Tag: economy

Gen X and the big economic shift

The costs of the 1970s economic shift are beginning to be recognised.

The single economic event that defines Generation X was the 1973 Oil Shock, the OPEC embargo on the west bought the post World War II era of economic growth to an end.

With stagflation gripping the western world, new solutions were sought and by the end of the decade governments touting ‘business friendly’ economic policies – more accurately ‘corporation friendly’ – were seen as the solution.

As Robert Reich described in the New York Times, these policies were not only a disaster for workers but also for the middle classes and business productivity.

US-economy-employment-wages

A notable aspect missing in the above graph is US productivity growth has since stalled as corporations have focused on stock buy backs rather than investment. The problem has been compounded by the use of tax shelters that have resulted in huge amounts of American corporate profits being locked away in offshore bank accounts.

While those stock buy backs and arbitraging tax regimes have benefitted executives and a small cabal of fund managers, the diversion of capital from productive investment has weakened the US and global economy.

For the baby boomers, even those of the Lucky Generation who preceded GenX, that lack of investment now threatens their retirement lifestyles as incomes and government spending stagnates.

The ‘big business friendly’ ideologies of Thatcher and Reagan defined the late Twentieth Century and continue to dominate government thinking in much of the western world, it may be though that we a reaching the end of that era as the costs to the broader economy are beginning to be recognised.

For GenX and their kids, the costs are being borne now but their parents may be about to feel the costs too.

Cutting through Australia’s innovation rhetoric

Investor Steve Baxter talks about some of the strengths and weaknesses in Australia’s innovation statement

Four months ago, the Australian government launched its innovation agenda with the noble ambition to put the nation “on the right track to becoming a leading innovator.”

The keenly awaited innovation statement was seen as a defining the new Prime Minister’s agenda after two decades of complacent political leadership. At the launch of the paper Malcolm Turnbull said “our vision is for Australians to be confident, embrace risk, pursue ideas and learn from mistakes, and for investors to back these ideas at an early-stage.”

One of the early stage investors currently investing in Australia’s startup sector is Brisbane based entrepreneur, and Australian Shark Tank judge, Steve Baxter who spoke to Decoding the New Economy last week about where he sees the strengths and weaknesses in the proposals.

Beating the rhetoric

“Competitive threats are far more effective than rhetoric from a Prime Minister,” says Baxter in observing what really drives adoption and change while emphasizing that the announcement is a welcome shift,  “the change in messaging from the government has been very important. It’s having an impact and a future looking message has been fantastic.”

While Baxter is positive about much of the incentives on offer and the importance of changes to regulations around bankruptcy and treatment of business losses, he flags the the delay in implementing the tax incentives as being a problem.

Too focused on commercialisation

Baxter though has been a long standing critic of Australia’s research sector and the emphasis on commercialisation of academic work is in his view one of the Innovation Statement’s major weaknesses, “commercialisation is a concept that we’ve failed at. It’s dead. We’ve put so much money into it, it’s actually embarrassing. We need a new mindset towards it.”

“there are seven hundred million dollars of a billion going to the research sector. That’s not entrepreneurship. In fact universities and research institutes are the least entrepreneurial organisations you’ll ever come across.”

“We need more business model innovation, we’re seeing too many people in lab coats with synchrotrons, square kilometre arrays which we have to do,” Baxter states. “What we’re not seeing the Dropboxes and the Instagrams and the Facebooks and the Wayze’s, the cool stuff that doesn’t need a two hundred million dollar building.”

Thin pipelines

As an early stage invest Baxter sees the real challenge for Australia lies in encouraging individuals to launch their own ventures, “I don’t think we’ve done enough yet to prove we have an investment problem when it comes to early stage companies,” he says. “I don’t believe we have a lack of capital”.

For those starting their own ventures, Baxter sees the word ‘innovation’ as being a barrier in itself.
“The entrepreneurs I back aren’t those who say ‘I’m going to innovate’ but those who say ‘I can see a problem’.”

While Baxter doesn’t say this, the real challenge lies weaning Australians off property speculation and encouraging investment and risk taking, something that requires major tax and social security reform.

Sadly, the Turnbull government has abandoned the prospect of any immediate taxation reform and even the Innovation Statement’s more modest agenda is now in doubt as the nation’s febrile Parliament prepares itself for an early election.

Baxter’s views, and his optimistic but guarded outlook towards the Innovation Statement reflect the opinion of many of those in the Australian investment community, it would be a shame for the country if the current opportunities are lost for short term political maneuvering.

China’s rocky economic pivot

China’s workforce problems shows an economic pivot is rarely smooth.

As the Chinese economy adjusts to new economic realities, some of the costs are beginning to be felt.

In China’s North-East where the economy is dominated by state owned enterprises in staid heavy industries, workers are moving to more promising regions and local leaders are worried.

However with the Chinese economy pivoting, things aren’t doing so well in the more laissez-faire South Eastern provinces either with workers giving up their precious New Year’s holidays to protest unpaid wages and unfair treatment.

For the Chinese government, this worker unrest is a serious problem. How the country’s leaders try to address the causes could well have global ramifications as the world’s economy faces the reality of massive economic overcapacity.

Out of the box thinking is needed, but it may not be enough to overcome the fears and needs of ordinary, angry workers. What is clear is that an economic pivot is never smooth.

Silicon Valley and the rise of Chinese innovation

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick thinks China could overtake the United States in being innovative

Silicon Valley could be soon surpassed by China warns Uber’s Travis Kalanick.

While sceptics could dismiss Kalanick’s claim as his simply sucking up to his hosts in Beijing where he made the comment, or put the statement down to a PR campaign for his company’s renewed push into China, there may be a kernel of truth.

If for nothing else, the Chinese diaspora across the Pacific Rim is known for its entrepreneurial drive. From Bangkok to San Francisco and Sydney, Chinese communities have a reputation for being full of smart and hardworking business people.

Added to the Chinese cultural aspect is history. Fifty years ago car makers in Detroit and motorbike manufacturers in Birmingham, England, scoffed at the idea that their Japanese competitors could overtake them.

Within a quarter of a century they were proved wrong.

Another concern for Silicon Valley is that it could be losing its edge. As veteran journalist Tom Foremski points out, increasingly workers in the Bay Area live in a privileged bubble.

Foremski discusses how younger, creative and innovative workers are finding opportunities in cheaper and more diverse American cities like New York’s Brooklyn.

America’s diversity, and depth of its economy, will continue to be a strength for the foreseeable future but Americans, particularly those in the Bay Area, shouldn’t be resting on its laurels.

