Category: creativity

How Many Unicorn Founders are Actually Repeat-Entrepreneurs

We discover in this interesting post ‘The Founders of Clubhouse, Spotify, Stripe, and 42% of Unicorns Have One Thing in Common‘ that most highly successful entrepreneurs are actually serial entrepreneurs.

It shows that unicorn founders are quite likely to be founders with a history of small scale success and having exited from previous ventures.

“Among the founders of billion-dollar startups, almost 60% were not first-time founders. In a randomly selected group of startups that had raised a minimum of $3 million in venture capital funding but didn’t reach unicorn status — the typical picture for a seed-funded startup — about 40% were not first-time founders. The statistic shows that repeat founders were more likely to start a billion-dollar company.”

Thus, “It turns out that the best preparation for starting a wildly successful company is founding a startup. If you have never started a company, the best preparation for doing so is to start something, maybe a club, a side hustle, or simply selling something online.”

From those considerations we can infer interesting observations for the business angel that I am: repeat entrepreneurs with a history of growing and selling their startups are interesting candidates for investment. I am aware that this statement reverses in terms of causality the simple observation of the paper, but at the same it demonstrates the possibility of overcoming an emotional attachment to a venture, as well as experience through the entire lifecycle of a startup, and hence this inspires greater confidence in the new project.

Share

How We Need to Be Able to End Things Gracefully

In this post ‘Ending it gracefully‘, Seth Godin reminds us how it is important to anticipate that most initiatives will end and probably “fail” at some stage. And it is typically at those moments that we need to be able to remain graceful.

“You can pull out every stop, fight every step of the way, mortgage your house and your reputation–and still fail. Or, perhaps, you can quit in a huff at the first feeling of frustration. The best path is clearly somewhere between the two. And yet, too often, we leave this choice unexamined. Deciding how and when to quit before you begin is far easier and more effective than making ad hoc decisions under pressure.” 

However, more importantly I believe is the capacity to be grateful to what happened before the end, and be graceful to all of those that have supported and participated to the adventure. The worst is when the end is the start of a long-winded drama.

Most initiatives we take will end eventually, and not always in the best of situations. Let’s learn the skill of ending gracefully and moving on.

Share

How We Get Closer to Having a Second Virtual World

In this post ‘Epic Games Raised $1 Billion to Fund Its Vision for Building the Metaverse’ I discovered that some companies are actively moving into creating that virtual second world of Ready Player One fame. Epic Games is one of the largest companies in the field of video games.

“In the context of Epic Games’ announcement, the metaverse will be not just a virtual world, but the virtual world—a digitized version of life where anyone can exist as an avatar or digital human and interact with others. It will be active even when people aren’t logged into it, and would link all previously-existing virtual worlds, like an internet for virtual reality.”

“The technology needed to build the metaverse is already available.” And many companies are heavily investing in virtual reality.

The article comes with a world of caution: like in the book and movie, we may be tempted to escape the real world into the Metaverse, and there will definitely be a challenge to find the right balance between virtual and real life.

Anyway, high quality virtual worlds are coming faster than we realize, and this will be a substantial disruption in our daily life.

Share

How to Overcome the Fear of Publishing

Leo Babauta in his post ‘The Fear of Putting Our Work Out There‘ expands on the fear of publishing which seems to concern most of us, and how to overcome it.

I must say first that this concerns only publishing things like art of a written text – anything which is an emotional investment – because it seems we don’t have much fear publishing (sometimes stupid) pictures ourselves on social networks, maybe because we believe that they will only be available to connections.

Anyway it is true that fear is present when we push publish to the world and I still vividly remember the first time I published a post back in October 2010!

“What’s so scary? […] They might judge us, dismiss it as having no value, think we’re stupid. We’ll feel embarrassed or rejected. This uncertainty is too much to bear for many people.” We need to face our fear, and the avoidance of this possibility that is prompted by our reasonable mind. However this clearly leads to procrastination. This also means you can’t develop your ability to improve over time the quality of your interaction with the world.

Let’s face it: not many people are going to read what you wrote, or look at what you produced. At least at the start it is probably going to be family and friends so don’t worry too much about it.

There will be negative feedback, jealousy and all sorts of negative crap. Don’t let it discourage you – the more you get, the more you are on the right way and you are touching a hot button. And you’ll also get those great encouragements and some day, someone will tell you that you changed their life.

Overcoming that fear of putting your art out in the world is if course a practice. I don’t think about it too much nowadays – I don’t really care, in fact, what people may think. The first time is the hardest time. Practice makes us better, and let’s not get deterred from publishing and getting feedback.

