Brian’s Corner: The Shortest Month of the Year
--
Is it just me, or is 2021 flying by way too quickly? It’s already mid-March and I’ve finally pulled all the details together for my February update. We’ll say that it’s because February’s the shortest month, so I haven’t had as long to finish writing this one. Nonetheless, I was still able to get a lot done in this short month and wanted to share with you what I’ve been able to accomplish.
This month was a whole bunch of calls. And yes, we all attend remote school or remote work, so Zoom calls are part of everyday life. What I’m talking about is calls to get to know people who were applying to the TeenTechSF Leadership Team & the MealMatch Ambassadorship and Beta Testing Programs, and calls to get to know the speakers for the speaker series I’m arranging.
Even though TeenTechSF accepts anyone onto its leadership team (so the real reward is the work you put in as a member of the team), it’s nice to get to know people who are also passionate about the same mission, vision, purpose, and values as you are. For the interviewee, it also allowed them time to get to know the organization better, have all of their questions answered, before they’re “dropped” right into the monthly planning meeting with little introduction and twenty other teens.
TeenTechSF x Bentley DTE Speaker Series
That’s right! The TeenTechSF x Bentley DTE Speaker series has already started as of the time of this writing. At the beginning of February, I reached out to some of the connections I made at LaunchX and a connection that another TeenTechSF leadership member had to a tennis AI startup called SwingVision. I created this speaker series for a number of reasons. First, I wanted to set up opportunities for my club members at Bentley DTE to hear from professionals in entrepreneurship, but wanted to get a larger audience to tune in (plus, it would be easier to convince speakers to talk to a larger audience), so I decided to make it a partnership with TeenTechSF. The speakers who are a part of this series are:
- Swupnil Sahai, Co-Founder/CEO of SwingVision, UCB Data Science Instructor, and former Tesla Engineer
- Farai Munjoma, recipient of the Anzisha Prize, recognizing the Top 12 young entrepreneurs in Africa, for his work as the CEO of the Shasha Network in providing digital education to rural and impoverished communities on the content
- Chloe Chia (LaunchX ‘20), teen co-founder of Munch, backed by Y Combinator & partnered with 27 restaurants, and founder of The Lemonade Stand startup blog
- …and Benjamin Stern, (a former high school startup) Founder of Nohbo, featured on Shark Tank for developing the world’s first single use water soluble pods encapsulating personal care products
To sign up for this series, happening on Saturdays through April 3rd, visit: ttsf-dte-speakers.eventbrite.com!
MealMatch Ambassadorship Program
As the Vice President of Marketing at MealMatch, I worked with the MealMatch team to select our new ambassadors! This was after other members of our team spoke to an international audience at Knovva Academy’s Virtual G20 Summit, and pitched at the second round of the 2021 Diamond Challenge. The MealMatch Ambassadorship Program is an opportunity to earn community service hours by spreading the word about our organization to friends, family, and the broader community, on what we’re doing to combat the growing problem of food insecurity and how other community members can get involved. The beta testing program allows exclusive access to the MealMatch interface in order to test functionality of the app.
If you’re interested in joining either one of these programs, visit https://tinyurl.com/y35wl2ne!
TeenTechSF PPE Initiative
A larger chunk of my time this month was spent on TeenTechSF’s PPE Initiative. At the end of last month and the beginning of this month, I sent out agreement forms and created instructional guides for each task. Once signed, I added the expenses and ordered each item directly to the leadership members so they could begin cutting, sewing, or printing. By the end of the month, I was able to create 124 front shields, which are a component for the face shields. Our goal is to 3D print 700 face shields and sew 1300 masks by May.
Next came reporting all of our progress and our purchases back to our grant funders. Since our funding for this specific project was finally improved, this was the first time that these specific funders read our monthly reports. Thus, I had to detail out all of the progress our organization has made from November 2020 to February 2021, including descriptions of our 2021 TeenTechSF Global Youth Summit, TeenTechSF’s participation in the MLK Jr. National Day of Service, and planning for future events.
