What a pleasure to smile again with my favorite (HBO’s) Silicon Valley start-up heroes. Whereas in Season 3, they were the latest unicorn…
in season 4, a brand new story begins…
to build the next…
The start-up world is so fashionable that a few clouds should gather above it. The thing is not new. In the past, I mentioned Silicon Valley Fever. There was also the recent Disrupted – My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble by Dan Lyons But, more worrying, the criticisms are more numerous and more serious. For example, the article The evidence is piling up – Silicon Valley is being destroyed about the Juicero and Theranos scandals. Without forgetting the more fundamental transhumanist / apolitical fever …
Here is a new book, fun and serious…In French: Bienvenue dans le nouveau monde Comment j’ai survécu à la coolitude des startups (Welcome in the new world – How I survived the coolitude of startups) by Mathilde Ramadier. Mockery uses language. The “novlangue”, the “coolitude”. But this hides more unacceptable behaviors. Discounted wages, ridiculous working conditions. All this in the tone of humor, or more of chilling irony. Excessive? A little bit in the sense that not all start-ups act as the author describes, but revealing a reality that should not be underestimated … Here are some examples:
“We’re a start-up, so please bring your own laptop.” [Page 24]
“During the end-of-test interview, my CEO tells me that instead of the 1500 euros agreed upon at the start, I will finally be hired with a payroll three times lower. [… He] knows very well what he does and delivers a perfectly honed speech to sweep away my disappointment. […] So I refused a job paid 500 euros because I lacked motivation, belief and ambition. I did not deserve to participate in the adventure.” [Page 26-7] The CEO had previously added that “if I want to make a career, I will have to accept to bend down and give everything. Just like in “the Voice’.”
“But doen’t disruption also mean an acceleration imposed too suddenly on society? […] The sharing economy allows the connection of a client who has a need and a service provider (let’s say a small hand that needs money.)” [Page 28] And then she quotes Bernard Stiegler. How right she is!
“But this tendency, pushed to the extreme, has become the watchword of a despotic regime which does not admit ‘the weakest’, that is to say the refractory, and which relegates them to the bottom of the social pyramid. Because if everyone can, in theory, become a superstar, there is little talk of those for whom “siliconization” does not embody a dream… nor a sinecure.” [Page 36]
“As Orwell has taught us, the manipulation of language is the starting point of any totalitarian discourse. […] The disappearance of the ability to think for oneself can even be the core competence of a company.” [Pages 41-2]
“In many cases, these are bullshit jobs, these new ‘jobs’ in the service sector that pride themselves abotu contributing to the rational organization of the company, but which cannot be described easily because even the first concerned fail to explain clearly what they do neither can they find a real utility. […] Wages were evidently free from all egalitarian considerations and remained confidential.” [Pages 44-5]
“I’ve seen people say ‘never again’ and had to start over again. They had promised that they would not step back behind the counter of a bar after their first internships and still return, for lack of finding a job in their branch. I have seen young women and young men becoming financially dependent on their partner, sublet their car or room to live in their living room (since all aspects of life are now marketable), and knocking at the door of their parents at thirty. Pregnant women put money aside because their maternity leave did not allow them to live decently. These are the people I saw accept a precarious contract with a ridiculous paycheck in a startup because they were promised many things, and offered ‘evolution prospects’ if they agreed to ‘give everything’.” [Page 70]
The author also has interesting definitions. “One of the definitions of start-up might be this: it is a young company with high potential but still not profitable. The objective, from the beginning, is therefore rapid growth.” (Page 94) Mathilde Ramadier even has her own glossary (pages 151-5), often funny… For example:
Disruption: super-powerful innovation that breaks the codes of a whole market. An earthquake, the disruption puts everything flat and does not generally worry about the consequences of the chaos it induces.
Entrepreneur: courageous person with rare talent, who has an idea of genius before everyone, is working to achieve it and succeeds – or not.
Innovation: introduction of a new product or process on the market. A startup is necessarily innovative (for those who launch it anyway).
