Siftables

Congratulations to JJK and DM for a listing in Engadget. Siftables certainly aren't ready for the prime time yet, but I do count myself among the set who thinks that more analog/physical means for manipulating digital information is both cool, useful, and has a market. Keep pushing...

You Can Pay Me Later: Hello, World!

Two ideas for you to steal and make:

An iPhone app where you can type in number, turn the phone upside down, and have them display like an old-school calculator with an LCD display. So, like MM says, you can pick up more nerdy girls. You can send me money for this whenever you like...

A contest for the best hack of an TI series graphing calculator. There must be in excess of several million of these floating around in the United States, for all the high school and college students who were required to buy these in the middle-90s. Are they still in use? And to be clear, the standard I am expecting would include augmented features like lasers or the ability to operate other, larger devices. Or time travel. The TI-85 was a pretty powerful package, as I recall.
And while I'm searching Flickr for photos of calculators, here is where I got my start. Little Perfesser, how I owe you...

Not Enough? Doerr on Green Tech

KPCB is a remarkable organization. They have been incredibly effective at identifying, investing in, and cultivating truly revolutionary ideas over the past 30 years. I have worked within the KPCB family, at a low enough level not to be noticed conspicuously, but at a high enough level to have some visibility into how Kleiner does things. Fundamentally, the ability of KPCB to marshal talent to create markets and solve problems through innovation in technologies and services has been impressive. And in the past few years, Kleiner's increasing attention on "green tech" and questions of long term environmental sustainability has been a positive development - even if a $200M net investment is, to steal John Doerr's reprise, "not enough." Not that I'm really knocking the investment and, heck yes, I'd love to be involved in another Kleiner company tackling green tech problems..

So I was very curious to hear what Mr. Doerr, the talisman of Kleiner's success in the last fifteen years, had to say about green technology and our looming environmental problems. Mostly, I'd suggest that you watch the video, as I think it speaks for itself - and the message is clear: while many actors, from Wal-mart in reducing its energy footprint to Brazil shifting to biofuels, have been able to successfully innovate to mitigate their environmental impact, the scale of change is simply not big enough yet. And I whole-heartedly agree with that basic analysis.

Beyond that, I do have some comments:

- Doerr identifies four agents of change ("four lessons") that can be influenced by entrepreneurs: Companies, Individuals (i.e., Consumers), Policies, and Radical Innovation. While I agree with his implicit commentary, that the efforts of any given influential individual (i.e., TED audience member) might be best targeted at a company, a government policy, or invested in innovation, and not targeted at changing consumer behavior, I think that Doerr, and most of the policy makers, innovators, technocrats, and academics give short shrift for the need to change the behaviors of individuals, and the need to address individuals directly through politics and cultural dialogue. I'll come back to this;

- Doerr frames the market opportunity of addressing the world's energy crisis as a $6 trillion dollar market. I agree. This market is huge. I also firmly believe that market forces, and disruptive innovation to meet market needs can radically change both the supply side economics of meeting a market need and the demand side behaviors in creating that need. What I do find curious, however, is framing the energy market as the market that needs to be satisfied to address the world's sustainability crisis (or put another way, isn't sustainability a much bigger question than a looming energy crisis)? Isn't energy always an input to other goods and services? Like transportation, primary industrial processes, commercial and residential electricity, etc. Don't we need to start thinking about how to fundamentally change the dynamics of those markets, not just focus on how to more efficiently solve the energy supply question?

- Selling a vision is a key part of what any entrepreneur must do, particularly entrepreneurs trying to market disruptive technologies. Do we have a coherent vision of what a sustainable future might look like? What kind of house will I live in? What kind of car will I drive? What will the place that I live in look like? I think some of the symbolic examples that are drawn forth in the current conversation on green tech are useful in selling this vision: electric vehicles, biofuels, carbon markets. But do we have a coherent vision of what a sustainable future might look like? And are we effectively communicating that vision?