Share

How We Should Stay More Often and Longer at the Edge of Uncertainty

In this inspiring post ‘Staying at the Edge of Uncertainty‘, Leo Babauta makes that point that we should learn to stay more often and longer at the edge of uncertainty. By moving close to the limite of our safe zone, on the brink of the uncertain, is where we learn and evolve most.

“All of us do this in most areas of our lives. Sometimes, we are able to voluntarily stay in uncertainty, but those times are relatively rare, and usually we don’t like it so much. Here’s the thing: the edge of uncertainty and chaos is where we learn, grow, create, lead, make incredible art and new inventions.”

And Leo Babauta insists that generally we tend to avoid this situation and rather come back to the well-known and familiar. To achieve this goal of being more closer to the edge and more often he recommends a deliberate practice:

  1. Set aside a time
  2. Pick something you are avoiding
  3. Do it for a short time (10-15 mins)
  4. Learn to embrace uncertainty
  5. Be kind to yourself

I have to be more self conscious about being more at this edge of uncertainty.

Being at the edge of our uncertainty and learning how to stay more often there is certainly a great advice. Have you tried to do it deliberately?

Share

How to Maintain a Middle Class in a Creative Economy

This excellent HBR article ‘The Creator Economy Needs a Middle Class‘ investigates the possible mechanisms by which a middle class can be maintained in a world where “the winner takes all” according to the rule of the complex systems and the effect of the ‘long tail’.

The interesting historical point made by the article is that the creation and maintenance of the middle class did mostly happen through government intervention in the 20th century. In the Industrial Age it made also sense to compensate adequately those workers who would also be the core consumers of products and services.

In the internet creative age, left to itself, revenue tends to concentrate on less than 1% of the creators. This is what can be observed on most social media creative platforms. This is not sustainable if we want overall revenue to remain significant while we are moving more towards a creative age. What business model can then be put in place to ensure that a larger share of revenue is spread over a larger number of people?

The paper proposes a few solutions that would need to be driven by the platforms themselves (or mandated by law to the platforms):

  1. Focus on content types with lower replay value (like podcasts rather than music)
  2. Serve heterogeneity and empower niches rather than mainstream
  3. Recommend content with an element of randomness to expose others than the winners
  4. Facilitate collaboration and community
  5. Provide capital investment to up-and-coming creators
  6. Decouple creator payout from audience demographic (which is akin to some kind of redistribution)
  7. Allow creators to capitalize on superfans (direct fan payment)
  8. Create passive (or almost passive) income opportunities for creators
  9. Offer some kind of Universal Creative Income
  10. Provide more creator education and learning (as a service)

All in all, this excellent article (which I encourage you to read) reminds us that left to themselves, platforms that disseminate creative work will not all a middle class to emerge, and that active action is required to allow this.

The key point of course is that if this is not in the economic interest of the platform itself, it will need to be mandated externally until everyone understand it is of social importance to maintain a wealthy middle-class.

Share

How to Overcome Both Science Reproducibility and Innovation Crisis

Stuart Buck’s post ‘Escaping science’s paradox‘ addresses the current science reproducibility crisis, and in particular if the current context of replication issues and suspicions could diminish innovation. His view is that “I do not think there’s a contradiction between reproducibility and innovation. Contrary to common belief, we can improve both at once“.

The paper first gives a raft of useful references about the issues of reproducibility and the apparent decrease of innovation (compared to the budgets spent) in science today. One particular issue is the capability of institutions to fund ‘out of the box’ innovative research.

The author proposes to achieve a consistent high rate of innovation “by incentivizing failed results, and by funding “Red Teams” that would aim to refute existing dogma or would be entirely outside it.” He first proposes to make sure there is less bias towards positive results in publications by enticing publication of null result experiments or even negative results experiments. And then he proposes to make sure there is always an independent challenge to avoid groupthink, and that systematic replication of important results should be funded.

It is quite interesting to observe how improving the outcome of scientific research ends up being a psychological balance exercise, making sure to erase biases towards positive results and providing means to foster innovation. This demonstrates how the shaping of the institutional framework is important to achieve the results we need for scientific research.

On the same topic – read our previous post ‘How to Overcome the Science Reproducibility Crisis‘

Share

How to Deal with the Upcoming Flood of AI-Generated Copywriting

Following up from our previous post about the transformation caused by AI in music, this excellent post addresses the issue of AI generated text content: ‘The internet is not ready for the flood of AI-generated text‘. As it is becoming easy for AI to generate copywriting that could pass for generated by humans, we can expect the internet to be flooded by far more text than humans can currently generate. And it is not ready to manage this flood of content!

One of the subtle ways AI generated text may take over the internet is the ability to quickly generate different versions of the text and find which is the most engaging, thus becoming increasingly better rated on platforms, and overtaking human-generated text. In a world where what matters is to grab attention, this could easily become a discriminating factor.