“During these four years in the startups, I was trapped in an infernal loop, tossed from one absurdity to another, finding here and there the same folklore … Paradoxically, we push the rational to the irrational, originality to conformism, thirst for the new to regression […] The solutions that the startupsphere promises us – to the crisis, unemployment, boredom, repetition of the same and even disuse, old age and ugliness, etc. – are also a deception: one can not pretend to live in the new world before having truly built it.” [Page 143]
How to Start a Business That Doesn’t Suck (and Will Actually Turn a Profit).
A Modestly Simple Guide to Starting a Business
by Michael R. Clarke
I have not read many books about “how to” for start-ups and usually I am bored very quickly, not to say angry. The worst was probably best-selling, The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, and the best was his mentor, Steve Blank .
I just finished “How To Start a Business That Doesn’t Suck” and I liked it very much. And it is funny (not the way Komisar mentions putting back the “fun” in funerals.com in his great The Monk and the Riddle). It is funny because it is fun to read and it is (really) informative.
If there is one thing I missed with his advice, it is how you price a product or a service. But there is so much good stuff. He begins simply with “Why You Should Definitely NOT (Under Any Circumstances) Start a Business.” [Pages 2-7]. And he is right in warning entrepreneurship is not for everyoneone. You should be passionate, crazy…
But if you are still interested, buy his book. Here are just a few good examples:
– Emphasize Learning Over Results [Page 9]
– Realize, It’s All About Value (Not Effort) [Page 11]
– [Have] A Willingness to Move FAST! (and Look Stupid) [Page 13]
– Don’t Listen to Anybody You Don’t Want (Including Me) [Page 19]
I liked very much his chapter 2 about finding an idea (not ideation!). Focus on things you know a lot about [page 26], you have strengths, and it doesn’t mean you have to be an expert. And Focus on things you are passionate about [page 29].
And then be sure to be specific enough about customer group [page 46] and do not waste time with those “that DIDN’T want a result bad enough” [Page 49]. You cannot open a donut shop, but maybe one for vegans with allergies [Page 54] (though my former, wise boss told me not to focus on Chinese food for dogs…)
I had the feeling of being a guinea pig when I read “Writers are a hidden goldmine of promotional potential. They’re also vain. (Trust me.) So email a writer/columnist in your industry and let ‘em know you liked something they wrote in that obscure trade magazine or blog. Then six months later tell ‘em about your new product. You might get some seriously awesome free promotion out of it!” [Page 71]
About products (chapter 5), I loved that customers do not care about products. They care about feelings… “I’d like to begin this chapter about “creating products and services…” …by telling you how unimportant they are. […]The only thing people care about is the result (and/or feeling) your product or service gives THEM.” [Page 84]
I was curious about his chapter 6, on business plans. I hate business plans but I liked his chapter. “Non-Sucky Business Plan Step No.1: Nail Your Elevator Pitch.” […] “Trust me: if you make a point of pitching 2-3 people a day, for the next 30 days, you will QUICKLY get a sense of what parts of your business idea people like (and don’t like).” [Page 105] And yes Clarke is right and I am wrong: “Just remember…it’s good to know the rules before you break them. And unless you have a compelling reason why ya gotta deviate from the pack, stick to the basics.”
I was also curious about what he has to say about funding, as many people hate investors. And he begins with: “Don’t read this chapter.” [Page 133] “But if I could go back and change just ONE THING in my business-building life, besides NOT fill my garage with Nascar™ fishing lures, it would be to have boot-strapped as many of my business ventures as possible and keep them lean, mean and debt-free clean.” OK right again…Still “But if I can give you one piece of advice, when it comes to prototypes, it’s this: make it LOOK good.” [Page 141]So be lean and beautiful…
I though he forgot covering teams and co-founders, but he did too! “These are not fun topics to discuss. (As a co-dependent, people-pleaser I like to avoid these types of conversations at all costs.) And it cost me thousands of dollars. (And three months of Kaiser therapy co-pays.) Because I entered into partnerships in which we had not established a clear plan for how we’d make decisions in the business. We didn’t establish who owned what when things went to crap. And we didn’t establish clearly how people would be paid if roles changed. (Yikes!) Please, if you bring on partners (even ones you’re related to) take the time to go over this uncomfortable territory.” [Page 162] and later “The key to hiring is not to hire your friends, but to “hire your weakness.” That means your staff should be:
• Hungry
• Supportive (without being a sycophant)
• And good at what you’re not.” [Page 177]
You must also read his chapter 10, about stupid mistakes he made, and you not make… Sometimes Clarke says too much he is not an expert in finance, legal, manufacturing, marketing. He may not be. But he gives damn good advice!
