InnovationInspiration

Apple Laptops w/ Embedded 4G Chips

Something I’ve wondered for a while now is why Apple doesn’t offer 3G/4G chips embedded into their Macbook Air and MacBook Pro products. If they had the chips built in, they could offer monthly subscription plans priced on a data usage basis.

Having just travelled this past week, and paying for wifi usage at various locations ( included in the hotel but not at all airports ) I can’t help but feel that I would pay for this service, as would many others - and that with some sort of agreement between Apple and the carriers it could be a major cash cow for both.

I wonder if the sheer amount of load this might place on the existing 3G/4G infrastructure is one of the reasons they haven’t offered this to date.

Dear Future Techstars

Almost two years ago, I participated in Techstars Seattle, an intense 3-month incubator program for early stage companies. While I was cleaning my house a few days ago, I came across a letter that we were asked to write to future Techstars members the day after the program ended. It was interesting to re-read it, and the advice still applies and resonates with me :

———- (made a few grammar edits) ———-

Dear Future Techstars,

I’m writing to you from a very hungover post-demo day. You will also one day be sitting having breakfast, after 3 months of a roller-coaster you could not imagine. This morning the sensation is exactly like when the roller-coaster pulls in, the car has that final kickback (that was last night), and then the sound of the air pressure releasing and the restraint bar rising to let you go. You don’t remember the ride too long, and it’s hard to describe, but you’ve got that exhilaration knowing that something amazing just happened, and now it’s all about deciding what ride to go on next.

So what can I tell you about the ride? I guess my one piece of advice is balance. Don’t be all fire, because what you’re doing now is your life. Andy said it somewhere in the program, and it was the best advice: this is your life, live it how you want it to be lived. And remember, everyone else is living their lives too.

All the best,

Nicolae

Never Delegate Understanding

The famous American designer, architect, and filmmaker Charles Eames, once said that we should “Never delegate understanding”. I watched the documentary Eames: Painter and Architect recently, and got the sense that it was through the process of actually working meticulously with the materials and tools he had available to him, and understanding their constraints, that Eames came to innovate his craft.

I think there is something essential to this idea of never delegating understanding. It’s almost a way of approaching things authentically, that captures the immense value inherent in having a deep understanding of a subject: it’s assumptions, and principles. When trying to innovate, more often than not new ideas don’t materialize out of nowhere. Instead, most valuable ideas accumulate gradually, from the process of actually committing yourself to a deep understanding and exploration of the systems, tools, and activities of your craft. Trying to use tools which build on certain basic principles that you don’t yet understand, while glossing over the fundamentals of a subject, is likely to limit your potential for truly meaningful innovation.

Not having a deep understanding is also likely to make your life tougher in the long run: eventually there will come a point where you will have to use those tools for purposes that they were not originally intended for, and when that happens you won’t have sufficient understanding to adapt those tools to your novel needs.

This difficulty of adapting things when you don’t really understand them, and the frustration of trying to do so, is something I believe many people will sympathize with from past experience.

In general, I believe, that there are two ways to give people power to create and innovate:
1. Abstraction - making tools that hide the workings of their more complex internals (i.e. building more powerful tools)
2. Understanding - teaching people the fundamental principles of how systems and tools work, so they can leverage that knowledge to build new tools, and adapt existing ones.

The two should co-exist. But, too much abstraction, and not enough knowledge, makes people feel like tools are magical… and in many ways - too ‘magical’ to truly understand.

It seems to me that right now, in the world of web programming, we’re doing a lot better on the abstraction front than we are doing on the teaching front. Even though our tools are constantly improving, and we’re coming up with better and better abstractions, not enough people really understand how those tools work. I think that lack of understanding is actually slowing them down, and also preventing them from being able to truly innovate.

Frameworks like Rails, and other abstractions, are often making things to mystical, or ‘assumed to be fool-proof’, while the knowledge of how these tools work is not being communicated adequately enough.

This makes them seem more magical and ultimately intimidating to people than needs to be
the case. People look at some framework code, and see something like: “show website”, and have no idea how that one line of code “show website” is able to generate their entire website
(of course this is a ludicrous example, but maybe not so far away from the sensation I had in early experiences with web programming).