Travis Kalanick’s warning might be dramatic, but it isn’t beyond the realms of possibility.

Where the jobs will go

An Australian state government survey outlines the impact of automation on employment

That automation is having a profound impact on existing jobs is beginning to be appreciated by governments. A study by the New South Wales government’s Parliamentary research service examines what the effects will be on the Australian state’s economy.

Like equivalent overseas studies, the report finds over half the state’s jobs – a total of 1.5 million positions – could be at risk from computerisation.

An interesting aspect of this is the bulk of the impacts being felt in the mining, construction and logistics industries. While there’s no doubt those sectors will be hard hit, particularly for lower skilled workers, the assumption is higher level positions in management and supervisory roles won’t be as greatly affected.

Examples of this include ‘professionals’ only being at a 4.6% risk of being displaced and ‘General Managers’ at 5.0%. This compares to labourers at 96.1% and 95.7% of ‘filing and registry clerks’ losing their jobs.

While there’s no doubt the lesser skilled roles are at immediate risk, and have been for decades, the rise of artificial intelligence and business automation are increasingly going to put management roles at risk.

Quibbles aside, the report is a good read on the impacts of automation and computerisation on what has been one of the western world’s more successful economies.

The hollowing out process of Australia’s middle classes it describes show that phenomenon is not just confined to the United States and this probably creates the greatest challenge to politicians as populists seek to blame foreigners and minorities for much of the population’s declining fortunes.

Almost every government in the world is facing these issues and the efforts of public servants and economists to accurately describe what’s happening has to be applauded and encouraged.

For voters and workers, reading these reports to understand the forces changing their industries and communities is essential to making informed choices at the ballot box and the workplace.

Silicon Valleys of the Twentieth Century

Dayton Ohio is an example of an industrial hub rising and falling, could Silicon Valley follow?

The rise and fall of industrial hubs is a topic that fascinates this blog and the excellent BBC and US National Public Radio series Six Routes to a Richer World discusses how countries as disparate as Germany, Brazil, China and the United States are carving their own paths to prosperity in the 21st Century.

In the US segment, the show looks at one of America’s industrial centres of last century – Dayton, Ohio.

The home of the Wright Brothers, Dayton also saw the invention of the cash register, air conditioner and even the self starting motor. In the early part of the Twentieth Century it held the most patents per capita of any US city and workers flocked to the region for high paying manufacturing job.

Manufacturing, and research, is largely gone from Dayton today and the question posed is could the successful cities of California’s Bay Area follow a similar path this Century.

Whether Silicon Valley and San Francisco fade will be a matter of historical forces that are difficult to see right now, but the likelihood can’t be underestimated.

Thinking through the effects of autonomous vehicles

Driverless cars and autonomous vehicles are going to change the economy and workplace. Where will the jobs come from?

The defining technology of the Twentieth Century was the automobile. While there were many advancements – antibiotics, mains electricity and mass communications to name just three – nothing changed society to the same extent as the motor car.

A hundred years ago it was impossible for a pundit to appreciate how the motor car was about to change communities, the population’s increased mobility saw the suburbanisation of cities, the creation of the consumerist society and the rise of industries such as supermarkets and drive in theatres, none of which were foreseeable fifty years earlier.

Change didn’t happen in isolation, those new industries were the result of a number of changes in technology alongside the motor car, for instance the supermarket couldn’t have happened without refrigerators becoming household items along with radio and television developing new markets through the advertising industry.

Economic drivers

The biggest driving force was economic, once motor cars became affordable for the typical worker – just before World War II in the US and in the mid 1950s in most of rest of the Western world – the cost of travelling fell dramatically.

With the cost of moving around falling, workers had the opportunity to move out of the dirty, grimy inner city to new and clean suburbs where they could commute to their jobs in offices and factories. At the same time it also meant families could travel further to buy their groceries, forcing the end of the cornershop and the milkman.

Autonomous vehicles change those economics again, as Uber founder Travis Kalanick pointed out last year, the most expensive item in a taxi or Uber fare is the driver.

During his interview at the Code Conference Kalanick went on to describe how eliminating the driver changes the economics.

“When there’s no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away.”

Changing ownership

The assumption in today’s discussions about autonomous vehicles is that car ownership will become and thing of the past, something that fits into Travis Kalanick’s view.

Should that be the case then a whole range of new industries open up. Who owns the cars, who dispatches the cars, who plans for peak and normal usage are just a few questions and opportunities that open for savvy entrepreneurs.

A changing concept of ownership doesn’t come without problems, not least who owns the code controlling the vehicles and the data being generated which in turn raises privacy issues.

Loss of jobs

The obvious other question with driverless vehicles is what happens to all the taxi drivers, couriers and long haul truckers as automobiles no longer require operators.

With truck driving being the dominant occupation in most US states, employing 1.8 million workers according to the Bureau of Labor Studies, this is a serious question. Interestingly the BLS forecasts employment to grow five percent per annum over the rest of the decade.

That scale of  job losses hasn’t been unusual over the last century. The agricultural industry itself has seen a massive fall in employment in that time period with the proportion of Americans working in agriculture falling from half the population to a tenth of that.

Creating new industries

Obviously half the US working population didn’t end up being unemployed, with the many of those displaced by the motor vehicle – either in the agricultural sector or in those fields catering for the pre-motor car market – finding work in other fields.

That the economy adapted to the loss of jobs in what were traditional fields in 1915 gives us a clue to where the jobs and industries of the future are going to come from as the changing nature of the economy means new businesses are created.

As the economics of these industries change, we see the need for workers move further up the value chain. We also see those reduced costs open opportunities for new ideas, just as the supermarket concept took hold in the 1950s as the economics of household shopping changed.

This is where the greatest opportunity lies for today’s entrepreneurs lies, in figuring out how those reduced costs will change the way consumers and society use transportation. In turn that will drive the next wave of employment growth.

Rethinking education in a time of a declining middle class

Reskilling the workforce is essential to address middle class decline

The role of higher education is changing in the face of technological and economic change as this World Economic Forum article describes.

Education is one of the keys to staying competitive in an increasingly technology driven society on both a personal and societal level. Individuals and nations that neglect their education investment risk are left behind.

One of the starkest examples of this are America’s lower middle class and the rise of Donald Trump.

In an article for The Atlantic, former George W. Bush adviser David Frum, describes how economic uncertainty for America’s relatively unskilled workforce are pushing back against their falling living standards.

