Reinvent Podcast

What have we wrought? Many in the tech community are increasingly pondering that question in the past year as public scrutiny roams from election hacking on Facebook to #metoo charges in the Valley. One tech veteran has been thinking about what tech has wrought longer than most and has developed some ideas about what could be done about some of these unintended consequences. Julie Hanna has founded and been a founding executive of five venture-backed startups (including Healtheon, now WebMD), and currently is an advisor to X (formerly Google X) and Executive Chair of the Board Kiva, to name just some of what she does. She has spent a lot of time thinking about purpose-driven profit, values-based leadership and what responsible innovation in this era of technology means. She wants to use May’s What’s Now: San Francisco at Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange to start a conversation about these increasingly important themes.

Of all our senses, the sense of smell is probably the least studied and appreciated. However, in recent years our scientific understanding of how we perceive scents and what they do to our brains and immune systems has deepened. It turns out that scent accounts for around 80% of the experience of flavor, a dominant force in the experience and enjoyment of eating. We also are learning how scents clearly and directly affect our emotions. Some scents (even when you hardly perceive them) will pick you up and give you energy while others will help calm you down or take you to a remembered experience. Our deepening understanding has reached the point where a new wave of technologies is being developed by a new crop of startup companies that promise to make an impact on a range of industries from food and restaurants to health and wellness.

Fifty years ago the Whole Earth Catalog burst onto the cultural scene and helped set in motion waves of innovation that reverberated through the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of America - and that continue to this day. The one-and-only Stewart Brand was the creative force behind that unique media publication and cultural phenomenon and we’re honored that he’s going to talk about the Whole Earth’s intellectual and entrepreneurial legacy at the June gathering of What’s Now: San Francisco.

What have we wrought? Many in the tech community are increasingly pondering that question in the past year as public scrutiny roams from election hacking on Facebook to #metoo charges in the Valley. One tech veteran has been thinking about what tech has wrought longer than most and has developed some ideas about what could be done about some of these unintended consequences. Julie Hanna has founded and been a founding executive of five venture-backed startups (including Healtheon, now WebMD), and currently is an advisor to X (formerly Google X) and Executive Chair of the Board Kiva, to name just some of what she does. She has spent a lot of time thinking about purpose-driven profit, values-based leadership and what responsible innovation in this era of technology means. She wants to use May’s What’s Now: San Francisco at Capgemini’s Applied Innovation Exchange to start a conversation about these increasingly important themes.

Way back in 2010, Eli Pariser came up with the term filter bubble, the idea that people on the Internet tend to see only information that agrees with them, and then he published his book The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Since that time, Facebook took off, viral marketing went nuts, fake news appeared, American politics polarized to the extreme, and now we’ve got a huge backlash to globalization and technology companies. Businesses increasingly are caught in between this polarization. If a brand takes a stand that pleases some stakeholders in one bubble, then it risks alienating other stakeholders in another one. The situation is getting untenable.

What the world needs now is a positive vision of the future of work. We’ve got plenty of dystopian visions of the rise of the robots, the race to the bottom of globalization, and the loss of myriad jobs on the horizon. Enough already. Marco Zappacosta, the young co-founder and CEO of Thumbtack, one of the most successful startups in the sharing economy, thinks we now need more positive thinking about how the next economy could work better for everyone. Marco fully understands that advanced automation and artificial intelligence will replace many routine jobs, and that globalization will continue to undermine American jobs competing with workers in foreign countries. However, he believes people are overlooking how much opportunity lies ahead for those doing work that is non-routine and not replaceable by machines, or that can’t be traded away because the service must be provided locally. That lack of vision of how that next system could work is undermining efforts to move forward.

Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don’t talk about them anymore, says Ries, and many of them stem from the fact that elite decision makers have adopted an unusually short-term framework. This problem is further compounded because the number of decision makers today is much smaller than it used to be—there are half the number of public companies in the U.S. today as there were 20 years ago, according to Ries. He attributes this sharp decline in public companies to three factors: 1) private companies tend to delay going public much longer 2) the amount of private equity has increased significantly and 3) there’s much more consolidation in today’s markets. Ries believes that we need to address the root causes of the problems in our economy, not just the symptoms. His litmus test for developing practical solutions and weeding out pie-in-the-sky fantasies is whether they are doable while we’re still alive.

Eric Ries, the bestselling author of Silicon Valley bible The Lean Startup, wants to accomplish something that many in the business world think will be harder than nuclear reactors: reinventing the stock exchange to prioritize long-term, rather than short-term, gains. The problems with our economy are so obvious that for the most part we don't talk about them anymore, says Ries, and many of them stem from the fact that elite decision makers have adopted an unusually short-term framework. This problem is further compounded because the number of decision makers today is much smaller than it used to be—there are half the number of public companies in the U.S. today as there were 20 years ago, according to Ries. He attributes this sharp decline in public companies to three factors: 1) private companies tend to delay going public much longer 2) the amount of private equity has increased significantly and 3) there's much more consolidation in today's markets. Ries believes that we need to address the root causes of the problems in our economy, not just the symptoms. His litmus test for developing practical solutions and weeding out pie-in-the-sky fantasies is whether they are doable while we're still alive.

Interest in new blockchain technologies has exploded in the last year as the possibilities for applications keep rapidly expanding. One way to understand the blockchain revolution is through a technical discussion - something we did early in our What’s Now: San Francisco series with Brian Behlendorf. This month we looked at the financial side of blockchain - how those with money are wading into the space and how the revolution can get funded better and really scale up. The conversation was led by E. David Ellington, the founder of the Silicon Valley Blockchain Society (SVBS), which has a simple three-word mission: Fund The Revolution.