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Technology
Suppose, just for a moment, just for argumentsake, that (some) cryptocurrencies are not a giant scam, and whatmore, they&re not just another kind of financial asset. Come on. Don&t look at me like that. Work with me here. Imagine, just for a moment, that there exist plausible futures in which they matter.
An interesting question to ask is: what exactly do those futures look like Because if we can&t come up with any compelling answers, then we may conclude, by reductio ad absurdum, that a cryptofuture is awfully unlikely. So letwalk through a few scenarios, shall we And then judge how likely each one is.
1. The Crypto Maximalist Future
Situation: Bitcoin is the global currency. Except for &System D,& of course, and transactions hidden for reasons of tax avoidance, which run on ZCash, which is (ineffectively) banned by governments who fear the loss of their tax revenue from earned income hidden by zk-SNARKs. All retail transactions run through Lightning hubs, constantly watched and verified by AIs.
People maintain their own private keys, without which all of their life savings effectively vanish. These keys also maintain all of their own personal data, which they approve for usage by dapps on the Ethereum &world computer,& which performs billions of transactions per second courtesy of Plasma and (again) AIs monitoring the system with fraud proofs at the ready.
Fiat currencies died of hyperinflation. Banks died with them. Nation-states are on life support., and the new generation prefers statelessness to any citizenship. The world is increasingly controlled by a weird combination of libertarian Bitcoin seasteaders and communal Ethereum hacker collectives, who name themselves &phyles& after Neal StephensonThe Diamond Age, but call this The Crypto Age.
Likelihood: essentially nil, for many, many reasons, such as: The overwhelming majority of people don&t want to maintain their own private keys, and if you don&t maintain your own private keys, cryptocurrencies are essentially no different from fiat money held in banks, except for the many ways (such as the irrevocability of transactions) in which they are wildly inferior. Credit and cryptocurrencies play poorly together. Most people want strong governments, and strong governments want to control their own currencies, meaning, with only one small logical remove, that most people want fiat currencies. Deflation is actually bad. Etcetera etcetera etcetera etcetera etcetera. I mean come on people.
2. The Wall Street Crypto Future
Situation: Ordinary people don&t use cryptocurrencies. Why would they But the financial world has gone full crypto; you always go full crypto. Stocks live only on the Ethereum blockchain. Bonds, too. Anyone who can qualify for a &security token& — a proof of your identity and valid investordom — can trade any stock, and any bond, in any market, from any country, anywhere in the world, in near real time, without asking for permission. Mostly via fully decentralized exchanges, though in certain markets centralized ones still have their advantages. Few people do it directly, though; their stock AIdvisors handle it for them.
Bitcoin is the global settlement and reserve currency; nobody cares about gold any more. Your credit card may be charged in dollars but that money is promptly converted to Bitcoin, and some satoshis are sent to the card issuer and the merchant bank (in a single transaction) before being converted back to dollars and sent to the vendor — the Lightning fees are so tiny, courtesy of the volume being so immense, that this is cheaper than the alternative. Ordinary people still don&t even know what Lightning is but the payment channels which connect banks, both within and between nations, pulse with hundreds of millions of dollars every single day.
Likelihood: slim to none. I personally see the irrevocability of crypto transactions, and the awkward &how do you provide cryptocurrency credit& issues as twin dealbreakers here — but I&m an engineer not a financier, so you could maybe persuade me that I&m wrong. We can at least see some of the advantages of cryptocurrencies here; why squander fortunes on running and maintaining hundreds to thousands of various financial databases and messaging buses around the world, when in theory we could have … well … one
3. The Dapper Dapp Future
Situation: Financially, cryptocurrencies are just an asset class and a counterculture, but tokenized &fat protocols& powering decentralized apps have conquered the Internet. Facebook, Twitter, and increasingly even Google have been replaced by vast peer-to-peer networks in which processing and data are coordinated and optimized in real time by token transfers orchestrated by AI proxies. The rules of these systems are determined by frequent votes, which, again, are tokenized.
All of your personal data is packetized in many redundant tranches scattered across the Internet, protected by your private key(s) and various aspects of it are made available to services that wish to use it only as and when you or your proxies approve that access. You are rewarded with tokens for this access, which can then spend on other services. You maintain a portfolio of hundreds, sometimes thousands, of different kinds of tokens, and your AI proxy frequently trades between them so as to optimize this portfolio for your behavior.
Similar tokenized protocol infrastructures are beginning to creep offline and to organize meatspace projects, too, ranging from hardware development to massive-scale art collectives to urban planning and the transformation of entire cities. Token economics increasingly govern all of human behavior.