The angriest and most pessimistic people in America are the people we used to call Middle Americans. Middle-class and middle-aged; not rich and not poor; people who are irked when asked to press 1 for English, and who wonder how white male became an accusation rather than a description.

You can measure their pessimism in polls that ask about their expectations for their lives—and for those of their children. On both counts, whites without a college degree express the bleakest view. You can see the effects of their despair in the new statistics describing horrifying rates of suicide and substance-abuse fatality among this same group, in middle age.

That these people are supporting Donald Trump – and their counterparts in almost every Western democracy – is not surprising as they losing in the new economic order and the technological changes which are eliminating or devaluing their jobs.

For governments and communities, the question is how to restore these folks’ fortunes or at least maintain their living standards. With protectionism almost certainly guaranteed to fail, the obvious answer is to give these workers the skills to compete and contribute in the 21st century economy.

Sadly, most Western governments still locked in a 1980s Reagan/Thatcherite mindset see education as a cost to be reduced rather than an investment in both their communities’ collective wealth and society’s cohesion.

Education, like the rest of society, is changing. A rethinking of both how it is delivered and its role is essential for nations to be successful in today’s economy.

Changing the Australian investment mindset

Can the Turnbull government’s Innovation Statement reset Australia’s investment mindset?

“Of course I’m minimising my tax. If anybody in this country doesn’t minimise their tax they want their head read,” media tycoon Kerry Packer growled when asked about his financial affairs at an Australian Parliamentary committee in 1991.

Kerry Packer’s attitude towards tax minimisation runs deep in the Australian psyche so the announcement of a range of concessions to encourage investment in startups as part of the Federal government’s Innovation Package, branded as The Ideas Boom, may well succeed in unexpected ways.

The National Innovation and Science Agenda should be welcomed by any Australian concerned about the nation’s role in the 21st Century. After 25 years of neglect – if not wilful ignorance – by successive Liberal and Labor governments there is now at least a recognition that developing new industries and businesses is essential to maintain first world living standards.

Many of the proposals in the package are long overdue such as a commitment to open government data, initiatives to support STEM education, programs to encourage women in the IT industry and recommitment of funding for the government scientific agency, the CSIRO.

Australia’s quiet tragedy

The defunding of education and CSIRO research by successive Liberal and Labor governments has been one of the quiet tragedies of Australia’s turning its back on the 21st Century. The reversal of the focus on property speculation and mining is hopefully the start of renewed government efforts to restore the long term competitiveness of the country.

While many of us hope this is part of a broader, bipartisan vision of where Australia should be in the connected century, at this stage no-one can have confidence that these long term measures won’t be the victim of short term political expediency.

Short term gains

In the short term however the focus will be on the immigration and investment incentives. In some respects they are disappointing – the $200,000 annual limit for tax benefits should be contrasted with there being no such restrictions on property speculation – and both the investment and immigration proposals are still overly complex and will be a boon for well connected advisors and consultants.

However the changes are a start in shifting the attitudes of the nation’s risk averse investment and business culture and may well be well timed as the real estate price bubble starts to deflate forcing investors and speculators to look elsewhere for returns and tax breaks.

That chase for tax breaks could well mark the change for Australia’s investment starved small business and startup community, at the time Kerry Packer made his comments to the Parliamentary committee one of the most popular tax minimisation strategies was investing in locally made movies under the 10BA scheme that allowed generous deductions for investors.

Following film

Most of the films made under the 10BA regime were at best forgettable and the scheme was wound up in the mid 2000s but the wave of money that flowed into the Australian film industry helped launch the careers of many of today’s globally actors, producers and industry professionals.

If these changes can have similar success in the technology industries then they may be well worthwhile.

Another aspect to the Innovation Statement may well be the shift in Australian government industrial policy from a failed ‘think big’ mindset that assumed local businesses had to dominate their domestic markets to compete globally into a view where smaller, nimble operations can succeed internationally.

Welcoming change

Overall the Turnbull government’s Innovation Statement is a welcome change from the last twenty years of complacent policy around Australia’s economic development. One big challenge remains though in changing the nation’s complacent business culture.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge is move Australian households and investors on from the tax minimisation mindset. While Kerry Packer may no longer be with us, his mindset remains the driving force of Australian business.

Investing in a low consumption economy

In an age where economic growth doesn’t require an exponential increase in energy and resource consumption, new investment models will be required

Four days at the Autodesk University in Las Vegas last week confirmed how a radical change has happened in economic development since the turn of this century. The question is whether business and national leaders will accept this new reality.

Andrew McAfee’s session at the Autodesk opening keynote illustrated the declining use of commodities by advanced nations. McAfee’s point dovetailed nicely with that of Kevin Ashton a few weeks earlier in Sydney that energy consumption of devices is falling as well.

Showcased at the conference were the new manufacturing processes, design methods and smart materials showing how we’re now in an age where increasing living standards are not coupled to rising consumption rates.

Falling use of energy and resources, even while living standards and functionality grow, is a direct contrast to the economic models of the past three hundred years where increasing affluence and quality of life meant exponentially increasing demands for energy and commodities.

This point has been missed by many businesses and policy makers, particularly in Australia where the assumption of ever increasing demands for energy has seen massive over-investment in coal and gas export facilities along with the tragic gold plating of the electricity distribution at cost that’s now crippling the nation’s industries and households.

Businesses, and nations, that haven’t recognised the trends will need admit the error, write off those costs and move onto the new model.

For voters, consumers and investors it’s time to demand leaders of business and government accept the 21st Century economic model is very different to that of the previous century.

Being invited to the investment party

Jon Medved is one of those credited with driving the current Israeli startup boom having been involved as either a founder or investor in over 100 startup companies over the past two decades.

His current venture, OurCrowd, is a fund raising platform for startups seeking investors. Since being launched in 2013 the service has raised over $34M for 31 portfolio companies.

At the Australian-Israeli Bridge Investment summit in Sydney last week, Jon was a keynote speaker and panellist describing the startup and technology landscape of Israel. Following his morning sessions, he spoke to Decoding the New Economy about Crowdfunding, investment regulation along with both Australia and Israel’s place in the world.

Thanks Jon, let’s start with what OurCrowd do

We’re the world’s largest equity crowdfunding platform. We focus on sophisticated investors. What they call in America an accredited investor, which means that you have to have substantial assets in order to crowdfund at this point because we’re offering shares in private partnerships that then are essentially investing on a per company basis so it’s more like democratized venture capital than it is classic Kickstarter crowdfunding.