As a conclusion, he gives the final good advice: “the only way to find out if your business — and you as a business owner — has the potential to succeed is to let go of the trapeze you’re holding on to, and reach out for the one right in front of you. […]You learn what your strengths are. (Fast!) And you learn what your weaknesses are. (Even faster!)” [Pages 187-8]
A really beautiful and good book…
Every year I try to convey what I believe to be the beauty of mathematics when I teach convex optimization at EPFL. I have already mentioned on this blog some beautiful books, popularizing the subject. Some recent readings have convinced me even more so let me try to convince you (again)…
Alain Badiou is a rather surprising choice to talk about mathematics but I love what he has recently written: “This quasi aesthetic feeling of mathematics struck me very early. […] I think of Euler’s line. It was shown that the three altitudes of a triangle are concurrent in a point H, it was already beautiful. Then that the three vertices were also concurrent, at a point O, better and better! Finally, that the three medians were equally so, at a point G! Terrific. But then, with a mysterious air, the professor told us that we could demonstrate, as the brilliant mathematician Euler had done, that these points H, O, G were in addition all three on the same line, which evidently was called Euler’s line! It was so unexpected, so elegant, this alignment of three fundamental points, as behavior of the characteristics of a triangle! […] There is this idea of a real discovery, a surprising result at the cost of a journey sometimes a little difficult to follow, but where one is rewarded. I often compared mathematics later to walking in the mountain: the approaching walk is long and painful, with a lot of turning, slopes; we think we have arrived, but there is still a turning point … We sweat, we struggle. But when we arrive at the pass, the reward is unequaled, truly: this gratification, this final beauty of mathematics, this surely conquered, absolutely singular beauty.” [Pages 11-12]
Another source of inspiration is Proofs from THE BOOK. Written in homage to Paul Erdös, the book begins with the two pages shown above. “Paul Erdös liked to talk about The Book, in which God maintains the perfect proofs for mathematical theorems, following the dictum of G. H. Hardy that there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics. Erdös also said that you need not believe in God but, as a mathematician, you should believe in The Book. […] We have no definition or characterization of what constitutes a proof from The Book: all we offer here is the examples that we have selected, hoping that our readers will share our enthusiasm about brilliant ideas, clever insights and wonderful observations.”
Sometimes I try to remember the most beautiful demonstrations I have “felt” since my high school years.
– The most luminous, the proof of the sum of the n first integers by Gauss
– Two demonstrations of the Pythagorean theorem,
– There would be many others like the infinity of prime numbers, the development in series of Π (
), the beautiful concept of duality for convex sets (you can look at a set through its “internal” points or through the dual “external” envelope made of its tangents).
– But the most fascinating for me, remains the use of Cantor’s Diagonal:
[From Wikipedia:]
In his 1891 article, Cantor considered the set T of all infinite sequences of binary digits (i.e. each digit is zero or one). He begins with a constructive proof of the following theorem:
To prove this, given an enumeration of elements from T, like e.g.