Likelihood: Yeah I don&t think so. I concede that in its way itan inspiring notion, but: most people want and like centralized solutions, which give them an authority to complain to, and to introduce and enforce rules, without having to vote on every single administrative detail of every network they connect to. (California ballot propositions are bad enough; imagine having to deal with their equivalent every day.) Dapps are by their very nature more complex, more fragile, and harder/slower to evolve than capps. (Imagine having to fork every time a feature changes. Now imagine some of those being hard forks.) Rewards to decentralized users are trivial — Facebook makes maybe $10/user/quarter, which is, to understate, not enough reward for the hassle of decentralization. Centralized solutions also have the advantages of things like &economies of scale& and &data centers which are more efficient than personal computers& and &databases which are vastly more efficient than blockchains.& And nobody wants to have to keep track of a portfolio of hundreds of different kinds of tokens no matter how useful their AI assistant may become.
4. The Global Crypto South Future
Situation: North America and Europe still use dollars and euros. Wall Street still uses its own systems, though it dabbles some in crypto assets. Facebook still rules the social media of the wealthy world. Cryptocurrencies are an afterthought, a curiosity, a fringe investment.
But the global South is different. Venezuela and Zimbabwe were the first to replace their currencies with cryptocurrencies that literally cannot hyperinflate. (I.e. a real cryptocurrency, not Venezualawhat-even-is-that recent grotesquerie) Others soon followed; it was an easy and natural evolution from M-Pesa, Orange Money, and the like. There were some catastrophic failures in the early days, eg the BGP attack that took out most of the miners / validators of the Ethiopian cryptobirr and enabled a successful 51% attack that made a few hackers very wealthy at the expense of Addis Ababatreasury, but a few hard forks and version 2.0s later, stable prosperity was achieved.
The local stock and bond markets followed. As did the local Internet, where bandwidth costs far greater than those of the USA, plus the relatively greater size of potential dapp rewards, led to efficient local dapps, mostly using national cryptocurrencies (which can be traded for one another in real time on a vast decentralized exchange of atomic cross-chain payment channels), which have all but replaced centralized Western local services. Nowadays when Zimbabweans visit London and New York they&re taken aback by how backward those legacy financial systems seem.
Likelihood: I&m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this is actually plausible. Not likely, necessarily, but plausible. In New York and London and Toronto and Paris, deflationary cryptocurrencies and real-time cross-country payment channels are basically solutions looking for a problem; I&d rather just use any one of my several no-international-usage-fees credit cards in Paris, and get the bonus miles / points, the ability to contest and reverse charges, the credit float, the extended warranty and other card bonuses, etc., rather than transact with the &global currency& Bitcoin over a Lightning payment channel, as cool as that sounds. But when you don&t have the mature, rewards-laden international payment system to hand, when you&re treated as suspicious and denied credit just because you&re from the most populous country in Africa, when your national currencyinflation rate crosses double digits heading for triple … then, suddenly, the calculation looks very different indeed.
5. The Crypto Counterculture Future
Situation: Bitcoin did not conquer. Ethereum did not conquer. Tezos did not, EOS did not, Hashgraph did not. People around the world use credit cards, US dollars, euros, reals, yuan, etc., just as they always did. Wall Street might use some private / permissioned blockchains, as may some supply-chain enterprises, but their effect consists of an uptick in enterprise efficiency and a decrease in some costs, not the global revolution we were promised.
…That is, for 98% of the population. 2% however, are different. Maybe because they&re libertarians who mistrust the government, or hackers fascinated by the technology, or because they believe in the prospect of a better world. They&re willing to go through the struggle of dealing with private keys, funding payment channels, acquiring tokens to set up and pay for dapps and federate their data, and so forth. Only 2% of the population. But worldwide, that means 140 million people.
Only 140 million people use uncensorable, independent, decentralized social media. But thata big enough number that it means censorship doesn&t really fly on centralized media, either, because it can be transposed to the decentralized alternative. Only 140 million use cryptocurrencies for their day-to-day expenses and long-term savings. But thata big enough alternative to keep national currencies honest, because they know that if they start to degrade, a viable alternative already exists, and if the pain of centralized fiat money grows great enough, people can and will move to that alternative. Only 140 million people use permissionless systems; but thatenough that if you get locked out of or kicked out of your nationpermissioned infrastructure, therean alternative that you can adopt without your life being entirely ruined.
In short, only 2% of the population use cryptocurrencies … but that 2% performs an enormous service for the other 98%, by keeping censors, and governments, and central banks, honest. Providing a viable decentralized alternative, in and of itself, mitigates many of the flaws of centralized systems. It could be, actually, the best of both worlds.