You, as an individual, to get into one of my deals have to commit $10,000 per deal. So that’s real money. You get complete choice. We sift through thousands of companies, select about 2% of those that we look at. We put them up on our website. We invest our own money and then you just choose to join us. We aggregate the variety of the investors and join us from 110 countries around the world and then we write a single check with the aggregated amount and that’s often millions of dollars so it’s not like couple 100k or 50k. This is real money.

Our biggest round has been $16 million with the other money. We invest in companies across all sectors and all stages. We’re sector agnostic as well as stage agnostic and we’re now geography agnostic. We’re from Israel and the majority of our deals are in Israel, but we’re increasingly investing in the States. Here in Australia, we’ve done two deals. Our first was launched, our first deal in India, deals in the UK, soon Latin America, etc., etc.

So where are the areas that you’re seeing the biggest growth?

The Internet of Things is just unstoppable.

On the hardware side or on the software analytics side?

Both, we have software for inter-device connectivity. We have software for big industrial control of the Internet of Things. We have devices themselves that are really cool. Things that are doing location of things, things that are doing analysis of non-connected devices. We have companies that are linking the physical world to the virtual world. I’m just a huge believer. I think this is such a big trend, and we haven’t even seen the beginning of it. It’s just getting started.

How did the idea of OurCrowd come about?

I’ve been 30 years on the tech business as an investor and as an entrepreneur, taking companies public, have been bought. I ran venture capital funds. I’ve been an Angel Investor, so I’ve been around the block several times.

I’m too young, at least in spirit, to hang up the spurs, and I wanted to do something that would combine three distinct loves that I have. One is I love investing. Two, I love disrupting and being an entrepreneur. And the third is I love Israel. I live in Israel. But I really believe that Israel has a role to play in history and the world beyond its small population.

I tried to mix up investment, entrepreneurship, and Israel, came up with OurCrowd because the idea is that today, the whole venture capital angel investing thing is very important in terms of powering innovation, but no one has disrupted that or changed that methodology for 50 years.

Some old venture funds, some old angel investments and some of the disadvantages of current practice is number one, you’re limited typically regionally or city. There’s the Boston Common Angels or South Coast Angels or the Melbourne Angels that, God forbid, don’t invest in Sydney. That’s fine for that period of time. That doesn’t work anymore. Basically, you’ve got to be global. The companies need global help. I’m here. Are they okay?

So, this was very disruptive I think of the existing way the people invest because it was going to turn something which had been very hyper and local into a global event, but it was also going to disrupt the business by bringing in completely uninvolved people. It turns out that in America, which I know very well, there are 10 million of these accredited households. About a hundred thousand have ever made an angel investment.

Literally, 1% of the rich people have ever done this kind of investing. So, I said, “Before we bring the whole world then which is going to happen, and people are working on legislation here and elsewhere, let’s first empower the wealthy to get access to these deals because really, if you look at who are the guys who’ve been investing in the next Facebook or the WhatsApps of the world, same couple of hundred angel investors in Silicon Valley and maybe the same 50 funds and everybody else has been screwed.

Basically, you’re not invited to the party. You know when you can get to the party? It’s when these companies get public. That’s what they’re called private companies. They only problem is that these companies go public and they are already at $50 billion valuation. Who wants to come to that party? It’s not a fun party. I want to get people into the company when they’re being priced at $10 million or $5 million or $20 million so you can ride it to the billion dollars and the individual can make a hundred times his money or hundreds of times the money.

I think we are disruptive both on the global thing in terms of being inclusive and giving people choice because until now, the Faustian bargain you had to make was either I’m going to have a choice, therefore, I am an angel which means I’m on my own. If I’m the newbie, figure it out, read a book, get a mentor. How do I make an investment like this? What’s a term sheet? What’s preferred stock? Who’s the lawyer I should use? How do I…That’s very hard for somebody who doesn’t grow organically in the system to access that.

You could go to a venture fund, but at a venture fund get ready to write a million or $5 million check. Get ready to be turned down by all the good funds in the valley who don’t need your money, and get ready to not have any discretion or fund. You can’t choose a deal. You basically hand over the money and say, “See you in 10 years.” It becomes like another investment. I said, “No, let’s go find a way to let people choose their own investment but within a safe platform in context where we’ve done the work, where we handle the legal, we protect the rights, we aggregate everybody so when we invest, we’re treated like the big boys. We get the same stock that a General Electric or an Andreessen Horowitz or a Telstra will get, we get for that individual. And you can get in for 10 grand. That’s where the subversive part comes.

I came up with this idea, figured that it would also be a really cool way to help Israel because all these people that get hot and bothered about startup nations, “Okay, yeah. I want to invest.” Good luck. How do you do it? They still have that same problem. They’ve got to go do it on their own and figure out, especially if they’re living abroad, how do you do that? Or find a venture fund. This is a different way, and it’s got legs. And we’ve managed now to cross the $200 million threshold. We’re $50 million Aussie dollars raised here, which is pretty cool. So it’s a big chunk of the money coming from Australia. Got a thousand investors here, 10,000 around the world, 90 companies and growing fast.

Were there any specific reason, apart from your own passion about Israel, for setting up there?

No, because our regulatory approach, which I think is the right one has been based on…In the U.S., they call it Reg D 506, but it’s all based on the exemption you get for being a venture capitalist or the exemption you get to do private placements among accredited or sophisticated investors. The regulators worldwide basically say, “You know what? If you got bucks, we leave you alone as long as you play by the rules, but we’ll not regulate these private in place because otherwise, how the hell will your companies grow to get ready to go public?”

We threaded that needle if you will, and restrict our platform to those who are accredited or sophisticated according to their…Is it they call it qualified. Each area is different. In Israel, at the moment, it’s like almost $4 million of assets. The test here in Australia is two and a half. In the U.S., it’s only 1 million outside of your home. There are different income tests, and we essentially geolocate our websites. We flow those requirements down based on where you’re from. We spend a boatload of money on our friends, the lawyers. We have a lot of lawyer friends.

We talk to the regulators regularly because they’re really trying to figure this out and want to open this business up except they have a series of difficult decisions to make. So their first big decision is whether or not they want to do this according to a junior IPO model which says, “Okay, go ahead and let the crowd into invest in startups but, they’ll buy stock directly in the company.” They’ll call them issuers. For example, the proposed regs here in Australia demand that the companies become non-listed public companies.

They demand 20 or more shareholders already, then we’ll let you crowdfund. Our whole approach is no, these guys should all go directly on the cap table. With all due respect, that screws it up. It prevents venture capitalists of note to really come. In other words, if they’re serious VCs, a company with a hundred or 200 individual investors, some with couple hundred dollars, forget it.