Books
This month, I read Erin Meyer and Reed Hastings’ No Rules Rules, Connected: James H. Fowler and Nicholas Christakis’ The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, and Seth Godin’s The Practice. Here are some of my key takeaways:
No Rules Rules
Co-written by the Professor of INSEAD and CEO of Netflix, this book explored the unique culture of Freedom & Responsibility that allowed Netflix to become what it is today, a subscription service used by 204 million people around the world.
- It started with the vision of Reed Hastings, who understood the detrimental impact that restrictions put on company employees can have: “With my next company, Netflix, I hoped to promote flexibility, employee freedom, and innovation, instead of error prevention and rule adherence. At the same time, I understood that as a company grows, if you don’t manage it with policies or control processes, the organization is likely to descend into chaos” (xix).
- Instead, Netflix built up its talent density by paying top of market: What surprised me was that it may be the only company to convince its employees to take recruiter calls. That way, it’s able to know what’s considered “top of market”. If the company has the best employees in their field, it should guarantee a high income so employees don’t have to worry about the paycheck or finding alternative places to work, and instead focus on the tasks at hand.
Netflix released more controls as time went on, such as vacation, travel, and expense policies. Here’s an example of what it’s like to work at a traditional company with control processes in place, from a former employee of HP:
“I followed the process and entered a request for spending approval into the HP procurement system. Then I looked over everything There were TWENTY names that needed to sign off before I could get started. My boss, my boss’s boss, my boss’s boss’s boss, but also a dozen names I had never heard of, people I soon learned were sitting in our procurement department in Guadalajara, Mexico….The approval took six weeks and I called Anna [, one of the only people in the procurement department that would pick up,] so many times that, when she made the next step in her career, she asked me to write a LinkedIn recommendation for her”.
When she joined Netflix, the process for a million-dollar expense was to sign a Statement of Work and fax it back to the vendor; “I kid you not. I nearly hit the floor” (67).
- The amount of openness and trust that employees will act in Nextflix’s best interest allows for situations like this: Although a Washington Post journalist planned to test Netflix on Samsung’s newest TV at the time, the TV had been disposed of the night before this was planned. The morning of the event, “was too late to call the Samsung people…[a manager] started calling every electronic store in town”, but to no avail. However, this is what the manager recalled from what happened next:
- “Nick, the most junior engineer on our team, sprinted into the office. ‘Don’t worry, Nigel,’ Nick said. ‘I solved that. I came in last night, and I saw the TV had been disposed of. You didn’t respond to any of my calls and texts. So I drove out to the Best Buy in Tracy, bought the same TV, and tested it this morning. It cost twenty-five hundred dollars, but I thought it was the right thing to do” (65).
The philosophy behind this: “real life is more nuanced than any policy could ever address” (57). Netflix is not the only startup that’s taking a more open approach and removing restrictions on employees. During the information age, where more access to information on what it’s like to work at a company, the environment that the culture offers appears to be growing in importance.
Netflix’s openness has allowed it to continue innovating and adapting, unlike traditional companies. When the Netflix team approached Blockbuster Video in its early days, Blockbuster didn’t believe in the power of Netflix at all; they already had a stable business and saw no need to adapt their product or add a completely new extension. The 1960’s and 1970’s was when major investors were backing many of the new brick-and-mortar stores which were founded as a result of post-war suburban expansion, which we now see as “going out of business” or “about to go out of business”. Those ideas were once novel and filling a growing customer need, but became too comfortable in their offering and too stuck in their ways (with control processes) that they could not keep up with the times in the digital era.
- One of the concepts I found the most interesting was the phenomenon of “exporting” Netflix’s company culture as the company expanded to other companies around the world. This led to a shift in decision-making for certain features, and a necessity for even more freedom and responsibility allowed by the higher-ups in the US to employees who had grown up in the countries Netflix was expanding in.