- At the end of his speech, Doerr urges his audience with a few calls to actions, exhorting them to "really think outside the box." His suggestions are all good: make going green "your gig," get carbon neutral (and buy carbon credits), join other leaders in lobbying for cap-and-trade systems for greenhouse gases, use your personal power or rolodex to "go green."

But what about the potentially most seismic change: consume less?

Why is this meme never engaged by the business, political, and academic leaders who claim to be serious thinkers about the environment?

Personally, I don't think it is either a naive conversation to engage, nor one that necessarily a compromise in quality of life or achievement. There are abundant reasons to believe that a less materially-driven life and culture will not only improve our ability to change market dynamics and address the salvo of "not enough," but will actually improve our quality of life, as well. But if our business and political leaders refuse to engage in this conversation, then the core dynamic driving the demand side of our market equations, and the A in our good old IPAT formulation, that dynamic will never change.

Wanting Less, Needing More

I spent the weekend in Santa Clara, attending TIECon 2007. TIECon is the annual conference of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TIE), a global networking association primarily for technology entrepreneurs from the South Asian diaspora. Due largely to the success that Indian entrepreneurs (I'll use Indian as politically insensitive shorthand for South Asian) have had, and particularly in Silicon Valley, the conference was able to host panels and keynotes comprised of a who's who of Silicon Valley tech all-stars, including Marc Benioff of Salesforce.com, Vinod Khosla of KPCB and Khosla Ventures, Matt Cohler of Facebook.com, Meg Whitman of eBay, etc., etc.

While I wasn't able to attend the conference wire-to-wire, I did sit in on a number of keynotes and panels, mostly choosing to focus on mobile and alternative energy. Lots of interesting stuff I'll deep-dive into further in future posts.

Among the notable trends was the excitement and focus that the conference paid to opportunities in alternative technologies, including a keynote by Vinod Khosla touting biofuels and solar thermal arrays (see slides here) and a panel moderated by Ajit Nazre of KPCB in which a number of exciting green technologies were discussed, including representatives from NanoSolar, Amyris Biotechnologies, and Tesla Motors.

The panel was of particular interest to me, as it brought together five very prominent entrepreneurs who are actively trying to build successful companies in the alternative energy space. I was pleased to hear a well-moderated and very candid and thoughtful exchange which highlighted the difficulties of innovating in the clean tech space (due to long cycles of innovation vis-a-vis information technologies, up-front sunken investments in excess of $20-30M to get a business of the ground, and uncertainties in both technology innovation and the structure of the marketplace), the interplay between technology and entrepreneurial drivers of innovation and the important role of policy in helping to internalize external costs and create the transparent prices and costs in the market, and the passion and moral perspective that many of the entrepreneurs brought to their ventures, above and beyond their belief that an open market opportunity existed, on which they could capitalize.

All of this was very exciting to hear, but one consistent and vexing problem always remains unaddressed when business people discuss potential solutions to environmental concerns. The problem arises because innovation, either in core technologies or in business processes, when driven by entrepreneurs, requires a market in which demand, and strong demand, exists. Demand for their products, be they energy, new housing materials, alternative vehicles, or whatever, is necessary in order to create and sustain a market-driven engine for innovation.

And while this is not inherently bad, and in general, most likely an accurate reflection of a consumerist society, it fails to leave much of an opportunity for the idea that consuming may be a key factor in addressing environmental problems. Consuming less is not, in general, an outcome that is well-supported by markets, by capitalist systems, or by entrepreneurial societies. Consuming less then becomes an ethical question, relegated to academia and the fuzzy world of non-profits. The question that I am left with, then, is how to inject this thought into the entrepreneurial debate. Can it be a part of the conversation? And if so, at whom should the question of Should we consume less? be aimed?

Would be interested if any other folks had thoughts on this, and I will try to uncover some better examples of how the ethic of consuming modestly has been injected into commercial discussions successfully. Until then, the best I can leave you with is Bill McDonough's excellent Cradle to Cradle, which should be read by all business students, in my opinion.