They’re going to go, “This is too hard.”

Because all these guys got to sign documents. It’s a mess. They got to vote. Our structure, which is to have a SPV (Special Purpose Vehicle) or intermediary partnership whereby we act as the nominee, we’re managing the process, we have a board member, that first of all, affords protection to the investor so they now have the right to get over a certain percentage of holding, which gives them anti-delusion, anti…They get preemptive rights. They get information rights to all the good…which the VCs have.

Now, we flow that down to our individual investor which no standard crowdfunding platform would have. More importantly, it’s good for the company because they now got a single shareholder who looks just like another VC fund and so we get to bring the company the advantage of having thousands of investors interested on the platform and pushing them forward but none of the headache of having to manage them all directly.

The regulators hopefully will figure out that our kind of structure doesn’t have to be mandated but should be at least allowed and in certain parts of the world, the regime as they are foreseeing it transform from accredited only to non-accredited broad based from what they call wholesale to resale, wholesale to retail, they are not allowing this, at least for the retail. If that’s the case, we won’t be in the retail again. We’ll stay with the accredited supposed to get it because we believe this is a sine qua non.

We don’t want to get a placement fee that the company pays or a slotting fee to go raise money. That’s going to get a negative selection process. It’s basically going to say that, “You know what, crowdfunding, you get the remainders,” the type B, like the socks or the underwear that have a defect. The better companies will go to venture capital. The worse ones, you’ll have to deal with that. Maybe you’ll get lucky.

That’s totally not our approach. Our approach is, we want to invest alongside Sequoia, Andreessen, Excel, and we do. In other words, we get OurCrowd into those deals which you really want to get into and in order to do that, it has to be managed. It has to be aggregated into a venture partnership, and then we want the focus of the whole process to be not ending at funding, but beginning at funding because the biggest mistake that the junior IPO approach makes is when you do an IPO, you hand the check over to the company. It’s gone public. You say, “Good luck.” Maybe you cover it.

In research, if you’re an investment bank, maybe you’ll try to do a secondary later, but you’re not involved. You don’t sit on the board, you don’t give guidance, you’re not trying to add value all the time. Whereas in venture, if you don’t, that’s the definition of dumb money. You don’t want to be dumb money. You want to be involved and we want to use our special asset, which is the fact we got these 10,000 global investors that can provide access and assistance to these companies like nobody’s business.

Going back to that regulation side, which jurisdictions do you think are ahead of the pack in this?

Look, UK is really ahead because they have just basically almost chosen not to regulate. I think that’s interesting. I think that this whole business can be fraught with danger, and I think there is regulation in the UK but very, very light handed. I think that’s the right approach.

I think that we’re going to have to experiment, we’re going to break some eggs and let the market figure out which model works. Hopefully, people will not get ripped off. By the way, just recently there was a terrible fraud in the U.S. from a guy who put together an oil and gas deal that seems to have gone on the lam and that was one of these platforms where they don’t do diligence.

Part of our whole gestalt is that we not only curate the investors and manage the deals and build SPVs, but we carefully diligence every company. We make mistakes like anybody else, but at least we hope we’d be able to weed out the obvious frauds unlike other sites that just allow people to put up whatever they like. The UK seems to be letting a lot of stuff there. The US has got this wonderful 685-page new decision that the SCC just passed.

Under the JOBS act

Under the JOBS, took them four years of work, almost. We’ll see who’s out there, but everybody is working on it. I think that you guys will get it right. I don’t think anybody feels that what will come in the first go round will be what will be ultimately. This is new stuff and for us, the major issue is that we got a thriving, rolling, wonderful business based on sophisticated, accredited, qualified investors. It’s growing really well.

There’s a ton of additional growth that we can have here, and while we would like to be with the wave of history and let everybody in, we don’t want to sacrifice our principles. If the jurisdictions won’t allow us to create intermediary structures where we can manage it, where we can be essentially incentive not at a placement to get the deal done, but we get incentive primarily on the success of the investment. In other words, we believe that we should be taking our fees from the investors, not from the companies because if we take money from the companies, we’re going to get the worst companies.

Then the companies say, “Hey, I don’t need you. I’ll go to a venture fund.” But I want to be able to compete and cooperate with the venture fund where the guy says, “Hey, I’ll take money from these venture funds and take money from you but at least I don’t have to pay either of you, right?” Then the investor pays for the privilege of hopefully making money. If we don’t make money, it’s not going to work. If no one makes money in this, none of these models are going to work. I think that our approach at least stands a better chance at returning real money because we’re getting good companies. You don’t need to pay us to get them up with the site. They have to convince us that they’re worthy.

You mentioned due diligence before. What happens when I’ve got a business, I come to you and say, “I’d like to fund my business through your funding.”

We run you through the wringer. We first ask, “Where is your kindergarten teacher and how do we reach her?” That kind of stuff. In Israel, by the way, it’s very easy because…Excuse me, if you pee in our pool, people know.

It’s not like people, the whole country knows. Diligence is rather easy. It’s little harder for us outside of Israel, but we rely often on our investor base to help us because we have deep tied investors who are from around the world.

We like to co-invest with other funds, and other family offices and corporations. We share diligence information, but we have a whole team that runs these companies through, I would say, a very rigorous diligence process. That includes not only checking out the team but also talking to their customers, verifying the data they’ve told us is correct. Speaking to technology experts, market experts, competitors, etc.

Going on to the Australian side of it, how do you find the Australian business culture versus the Israeli business culture.

I think Australia is amazing. I’ve become a real fan of this country and a huge fan of the current prime minister. I think you guys got an amazing guy there (new Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull) who’ll actually have the potential of making a significant impact on the business culture and national culture of the country.

You got everything in place more or less. You’ve got great technology, world-class universities [inaudible 00:21:42] billions of dollars exporting education. You’ve got progressive, interesting big enough size companies in the Telstras and the Qantases and the Commonwealth (Bank). These are not small businesses.

Great, unbelievable pool of capital and it’s second in the world in terms of superannuation funds. I think it’s a matter of time until the stars align and you break out in terms of realizing your innovation potential. We’re betting on it.

That’s why we’re spending so much time down here. We’re fans of everything Aussie, and I think that the sense of isolation and a little bit like we’re out of the mainstream and we’re far away and all that stuff, that goes away, not only when hopefully planes will fly twice the speed they do today, but I think it goes away notionally [SP] and culturally and what not.