| s1 = | (0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | …) |
| s2 = | (1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | …) |
| s3 = | (0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | …) |
| s4 = | (1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | …) |
| s5 = | (1, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 1, | …) |
| s6 = | (0, | 0, | 1, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 1, | …) |
| s7 = | (1, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 0, | …) |
| … |
he constructs the sequence s by choosing the 1st digit as complementary to the 1st digit of s1 (swapping 0s for 1s and vice versa), the 2nd digit as complementary to the 2nd digit of s2, the 3rd digit as complementary to the 3rd digit of s3, and generally for every n, the nth digit as complementary to the nth digit of sn. In the example, this yields:
| s1 | = | (0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 0, | …) |
| s2 | = | (1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 1, | …) |
| s3 | = | (0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | …) |
| s4 | = | (1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | …) |
| s5 | = | (1, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 1, | …) |
| s6 | = | (0, | 0, | 1, | 1, | 0, | 1, | 1, | …) |
| s7 | = | (1, | 0, | 0, | 0, | 1, | 0, | 0, | …) |
| … | |||||||||
| s | = | (1, | 0, | 1, | 1, | 1, | 0, | 1, | …) |
By construction, s differs from each sn, since their nth digits differ (highlighted in the example). Hence, s cannot occur in the enumeration.Based on this theorem, Cantor then uses a proof by contradictionto show that:The set T is uncountable.
But let me add another extract from Badiou (page 82): “I call truths (always in the plural, there is no “truth”) singular creations of universal value: works of art, scientific theories, policies of emancipation, love passions. Let us say to cut short: scientific theories are truths concerning the being itself (mathematics) or the “natural” laws of the worlds of which we can have an experimental knowledge (physics and biology). Political truths concern the organization of societies, the laws of collective life and its reorganization, all in the light of universal principles, such as freedom, and today, principally, equality. The artistic truths relate to the formal consistency of finite works that sublimate what our senses can receive: music for hearing, painting and sculpture for vision, poetry for speech … Finally, the love truths concern the dialectical power contained in the experience of the world not from the One, from the individual singularity, but from the Two, and thus from a radical acceptance of the other. These truths are not, of course, of philosophical origin or nature. But my goal is to save the (philosophical) category of truth that distinguishes and names them, legitimizing that a truth can be:
– absolute, while being a localized construction,
– eternal, while resulting from a process which begins in a certain world and therefore belongs to the time of this world.”
Once again the Paris Innovation Review (formerly ParisTech Review) publishes a series of excellent articles, this time dedicated to start-ups. These are:
– Companies like others? A sociological survey of French startup. http://parisinnovationreview.com/2017/03/21/sociological-survey-french-startups/
– Startups Employees Perks & Incentives – 1 – Wages. http://parisinnovationreview.com/2017/03/23/startups-employees-perks-incentives-1-wages/
– Startups Employees Perks & Incentives – 2 – Equity. http://parisinnovationreview.com/2017/03/23/startups-employees-perks-incentives-2-equity/
The article about the sociology of start-ups shows (in fact confirms) interesting things. I will let you read and jump directly to some of their concluding points: “Some of these results can provide pause for thought for public policies aimed at fostering startup creations. The survival of these businesses seems relatively unpredictable, both for the people involved (entrepreneurs, employees, support bodies) and for analysts who observe them from the outside. We have interpreted this unpredictability as the result of two causes. The first is the selection operated by the support agencies, a selection that has largely guided ours, since a claim of technical innovation, which was our main criterion for inclusion in our survey, is generally associated with subsequent monitoring and aid by these agencies. One might think that a number of projects considered very unrealistic could have been excluded by these services, which in fact limits the variety of the companies we studied. The second, more fundamental cause is the very variety of factors that make or break businesses: outlets that emerge and disappear along with the flow of global economic changes, strategies of major industrial groups and initiatives by competitors, internal conflicts, resources which become abundant or scarce depending on the context, financial problems which are difficult to anticipate, etc. This may encourage governments and public agencies to foster a much greater number of projects and not merely be satisfied with those that they consider to be the most promising. Watering a whole field is often more efficient than dumping all the available water on but a few square meters… Securing solid support by authorities, companies that are deemed innovative are doing better than the others if one considers their survival rate. Perhaps it would not be absurd to offer an equivalent support to businesses in other economic circles.”
