18 ms·

It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really rea

by cateye 9y ago

It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? Or how many Alan Key's are out there that completely failed and would prescribe a totally different approach and attribute the cause and effect on other factors? I also totally get the point of funding problem finding versus funding business plans that are full of bullshit and pretend to have a risk free solution with a play book that just needs some money to execute it linearly step-by-step. So, for that part it is written very well and the point is clear. Another topic is: would all kind of innovations really emerge if the funding mechanism was radically different in the last 20 years? Would we see all kinds of big leaps or was ARPA-Parc just a serendipity moment that couldn't be repeated no matter what the funding structure was?

api 9y ago
On your second point -- namely why does Juicero get funded and qualitative innovation doesn't -- I think it comes down to the still very real weight given to subjective alpha-primate-ness in business decision making. On two occasions I've had VC types (in one case post-beer) tell me they almost never fund anyone who doesn't have (paraphrasing) "presence" or "a reality distortion field" etc. I would have assumed it to be subconscious but these comments convinced me that it's a conscious explicit bias in at least some cases. This is a really outstanding book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can%27t_Stop_Talking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts... Put enough weaponized extroversion and alpha primate signaling behind it and you can get people to invest in millions in absolute BS. You can also over-inflate the value of something real to stratospheric degrees. See also: Uber. On the other hand if you have an underspoken introvert try to sell something outstanding, the majority of businesspeople will not pay attention. I have seen a case where a meek soft-spoken woman tried to pitch a mobile startup with outstanding user base growth, revenue, and cash efficiency numbers and got yawns. She wasn't asking for much. This was seed stage stuff and these were crazy amazing numbers. In the same pitch fest the investor panel perked up for a number of vapid pre-revenue proposals backed by more extroverted alpha personalities. I don't think it was just sexism since one of these was also a woman. (I suspect some sexism is actually this bias since it may be tougher for women to play the alpha primate card with men.) Most innovators ("artists") are more on the introvert end of the spectrum. Edit: this may be rational for funding things that rely heavily on in-person salesmanship, but it's applied broadly. Edit #2: another reason this may be rational for VCs is that they are only thinking about their cash-out. They may be looking for people who can pump the value of the company's stock to later investors more than people who can actually deliver lasting value. The company's product is its stock, not its product.
- Joboman555 9y ago
  If you think that companies by introverts are undervalued, a ton of money could be made exploiting this trend.
  - api 9y ago
    I'd do it if I were rich-- I'd look for companies with: (1) Breakthrough technologies and/or amazing numbers. (2) Introverted founders passed over by other investors. (3) A sales process that is not in-person where being introverted, understated, or shy is not a major handicap. Companies with mostly inbound, viral, indirect, or automated sales processes or that can outsource sales easily would work.
    - afarrell 9y ago
      Re #2 What tools could you use to decrease the friction caused because introversion makes a founder harder to find?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
BaronSamedi 9y ago
I think Parc was a unique "a serendipity moment". These Cambrian Explosion type moments happen frequently in history: high creativity in which a new form is developed, followed by an increasing focus on small incremental improvements, and finally stagnation. The amount of potential a new form has determines how long this process takes. I believe that for workstation/desktop computing we have already hit stagnation. I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990. By this perhaps surprising claim, I mean that the languages available today are no more capable than those available in the 1980s.
- jackmott 9y ago
  > I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990 I would have said not much since 1970? 1950? What big new things have their been?
- vidarh 9y ago
  Reading books about the evolution of computing from different angles, it quickly becomes clear 1) how few ideas are original and/or how few are big leaps vs. incremental steps that tends to occur multiple places at once even in the beginning; e.g. the number of internal projects that would have been "close enough" that were cancelled because competitors beat them by mere months. 2) how much innovation gets stomped into the ground because of ridiculous reasons such as corporate politics. While there certainly are amazing people doing amazing things that deserve recognition, it seems increasingly clear to me that if any of them weren't there, the space would have been filled, and quickly. Maybe in different ways and things wouldn't be the same, but history is so full of independent near-simultaneous invention of practically the same things that it seems that a lot of ideas end up being realized not because of some unique intellect, but because their time has come, and the best these people can do is speed it up a bit. Marketing and adoption is a different issue - I think William Gibson got it right: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." A lot of the challenge of innovation is not the innovation itself, but getting the knowledge to filter out there. Arguably, it's first the last decade or so that languages like Lisp and Smalltalk has won people over - not by themselves, but by the success of an increasing array of languages created by people who were inspired by them that themselves have taken years to get traction. And even then there are so many low hanging fruit that has not seen traction because, frankly, people are busy, and the amazing stuff often isn't the work most likely to pay the bills then and there.
coldtea 9y ago
>It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? That's not a problem I see, because this is not about Alan Kay's personal track record. The kind of organizational freedom he describes was available in Park and Bell Labs, and it wasn't just Kay, but tens of people, one after another creating the most important technologies, while it was on.
- david927 9y ago
  > appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? First, that's not what appeal to authority means. It doesn't mean, "Don't be interested in what Einstein thought," for example. Second, ironically, the big problem in our industry is that no one ever listens to those who have gone before. It's Alan Kay, not Alan Key. We reinvent technology, package it with a new logo, give it a new name, and run into the same problems as before, until someone comes up with a new technology to replace it, which is the same technology again, ad infinitum. You really need to listen to authority, because, frankly your software sucks. How do I know? Because all software sucks. Alan Kay, not Key, is one of the few people who understand that and understand what kind of creativity might lead us out of this mess. We should all be interested in what he's saying.
- vajrabum 9y ago
  And most tellingly the innovations at Bell Labs didn't just arise in computing--the transistor, the solar cell, information theory, statistical process control, the laser, the cell phone, and the discovery of cosmic background radiation are some examples. What Alan Kay is talking about is literally a cornucopia. Long term scientific research directed by scientists works.
  - vajrabum 9y ago
    Oh in a different field don't forget 3M.
bambax 9y ago
Yes. This is really funny: > I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. (etc.) however it's really hard to argue that Apple, Microsoft, or indeed IBM or Disney ever killed the geese that lay the golden eggs. Or if they did, they had plenty others running around.
- tzahola 9y ago
  Except when Apple forced Jobs to step down in the 90s.
- Pulcinella 9y ago
  Eh Disney came closer than they would have liked during the second half of the Eisner era. They released some bombs (e.g. Treasure Planet) and the quality of the parks was decreasing because of Eisner’s cost cutting.
- rbultje 9y ago
  > however it's really hard to argue that Apple, Microsoft, or indeed IBM or Disney ever killed the geese that lay the golden eggs. In this context, you're not talking about the geese, but about the eggs. For example, for Apple, one such golden egg is the iPhone, and what Kay talks about is how there are many capable people to turn this golden egg (invention) into coins or platinum (product => shareholder value). But the geese are not the products; the geese are the inventors. Jobs turned the failing Apple around from outside its own context. Microsoft missed out on the entire phone eco-system. Lots of people would attribute these long-term business fails to exactly what Kay talks about here.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Jobs gutted Apples version of PARC when he came back, yet somehow it kick-started Apples greatest ever period of innovation.
    - 9y ago

