Tim O'Reilly discusses lessons learned from startups like Square, Uber, and the Google autonomous vehicle project. The key lessons are:
1) Do less by leveraging sensors and existing data to streamline workflows
2) Get creative with hardware as well as software
3) Build systems that connect different devices and leverage network effects of aggregated user data
4) Rethink workflows and experiences through human-machine symbiosis like augmented retail workers
5) Create value for stakeholders beyond just shareholders to build a prosperous community
6) Work on projects that solve meaningful problems in areas like healthcare, education, and government.
1. Some Lessons for Startups
Tim O’Reilly
O’Reilly Media
@timoreilly
Stanford Technology Ventures Program
March 6, 2013
Friday, March 8, 13
2. “The skill of writing is to
create a context in which
other people can think.”
-Edwin Schlossberg
Friday, March 8, 13
I like to begin my talks with a quote, because, as Oscar Wilde once said, “Quotation is a serviceable substitute for wit.”
Edwin Schlossberg once said...
Today, I’m going to look at a couple of startups or tech projects that I find really interesting, and try to explain why I find them
interesting, both from a technical and a business perspective, and as a way of helping you to develop your own
“interestingness” filters.
3. Friday, March 8, 13
I want to start out by talking about Square. There’s so much to learn from this business.
How many of you have ever bought something from a store with Square’s iPad cash register? How many of you had the Square
Wallet app running on your phone when you did that?
4. Friday, March 8, 13
It automatically checks you in when you walk into a participating merchant. Your name and face appear on the register, and
since your payment details are already on file, all the retail clerk has to do is confirm your identity, as shown in this screen shot.
5. Lesson #1: Do Less
Friday, March 8, 13
This is so key. The phone already knows you’re there. Why make you “check in” manually? This makes sense for apps like
Foursquare, but it’s so important to think through what the sensors in the phone let you take out of the UI. This is going to be
one of the big voyages of discovery over the next few years, as we design interfaces for devices that have “senses” of their own.
6. Lesson #2:
Get creative with hardware, not just software
Friday, March 8, 13
Square started with this creative hardware hack, a little free dongle that uses the phone’s microphone jack to turn it into a credit
card reader.
7. Lesson #3:
Build “software above the level of a single device”
Friday, March 8, 13
But with the addition of the cash Register app, Square saw the possibilities of building a system that actually connected buyer
and seller in a more profound way. The software system includes both an app on your phone, and an app on the merchant’s
ipad, and a cloud database and services in between.
8. Lesson #4: Harness network effects in data
Friday, March 8, 13
When I first talked to Jack about Square, he talked about it as a data business - using social network data to make better credit
scoring decisions. Long term, once square has millions of participating merchants and consumers, they have built a powerful
data system that literally gets better the more people use it. But even apart from this banking angle, think how Square
transforms the way a small merchant operates, bringing “knowing your customer” to a new level. Square has my face, my credit
card info, and, potentially for a repeat buyer, my preferences, like what kind of coffee I normally order.
9. `
Lesson #5: Rethink workflows and experiences
Friday, March 8, 13
And that leads to a profound rethinking of the retail experience.
10. Friday, March 8, 13
Another example of someone rethinking the workflows in retail is the Apple Store. Where most stores (at least in America) have
used technology to eliminate salespeople, Apple has used it to augment them. Each store is flooded with smartphone-wielding
salespeople who are able to help customers with everything from technical questions to purchase and checkout. Walgreens is
experimenting with a similar approach in the pharmacy, and US CTO Todd Park foresees a future in which health workers will be
part of a feedback loop including sensors to track patient data coupled with systems that alert them when a patient needs to be
checked up on. The augmented home health worker will allow relatively unskilled workers to be empowered with the much
deeper knowledge held in the cloud.
11. Friday, March 8, 13
This may be the real opportunity for new information retrieval UIs like Google’s Project Glass - in specialized settings where
access to a computer can be seen as a powerful kind of human augmentation. I expect it to be used in professional settings
before it becomes popular as a consumer device. (In social settings, it will require even more profound resets of behavior than
the “always-on” mobile phone.)