“Technologies such as GPT-3 may dramatically impact the world of misinformation and disinformation, creating an infinite supply of fake news” – and in the process creating more inequality between those that can pay to have access to quality-vetted information and the others.

What can be done? In addition to having machines that can detect machine-generated content, “One of the most obvious first steps forward, which should be put in place for every output of tools such as GPT-3 no matter or much or how little human editing was involved, is labeling of AI-generated content so that people know what they are reading.”

Welcome to a world where human-generated content will become a rarity for which we may need to pay a bit more!

Share

How Deepfake Music Is Changing the Music Industry

In this excellent Guardian post ‘It’s the screams of the damned!’ The eerie AI world of deepfake music‘, the implications of modern AI in the field of music are detailed. It seems quite possible nowadays to imitate the voice of any singer including those of the past. And copyright laws won’t generally apply.

This implies as well of course that it is quite possible to imitate perfectly the voice of anybody, which creates at once a potential for fakeness for all sorts of voice recordings nowadays.

It is also the start of an era where the position of the artist will change, with an onus for song- and musicwriters and potentially less for singers, unless they manage to unleash emotional impact. Actually as the economy of music is moving progressively towards live performance, recordings become more and more of a commodity and artists will need to be better performing live.

An interesting point is that copyright law is different in each country. It appears that in the US there is a law “against impersonating famous people for commercial purposes” but not in the UK or in many countries. We can expect some substantial law changes to protect the unwary, artists and their heirs against usage of its voice at least for commercial purpose. Another situation where the law will have to catchup soon!

In any case AI is also upending a large part of the music industry like it is upending many other industries, and that is made easier because at the end music is only a succession of bits, which can be taught to AI. Welcome to a new world of music!

Share

How Surrounding Yourself With the Right People is Essential to Start Something New

In this interesting post ‘Early Work‘, Paul Graham examines what is holding back people from doing great work. And he identifies that it is mainly “the fear of making something lame“, unremarkable, mediocre.

“Many great projects go through a stage early on where they don’t seem very impressive, even to their creators. You have to push through this stage to reach the great work that lies beyond. But many people don’t. Most people don’t even reach the stage of making something they’re embarrassed by, let alone continue past it. They’re too frightened even to start.”

As Paul Graham mentions there is an increasing institutional support to people starting new things (business angels, incubators…) and this is going in the right direction.

He points out interestingly however that there is another social effect that needs to be overcome: “If you try something ambitious, many of those around you will hope, consciously or unconsciously, that you’ll fail. They worry that if you try something ambitious and succeed, it will put you above them.”

The key is thus as always to surround yourself with the right people to instill the right level of confidence and get the right support to go through the ‘lame’ phase.

Share

How Most Internet Services Are Poor at Helping You Discover New Things

This thoughtful blog by Seth Godin ‘Who is good at discovery?‘ remind us that most internet services are poor to help us discover new things. Some are better like Netflix, but many are really poor.

“Google built its entire business on the mythology of discovery, persuading millions of entrepreneurs and creators that somehow, SEO would help them get found, at the very same time they’ve dramatically decreased organic search results to maximize revenue.”

Intrinsically, and increasingly, internet services tend to propose new things that fit our preferences in order to keep us hooked. I find that it is increasingly difficult to get a connection to something new. And it is not the case for traditional press and magazines, my personal network of peers and connections, references in the books I read which continue to allow me to discover new things much more than all internet united.

When you search on internet you’d better know what you’d like to find, because serendipity is not going to happen by itself. Worse, on “YouTube–if you follow the ‘recommended’ path for just a handful or two of clicks, you’ll end up with something banal or violent.“

Don’t rely on the internet to find new things to discover. Rather rely on your network and traditional sources!

Share

How Diversity Is Shown to Increases Academic Research Results

This Nature article ‘These labs are remarkably diverse — here’s why they’re winning at science‘ makes the point that diversity is fostering creativity and academic outcomes, based on a study of scientific papers.

Of course, this study that shows that diversity is beneficial is based on citation count of scientific papers vs the names of contributors, which may not be fully representative of the importance of the research. Still, it is interesting to see a full fledged research based on data demonstrate the benefits of diversity.

The diversity of experience, cultures and viewpoints is quite essential for creativity and the article gives quite a few examples, in particular with the input from Maori culture into research, and other multi-cultural research teams such as an Okinawa setup that requires diversity and multi-culture to be part of the team. The article also mentions challenges of working in diverse teams such as language and cultural behavior.

Another stone in the field of demonstrating how diversity is beneficial for creativity and value creation.

Share