- An example of a different outcome as a result of international expansion was this: Netflix saw no need to add an additional feature to allow people to download content. Plus, they didn’t want to increase piracy or distribution of the shows they were offering on a subscription service. While the company was in the US, Netflix had no intention of developing this feature. However, when they listened to their new customers in India, there were unique problems that customers faced that led to a completely different view of whether or not a download feature should be added. Many customers in India only had stable wifi in the living room, but the network strength was too low as they were cooking in the kitchen, where they would want to watch movies in the background. Many others didn’t have a stable enough wifi connection at home, and wanted a download feature because they could get movies to watch at home by downloading while at work. Thus, Netflix decided to add in a download feature, which significantly helped its adoption in India.
- Although it’s not just customers who behave differently — it’s also the local people who are hired to work at the Netflix office. While French workplace culture allows for debate and a more confrontational approach without hurt feelings, and where you must take time to build up your argument before getting to the main point in meetings, Americans tend to soften up their suggestions by adding positive feedback on top of some critical suggestions, although they get to the main point in meetings. In Singapore, an employee was deeply offended by an inconsiderate message sent from a worker from an American office, but to any American, it seemed like a normal message, although it didn’t include the respectful words that need to be added in East Asia.
- Above is a map that Netflix used to understand how behavior was different across their international audiences. Yet the implications of this study goes beyond Netflix — it also talks about how difficult it is for people around the world to understand each other’s intentions, and to work together when many gestures (not to mention words) are lost in translation. Netflix has worked on this by holding feedback sessions open to their international employees, although it’s important for all of us when working with people from around the world to expect the best intentions, but understand that there may be conflict because of cultural differences.
Connected
- “So whereas we think of our own network as having a more limited social and geographic reach, the networks that surround each of us are actually widely interconnected” (19).
- Typically we have three degrees of influence — our decision-making has an impact on the decision making of our friends, friends’ friends’, and friends’ friends’ friends.
- The partisan divide in American politics is visible when mapping out social networks! Included in this book was a study conducted of how often politicians vote, put into perspective with other politicians. The map produced as a result displayed that although there are several connections between representatives of different political parties, they are typically much weaker or in fewer numbers. Although there are exceptions to the rule.
- “This kind of person-to-person contact caused many people who would otherwise ignore the run to join in the frenzy…Under the right conditions, what starts as aberrant behavior in just a few people can spread like wildfire in social networks” (137).
The Practice
- The basis of this book: “The industrial system we live in is all outcome-based. It’s about guaranteed productivity in exchange for soul-numbing, redirected labors. But if we choose to look for it, there’s a different journey available to us. This is the path followed by those who seek change, who want to make things better” (7). Throughout the book, Seth Godin goes on to talk about the process of shipping creative work, sharing a numbered list of stories and lessons about shifting your mindset as a creative person.
- “Like many researchers throughout time, Pythagoras threw out the fifth hammer (and the pesky mismatch) and published his work only on the first four. But it turns out that the misfit, the fifth hammer, was the secret to the entire sound” (50). All of what we now consider to be “the foundations of science” are based on recurring patterns (theorems, theories, or formulas) that humans observed in nature over centuries. Yet there are always exceptions to each rule in nature, and there are always aspects that scientists decided not to consider because the directions in which you can take your observations to prove something larger are endless. Think about how close we might be to unlocking a whole new dimension of physics or neuroscience or biology, in the same way the internet created the information age — it took visionaries who only took their thoughts a little further than other computational experts on how to transform what machines they were working with to something that could enhance the lives of every person on the planet.
- “As each key is tried, there’s no emotion involved. He’s not viewing this as a referendum on his abilities as a locksmith. Besides, trying each key is a moment for feedback. Does this key fit this lock? Data is being collected. Ultimately, he’ll find a key that fits (or he won’t).
- The professional locksmith doesn’t match our vision of the working artist. But what about the professional software engineer? She writes a line of code, compiles it, sees if it works. A bug isn’t personal. It’s another bit of data. Adjust the code and repeat” (65).