The incentive topic is one I have covered at length as you may see with my Slideshare link below. On the salary side, I fully agree with their claim: Be as objective as possible: this ensures fairness and acknowledges a basic truth: people talk. On the equity side, know the rules of vesting and cliffs, and build a granting mechanism based on experience of employees and layers of early and late comers, i.e. the same number of stock options could be granted per year (so more shares to early employees as there are more employees per year when the company grows. If it does not, stock options are probably worthless…)
I like April fools. I have done a few in my life. Here is my favorite for 2017. It does not hesitate to smile at the promises of AI…
And this one isn’t bad either…
I regularly compile data about start-ups and in particular about how equity is allocated to founders, employees (through stock options), independant board members and investors (through preferred shares). I have now more than 400 such cases (see below the full list). What is interesting is to look at some statistics by geography, by field and by period of foundation. here they are:
There would be a lot to say, but I prefer you build your own opinion…
Equity Structure in 401+ Start-ups by Herve Lebret on Scribd
I remember hesitating to buy Homo Deus. I never really appreciated people trying to analyze what the future might be. I have similar concerns with Harari’s book. I am not the only one as the New Yorker was not all positive: Then he announces his bald thesis: that “once technology enables us to re-engineer human minds, Homo sapiens will disappear, human history will come to an end, and a completely new process will begin, which people like you and me cannot comprehend.” Now, any big book on big ideas will inevitably turn out to have lots of little flaws in argument and detail along the way. No one can master every finicky footnote. As readers, we blow past the details of subjects in which we are inexpert, and don’t care if hominins get confused with hominids or the Jurassic with the Mesozoic. (The in-group readers do, and grouse all the way to the author’s next big advance.) Yet, with Harari’s move from mostly prehistoric cultural history to modern cultural history, even the most complacent reader becomes uneasy encountering historical and empirical claims so coarse, bizarre, or tendentious. […] Harari’s larger contention is that our homocentric creed, devoted to human liberty and happiness, will be destroyed by the approaching post-humanist horizon. Free will and individualism are, he says, illusions. We must reconceive ourselves as mere meat machines running algorithms, soon to be overtaken by metal machines running better ones.
If I feel the same unease, I still beleive Harari asks important questions and he might even have been misunderstood in his real motivation… I link this reading to my recent great readings of Piketty, Fleury and Stiegler.
Whatever some more extracts:
“Because science does not deal with questions of value, it cannot determine whether liberals are right in valuing liberty more than equality, or in valuing the individual more than the collective.” [Page 281]
A strange section is the following: The experiment changed Sally’s life. In the following days, she realised she has been through a ‘near-spiritual experience… what defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head had finally shut up… My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head… I hope you can sympathise with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes. I also started to have a lot of questions. Who was I apart the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I’m too scared to try? And where did the voices come from?’
Some of those voices repeat society’s prejudices, some echo our personal history, and some articulate our genetic legacy. [Page 289] Again individual, society and evolution…
We see then that the self too is an imaginary story, just like nations, gods and money. Each of us has a sophisticated system that throws away most of our experiences, keeps only a few choice samples, mixes them up with bits from movies we saw, novels we read, speeches we heard, and from our own daydreams, and weaves out of all that jumble a seemingly coherent story about who I am, where I came from and where I am going. This story tells me what to love, whom to hate and what to do with myself. This story may even cause to sacrifice my life, if that’s what the plot requires. We all gave our genre. Some people live a tragedy, others inhabit a never-ending religious drama, some approach life as if it were an action film, and not a few act as in a comedy. But in the end, they are all just stories.
What, then, is the meaning of life? Liberalism maintains that we shouldn’t expect an external entity to provide us with some ready-made meaning. Rather, each individual voter, customer and viewer ought to use his or her free will in order to create meaning not just for his or her life, but for the entire universe.