by cateye 9y ago

api 9y ago

On your second point -- namely why does Juicero get funded and qualitative innovation doesn't -- I think it comes down to the still very real weight given to subjective alpha-primate-ness in business decision making. On two occasions I've had VC types (in one case post-beer) tell me they almost never fund anyone who doesn't have (paraphrasing) "presence" or "a reality distortion field" etc. I would have assumed it to be subconscious but these comments convinced me that it's a conscious explicit bias in at least some cases. This is a really outstanding book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts_in_a_World_That_Can%27t_Stop_Talking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet:_The_Power_of_Introverts... Put enough weaponized extroversion and alpha primate signaling behind it and you can get people to invest in millions in absolute BS. You can also over-inflate the value of something real to stratospheric degrees. See also: Uber. On the other hand if you have an underspoken introvert try to sell something outstanding, the majority of businesspeople will not pay attention. I have seen a case where a meek soft-spoken woman tried to pitch a mobile startup with outstanding user base growth, revenue, and cash efficiency numbers and got yawns. She wasn't asking for much. This was seed stage stuff and these were crazy amazing numbers. In the same pitch fest the investor panel perked up for a number of vapid pre-revenue proposals backed by more extroverted alpha personalities. I don't think it was just sexism since one of these was also a woman. (I suspect some sexism is actually this bias since it may be tougher for women to play the alpha primate card with men.) Most innovators ("artists") are more on the introvert end of the spectrum. Edit: this may be rational for funding things that rely heavily on in-person salesmanship, but it's applied broadly. Edit #2: another reason this may be rational for VCs is that they are only thinking about their cash-out. They may be looking for people who can pump the value of the company's stock to later investors more than people who can actually deliver lasting value. The company's product is its stock, not its product.