- I found this passage extremely intriguing. Too often we internalize that fact that we haven’t figured out the right puzzle piece as if something is wrong with us, even though nothing about rearranging code has anything to do with our qualities as a person.
Talks and Lectures
Master DTC Marketing | Learn Organic vs. Paid Acquisition
Nik Sharma, the CEO of Sharma Brands (also known as the king of direct to consumer marketing) shared some of his insights with Garry Tan, VC @ Initialized. It all started with the “high school 16 year old mindset of ‘how do I pay for everything?’”. That’s when he wanted to find something to excel at so he wouldn’t be struggling later in life. Instead of taking the traditional path of going to college, he initially deferred and joined an adtech company in SF to learn about paid marketing. After learning about advertising and getting addicted to placing bulk orders of Hint Water, he joined Hint with his marketing expertise as the Director of Performance Marketing. During this talk, he talked about the importance of getting a brand to tell a story ( people treat brands like other people that they interact with on a personal basis), in the same way Hint Water spoke to him. A consistent brand image allows the customer to enjoy a familiar and inviting experience and it’s even more impressive if you’re able to grow attention to your brand through organic growth and not paid acquisition.
At the end of the talk, he mentioned that if he were to do anything different, it would be getting enough sleep and having enough time to deeply reflect, which was interesting to me; regardless of how unconventional the path is (deferring college, thus seemingly granted with more time, and joining a company as a fan of the brand), all of us still share the same struggles in having enough time to accomplish what we want to do.
The One World Schoolhouse: Education Reimagined
At this talk at Google, Sal Khan talked about initial struggles starting Khan Academy, and weaknesses in the education system that his company is trying to address. When Sal started making videos to tutor his nieces from afar, he had to get over the idea that putting videos on an accessible platform like YouTube wasn’t his idea; it didn’t feel right to upload serious videos about how to solve math problems in a place that only stored content about cats or short comedy sketches at the time. After getting more views, there was proof of concept, and he invested more and more time to improve production quality and record videos on more concepts.
As Khan Academy grew, Sal found that when a child is stuck in our education system, they are typically left unable to catch up: “the teacher knew that there were these core weaknesses because these students just kept being promoted along, even though they had these gaps in their knowledge. And then, at some point, when they’re just not getting algebra, it has nothing to do with the algebra. It’s just because they can’t even understand what’s going on”. That’s where the flipped classroom model came in. With the power of tools like Khan Academy available online, two fifth grade classes within the Los Altos School District experimented with self-paced study, where students only moved on to the next concept once they fully understood everything, not when the entire class shifted gears to move according to the pre-planned schedule for the school year. As a result, some fifth graders were learning calculus in a matter of weeks, while other students who had previously been behind had made the most progress. With the addition of gamification features such as getting rewards or gems (which are a part of Khan Academy today), many students were incentivized to fully understand concepts in a way that a classroom without digital tools used for enhancement cannot provide. Like any startup in its early days, Khan Academy constantly iterated from what they saw in these experiments and improved their offering to all students.
Why You Should Be More Optimistic
Yes, you should be more optimistic. A generation ago, no one thought the internet was going to work, and no one thought that we could ever have the power to share so much information in milliseconds. Now, we actually have the power to create a world where every person’s ideas can contribute to the bigger picture; for example. “You have millions of people who were highly skilled in everything except the skill of English now being able to participate in a global economy”. Even though headlines can be found with negative news every day, Marc Andressen from a16z asked the question, “are fundamental systems actually working”? It turns out that when we look at access to information, access to economic markets, and freedom indexes, all of them are on an upward trend. Ordinary people now have the power to create tools that enhance their lives from their own homes; it’s a matter of how we use the powerful tools at our fingertips to bridge the digital divide and enhance our lives that can have a profound positive impact on society.