The life sciences undermine liberalism, arguing that the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms. Every moment, the biochemical mechanisms of the brain create a flash of experience, which immediately disappears. The more flashes appear and fade, in quick succession. These momentary experiences do not add up to any enduring essence, The narrating self tries to impose order on this chaos by spinning a never-ending story, in which every such experience has its place, and hence every experience has some lasting meaning. But, as convincing and tempting as it may be, this story is a fiction. [Pages 304-5]
At the beginning of the third millennium, liberalism is threatened not by the philosophical idea that ‘there are no free individuals’ but rather by concrete technologies. We are about to face a flood of extremely useful devices., tools and structures that make no allowance for the free will of individual humans. Can democracy, the free market and human rights survive this flood? [Page 306]
The great decoupling
The practical developments might make this belief [liberalism] obsolete:
1. Humans will lose their economic and military usefulness, hence the economic and political system will stop attaching much value to them.
2. The system will still find value in humans collectively, but not in unique individuals.
3. The system will still find value in some unique individuals, but these will be a new elite of upgraded superhumans rather than the mass of the population. [page 307]
Humans are in danger of losing their value, because intelligence is decoupling from consciousness. [Page 311]
Intelligence is mandatory, but consciousness is optional. [Page 312]
The current scientific answer to this pipe dream can be summarized in three simple principles:
1. Organisms are algorithms. Every animal – including Homo Sapiens – is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.
2. Algorithmic calculations are not affected by the materials from which you build the calculator. Whether you build an abacus from wood, iron or plastic, two beads plus two beads equal four beads.
3. Hence there is not reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that non-organic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass. [Page 319]
As algorithms push humans out of the job market, wealth might become concentrated in the hands of the tiny elite that owns the all-powerful algorithms creating unprecedented social inequality. [Page 323]
Is there too much story telling with Harari’s new book. Is the cashier replaced by a robot, or by the customer? What about the Google flu tool, that is mentioned page 335. Did it really work?
The Ocean of Consciousness
The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes. Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. [Page 351]
The humanist revolution caused modern Western culture to lose faith and interest in superior mental states, and to sanctify the mundane experiences of the average Joe. Modern Western culture is therefore unique in lacking a special class of people who seek to experience extraordinary mental states. It believes anyone attempting to do so is a drug addict, mental patient or charlatan. Consequently, though we have a detailed map of the mental landscape of Harvard psychology students, we know far less about the mental landscape of Native American shamans, Buddhist monks or Sufi mystics. And that is just the Sapiens mind. Fifty thousand years ago, we shared this planet with our Neanderthal cousins. They didn’t launch spaceships, build pyramids or establish empire. They obviously had very different mental abilities, and lacked many of our talents. Nevertheless, they had bigger brains than us Sapiens. What exactly did they do with all those neurons? We have absolutely no idea. But they might well have many mental states that no Sapiens had ever experienced. [Page 356]
Techno-humanism faces an impossible dilemma here. It considers the human will to be the most important thing in the universe, hence it pushes humankind to develop technologies that can control and redesign our will. After all, it’s tempting to gain control over the most important thing in the world. Yet once we have such control, techno-humanism would not know what to do with it, because the sacred human will would become just another designer product. We can never deal with such technologeis as long as we believe that the human will and the human experience are the supreme source of authority and meaning.[Page 366]
The Data Religion
[Dataism] is very attractive. It gives all scientists a common language, builds bridges over academic rifts and easily exports insights across disciplinary borders. Musicologists, political scientists and cell biologists can finally understand each other. […] Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms. [Page 368]
Capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. [Page 372] The Industrial Revolution unfolded slowly enough for politicians and voters to remain one step ahead. […] Technological revolutions now outpace political processes, causing MPs and voters alike to lose control. [See Stiegler again] […] The Internet is a free and lawless zone that erodes state sovereignty, ignores borders, abolishes privacy and poses perhaps the most formidable global security risk. [Here see Beaude] […] The NSA may be spying on your every word, but to judge by the repeated failures of American foreign policy, nobody in Washington knows what to do with all the data. [Page 374]
Dataism is also missionary. Its second commandment is to connect everything to the system, including heretics who don’t want to be connected. And ‘every-thing’ means more than just humans. It means every thing. My body, of course, but also the cars on the street, the refrigerators in the kitchen, the chickens in their coop and the trees in the jungle – all should be connected to the Internet-of-All-Things. […] Conversely, the greatest sin is to block the data flow. What is death, if not a situation when information doesn’t flow? […] Dataism is the first movement since 1789 that created a really novel value: freedom of information [Page 382] which has Harari correctly explains in neither freedom nor freedom of expression.
