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May 17, 2008
TieCON 2008 - Day 2: May 17, 2008
The morning started without coffee (I arrived a bit too late for breakfast, but why won't you at least keep the coffee stalls around on a Saturday morning at 9 am) -- but as I stumbled into the auditorium -- I see this Tesla roadstar next to stage and Elon Musk talking about his life in the fast track of entrepreneurship. Maybe I didn't really need the coffee ;-)What do Internet, Energy and Outer-Space Have in Common? Big Ideas or Elon Musk?
Elon Musk, Chairman Tesla Motors, Solar City, Space-X With Mike Malone, Technology Writer
If you feel there is a big problem out there to be solved, no matter how daunting or crazy, as an entrepreneur you should at least try to go solve it. Early in his career (or life, this guy wrote his first software program at 10, and more astonishing is the fact he *sold* his first program at 12) -- anyway, 3 big opportunity (or underexplored areas) for him were Internet, space exploration, and energy. By 36, he's built companies to address all 3 - sick!
What't next? Elon has a side bet with Mike Malone that he'll get a man on mars by 2030. Elon in a softspoken way says he's got a technology roadmap that is more or less on track for the deadline.
KEYNOTE: Sustaining Entrepreneurship in Biotech and Its Global Impact
John C. Martin, PhD, President and CEO, Gilead Sciences
I have to admit my brain shuts off when I look at powerpoint slides with lots of text, specially when it is an industry I have little understanding -- sorry Mr. Martin
Charging Ahead to Build Global Businesses:
Vivek Paul, Partner, Texas Pacific Group
- Digital world -- Chris Anderson talks about abundance, and in the real world, we are running to shortages everywhere..
- We are running out of oil
- We are running out of food in SE asia - there are food riots showing up
- There is water shortage, neighboring countries are starting to fight over water. The latin root for the words "river" and "rival" is the same -- perhaps meaning a river gives rise to rivalry
- Successful global businesses are about addressing these challenges
Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Product Marketing, Facebook
- Barriers to building a business - money, technology distribution - are being lowered
- 7 OSI Layers (physical, data, network, transport, session, presentation, application) -- the application layer was the often ignored one since its the most abstract and most constrained
- Today - instead of OSI layers -- we have something like the LAMP stack -- enabling a few more to succeed at teh application layer
- Challenges of building on LAMP - standards, interopeability, cost are addressed, but distribution, identity and engagement still remain as an afterthought
- Social Stack
- 1 - Distribution
- should not be gated by a company
- should be in a level playing field
- is all about the social graph
- improvement in communication technology increases the amount of info shared between individuals, and also makes sharing a passive activity a la facebook where my activities are feeds to my friends
- as long as my experience is genuine and meaningful, I will be rewarded with automatic distribution by the social graph
- e.g. iLike -- 1 million users in 4 days
- 2 - Identity
- Universal single sign-on
- Site or service-specific identity establishment is increasingly repetitive and redundant
- Identity = trust and authenticity
- Facebook photo applicaiton has more users than photobucket, flickr, etc. combined, same with calendar
- 3 - Engagement
- Engaging Behaviors
- The perspective on any activity (or application) changes when you add the aspect of sharing it with your friends
- stand-alone music app or listening/sharing music
- stand-alone photo-editing or creating a photo album together with friends
- Challenge: how to build an application that has the awareness of the social aspect
- e.g. expedia vs trip advisor
- Facebook makes $250k grants to create new applications without asking for equity
But what if the group is not at the same place? What if a stat professor or a business analyst in Berkeley wants to involve or talk over the numbers with all his/her "friends" in the leading stat professors everywhere from Vienna to Mumbai to Barcelona to Boston -- if a BI tool enabled this social context -- wouldn't that make the process more effective?
We in the BI practice often bemoan the fact that except for a few "power users", getting true adoption of a BI application -- isn't part of it attributable to the fact that we as BI application developers often ignore this "discussion of numbers" part of the exercise? If you enable it as a social activity -- help users not only see the numbers but also discuss it -- how does that help adoption?