Oprah Winfrey on Career, Life, and Leadership, Stanford GSB
During this talk, Oprah explained her journey in how she went from working in radio while at Tennessee State University to holding her popular show today: “I just had to find my way”. There were so many different pathways she could have taken after her first job as a radio announcer, but she declined a $40K offer among others because, as she puts it, “I started listening to what felt like the truth for me”. Even though she could have been financially successful by continuing on nightly news on television, she decided to switch to talk shows. After making the switch, “knew that [she] had found home for [herself]”. The most important lessons she took away while reflecting upon her experience was to take the time to know who you are, so you can find the highest, truest expression of yourself as a human being.
“Did you hear me? Did you see me? And did what I said mean anything to you?” are the questions that everyone hopes is answered affirmatively by others. And although whether people hear or see you cannot be answered by yourself, it’s how you nurture and honor yourself, go after your reason for being present and doing the work that you do, that will allow you to find your ultimate purpose and fulfill it. It was only after switching from television to a talk show, and having negative experiences with guests using Oprah’s platform to spread a negative message or cause humiliation of other family members, for her to say to her producers, “we’re going to turn this thing around. And I am no longer going to be used by television. I am going to use television”, to have conversations to enjoy life, fulfill ourselves, and find the highest and truest expression of ourselves.
Quotes from this talk:
- “All of my best decisions in life have come because I was attracted to what really felt like the right move for me…If I fail, then I will find out what is the next thing for me.”
- “Everything that I have, I have because I let it be fueled by who I am, and what I realized by contributions to this planet could be.”
- “I’ve talked to nearly 30,000 people on this show, and all 30,000 people had one thing in common: they all wanted validation…I would tell you that every person you will ever meet shares this common desire.”
- “I always understood that there really was no difference between me and the audience. I might have had better shoes. But at the core, the core of what really matters, that we are all the same.”
If there was one more story to share from this talk, it would be Oprah visiting Nelson Mandela while he was the leader of South Africa: Oprah saw the conditions outside the window of the area they were passing, and thought out loud that a school should be built there to help end poverty through education. At that instant, Mandela called the Ministry of Education and said “get over here now, Oprah wants to build a school”. This school has now served thousands of students since 2007. When you have an idea of what needs to be done, it takes people who are willing to take the bold next step to make it happen. We need ambitious people who are willing to take an idea, no matter how novel, to test the idea and make it a reality, because “the limit of global progress is the ambition of the most ambitious”.
MasterCard CEO Ajay Banga on Taking Risks in Your Life and Career
Ajay Banga, born in India, took his first job at Nestle just as India was beginning to open up to multinational corporations. Every business school student looked up to companies like Nestle, and Ajay Banga was fortunate enough to be accepted. This opportunity to work in both a growing office and a Western company allowed him to understand how company operations around the world worked, and to understand different fields, such as sales, marketing, manufacturing, product management, running a region, and how it was possible to change “the entire inventory system of the Indian company and to manage inventory and working capital better”. After joining Nestle in the United States, he decided to leave for Mastercard; he always liked working with data and enjoyed the feel of a smaller company. There, he not only worked towards MasterCard’s vision: “a world beyond cash,” but also added that he used his global perspective to make sure not to leave anyone behind. The reasoning:
- “Cash is still king” — 2.5 billion people around the world can’t do transactions online (85% vs. 15%) — Ajay didn’t want to leave 85% of the world’s population in the dust
- “Their lives are different, and that’s got to change. Because non-inclusive growth will destroy the feeling that I’m talking about, of prosperity and growth in the US as well”.
- Yet the simplicity of the vision statement is important to go after — estimates show that 42% of money that goes from a government to an individual through social programs gets stolen along the way. The US has some of the lowest tax evasion rates in the world, but it is still estimated to be 20%.
Ajay also talked about the importance of ensuring that innovation continues, even as the company expands (usually resulting in more bureaucracy); “we have to be drivers of new ideas”. Mastercard is a technology and data company that can make a difference to help people work, and MasterCard Labs works on new projects which may not succeed, but go after this idea, because having a culture that allows for drivers behind ambitious projects is a strong component of your company.
“If you try something new and it doesn’t work, that’s fine. You can take a risk and can lose the money and move on.”