Humanism thought that experiences occur inside us. Dataists believe that experiences are valueless if they are not shared. Twenty years ago Japanese tourists were a universal laughing stock because they always carried cameras and took pictures of everything in sight. Now everyone is doing it. […] Writing a private diary sounds to many utterly pointless. The new moot says: ‘If you experience something – record it. If you record something – upload it. if you upload something – share it.’ [Page 386] Should I blog?
Dataism is neither liberal nor humanist. It isn’t anti-humanist. [Page 387] By equating the human experience with data patterns, Dataism undermines our main source of authority and meaning, and heralds a tremendous religious revolution. […] ‘Yes God is a product of the human imagination, but human imagination in turn is the product of biochemical algorithms.’ In the eighteenth century, humanism sidelined God by shifting from a deo-centric to a homo-centric world view. In the twenty-first century, Dataism may sideline humans by shifting from a homo-centric to a data-centric view. The Dataist revolution will probably take a few decades, if not a century or two. But then the humanist revolution too did not happen overnight. [Page 389]
A critical examination of the Dataist dogma is likely to be not only the greatest scientific challenge of the twenty-first century, but also the most urgent political and economic project. Scholars in the life sciences and social sciences should ask themselves whether we miss anything when we understand life as data processing and decision-making. Is there perhaps something in the universe that cannot be reduced to data? Suppose non-conscious algorithms could eventually outperform conscious intelligence in all known data-processing tasks – what, if anything, would be lost by replacing conscious intelligence with superior non-conscious algorithms? Of course, even if Dataism is wrong and organisms aren’t just algorithms, it won’t necessarily prevent Dataism from taking over the world. Many previous religions gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual mistakes. If Christianity and communism could do it, why not Dataism? [Page 394]
Humans relinquish authority to the free market, to crowd wisdom and to external algorithms partly because they cannot deal with the deluge of data. [Page 396]
As a conclusion, Harari ends his book with the 3 following questions:
1. Are organisms really just algorithms, and is life really just data processing?
2. What is more valuable – intelligence or consciousness?
3. What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?
If reading is not for you, you can still listen to Harari in a recent Ted Talk: Nationalism vs. globalism: the new political divide.
I wrote here how much I enjoyed reading Sapiens. Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, is just as good.
In Death Is Optional, the exchange between Daniel Kahneman and the author, which summarizes many of Harari’s most original ideas, here is one of the most interesting ones – in relationship to start-ups: “in terms of history, the events in Middle East, of ISIS and all of that, is just a speed bump on history’s highway. The Middle East is not very important. Silicon Valley is much more important. It’s the world of the 21st century … I’m not speaking only about technology.” One may not like it, but it is interesting.