Likelihood: Call me an optimist, but I think this is the most likely outcome of all.
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Write comment (98 Comments)Every once in a while, a college student or recent graduate dares to launch a robotics startup and . . . everything goes as well as could be expected. Such is the case, for example, with Alex Rodrigues and Brandon Moak, two former University of Waterloo students who worked on self-driving technologies together in college and formed their now venture-backed, self-driving truck company, Embark, instead of graduating. (Originally called Varden Labs, the startup’s trip through Y Combinator undoubtedly helped.)
Still, to capture the sustained interest of robotics investors, it helps to either have experience in a particular industry or to pull in someone, quickly, who does. That much was established yesterday at UC Berkeley, when three veteran investors — Renata Quintini of Lux Capital, Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, and Chris Evdemon of Sinovation Ventures — took the stage of a packed Zellerbach Hall to talk about where they’ve invested previously, and where they are shopping now.
Though the three expressed interest in a wide range of technologies and plenty of optimism about what’s to come, each lingered a bit on one point in particular, which was the difficulty robotics founders face who are completely unfamiliar with the particular industry they may hope to reshape with their innovation.
Quintini on how comfortable she and her colleagues at Lux are when it comes to backing recent college graduates:
What we care the most about what is your unique insight and what do you know about tackling a certain market or problem that’s not obvious or easy to replicate. In some cases, it’s very fair for someone right out of university who finds a technological breakthrough and . . . that breakthrough alone is understandable and comprehensible to the market and it’s a very backable company, and we’ve done that in the past.
But in some cases, and you’ve heard today, [CEO] Patrick [Sobalvarro] from Veo Robotics speak — and [Veo is] actually giving robotic arms perception sensors to allow people and robots to work together — all his insights came because he came from industry. He was at Rethink Robotics; he’s been in the robotics industry, selling to people who use robots as part of the manufacturing process. And so he actually understands the importance of safety and the selling of those systems to customers. Because he knew that, it made a big difference in how he approaches his go-to-market strategy and how he approaches building a product. And somebody who’s just thinking about, ‘Oh, let me figure out the technology and how to understand when a human is close or not’ and who didn’t think about the other angle wouldn’t be so successful or differentiated in our opinion.
Coneybeer sounded a similar tone. In fact, when asked if he felt there were other overlooked opportunities like that identified by Veo — which is refitting existing robotic arms, rather than trying to remake them from scratch — Coneybeer said the most attractive thing of all to him are startups in search of a problem that actually exists:
What we’re very cognizant of is people who love robots and are trying to invent a market or invent a need and kind of force fit it, as opposed to people who understand a need and are using robotics as a tool to truly solve that need. That’s a really key differentiator.
We directed an entirely different question to Evdemon, about how Sinovation thinks about domestic versus industrial robots and whether it expects to commit more capital to one or the other. But Evdemon first took the time to note that the problem of founders who don’t know their industries is a very big one, and deserved more discussion:
Chiming in to what Renata and Rob were saying, you understated [the issue]. The majority of the teams that we are looking on both the consumer and industrial robot [worlds] at the moment are more of a technology trying to find a fit in the market, and that’s obviously a very big problem from a venture point of view.
We also see a lot of teams that are fresh out of school, usually a supervising professor with a couple of his or her PhD students having come across some kind of technological breakthrough in university and trying to commercialize that. But robotics are all about what sectors they are being applied to. An ag tech team that knows nothing about agriculture, or a security robot that has a team that’s come up with a great computer vision breakthrough around security issues but that has no idea how the security industry in the U.S. or other parts of the world is structured, is obviously not a good starting point — at least not from a business-minded point of view.
And all of these companies run across tremendous difficulty when it comes to sales. Complementary of teams and market fit [both, are] important for [students] who are thinking about such a move straight out of school.
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Write comment (100 Comments)There isn&t a software company out there worth its salt that doesn&t have some kind of artificial intelligence initiative in progress right now. These organizations understand that AI is going to be a game-changer, even if they might not have a full understanding of how thatgoing to work just yet.
In March at the Adobe Summit, I sat down with Adobeexecutive vice president and CTO Abhay Parasnis, and talked about a range of subjects with him including the companygoal to build a cloud platform for the next decade — and how AI is a big part of that.
Parasnis told me that he has a broad set of responsibilities starting with the typical CTO role of setting the tone for the companytechnology strategy, but it doesn&t stop there by any means. He also is in charge of operational execution for the core cloud platform and all the engineering building out the platform — including AI and Sensei. That includes managing a multi-thousand person engineering team. Finally, hein charge of all the digital infrastructure and the IT organization — just a bit on his plate.
