How Fundamental Scientific and Technological Programs are Now Run in a Competitive Manner by Private Companies

Following up on our previous post ‘How Private Initiatives to Reach the Graal of Nuclear Fusion Show a Tipping Point in the Financing of Fundamental Science‘ that expanded on TAE technologies (a US West Coast startup close to Stanford), another similar start-up – this time on the US East Coast close to the MIT – Commonwealth Fusion Systems, has also recently raised dozen million dollars for the same goal, using a different technology (see here the Wikipedia entry on Commonwealth Fusion Systems).

Commonwealth Fusion Systems Tokamak system

In the same year where the US is gone back to space thanks to private companies such as Space X, with an alliance of high technology and design, this really raises the question of the future role of governments in running fundamental scientific experiments and high technology programs by themselves. The aspect which I want to expand here is actual execution of advanced science and technology leveraging on competition.

Both the new space programme and the new fusion efforts appear to share the same principle of competition (Space X, Boeing and other ventures competing for the NASA contract, several companies competing for fusion) . Where in the past large science experiments were run in monopoly fashion (NASA space program, or ITER in fusion), the new world of abundance of private funding (and increased scarcity of public funding) allows to run these high-risk programs with several teams in competition. This is probably an excellent thing to reach the goal quicker and with better quality: a spirit of competition, the emergence of a variety of ideas and solutions, everything that innovative programs should seek (and have sought, as in the famous parallel development of uranium-based and plutonium-based solutions during the Manhattan nuclear project).

I believe this is a fundamental shift in how science is getting done, and not sufficiently noticed. Monolithic state research organisations need to get into this new world of competitive fundamental research, fostering initiatives instead of trying to capture them and run them by themselves.

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How to Use Modern Mantras in the Modern World

I like this article ‘To get better at life, try this modern mantra‘. Mantras are short sentences that can be repeated and are used extensively by meditation practitioners, among others. And “modern mantras [are] simple sayings that you can call upon at any time to foster equanimity, compassion, insight, or whatever the moment calls for.”

The suggested mantra suitable to the modern world is “Right now, it’s like this” (the article was written in 2019 but this works quite well even during the Covid-19 crisis!). This mantra helps accept reality as it is.

And repeating the mantra seems to have quite some soothing effect on one’s brains and moods. The practice is this – repeat often in a reflective mode, and particularly when you become upset by something.

Repeat after me: “Right now, it’s like this“! And breathe…

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How Founder Compatibility Is Essential In Startups and Any Venture

This post ‘Startup Founder Compatibility is Vital‘ reminds us how essential it can be that founders go along well together, both in good and bad times. And it is not easy because often, company founder teams get together only a short time before kicking off the venture.

While the post is specifically geared towards start-ups, this is quite true for any kind of company including taking over an existing company. Differences and mis-alignments will appear in tense times, and can be quite devastating and mentally tiring (I speak by experience).

“The relationship among founders of a healthy business is like a marriage. Compatible goals, thinking, values, and decision-making styles is really important.” I can’t agree more, and like marriage it is essential to take the time to know each other well before committing into it.

“Don’t confuse compatibility with sameness. It takes a mix of different skills and backgrounds to build a business right.” On this one, I agree that different skills are needed. However I disagree when it comes to values and understanding of business ethics. On those aspects, an alignment is essential because when bad comes to the worst, founders will have to look at their values as a reference. And a misalignment there have quite dramatic consequences.

Founder compatibility is essential, and particularly in terms of shared values, ethics and benevolence. Take the time to know your partners before entering into a venture. It is like marriage.

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How Our Perception of Knowledge Is Shifting to Relative Knowledge

In this quite tedious post ‘Knowledge is crude: Far from being a touchstone of the truth, knowledge is a stone-age concept that harms our dealings with the modern world‘, some interesting concepts are developed how our view of knowledge needs to change as we move into the Collaborative Age.

My understanding of the thesis of the post is that basically, knowledge is increasingly relative – and more based on a statistical evidence. It is much less absolute and certain like we considered knowledge previously.

Specifically, knowledge being considered as something being shared between people becomes increasingly an alignment of opinions rather than a more certain knowledge independently vetted and settled.

I am quite convinced that we have realized in the few past decades how knowledge is temporary and can be put in question by new evidence. We now know that scientific knowledge and theories only wait for the next bit of evidence to contradict it and thus create the need for new, better theories.

In the Collaborative Age, we will increasingly see knowledge as relative and ready to be upended. Tools to support this are already there, such as online encyclopedia. The challenge of course is to ensure that knowledge remains grounded and does not become another set of conspiracy theories. We still have to invent the quality criteria of a relative knowledge. Let’s get to work.