As usual, a few extracts:
“Most studies cite tool production and intelligence as particulararly important for the ascent of humankind. […] Humans nowadays completely dominate the planet not because the individual human is far smarter and more nimble-fingered than the individual chimp or wolf, but because Homo Sapiens is the only species on earth capable of co-operating flexibly in large numbers.” [Pages 130-1]
“Animals such as wolves and chimpanzees live in a dual reality. On the one hand, they are familiar with objective entities outside them, such as trees, rocks and rivers. On the other hand, they are aware of subjective experiences within them, such as fear, joy and desire. Sapiens, in contrast, live in triple-layered reality. In addition to trees, rivers, fears and desires, the Sapiens world also contains stories about money, gods, nations and corporations. As history unfolded, the impact of gods, nations and corporations grew at the expense of rivers, fears and desires. There are still many rivers in the world, and people are still motivated by their fears and wishes, but Jesus Christ, the French Republic and Apple Inc. have dammed and harnessed the rivers, and have learned to shape our deepest anxieties and yearnings.” [Page 156]
If we invest money in research, then scientific breakthroughs will accelerate technological progress. New technologies will fuel economic growth, and a growing economy could dedicate even more money to research. With each passing decade we will enjoy more food, faster vehicles and better medicines. One day our knowledge will be so vast and our technology so advanced that we could distill the elixir of eternal youth, the elixir of true happiness, and any other drug we might possibly desire – and no god will stop us. […] Modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning. [Page 201]
Interesting comparison between the Scientific revolution, where Knowledge = Empirical Data X Mathematics, and the Humanist revolution led by Knowledge = Experiences X Sensitivity. In medieval Europe, Knowledge = Scriptures X Logic. [Pages 235-7]
Humanist revolution according to Harari [Pages 232-3]
Harari is sometimes too long in the development of his ideas, but it is worth following him. On pages 247-76, he explains how humanism is not a coherent view of the world. Three schisms have occurred: liberalism (where liberty is the most important value), socialism (where equality is first) and evolutionary humanism (where conflict is the raw material pushing evolution forward).
“By 1970 the world contained 130 independent countries, but only thirty of these were liberal. […] And then everything changed. The supermarket proved to be far stronger than the gulag. […] As of 2016, there is no serious alternative to the liberal package. […] China is the most promising ground for the new techno-religions emerging from Silicon Valley. […] God is dead. […] Religions that lose touch with the technological realities of the day lose their ability even to understand the questions being asked.” [Pages 264-8]
“Numbers alone don’t count for much in history. History is often shaped by small groups of forward-looking innovators. […] In 1881, Muhammad Ahmad bin Abdallah, […] meanwhile in 1875, Dayananda Saraswati in India, […] Pope Pius IX, in Europe […] or thirty years before, Hong Xiuquan […] Hundreds of millions clung to their religious dogmas. […] Hong led the deadliest war of the nineteenth century, the Taiping Rebellion. From 1850 to 1864, at least 20 million people lost their lives.” [Pages 270-1]
“Most societies failed to understand what was happening, and they therefore missed the train of progress”. [Page 273] Ask yourself what was the most influential discovery, invention or creation of the twentieth century? That’s a difficult question […] antibiotics, […] computers, […] feminism. […] What did religions bring? This is a difficult question too because there is so little to choose from. [Page 275]
And as a conclusion of chapter 7: “Since humanism has long sanctified the life, the emotions and the desires of human beings, it’s hardly surprising that a humanist civilisation will want to maximize human lifespans, human happiness and human power.” [Page 277]
What is the equity structure of Uber and Airbnb? Unfortunately, this is a question only the shareholders in the two start-ups can know. I have nearly no clue. But over the week-end I had a quick look at how much these unicorns have raised and how this impacted the founders. If you read this blog from time to time, you probably know I do this exercise regularly. I have a databasis of more than 350 examples, and I will update it soon with 401 companies, including these two ones. Here is the result of my “quick and dirty” analysis.
Airbnb cap. table – A speculative exercise with very little information available
Uber cap. table – A speculative exercise with very little information available
A few additional remarks:
– the three founders of Airbnb were 27, 27 and 25-year old at the date of foundation. Whereas for Uber, they were 32 and 34;
– as you may see, I do not have any information about other common shareholders, neither about stock option plans. More information will be released when/if the companies file to go public…
– the amounts raised are just amazing but the founders relatively undiluted;
– finally, Uber did a stock split so the huge price per share would be divided by around 40 whereas the real number of shares is multiplied by the same amount.
Comments welcome!
PS: for some unknown reason, I had some trouble with Slideshare. So here is my updated document on Scribd…
Equity Structure in 401+ Start-ups by Herve Lebret on Scribd