Ten years down the road
The companytransition from selling boxed software to a subscription-based cloud companybegan in 2013, long before Parasnis came on board. It has been a highly successful one, but Adobe knew it would take more than simply shedding boxed software to survive long-term. When Parasnis arrived, the next step was to rearchitect the base platform in a way that was flexible enough to last for at least a decade — yes, a decade.
&When we first started thinking about the next generation platform, we had to think about what do we want to build for. Ita massive lift and we have to architect to last a decade,& he said. Therea huge challenge because so much can change over time, especially right now when technology is shifting so rapidly.
That meant that they had to build in flexibility to allow for these kinds of changes over time, maybe even ones they can&t anticipate just yet. The company certainly sees immersive technology like AR and VR, as well as voice as something they need to start thinking about as a future bet — and their base platform had to be adaptable enough to support that.
Making Sensei of it all
But Adobe also needed to get its ducks in a row around AI. Thatwhy around 18 months ago, the company made another strategic decision to develop AI as a core part of the new platform. They saw a lot of companies looking at a more general AI for developers, but they had a different vision, one tightly focussed on Adobecore functionality. Parasnis sees this as the key part of the companycloud platform strategy. &AI will be the single most transformational force in technology,& he said, adding that Sensei is by far the thing he is spending the most time on.&
Photo: Ron Miller
The company began thinking about the new cloud platform with the larger artificial intelligence goal in mind, building AI-fueled algorithms to handle core platform functionality. Once they refined them for use in-house, the next step was to open up these algorithms to third-party developers to build their own applications using AdobeAI tools.
Itactually a classic software platform play, whether the service involves AI or not. Every cloud company from Box to Salesforce has been exposing their services for years, letting developers take advantage of their expertise so they can concentrate on their core knowledge. They don&t have to worry about building something like storage or security from scratch because they can grab those features from a platform that has built-in expertise and provides a way to easily incorporate it into applications.
The difference here is that it involves Adobecore functions, so it may be intelligent auto cropping and smart tagging in Adobe Experience Manager or AI-fueled visual stock search in Creative Cloud. These are features that are essential to the Adobe software experience, which the company is packaging as an API and delivering to developers to use in their own software.
Whether or not Sensei can be the technology that drives the Adobe cloud platform for the next 10 years, Parasnis and the company at large are very much committed to that vision. We should see more announcements from Adobe in the coming months and years as they build more AI-powered algorithms into the platform and expose them to developers for use in their own software.
Parasnis certainly recognizes this as an ongoing process. &We still have a lot of work to do, but we are off in an extremely good architectural direction, and AI will be a crucial part,& he said.
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Write comment (96 Comments)There is no degree required to be a CEO of a venture-backed company. But it likely helps to graduate from Harvard, Stanford or one of about a dozen other prominent universities that churn out a high number of top startup executives.
That is the central conclusion from our latest graduation season data crunch. For this exercise,Crunchbase Newstook a look at top U.S. university affiliations for CEOs of startups that raised $1 million or more in the past year.
In many ways, the findings weren&t too different from what we unearthed almost a year ago, looking at theuniversity backgrounds of funded startup founders. However, there were a few twists. Here are some key findings:
Harvard fares better in its rivalry with Stanford when it comes to educating future CEOs than founders. The two universities essentially tied for first place in the CEO alum ranking. (Stanford was well ahead for founders.)
Business schools are big. While MBA programs may be seeingfewer applicants, the degree remains quite popular among startup CEOs. At Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, more than half of the CEOs on our list graduated as business school alum.
University affiliation is influential but not determinative for CEOs. The 20 schools featured on our list graduated CEOs of more than 800 global startups that raised $1M or more in roughly the past year, a minority of the total. Below, we flesh out the findings in more detail.
Where startup CEOs went to school
First, letstart with school rankings. There aren&t many big surprises here. Harvard and Stanford far outpace any other institutions on the CEO list. Each counts close to 150 known alum among chief executives of startups that raised $1 million or more over the past year.
MIT, University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia round out the top five. Ivy League schools and large research universities constitute most of the remaining institutions on our list of about twenty with a strong track record for graduating CEOs. The numbers are laid out in the chart below:
Traditional MBA popular with startup CEOs
Yes, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard. And Steve Jobs ditched college after a semester. But they are the exceptions in CEO-land.
The typical path for the leader of a venture-backed company is a bit more staid. Degrees from prestigious universities abound. And MBA degrees, particularly from top-ranked programs, are a pretty popular credential.