Social Entrepreneurship- Extending For-Profit Concepts to Social Businesses
Can't believe I missed most of this one. Maybe an indicator that while I really care about social entrepreneurship, it is often getting in the back-burner of my professional life because I am chasing all these things around BI
New Opportunities: Profit at the Bottom of the Pyramid
Who are the people at the BOP?
- Jay -- Rose in Nairobi -- earns less 90 cents selling fruits on streets of nairobi - 3 kids, works with youngest one on the back
- Dimple -- Urban slums in Dhaka and Mumbai have similar challenges
- Kailash -- Also a problem in the US - e.g. of people in Appalachia -- where people earning $20 a day
- Richard -- 2 mexican teenager kids left behind in Sonoma county after immigratnt parents went back to Mexico -- slept in cars, worked their way through -- eventually learned winemaking, now have their own winery Screaming Eagle
- Dimple -- property rights - one of her first investments in Omidyar. Opportunity for landless women to purchase land. What did it mean for them? The most important thing the land provided was social capital - standing in the village, their husband less likely to abandon them, likelihood of their kids marrying into better families. Who would they pass the land to? "our sons"
- Jay -- aspiration for vast majority in Africa -- education (after food and shelter -- which are more immediate needs, not aspirational per se)
- Kailash -- Aspirations also have a lot to do with culture (after following Maslov's hierarchy)
- Richard
- there are many models - public, private, franchise, public/private - how do they work?
- Jay
- New Globe School - franchise model for for-profit primary schools, starting in Africa
- a typical problem - teachers don't show up for classes 50% of the time
- Enable local entrepreneur to manage the schools with accountability
- Dimple:
- Omidyar network applies e-bay like marketplace philosophy for philanthropy
- typical $3-5 million investment
- 3 areas of investment - economic empowerment (micro-finance and sme's); technology (social empowerment); Entities empowering capitalistic market (property rights, anti-corruption)
- e.g. property rights in Andhra pradesh - part micro-finance, part
- e.g. Rural ICT model based on Kiosk for anything from e-governance, agri trades all the way to BPO
- Richard - city of San Francisc0
- Kailash
- http://www.emri.in
- providing 911-like emergency services in India with improved visibility into performance measurement metrics
Micro-Lending Models:
- SKS in India: largest, fastest growing MFI in India
- Self help-model: people form groups on their own
- Micro finance is not a panacea, it doesn't get rid of poverty on its own - you need to add micro-insurance, remittance
- Micro finance combined with implementation could be more effective in efficient use of the capital
Public-private model
- management has to be entirely private
- recruitment, procurement, are not influenced by the government any means
- but give government all the credit, so they are happy
- wasn't seen that way
- jury still out
- omidyar just created a SME fund with google in India, 17.5 million dollars for SME's focusing on BOP
- EMRI -- significant focus on processes and discipline to follow through; there are metrics for every little action of the organization -- and also being reviewed constantly; standardization of ambulance design, processes, training programs
- New Global School - design for scale from the beginning
- Prosperity enables green awareness.
- Need for the best leadership for BOP enterprises
- First -- Try to truly understand the people you are trying to serve
- Think of BOP as a real, viable market segment
- Decide -- do you want to contribute time or contribute money?
- John Wood, Founder amp; CEO, Room to Read
The laptop's almost running out of battery, so I hope there's enough to cover this (I should get a laptop with better battery time).
- "I'm glad I got the book title before Bill Gates did -- since leaving Microsoft for philonthropy is becoming such a trend"
- "Accidental Philanthropist"
- Business Model for a Non-Profit NGO
- Local Leadership
- Local participation/ownership
- challenge grants
- local contribution
- Be nimble and act quickly
- Investment heavily in human capital e.g. librarian training
- Invest heavily in monitoring and evaluation
- Have an intense focus on results - Ballmerism: "What gets measured, gets done"
- Make efficient use of donor dollars
- Create a worldwide movement of "super-empowered individuals"
- Build for Scale
- Ballmerism: Go Big or Go Home
- Low price empowers wide scale participation in change
- What's the most optimistic image you can imagine?
- Action-Oriented Optimism
All in all -- great conference -- good energy boost and a fresh global and social perspective on overall state of business.
Posted by Sandeep Giri at May 17, 2008 4:26 PM