Joboman555 9y ago
If you think that companies by introverts are undervalued, a ton of money could be made exploiting this trend.
- api 9y ago
  I'd do it if I were rich-- I'd look for companies with: (1) Breakthrough technologies and/or amazing numbers. (2) Introverted founders passed over by other investors. (3) A sales process that is not in-person where being introverted, understated, or shy is not a major handicap. Companies with mostly inbound, viral, indirect, or automated sales processes or that can outsource sales easily would work.
  - afarrell 9y ago
    Re #2 What tools could you use to decrease the friction caused because introversion makes a founder harder to find?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]

BaronSamedi 9y ago

I think Parc was a unique "a serendipity moment". These Cambrian Explosion type moments happen frequently in history: high creativity in which a new form is developed, followed by an increasing focus on small incremental improvements, and finally stagnation. The amount of potential a new form has determines how long this process takes. I believe that for workstation/desktop computing we have already hit stagnation. I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990. By this perhaps surprising claim, I mean that the languages available today are no more capable than those available in the 1980s.

jackmott 9y ago
> I also suspect that programming languages have not advanced in any significant way since around 1990 I would have said not much since 1970? 1950? What big new things have their been?
vidarh 9y ago
Reading books about the evolution of computing from different angles, it quickly becomes clear 1) how few ideas are original and/or how few are big leaps vs. incremental steps that tends to occur multiple places at once even in the beginning; e.g. the number of internal projects that would have been "close enough" that were cancelled because competitors beat them by mere months. 2) how much innovation gets stomped into the ground because of ridiculous reasons such as corporate politics. While there certainly are amazing people doing amazing things that deserve recognition, it seems increasingly clear to me that if any of them weren't there, the space would have been filled, and quickly. Maybe in different ways and things wouldn't be the same, but history is so full of independent near-simultaneous invention of practically the same things that it seems that a lot of ideas end up being realized not because of some unique intellect, but because their time has come, and the best these people can do is speed it up a bit. Marketing and adoption is a different issue - I think William Gibson got it right: "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." A lot of the challenge of innovation is not the innovation itself, but getting the knowledge to filter out there. Arguably, it's first the last decade or so that languages like Lisp and Smalltalk has won people over - not by themselves, but by the success of an increasing array of languages created by people who were inspired by them that themselves have taken years to get traction. And even then there are so many low hanging fruit that has not seen traction because, frankly, people are busy, and the amazing stuff often isn't the work most likely to pay the bills then and there.

coldtea 9y ago

>It is a very difficult narrative. Mainly because while reading it, I had to think constantly about survivorship bias and appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? That's not a problem I see, because this is not about Alan Kay's personal track record. The kind of organizational freedom he describes was available in Park and Bell Labs, and it wasn't just Kay, but tens of people, one after another creating the most important technologies, while it was on.

david927 9y ago
> appeal to authority. Would I really read this if it was written by a 20 year old without a track record? First, that's not what appeal to authority means. It doesn't mean, "Don't be interested in what Einstein thought," for example. Second, ironically, the big problem in our industry is that no one ever listens to those who have gone before. It's Alan Kay, not Alan Key. We reinvent technology, package it with a new logo, give it a new name, and run into the same problems as before, until someone comes up with a new technology to replace it, which is the same technology again, ad infinitum. You really need to listen to authority, because, frankly your software sucks. How do I know? Because all software sucks. Alan Kay, not Key, is one of the few people who understand that and understand what kind of creativity might lead us out of this mess. We should all be interested in what he's saying.
vajrabum 9y ago
And most tellingly the innovations at Bell Labs didn't just arise in computing--the transistor, the solar cell, information theory, statistical process control, the laser, the cell phone, and the discovery of cosmic background radiation are some examples. What Alan Kay is talking about is literally a cornucopia. Long term scientific research directed by scientists works.
- vajrabum 9y ago
  Oh in a different field don't forget 3M.

bambax 9y ago

Yes. This is really funny: > I once gave a talk to Disney executives about "new ways to kill the geese that lay the golden eggs". For example, set up deadlines and quotas for the eggs. Make the geese into managers. Make the geese go to meetings to justify their diet and day to day processes. (etc.) however it's really hard to argue that Apple, Microsoft, or indeed IBM or Disney ever killed the geese that lay the golden eggs. Or if they did, they had plenty others running around.

tzahola 9y ago
Except when Apple forced Jobs to step down in the 90s.
Pulcinella 9y ago
Eh Disney came closer than they would have liked during the second half of the Eisner era. They released some bombs (e.g. Treasure Planet) and the quality of the parks was decreasing because of Eisner’s cost cutting.
rbultje 9y ago
> however it's really hard to argue that Apple, Microsoft, or indeed IBM or Disney ever killed the geese that lay the golden eggs. In this context, you're not talking about the geese, but about the eggs. For example, for Apple, one such golden egg is the iPhone, and what Kay talks about is how there are many capable people to turn this golden egg (invention) into coins or platinum (product => shareholder value). But the geese are not the products; the geese are the inventors. Jobs turned the failing Apple around from outside its own context. Microsoft missed out on the entire phone eco-system. Lots of people would attribute these long-term business fails to exactly what Kay talks about here.
- valuearb 9y ago
  Jobs gutted Apples version of PARC when he came back, yet somehow it kick-started Apples greatest ever period of innovation.
  - 9y ago