People are afraid to ask about the basics, because they may be afraid that their questions sound stupid, when in fact the questions they have are likely the right questions to be asking.

When people don’t understand the basic assumptions the tools they use encapsulate, they don’t have the ability to question those basic assumptions - and to really ask: “Is this the best way that things could be done?” They accept the wisdom of the crowd, and assume that the current tool is the best tool available, because otherwise a better tool would have already been made - this type of belief is what makes people feel complacent, and unempowered.

I encountered this not too long ago when I started working on my first startup: The Shared Web (formerly called PerpetualP :( … yah didn’t think about that name too much). The idea there was to make a site where you could see at any given time where on the internet all your friends are browsing. From a technological perspective, this posed the problem of many thousands of concurrent connections. I began to think about why the Internet was so focused on pull and polling mechanisms rather than push. I also started looking at Apache a bit more closely (this was in late 2009), and realized that it may have some big limitations. I had this feeling like Apache may not be the best server solution possible for particular types of web programming - but at the same time I had a feeling that… well… if that was the case, surely someone else would have built a better server by now - there’s a reason everyone uses Apache! It’s true that there’s usually a reason that people use a particular tool: history, convention, availability - but it’s likely rarely because that tool is the best way to do that thing. I fell victim to what we might call the “Pangloss” innovation syndrome - where I just assumed things were as great as they could be. Eventually, I found this article about the C10K problem, and realized that other people were thinking about this same thing. I then found out about NodeJS, and saw that people like Ryan Dahl were already questioning some of the fundamental assumptions web servers like Apache were built upon. My assumption that the way things are done is the best way they can be done was unfounded, and doing this deeper research was an important step in boosting my confidence and encouraging me to always trust my questions.

In my philosophy courses at university, we would try to translate arguments we read in terms of their assumptions, and conclusions, (A, B, and C, therefore D), and then try to see if there were problems with any of the assumptions that would render them false (e.g. A is not a valid assumption because of Y). In most fields, this refutation of basic assumptions is often how innovation happens, and that’s why it’s important to dig deep and understand and question those assumptions (while still being able to use things at a higher level, and appreciating the value of employing existing abstractions). It also helps to unearth what are the sometimes ‘hidden’ assumptions that are being made - and those ‘hidden’ assumptions are often the best opportunities for innovation.

But, getting back to abstraction and understanding. In the case of web programming, I think what’s missing on the understanding front is high-quality, freely available documentation about the fundamentals of how web stacks work, what frameworks are, etc. These can be written even in the form of questions and answers, so that we highlight and answer the basic questions some people are afraid to ask (e.g. how does the Internet work at a deeper level in terms of the TCP/IP stack). I’m also a big believer in teaching the history of a subject, because I think that seeing the history of how a subject/approach evolved makes things seem much simpler, and removes the feeling that the people building the tools and abstractions we use were on some other mental  level (more often than not they were reacting to immediate questions/needs that emerged).

Now, it may be that I haven’t googled enough, but I think that there’s really not a lot of great documentation on some of the most basic concepts in web programming. At least they’re not compiled in a nicely presented format. I’ve taken time to sit with a few developers + designers recently to talk about this feeling, and also in some cases to also explain some of these core concepts to them. From those I talked to a bit, I can see that many shared this experience of having to sort of figure things out on your own. I can also already see that having some of those basic questions answered has had a big impact in terms of their confidence when programming, and their general sense that things are no longer mystical incantations (e.g. Rails Magic). They understand the tools they are using, and have a sense of how they were made - and this makes them feel empowered, it makes them feel like they can build their own tools too. The deeper you go, the more fearless, and confident you become.

I think a good learning curve for web developers may be something like:
1. Explain the basics of web-programming at a high level (e.g. how servers, browsers, and frameworks work)
2. Let people start using a framework like Rails, and explain to them how the pieces of Rails correspond to the overall framework concepts
3. As an exercise, then have them try to roll their own framework, server, etc. - just for educational purposes - to learn about the tradeoffs that are made, and to think deeply about what’s really going on.