Other takeaways from this talk:
- When asked about whether to grow to a higher management position in India, where he would have a greater perspective on how to solve its societal problems, or go to the US, he had this to say about the US: “This is the place where you can really get things done. This is the place where the environment allows you to think about expanding and growing, in a way that you can’t do in other countries.” He continued by mentioning how bureaucrats in many countries “lay out the red tape instead of the red carpet” when it comes to new, innovative ideas, “but if [working in your home country] inspires you, you should go after it” because we need drivers in every corner of the world.
- “Innovation is alive and well in the US, and you better watch out, because it’s coming.”
- “I would think humility is actually a big part of this, you can’t throw it out the window, because if you’re not willing to learn from people or adopt or adjust and progress in your mind, ([as] there’s always learning), you can’t be in a company like this and succeed…..I think you can be successful without the humility, but you won’t enjoy it as much.”
- “You’ve got to be willing to take risks with your life and your career…You’ve got to get comfortable with your skin and have a little bit of confidence in yourself…You pick it up as you go along. And you’re capable of changing who you are, as you go along.”
- Understanding that when people attack your identity, only 0.005% of people in the world are not on your side. If you have that strength of the 99.005%, you can get through a lot. Humanity is sensitive, and we like to only focus on fear, even when the fuller picture looks very different.
Elon Musk: Tesla Motors CEO, Stanford GSB 2013 Entrepreneurial Company of the Year
From the moderators of this talk: “Tesla succeeded in an industry where startups aren’t supposed to succeed by incorporating novel design approaches to little things like concept design, battery design, and body design,…and manufacturing design, supply chain management, mass production. Tesla is attempting to disrupt an industry in which its competitors have massive scales and long histories.” Being focused on something that’s a higher calling typically takes more time and a strong committed effort over a long period of time, so it typically isn’t thought of as a “startup”, yet Tesla is thought of today as a successful Silicon Valley startup.
In response, Elon Musk mentioned the following: “I didn’t really get into any of the swift with the expectation of success”. Tesla went through a financing round on the last hour of the last possible day of the calendar year — 6 pm on December 24, 2018. If the company hadn’t been financed then, it would have gone bankrupt a few days after that Christmas. To Elon, it was about wanting to impact the world in a positive way — sustainable energy, internet access, making life interplanetary (enhancing our lives with resources from other planets). With all of his projects, there was a low probability of success, but a certainty that it needed to be done, going after a “fundamental good that [a company like] Tesla can accelerate”.
“It was not from the standpoint of life what’s the best rate of return, or where I think things could be successful. Just like I think these things need to happen.”
In order to be successful, Tesla reset from first principles instead of iterating from the past — “designing battery-powered vehicles from the ground up”. From there, the company created a solution uniquely designed for the future, causing the Tesla Effect — first Tesla, then other companies like GM, Nissan, and Ford all saw the possibility. It took a pioneer to take this extra effort to catalyze and accelerate this industry fit, and show that it was what consumers were looking for.
Elon also talked about his fascination with Space Travel. Surprised that NASA had no plan to go to Mars, SpaceX started with an idea to contribute funding to a potential mission run by NASA. He tried to figure out the costs it would take to get to Mars, and was able to figure out from PayPal proceeds about the cost of spacecraft, communications, a greenhouse/safe home for civilians on Mars, but couldn’t figure out how to decrease the cost of the rocket itself without going overseas to much cheaper markets. Elon came to the conclusion that he shouldn’t be looking overseas for cheaper launch sites, because “I actually think there’s a tremendous amount of will in the American population, particularly to explore. The United States, more than any other country, is a distillation of the human spirit of exploration”. Thus, he leveraged First Principles again to build a rocket from the ground up, leveraging the power of intersections between physics and engineering.