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How The Most Valuable Start-Ups are Marketplaces

The focus of venture capitalists such as Andreessen Horowitz is on virtual marketplaces. They even follow the top 100 online marketplaces as the hottest ventures around. Those are the companies like Amazon, eBay, Airbnb, Uber and Lyft, Alibaba, Instacart…

A souk, one of the oldest marketplaces

That marketplaces or trading ventures are probably the most secure way to riches is well known for a long time (I use often the example of the Californian gold rush of 1849 or the Klondike gold rush – statistically the traders became richer, and in a far more reliable manner, than the prospectors). They are also the most easily scalable as they are not linked to production factors, only to logistics, therefore require relatively less capital to be setup and operated. They earn inter-mediation fees with relatively limited risk compared to the people that do the work.

No wonder marketplaces are hot for venture capitalists and investors. It is also probably one of the easiest kind of start-ups to get financed those days. However, the trader should not forget that at the end of the day it is relying on producers and they also need to find their benefit in the arrangement. Sustainable marketplaces need to maintain a fair treatment of producers. It is not quite yet the case in the virtual world with the gig workers, but will come soon.

If you want to launch a start-up, consider marketplaces. Easy to fund, less capitalistic, quicker to scale. Too bad I tend to prefer longer term, concrete innovative producers in my investments!

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How the Economy Becomes Increasingly Bi-Polar

This extremely interesting post ‘We’re living in two economies, and they are tearing us apart‘ aligns with many of our views in terms of the current revolutionary transformation from the Industrial Age into a new age which the author calls ‘Autonomous Age’, which is what we call the ‘Collaborative Age’. The interesting part is the analysis of what happens in the economy during this transformation, with an increased bi-polar economy between traditional (physical) and virtual economies.

The interesting part of the analysis is how the two economies are “pulling in opposite directions, and doing so, tearing the Old Order apart“. “In particular, the traditional economy is biased toward inflation. By comparison, the Autonomous Economy is biased toward deflation.” “The problem is non-monetizable productivity — unlike in the real world, the productivity gains in the Autonomous Economy don’t translate to increased incomes for average folks.”

We connect here with the Baumol effect that we described in the post ‘How the Relative Increase of Cost for Education or Health Care Can be Explained‘. Physical services struggle to improve in terms of productivity and become therefore relatively more expensive.

The author of the post however goes further and asks itself how we can avoid an upcoming wave of unemployment as the virtual economy productivity will require much less people to provide the same or a better level of service.

As I observe at the same time a strong trend to go local and develop human touch services, I am not too concerned on the long term although the transition may well be difficult as people lose their jobs and struggle to transform their occupation.

The bi-polar economy is there to stay and we need to be ready for the disruption. I remain optimistic on the longer term, but we need to brace for the short term.

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How Venture Funds Also Deploy Monopoly-Like Behaviors

My attention has been drawn by the behavior of Softbank, probably one of the venture capitalists, or as a minimum the largest investment funds into unicorn start-ups. This sprawling investor has stakes in many companies which are not known by their best ethical behavior( Uber, DoorDash, WeWork…), and does not seem much concerned by those aspects (read particularly recent news that looks like patent troll behavior in ‘A SoftBank-owned company used Theranos patents to sue over COVID-19 tests‘ or ‘SoftBank Owned Patent Troll, Using Monkey Selfie Law Firm, Sues To Block Covid-19 Testing, Using Theranos Patents‘)

The point which seems quite obvious is that while we start complaining about possible monopolistic behavior of companies like the GAFAM, this type of behavior also seems to exist with some major funds. Softbank is allied by the Saudi Arabian sovereign fund in the Vision Fund, the largest venture fund around. And its behavior seems to to try to build companies that could be one day in a sort of monopoly situation and then milk it. Unethical behaviors in the companies in their portfolios do not seem to faze this fund and its main contributors. It takes only public uproar for refraining some of those behaviors.

Therefore, if we manage collectively to do something to curb the monopolistic tendencies of the GAFAM and largest unicorns, we may as well do something about the monopolistic tendencies of some of the largest investors that are behind unicorns and the largest start-ups of the age.

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How We Need to Take Time To Know Each Other Before Entering a Business Partnership

Building on our previous post ‘How Founder Compatibility Is Essential In Startups and Any Venture‘, this also obviously applies to other situations such as partnerships, mergers and acquisitions.

I have too often observed partnerships between companies, or plans for merger or acquisition falter because after the operation has been consumed, partners realize that they actually have a low cultural or values compatibility. The root cause is the lack of time taken to get to know each other, and specifically, identify and address misalignment.