12. Lesson #6:
Rethink the possibilities in man-machine symbiosis
Friday, March 8, 13
In this context, I can’t help but mention the Google Autonomous Vehicle project.
13. The Google Autonomous Vehicle
Friday, March 8, 13
The Google autonomous vehicle is thought-provoking on a number of levels.
14. 2005: Seven Miles in Seven Hours
Friday, March 8, 13
But that’s not the most important lesson from the Google autonomous vehicle.
You see, back in 2005, the winning vehicle in the DARPA Grand Challenge went seven miles in seven hours.
15. “We don’t have better algorithms. We just have more
data.” - Peter Norvig, Chief Scientist, Google
Friday, March 8, 13
Yet only five years later, Google announced that they had a car that had driven hundreds of thousands of miles in ordinary
traffic. Was this a triumph of AI? It was surely that. But there’s another important factor that is easy to overlook. Google’s chief
scientist, Peter Norvig, says that the algorithms aren’t any better. Google just has more data. What kind of data?
16. AI plus the recorded memory of augmented humans
Friday, March 8, 13
It turns out that the autonomous vehicle is made possible by Google Streetview. Google had human drivers drive all those streets
in cars that were taking pictures, and making very precise measurements of distances to everything. The autonomous vehicle is
actually remembering the route that was driven by human drivers at some previous time. That “memory”, as recorded by the
car’s electronic sensors, is stored in the cloud, and helps guide the car. As Peter pointed out to me, “picking a traffic light out of
the field of view of a video camera is a hard AI problem. Figuring out if it’s red or green when you already know it’s there is
trivial.” So this is a unique and unexpected application of the notion of human-machine symbiosis, which was originally called
out as an important thread in computing by JCR Licklider in a paper all the way back in 1960.
17. Friday, March 8, 13
Many of the notions that I highlighted about Square also show up in an app like Uber. A driver and a passenger both augmented
with a smartphone changes our expectations about transit, and has the ability to change the way we organize public transit.
Uber also shows us the principles of Software Above the Level of a Single Device, the use of sensors (both you and the driver have
phones that know where you are), a data back end as part of the system, and “doing less.” Because your credit card is already on
file, they’ve taken payment out of the workflow. And replaced it with reputation - they ask you to rate the driver, and the driver
to rate the passenger.
18. To what extent can reputation systems
replace or augment regulation?
Friday, March 8, 13
That leads me to an interesting question. Uber asks every passenger to rate each driver. Drivers who don’t do well are
eliminated from the service. This actually leads to better results than a system that licenses drivers up front.
19. Lesson #7: Close the loop
Friday, March 8, 13
But there’s one other great lesson from Uber.
20. “What I learned from Google is to
only invest in things that close the
loop.”
- Chris Sacca
Friday, March 8, 13
Investor Chris Sacca, who used to run special projects for Google, and who is an early investor in Uber, once remarked “What I
learned...”
This is what Google did with advertising, figuring out how to predict what ads people would click on. And in the case of Uber,
it’s fundamental to the value proposition. With a taxi, you wait and hope to find one. With Uber, you know where the car is,
when it’s going to arrive, and can even watch its progress towards you. Uber closes the loop and takes the uncertainty out of the
experience.
21. Lesson #8: Create More Value Than You Capture
Friday, March 8, 13
But I want to return to Square. There’s one other great lesson there. Create value for more than yourself.
Jack’s original inspiration for Square was that he wanted to make it possible for anyone to take a credit card. He wanted to
enable a fairer, more evenly distributed economy.
Don’t just think about how much value you can create for yourself, your company, and your investors. Think about how much
value you can create for your customers.
22. “There’s a wonderful section in Les Miserables about the
good that Jean Valjean does as a businessman (operating
under the pseudonym of Father Madeleine). Through his
industry and vision, he makes an entire region prosperous,
so that “there was no pocket so obscure that it had not a
little money in it; no dwelling so lowly that there was not
some little joy within it.”