We’re just a small world. You have a lot of great Aussies who are in the valley so there’s a good money here and there’s a good. I think this is going to happen fast. I bet you that if the number is 200 million or so being invested in Australian VC, that grows tenfold over the next couple of years.

So in the Australian market, what’s your priority at the moment? Are you looking for investors putting money in or are you looking for businesses to invest in?

Yes and yes. It starts with the investors because our strategy is once we build an investor community like we’ve already begun to do here, we have a thousand investors, ain’t too shabby when they’re all sophisticated investors. I think it makes us probably…We’re now the largest crowdfunding for equity platform in Australia. That’s where it starts, but it certainly doesn’t end there. What happens is, through that network, a lot of these are investors who have deals, and they start sourcing us deals. They provide the diligence infrastructure for looking at deals and they more importantly, provide this business development shock force that can help our deals grow here as well as help our companies from Israel around the world enter this market.

This is a very interesting market. It’s big enough to actually make some money and it’s small enough to get in. The people here are nice. They’re not cut-throat. They don’t steal from you. I think it’s actually an interesting place to prove a product. It doesn’t have the explosive scale of the U.S. or European or an Asian market, but it’s a good place to make your initial mistakes and to find high standard customers who will get you through your paces.

Listening to a number of your conversations today, you seem to be fairly down on the more traditional, if you like, type of crowdfunding.

No, I like Kickstarter and Indiegogo because they don’t pretend to give you, the investor, any upside. You got a t-shirt. If you’re expecting more, then you’re a fool. It’s just the fun. It’s just like going to a…I don’t know. It’s about charity. It’s about backing somebody. You get a cool product early. In other words, if you’re a gadget guy, you get to buy them for half price. Maybe they ship and maybe they don’t but that’s the risk you’re taking. That’s fine. And anyway, you’re only talking about a couple hundred bucks. People can afford that.

What I’m afraid of is uncontrolled equity sites where people think they are buying stocks and not having the control that would prevent fraud from happening, as well as even good intentioned guys who are just letting companies put cool video up and then people start putting real money, and there’s nobody there. Forget the fraud, just nobody to help the two guys and a dog build the company, to find additional money, to provide support. That can screw it up for all of us because the consumer is not necessarily, wealthy or not, that sophisticated to say, “Oh, this crowdfunding is right. That’s what crowdfunding is…” As soon as crowdfunding gets a bad name, you hurt everybody.

Beyond the world of talking toasters

Inventor of the Internet of Things term Kevin Ashton speaks of his startup experiences, the future of work, skills needed for success and why the media is a doing a poor job on reporting technology.

Kevin Ashton is best known for coining the ‘Internet of Things’ term in 1999, however that’s just one part of a varied career that’s included building a number of tech startups, co-founding MIT’s Auto-ID Center and leading some of the early development work in RFID (radio frequency identification) networks, which led to the IoT label being born.

Since exiting his last business Ashton’s focus has been on consulting, mentoring some of the startups he’s invested in and writing with his last book “How To Fly A Horse, the secret history of creation, invention and discovery” released at the beginning of this year.

During his visit to Sydney last week, he spoke to Decoding The New Economy about his startup experiences, the future of work, skills needed for success and why the media is a doing a poor job on reporting technology.

Let’s kick off with your book, what was the motivation behind writing it?

In the late 1990s I started a lab at MIT and most of my talking was about the research we were doing. I’d talk and then they’d hear it. But occasionally someone would say, oh, but you’re leading a very innovative team, and we’re very interested in innovation. Can you talk about innovation and how things get created?

So I started giving talks about my experiences of driving an innovation and trying to be innovative, and so on. And that became more and more popular through the 2000s. Eventually I was giving a talk in Napa Valley, California, and a friend of mine came to watch, and at the end they were like, “Oh my God, that was amazing! You need to write a book.”

I  started writing a book of the talk and it did very well. People really liked it. And it was weird because, I guess, you kind of get used to a way of thinking about things, and it seems you forget that to other people it might be insightful.

The book is really my experience and my strong belief that creating is not about magical flashes of inspiration and being a special kind of person, or being a genius, or whatever. It’s got a lot more to do with being willing to just keep going even when it’s not working, even when you can’t see a way forward.

And it’s also not an individual thing. It’s very much about building on the work of other people. Creating itself is very individual, which turned out to be a controversial point as well, that you’re always part of a community of people you know, people you don’t know, people that are still alive, people that died years ago. You’re making these incremental steps, building on the work of others. So that was always my thought, and that’s the book that I wrote. And I’m lucky. People seem to really like it.

What’s your thoughts on the current startup mania?

I think, by and large, big companies suck at doing new things, and the reason is structural. Every big company was a small company at some point. Someone was doing a new thing. And eventually they happened upon something that worked.

The first thing you tried doesn’t work, the second thing you tried doesn’t work, and accidentally you stumble across something that does work and starts making money. Maybe those people move on, maybe they stay, but it’s easy to become addicted to the comfort and safety of the thing that works.

And the money that flows from the thing that works, it’s easy to believe that that thing will continue to work. Or you make a slight change. You only had a red one, and now you’ve got an orange one, and you feel like you’ve been profoundly innovative.

So if you really want to do something new, you probably need to be in a small, passionate group of people. Now it is possible for a big company to take a small, passionate group of people and sort of stick then in an airlock somewhere and leave them alone. Theoretically, that’s possible. It seldom happens, and particularly because most of innovating is failing.

I’ve seen time and again is the people who rise to the top of big companies are often people who are very good at avoiding failure, or the appearance of failure. Very good at taking credit for other people’s success. They’re often from a privileged class. It’s typically white men. The typical CEO is a tallish white man with a full head of hair and a deep voice. I see that all the time. Failing is not good for your career. Ironically, because it is good for creating.

So, I think startups, meaning small companies, small groups of passionate people who are either not scared of failing or don’t have any choice but to keep failing until they succeed because there’s nowhere else to go, are always going to be the engines of innovation and creating.

Now, I will qualify that. There is also a class of privileged white men called venture capitalists who like to make you think that unless they’re allowed to give you some money that you can’t succeed and that you’re not a credible startup unless somebody blessed you with some venture capital or something. And I think, frankly, that’s all bullshit.

The last thing you want to do as an entrepreneur is, and I’ve done it. I’ve started companies without venture capital, and then taken some eventually. My my most successful company never took on any money from anybody else. There was kind of in the middle somewhere.