Jack Dorsey: The Future has Already Arrived
After dropping out of NYU, Dorsey went to SF to start a web-based dispatch firm. Although the company failed, he realized one key element in the map of the city: they people. In 2001, he tried to write a simple program to solve this, although “it was the wrong time, and wrong tech”. 2005 was the first year where you could cross carriers with SMS text, which allowed someone with a Sprint phone to be able to text any other phone number (e.g. one carried under AT&T). After working at a podcasting company, he found co-founders who had some knowledge about text as a medium, who built Twitter in 2 weeks, and invited co-workers and friends to test out the platform.
More recently, Dorsey Co-Founded Square, “commerce made easy”. This company came out of a conversation he had in 2008, where another aspiring entrepreneur was talking with Dorsey: “Jack, I just lost a sale because they couldn’t accept credit card”. Since then, Square has worked to create a solution that makes it easy to accept credit cards, and offers additional data to the store.
LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner on Compassionate Management
In this talk at Stanford GSB, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner talked about how to be a leader of an organization, the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and his thoughts on how we should change our education system to adapt. On compassionate management, he believes that fostering a culture that believes in transformation of the self, company, and world is of high importance. To that end, he discussed the importance of empathy — feeling what the other person is feeling — AND compassion — maintaining enough difference where you can actually do something about the way the other person feels. You don’t want to create an environment where if someone else is angry, you step into their shoes so much that you begin to feel angry too, instead of acting as an intermediary or resolving the issue at hand. These values, along with the values of “members come first, relationship matters, to be open, honest, & constructive, to demand excellence, and to take intelligent risks and act like an owner” can be felt throughout LinkedIn’s offices.
The current industrial revolution comes after mechanization (steam engine) and mass production (electricity and assembly lines). To this, Weiner asked:
- Are they being certified in new skills that are jobs that will be as opposed to jobs that once were (in the education system)?
- Where is the spirit of entrepreneurship, the investment, energy in vocational training, innovation in how we train people to take on these new technologies and the job opportunities created by these new technologies?”
“How are we leveraging infrastructure that we haven’t even dreamed of decades ago?” — We have so much more data as a result of significantly larger capacity to store data, and need to spend more time understanding what it all means, and how we can solve the problems of the 21st century.
Further thoughts on the education system:
“Well, coming back to education reform because it goes well beyond how we work…to reskill displaced workers, I think from a generational perspective it starts with primary education and then K through 12.”
He continued, mentioning that the American education system has summer vacation so students could have time to go out and harvest the fields, while students typically still sit in rows in primary education due to assembly lines.
“So we exist in a different world and increasingly the world has become more digital, more networked. Things changed much faster than they’ve ever changed.”
Weiner offered some ideas on how to bring the system into the 21st Century, such as programs in place meant to reskill workers in new industries with exponential tech (mentioned above), and vocational training for those who want to take a different path & develop mastery of a specific skill, which has been implemented in some form in countries like Germany.
Jessica Livingston (Y Combinator) at Startup Grind Silicon Valley
“The only lesson in my career is…if you feel like you’re not happy in your job, don’t be complacent”. It was only when she co-founded Y Combinator that “she had a vision for herself”. The process began in 2003, when Jessica met some of the first “modern startup” founders at an outing in Cambridge. Wondering why all of the amazing concepts these founders were talking about, she decided to write a book to cover them, eventually being so fascinated by the idea of startups that she ended up quitting her job and taking out $100K to go along with Paul Graham’s (one of the people she talked to in Cambridge) idea of offering angel investing for early stage startups. In the summer of 2005, eight companies went through the first Y Combinator batch, including many entrepreneurs who went on to found companies Reddit and Justin.tv (later renamed Twitch).
In addition, being the only co-founder out of the four that had minimal technical knowledge, Jessica decided she would not factor this category into investing, and instead focus on an area she could hone in on: team dynamics. As Jessica mentioned in the talk, if you have a team with top talent in different fields, you want to utilize your time best by working where you stand out to improve your company in order to create the best possible outcome.
This concludes my update for February 2021! The one in March is coming out soon, and in fact, I’ve already started working on it so I won’t be behind for long :)