And the key point: “Father Madeleine made his fortune; but
a singular thing in a simple man of business, it did not seem
as though that were his chief care. He appeared to be
thinking much of others, and little of himself.”
Friday, March 8, 13
I’m reminded of this wonderful quote from Les Miserables.
23. I call it “the big lie” of modern
business
Friday, March 8, 13
This is in sharp contrast to the dominant ideology of modern capitalism over the past few decades, which says that the
only responsibility of a company is to make money for its shareholders. Leaving aside the fact of excessive executive
compensation as prima facie evidence that no big company really believes that principle, this notion misses the point
that an economy is an ecosystem.
24. Friday, March 8, 13
This desire to build value for a community of stakeholders also shapes companies like Etsy, AirBnb, and Kickstarter.
27. Lesson #9: Work on stuff that matters
Friday, March 8, 13
Perhaps the more general lesson here is to work on stuff that matters.
28. Open Source
Web 2.0
The Maker Movement
Open Data
Open Government
Friday, March 8, 13
But there’s another lesson here. Let me point to some of the things that matter that I’ve worked on. In each of these cases, I
did some good for my business, but I was mainly concerned with telling the story of an industry movement, and trying to create
awareness and value that benefited many people besides myself and my own company.
29. Lesson #10: Idealism is the best marketing
Friday, March 8, 13
People are hungry for meaning. When you really care about creating value for more than yourself, and work hard at it, people
understand it. So don’t be afraid to talk about your values, and why what you do matters. Tell it to yourself, and then tell it to
your customers.
30. Why I love hackers
Friday, March 8, 13
One of my best experiences with doing this was when I gave a talk at my Emerging Technologies Conference in 2008 entitled,
“Why I love hackers.”
They work on what is hard.
I recited a poem by Rilke, the Man Watching, which talks about Jacob wrestling with an angel. He knew he couldn’t win, but came
away strengthened from the fight. The poem ends with something like this:
“What we fight with is so small, and when we win, it makes us small.
What we want is to be defeated decisively by successively greater beings.”
31. Friday, March 8, 13
A great example of this is a company called Makani Power, which is building drone aircraft for high altitude wind farms. One of
the early employees left a Wall Street hedge fund not because he thought he’d make more money, but because, as he said, “the
math is harder and more interesting.”
32. Friday, March 8, 13
There are lots of ways to work on stuff that matters. Code for America, a non-profit I’ve been working with, brings talent from
the tech industry to work with local governments to build simple, beautiful and easy-to-use interfaces to government services
and challenging government to reinvent the way it engages with citizens.
33. Friday, March 8, 13
This coming year, we’re going to be working with New York City and Louisville KY on a project that Anne Milgram from the
Arnold Foundation, calls Moneyballing Criminal Justice. It turns out that pre-trial incarceration is one of the biggest costs for
cities. Using predictive analytics to figure out who to release on bail can save huge sums for cities, but more importantly, it can
save jobs and families. Keep someone in jail unnecessarily and they may lose their job, forcing them into the very life of crime
we’re trying to avoid. This is an incredibly meaningful application of today’s “big data” technology to an important real-world
problem.
34. Friday, March 8, 13
The White House Presidential Innovation Fellows offers similar opportunities to bring technology expertise into the Federal
Government. I encourage any of you to apply to either of these programs.
35. Friday, March 8, 13
Health care is another area where today’s skills can be put to use working on stuff that really matters. Here’s a report I co-
authored recently that covers some of my ideas on the subject.
I don’t have time to go into all the details today, but the report is a free download.
36. Friday, March 8, 13
And there are also amazing entrepreneurial opportunities building companies that also solve interesting social problems. Jen
Pahlka, who founded Code for America, wrote a blog post recently that summarized one of these opportunities, which we’ve
been brainstorming recently. How do you reinvent the corner store so that it delivers what people really need, at affordable
prices, in a walkable city?
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These are the kinds of opportunities that we’re looking for at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, our early stage venture firm. If you
want to apply the principles I’ve outlined here to build a great business that also just happens to make the world a better place,
we’d love to hear from you. plans@oatv.com