Not only is venture capital and outside investment not a prerequisite for having a successful startup, it’s really a last resort. Because what comes with that money is loss of control and people who don’t…You know, you start to get some of the problems that come with a big company. Venture capitalists who hear this will just throw up their hands and hate it when they get called out on their shit, but that’s true.

And by the way, a lot of very successful companies that…take Microsoft, or Amazon, or whatever…had a very slight relationship with venture capital. So it’s entirely possible to build a large, successful, high-tech company, without venture money.

The discipline that comes from living hand to mouth and trying to find a customer and trying to make a profit and not wasting your money on bean bags and air hockey or whatever, that’s a good thing. So, I’m all for people of all genders, colors, sexualities, shapes and sizes trying to do something by themselves. I think you can be successful. I don’t think you need anybody’s permission.

Which was your most successful company?

Zensi was a company I started with some academic friends, and it was a very smart way to identify how people were consuming electricity and water. I was very into knowing things relatively. In the case of water, for example, we put a very simple sensor that you could screw under the kitchen sink. It was just a little diaphragm. But every time you use water anywhere in your home, the pressure in your water system changes.

So you turn on the shower upstairs, and throughout your water system, there’s a pressure drop, and then a pressure stabilization as the system gets back to its regular pressure. And what we found was, you could analyze that pressure change and determine someone had just taken a shower, for example.

It’s a very simple sensor connected to the internet, a bunch of algorithms in the cloud. And you could identify leaks, you could tell people where they were wasting water. So, we started that company, basically, with cash of our own and that was in January, February 2009. So that was the depths of the recession. When nobody was starting anything, by the way.

What do they say? They say buy low and sell high. Well, guess what? When you can buy low, nobody’s buying. They’re scared, right?

So we started it 2009, and about 10 months later we had a couple of people trying to acquire it for a lot of money. The best answer you can ever give somebody when they want to acquire your company is, we’re not for sale, because then the price just keeps going up. You have to mean it, right?

Eventually, we got an offer we really couldn’t refuse. At the same time, we were thinking about trying to raise venture money, and so on. It wasn’t like a deliberate strategy to never do it. But the acquisition deal was just so much more valuable. And the beauty of that is, you’re not sharing the money with anybody else.

Today you’re an author and speaker?

Author, speaker. I’ve got some investments in some Austin-based startups. I do a little bit of consulting here and there. So, companies I’m interested in. I have done the MIT thing. And then three startups. And I’m actually enjoying not having a very formal schedule. It gives me a chance to write, which I love. It gives me a chance to come here and do this. I’ve never been very successful in companies that I was not in charge of.

I find that a lot of the kind of mansplaining and bullshit and endless PowerPoint and people wanting to have nothing but meetings and, you know, a lot of posturing and politics and stuff. I mean, like a lot of people who are interested in innovation and passionate about creating new things, I have a very low tolerance for that crap. I’m very bad at it. So, I love my life right now, because I really choose. I’m very much the master of my own destiny, and I don’t have to…I’m not obliged to deal with too many idiots. Which is good for me, because I’m not good at it.

So onto that inevitable question that you’re going to get about the Internet of Things. Do you regret coming up with that tag?

No.

No?

No, I joked one time that I should have called it the internet for things, and people took that a bit too seriously. I mean, I had no idea that it was going to have a life outside of the PowerPoint presentation that I was working on at the time, but it has a poetry to it. It’s specific enough that when people ask what it is, I think you can give a good explanation. It’s general enough that it’s not limiting itself to one application, or something.

The other thing I think is really curious to me is…so the internet of things was something I talked about a lot between ’99 and 2005 or something. And it was reasonably well known in the fairly small community of people who are interested in ubiquitous computing and embedded computing.

And then it took on a life of its own in the late 2000s and sort of the last few years. And I think there’s a couple of reasons why. Right? One is that there are a lot of people graduating right now who are really internet natives.

So the idea of things not being networked, or of things being wirelessly networked, the idea of computers only getting information via keyboard, that’s not a paradigm they’ve ever lived in. And they are…I think I got that slightly wrong, that sentence, so let me rephrase it for you. But there are a group of internet natives graduating right now who have never lived in the paradigm where computers are not connected.

And they’ve never lived in a paradigm where computers don’t gather their own information. So it’s very…the internet of things idea is incredibly natural to them. People who were using computers, let’s say, in the 80s and the early 90s, pre-internet, it can be a little less intuitive. So that’s one thing, but the other thing is, just a complete coincidence, I think, is Twitter. On the internet of things community on Twitter we use the hashtag IOT.

Now, it just so happens, first of all, IoT is very Twitter-friendly because it’s very short. But by calling this thing the internet of things, I inadvertently happened upon a three letter acronym that was distinctive. There aren’t many of those in the world. But there isn’t anything IOT stands for. Now, we never used the term IoT in the early days because it wouldn’t mean anything to anybody, right? But I happened upon this distinctive three-letter acronym, and then Twitter came along. And it made it very easy for all these kids that were kind of internet of things natives to find one another and communicate with one another, and that really helped. That really helped. So there was some coincidence in that realm.

In the presentation that preceded this interview you were quite scathing about some of the more trivial commercial consumer IoT examples.

Oh, stupid. Yeah.

I couldn’t help but think of Marc Benioff a couple of years back, waving his connected toothbrush around at Dreamforce.

People will do everything. If you’ve been in tech for a while, people have been doing that for years. It’s bullshit. I mean, the…So you must live in a super smart home. Not really, no. And they’re like, what have you got?

They think I’m going to have Roombas talking to light bulbs or some bullshit. But the one thing of those consumer products I found useful is my bathroom scale is on WiFi. It’s crazy expensive, but it means that I can never lie to myself about whether or not I’m losing or gaining weight, because it’s like, there’s something on the web, it’s keeping a record. That’s useful. But I think…one of the things that’s kind of curious to me. I talk about it a little bit in my book actually is, there seems to be this obsession with consumer applications in technology.

Which is coupled with a complete lack of curiosity, particularly with respect to you, on the part of journalists and editors and people like that, about how the world actually works. Right. The manufacturing, supply chain, distribution, agriculture, the history of technology. They don’t want to know. It’s like, what is it? And this is a thing. Journalists are the only people who their life is writing about stuff, and then they go out into their kitchen, which is why…they don’t really seem to care about how stuff gets to their kitchen.

It’s like, tell me what it means for my toaster. But there’s so much more to the world than freaking kitchen appliances, you know? And I’m sure there’s something interesting you might to do with a kitchen appliance, but I can’t really think of it. And I don’t see why I have to.