Top business schools enroll only a small percentage of students at their respective universities. However, these institutions produce a disproportionately large share of CEOs. Wharton School of Business degrees, for instance, accounted for the majority of CEO alumni from the University of Pennsylvania . Harvard Business School also graduated more than half of the Harvard-affiliated CEOs. And at NorthwesternKellogg School of Management, the share was nearly half.
CEO alumni background is really quite varied
While the educational backgrounds of startup CEOs do show a lot of overlap, there is also plenty of room for variance. About 3,000 U.S. startups and nearly 5,000 global startups with listed CEOs raised $1 million or more since last May. In both cases, those startups were largely led by people who didn&t attend a school on the list above.
Admittedly, the math for this is a bit fuzzy. A big chunk of CEO profiles in Crunchbase (probably more than a third) don&t include a university affiliation. Even taking this into account, however, it looks like more than half of the U.S. CEOs were not graduates of schools on the short list. Meanwhile, for non-U.S. CEOs, only a small number attended a school on the list.
So, with that, some words of inspiration for graduates: If your goal is to be a funded startup CEO, the surest path is probably to launch a startup. Degrees matter, but they&re not determinative.
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A little more than three years ago,Apple announceda new MacBook with a &butterfly& keyboard that was 40 percent thinner and ostensibly four times more stable than the previous &scissor& mechanism that MacBooks employed.
The promise was to more evenly distribute pressure on each key. Not everyone loved this &reinvention,& however, and now, Apple is facing a class action lawsuit over it.
According to a complaint lodged in the Northern District Court of California yesterday and first spied by the folks over at AppleInsider,&thousands& of MacBook and MacBook Pro laptops produced in 2015 and 2016 experienced failure owing to dust or debris that rendered the machines useless. The complaint further alleges that Apple &continues to fail to disclose to consumers that the MacBook is defective, including when consumers bring their failed laptops into the ‘Genius Bar& (the in-store support desk) at Apple stores to request technical support.&
It just not a lack of disclosures thatproblematic, the suit continues. Customers who think the issue will be covered by their warranties are sometimes in for an unpleasant surprise. As stated in the filing: &Although every MacBook comes with a one-year written warranty, Apple routinely refuses to honor its warranty obligations. Instead of fixing the keyboard problems, Apple advises MacBook owners to try self-help remedies that it knows will not result in a permanent repair. When Apple does agree to attempt a warranty repair, the repair is only temporary—a purportedly repaired MacBook fails again from the same keyboard problems. For consumers outside of the warranty period, Apple denies warranty service, and directs consumers to engage in paid repairs, which cost between $400 and $700. Thekeyboard defect in the MacBook is substantially certain to manifest.&
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two users, ZIxuan Rao and Kyle Barbaro, and more broadly &on behalf of all others similarly situated.& It was brought by Girard Gibbs, a San Francisco-based law firm that has battled with Apple numerous times in the past, including filing a class-action suit centered on the iPod&diminishing battery capacity.& (Apple appears to have settled that one.)
We&ve reached out to Apple for comment.
Interestingly, AppleInsider appears to have provided the fodder for this new lawsuit, or some of it at least. Last month, the outlet reported findings of its own separate investigation into the problem after hearing enough anecdotes to support a deep dive. It says that after collecting service data for the first year of release for the 2014, 2015, and 2016 MacBook Pros, it concluded that — excluding Touch Bar failures — the 2016 MacBook Pro keyboard has been failing its users twice as often in the first year of use as the 2014 or 2015 MacBook Pro models.
AppleInsider says it collected its data from &assorted Apple Genius Bars in the U.S.& that it has worked with for several years, as well as Apple-authorized third-party repair shops.
The investigation clearly resonated with MacBook owners, because soon after, more than 17,000 people signed a Change.org petition demanding that Apple recall all MacBooks with butterfly switch keyboards.
That petition — which cites among others the highly regarded writer and UI designer John Gruber, who has called the keyboard &one of the biggest design screwups in Apple history& — continues to gain steam, fueled possibly by news of the lawsuit. As of this writing, roughly 18,000 people have provided their signature.
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The Gillmor Gang — Doc Searls, Frank Radice, Esteban Kolsky, Michael Markman, and Steve Gillmor . Recorded live Friday, May 11, 2018. Audio networks, a new Beatles, and other digital cliffhangers
@stevegillmor, @dsearls, @fradice, @mickeleh, @ekolsky
Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor
Liner Notes
Live chat stream
The Gillmor Gang on Facebook
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