check out EP 245 on Udacity, which he teaches about the new business model.

Artwork: Sara Hughes, Download, 2005, acrylic on linen, 1.5 m x 1.5 m, Wallace Trust Collection

Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything – Harvard Business Review.

But a recent in-depth study of long-term performance suggests an alternative point of view about business strategy. When the measure of performance is profitability, a few large companies in every industry consistently outperform their peers over extended periods. And they maintain this performance edge even in the face of significant business change in their competitive environments. The one factor they seem to have in common is agility. They adapt to business change more quickly and reliably than their competitors; they have found a way to turn as quickly as speedboats when necessary.

via The Agility Factor.

Scott Young writes about creating under there’s-no-turning-back constraints by forcing himself to only focus on one project every 30 days:

We’ve seen example of this in folklore, Young points out. Like when Ulysses tied himself to his ship’s mast to prevent himself from succumbing to the Siren’s Song. Sometimes the “mast” is your desk and the “siren” is Twitter. Those who employ this strategy often say they are “burning the boats” – a reference to Spanish conqueror Hernán Cortes burning his boats so his men weren’t tempted to turn back. It’s an extreme measure, but one that produces results.

Among the subscribers to this mindset, Louis C.K. prefers to do away with his previously existing material every year (NSFW). “Get rid of all your best weapons,” he says, “then you have to get good.”

via Burn the Boats. – 99U.

Check out this great article on failure by Steve Blank.  Praying we get to the point of insight quickly:

“What’s gone and what’s past help
Should be past grief.”

William Shakespeare - The Winter’s Tale

We give abundant advice to founders about how to make startups succeed yet we offer few models about dealing with failure.

So here’s mine.
——–

In my experience, living through failure has 6 stages:

• Stage 1: Shock and Surprise
• Stage 2: Denial
• Stage 3: Anger and Blame
• Stage 4: Depression
• Stage 5: Acceptance
• Stage 6: Insight and Change

While I had been part of a few failed startups, none of them had fallen squarely on my shoulders until Rocket Science Games where my business card said CEO. It was there that I lived through all 6 stages and came out the other side a changed man.

Failure

Stage 1: Shock and Surprise
We raised $35 million and after 18 months made the cover of Wired magazine. The press called Rocket Science one of the hottest companies in Silicon Valley and predicted that our games would be great because the storyboards and trailers were spectacular. 90 days later, I found out our games are terrible, no one is buying them, our best engineers started leaving, and with 120 people and a huge burn rate, we’re running out of money and about to crash. This can’t be happening tome.

Stage 2: Deny any of it was your fault
In my mind, I had done everything the investors asked me to do. I raised a ton of money and got a ton of press. We hired everyone according to our plan. It was everyone else who screwed up. I did everything right.

Stage 3: Get angry and blame everyone else
This was the fault of my cofounder since he was in charge of game development, it was the engineers who bailed on me, it was the sales and marketing people who didn’t tell me how bad the games were, it was the VC’s who refused to put any more money in the company, it was Sega’s fault for making a bad gaming platform…

State 4: Get depressed
When the inevitability and magnitude of the failure sunk in, I slept in a lot. There were days I’d get up late and go to bed again at 5 pm. I lost interest in anything associated with my past industry. (To this day I still can’t play a video game.)

Redemption

Step 5: Gradually accept your role in the failure
A few weeks after leaving, I began to think about what I should have done, could have done and pondered why I didn’t do it. (I didn’t listen, I didn’t act, I didn’t own my role as CEO, I wasn’t prepared to do what was right or leave.) This was hard and didn’t happen overnight. My wife was a great partner here. I often reverted to Stages 2 and 3, but over time I took ownership of my primary role in the debacle.

Stage 6: Gain insight and change your behavior
This was the hardest part. While I stopped blaming others, understanding what I could change in my behavior took long months. It would have been much easier to just move on, but I was looking for the lessons that would make my next startup successful. I looked at the patterns of behavior, not just at my last company but also across my entire career. I learned how to dial back the hubris, get other smart people to work with me – rather than just for me, listen better, and act and do what was right – regardless of what others thought I should do.

Epilogue
For my next startup I parked the behaviors that drove Rocket Science off the cliff. We established a team of founders who worked collaboratively. When my co-founders and I got the company scalable and repeatable, we hired an operating executive as the CEO and returned a billion dollars to each of our two lead investors.

Now when I listen to entrepreneurs who’ve cratered a company, I listen for their stories of failure and redemption.

Lessons Learned

• Six stages of failure and redemption
• Don’t get stuck in Stages 2, 3 or 4  - move forward
• Don’t skip acceptance of your role
• Get to insight so you can change your behavior—then commit to the challenge of doing it differently the next time

Failure and Redemption | Steve Blank.

“Think differently about what winning is.” – AG Lafley

Listen to how AG describes the transition of thought around a new way to grow business, surrounding their purchase of MaxFactor and plan to take their cosmetics to a global brand.

How P&G Turned Acquisition into a Core Competency – Video – Harvard Business Review.