When things are not well anticipated, one of the parties will generally take the lead and dominate to the frustration of the other. And it most cases it leads to botched projects with people leaving the resulting organisation.

In my business practice I now try to spend a lot of time getting to know presumptive business partners well, before committing into a more serious relationship where reputations or even survival can be affected. It is not always possible to spend as much time and effort as we would like because of the pace of business. Still there is nothing worse than entering in a partnership and then be anxious that the partner will not play fair, or aligned with our values.

Take enough time to know your counterpart intimately. Partnerships, mergers and other (friendly) acquisitions only will work with benevolence, trust, and minimal cultural and values alignment.

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How We Adapt to the New Mask Wearing Habit

A little bit of fun, with this website that proposes to produce masks printed with the image of your face to allow you to… unlock your phone!

Since masks are used for a long time in Asia it is a bit surprising that such initiatives only seem to emerge with the Covid-19 context. Still quite a creative way to respond to the “new normal”. And also a demonstration of the limits of effective mobile phone security!

On a less fun way, with everyone wearing masks, security in public places is an increased issue where before, people were asked to drop helmets and not have their face covered. This represents a clear shift of what is acceptable or not.

There will still be more adaptations of how we live in the new normal.

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How to Overcome the Project Uniqueness Bias

The project uniqueness bias is well explained in the Oxford Handbook for Megaproject management. It is the “tendency of planners and managers to see their projects as singular.”

Always striving to build something unique…

This bias is very common in all technology projects (engineers always try to invent new things or improve the existing), and also in other types of projects. It also exists in other situations, linked to the particular situation of the project. It generally feels good to convince oneself that the project is a unique challenge.

The bias has many consequences, among which the dismissal of benchmarks from the industry to make the project plan more robust, and more generally a sort of arrogance based on the legitimacy of doing something for the first time.

But then of course it “impedes managers’ learning , because they think they have nothing to learn from other projects as their own project is unique. This lack of learning may explain why mangers who see their projects as unique perform significantly worse than other managers” and thus “project managers who think their project is unique are therefore a liability to their project and organisations“

Beware of the uniqueness bias. What we do is often building for most of it on the existing, with a few tweaks and add-ons. Let’s recognize that the share of uniqueness is most limited.

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How The Collaborative Age Will Be Both More Local and More Global

Seth Godin in this post ‘Clusters‘ makes the point that while the Industrial Age expanded national broadcasting media to an uncredible point, there is a return to the local cluster: local marketing, locally grown vegetables, a sense of community. At the same time however we have never been more globally connected: working for a global corporation, talking to people at the other end of the globe every day.

This strange situation of both a concentration of the local with an expansion of our horizon beyond the national to the super global is an interesting contradiction of the Collaborative Age. Globally connected and locally aware. Globally active and locally committed.

Quite a strange situation indeed and I can understand that some feel a bit unsettled by this new situation. Yet it is obviously by building those links between the local and the global that we will let the value of the Collaborative Age emerge. It is by overcoming this contradiction that we will find our place in the Collaborative Age.

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How the Future of Work is Shaping and Accelerated through the Covid-19 Crisis

Following up on our previous post ‘How Companies Manage Hundreds of Employees Remotely‘, this additional post ‘Tech will return to work, but habits will be changed forever‘ provides more perspective on the changes coming up for more traditional technology companies (those with large offices!).

Empty offices of the future

Because in the next few months it will not be possible to have more than 25% of the people normally present in offices (from distanciation to limits in elevator capacity for high rises), many companies will be forced to work remotely for most of the time, with limited office presence.

In reality as I have heard around me and confirmed in the post, productivity has increased by working remotely for many people (provided there are limited domestic disturbances and limited impact of children care). One of the elements is the time gained by avoiding commuting.

On the other side, the working rhythm is tough with many people finding that the long days on video meeting take a toll on their well-being. The lack of informal relationship may also not be easy to bear on the longer term and may even create inefficiencies, because relying only on formal conversations and events is not sufficient in most companies and processes.

“The era of trophy-like corporate headquarters such as the Salesforce tower (1.6m sqft over 61 floors in downtown SF) may be over.”

It also seems that many people are now considering moving to the countryside to work remotely and maybe only attend the office a couple of days a week. This shift it is confirmed beyond the current intentions may well be very significant in reshaping our communities. It actually runs contrary to the tendency of relocation to city centers that prevailed in the past few years.

Interesting trends are shaping up. I am quite convinced that those are just trends of the Collaborative Age that are getting accelerated by the current crisis. For sure, for white collars, the era of the nomadic remote worker has just become much closer.

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