Look at Uber,  the interesting thing about it is, people think I’m cheating. I’m like, so, you’ve got GPS, right? Yeah. Well, that’s a sensor. It’s network connected. That’s part of the internet of things. Oh, yeah, okay, like, not really. I’m like, yes, really. That really is. Right? And it’s the same with…so, oh, I’ve got a smart watch now, and I’m measuring how many steps I take, or something. Great. If you’re doing that, that’s internet of things, right?

And on and on it goes. So there’s a real ignorance among a certain class of people, a kind of communicating class, about how the world works, how things are made, how complicated and miraculous that is. And also there’s kind of an anthropomorphic tendency they have that, when you point out that a phone has a camera and a camera is a sensor, that’s kind of confusing, because unless it’s a human-like sense, it kind of doesn’t count, right? Well, we don’t have GPS, but GPS is still location-sensing.

So I think all this is part of paradigm shift, as well. So it’s not that surprising to the internet of things generation, which is really people, for one, like, I don’t know, after 1990 or something. It’s fairly obvious to them, but to older people it’s like, oh, what does the fridge say to the toaster?

I’ve encountered that myself where producers or editors aren’t interested yet the audience enjoys the discussion or topic.

I mean, that’s the thing, and that’s why I made that joke on the stage. It’s like, I don’t actually agree with these filters. My audience isn’t interested in this because I speak to thousands of people a month, and they’re all interested in it.

So supply chain, it’s amazing to me that there’s a couple hundred eight meter high freaking self-driving trucks in the Pilbara but because people don’t care about, well, what is a strip mine, and what the hell are they strip mining?

What is it that Rio Tinto do anyway? It looks kind of dusty, and the things are big and yellow, and not quite black and shiny, or whatever, so we don’t care. That’s amazing technology. And we depend on the minerals those guys are mining, and they can’t necessarily afford to pay 200,000 Australian dollars a year for someone to drive that truck because nobody wants to live there.

I get that a $200,000 a year job is nice, but living in that place probably isn’t, right? So there’s a dehumanizing thing about that kind of work, as well. Mining is horrible. The fewer people that have to do mining…we need mining. The less manual it is, the better. Dangerous, nasty, it’s bad for your health. So that’s really cool, in turn things technology. But you’re right, try pitch it to an editor.

This touches on a constant theme with the IoT and automation. Where do you see the job coming from?

We have to be real careful when we talk about jobs, because there’s a hard piece to this which is on the individual level, it can be quite devastating. Okay? If you made a living as a cab driver, for example, in some license-regulated monopoly city taxi service, Uber is a threat to your livelihood, and there’s no getting away from that. So on the individual level, new technology can be very disruptive, and I don’t want to trivialize that at all.

However, there were people asked that question, they’re generally asking on a macro level. And on a macro level, what we see all the time is that technology tends to humanize the workforce. You are replacing…what technology can do compared to what humans can do is relatively basic. Again, I talk about this in the book. But a thousand years ago or something in the textile industry, there were people whose job was to stomp up and down on wet cloth all the time, right?

To prepare the fibre for weaving, manual weaving, or whatever. And they got replaced by water mills and wind mills. And then you had apprenticeships, right? So people learned to weave as apprentices, and that predates the education system. So, instead of it being enough for you there to stomp up and down in time to some song people were singing, you got trained in a skill. You became more valuable. I think that’s a more fulfilling life.

Then weavers got replaced by automated looms. But that created a volume of sophisticated new textiles that required management jobs, and so people were taught to read. I’m simplifying slightly, but the macro trend is very obvious. As technology replaces menial and manual labor, we need more skilled workers, we need more educated workers, and that’s why we can all read.

Our three times great grandparents or something were probably illiterate. As were all our ancestors before that. Reading is a very recent skill, and now it’s public education, and it’s considered elementary. That’s why it’s called elementary education. It never used to be. So, in terms of where the jobs come from in the internet of things age, I think the internet of things generates efficiencies that allow us to produce more things and allows to give people longer, better lives, and managing that production and that productivity requires skills. It’s really that simple.

I remember trying to explain to some friend’s mother, old mother or something one time, what I did, when I was just in a marketing job at Procter and Gamble. And she was like, oh, so you don’t really do anything. And she was very explicit. But it’s like, no, I don’t really do any…I don’t do any manual labor. I’m a knowledge worker.

I think that comes from something Drucker said in the 1960s. But that’s what happens. And the more we move to a knowledge economy, the less your job is a health risk, and the higher your quality of life, and the higher standard of education your nation is going to want to give you.

I don’t want to be too cynical about it, but countries don’t invest in public education for your sake. A lot of the time, they do it for the sake of the economy. I was just talking to some lady about why Australian school kids need to code. That’s a great question. That’s an important thing. And it’s not coding that matters. It’s advanced mathematics, advanced critical thinking skills.

And by the way, as we end up with a more informed population, a more informed electorate, we end up with a more enlightened society, because it’s harder for some guy on a pulpit or something to talk about brimstone and hire and spew hatred. And that’s another…there’s these huge social trends that we see that come partly from the more educated workforce you need in a more high-tech society. All interconnected.

So what skills do you see being in demand?

I think coding is a little bit…you’ve got to understand, coding is a little bit yesterday’s skill, actually. I did want to say that to the coding lady. But the thing I mentioned to the panelist today, but the thing that’s more important than coding now is data science.

And data science is not coding. Data science is understanding statistics and maths and modeling in a way that means you can write an algorithm which you or somebody else then turns into a piece of computer code.

But basic mathematical equation, that can separate the wheat from the chafe in a big pile of numbers, and identify what’s interesting and what’s not. It’s a little bit like solving a puzzle, and it’s really quite cool. Auto-correct is an example of it, and Netflix recommendation algorithms is an example of it.

It’s a wild and interesting frontier, particularly for mathematically-inclined kids, or puzzle-solving, chess-playing kind of kids. And there’s a huge skills gap. Huge. And these guys are making a fortune coming out of school. They’ve got 20 job offers. And that will be true 10 years from now.

I’m trying to push my kids into doing statistics and data science. It’s a hard sell.

Yeah, I get that it’s not for everybody, but the kind of kid that might get directed toward coding is probably the kind of kid that could also be directed towards data science. And you know, they’re not mutually exclusive, but that’s the bias that I like to lean people towards, because technology is changing very rapidly.

We have to think about what’s going to be needed 5 to 10 years from now and not what’s needed today. You don’t want your 12-year-old to be learning a thing they need to know today, that the workforce needs to know today, that’s not going to be relevant in 10 years from now.