This is the path I went down, and I feel I benefited from doing this … well except that we ended up using the framework I built in 3 in an actual production environment for The Shared Web (which maybe wasn’t the best idea, even though the site didn’t go down too often).

Having talked to a few people who have participated in Hacker School - it sounds like that’s the general approach they take too: immersing people in the code - and you can see the difference it makes when talking to people who come out of the program.  So it looks like some organizations are taking this approach. People become less afraid of going deep - and that’s a great thing.

One of the things I’d like to do in the coming months is to spend some time putting together some lessons on the basics of web stacks, and web frameworks. Here’s a few topics I think are important, and I’d love to hear if you guys have other suggestions, or things you wish people told you:

Figure out what a Web Framework is.
Understand the principles of Model-View-Controller.
Understand what a Web Server is.
Understand the different ways that routing can be done:
- At the server level, at the language level with a front-controller approach (etc.)
Understanding the idea of the client-server model in principle (e.g. many databases run as services).
Explaining the concepts of the HTTP protocol, APIs, REST,
How Source Control Systems Work and why we use them.
Shells, and Shell Scripting

(As a side note, I was talking to our Systems Director recently, and he was saying that the basic principles of how things work, and how to do things when it comes to data centers, and scaling sites is even less well documented - some documentation there would be great too.)

Looking forward to your feedback. Never delegate understanding, and dive in fearlessly.

Why Peter Theil is Half-Wrong

Peter Theil, cofounder of Pay Pal and current venture capitalist believes that innovation is currently stagnating across most fields except for computers. We’re making progress in the digital world, but stalling in the physical world - in the real world. In his own words:

“Whether we look at transportation, energy, commodity production, food production, agro-tech, nanotechnology — that with the exception of computers, we’ve had tremendous slowdown,”

The argument he makes is that certain movements such as environmentalism, increasing risk aversion, and government regulation have been the primary impediments to innovation:

“I believe we are in a world where innovation in stuff was outlawed. It was basically outlawed in the last 40 years — part of it was environmentalism, part of it was risk aversion,” he says. “And all the engineering disciplines that had to do with stuff have basically been outlawed one by one.”

In general, I agree with this perspective that government regulation is an obstacle to innovation in many fields: e.g. think healthcare, material engineering, financial sector, etc. But, I think that regulation is probably only a small part of the reason there is so much innovation in the realm of the digital, and so little in the realm of the physical. 

From an economic perspective, labor and capital is going to where there are the greatest returns - and the greatest value that we can obtain right now is collecting more information, organizing it, and making it easier to access. Imagine you were doing research before the Internet and the World Wide Web were developed - you wouldn’t have had easy, realtime access to the huge troves of research and new ideas appearing around the world (research papers, brief ideas expressed on twitter, ted talks). Just consider how much easier it is to obtain answers to any questions that you may have a whim to know the answers to. So, having seen the powerful transformation of information availability experienced over the last 20 years, and realizing that so much more can be done, at a macroeconomic level it seems to make sense that more time should be spent on building the information platform that will make research in all those other fields much easier. The benefits from organizing information and making it accessible trickle down to all fields, and I think that cross discipline benefit is actually the motive that is causing there to be more innovation in the digital realm than in the physical. Not to mention the power that is continuously gained from improved computing power, and algorithms, that allows analysis of ever lager models and data sets.

Now, there are questions about whether the type of innovation that has been happening on the Internet of late falls into this category. But, I think there’s no doubt that new data is being made available through applications like Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare that create new possibilities for the types of research that can be conducted. 

A country’s power (both economic and military) is to a large extent dictated by it’s ability to improve the accessibility, organization and transmission of information. The more efficient it’s informational capabilities, the more the engine of economic growth is revved up. Rich Barton, the founder of Expedia, Glassdoor, and Zillow, gave a talk during the Techstars program I participated in - and he said his goal is to democratize information and help people make decisions. All his businesses follow this thread, and so do his investment decisions seemingly. I think that’s a good frame for evaluating what companies are worth working on.