Investing in your life
Ingenuism Weekly 24
“The most contrarian thing of all is not to oppose the crowd but to think for yourself.” —Peter Thiel
MEDIA
Ingenuist Investing (w/ Yaron Brook) – Silicon Valley Examined 13
On the Silicon Valley Examined podcast, Robert Hendershott, Don Watkins, and special guest Yaron Brook discuss the role of investment in innovation. How can investment not only help launch new businesses—but spur the discovery of new ideas?
INSIGHTS
Investing in your life
Robert Hendershott and Don Watkins
The business world has changed over the last fifty years. It’s no longer true that you finish school, join your father-in-law’s firm, and work your way up the corporate ladder, only to walk away with a gold watch and a pension at 65.
No, today’s world is made for free agents who spot and capitalize on opportunities, ready to pivot to enhance their knowledge or increase their paycheck.
And yet how are young people taught to prepare for this world? Parents push their kids into elite preschools so they can go to elite secondary schools so they can go to elite colleges so they can go work on Wall Street or as consultants at McKinsey. Rebels go to law school.
We often treat success as a “track” someone else created for us to follow. But Ingenuism implies a radically different approach—one that recognizes that ingenuity is what makes your work valuable, and that ingenuity does not come from following a carved-out path.
Peter Thiel tells the story of how he started off on a highly tracked life, going to the best schools, and ending up on Wall Street as a young man. And he tells how he decided it wasn’t for him and walked out the door unsure of what he would do next. What he did next was become an entrepreneur and help found PayPal.
Jeff Bezos left Wall Street to start Amazon.com (formerly derided as Amazon.bomb). Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg dropped out of Harvard—likely (at least initially) to their parents’ chagrin. What do they see that most other people do not?
On the Ingenuist view, they all see the world as an entrepreneur. Approaching your life as an entrepreneur may mean literally starting new companies—and in these cases it did—but it need not. What it always means is that you focus on looking for opportunities to exercise your ingenuity. That you engage in exploration and experimentation to find where you can create the most value and attain the most joy. That you connect with others to learn, to build, to share insights and ideas.
Like any entrepreneurial venture, individual entrepreneurship requires investment. Making connections so that you can learn from others and build complementary teams. Exploring ideas while being willing to evolve or even abandon them. In business, investors identify opportunities with high potential upside and pour time, energy, and money into them, managing their downside by starting small and seeking out opportunities to learn quickly whether the path is likely to prove fruitful. As an individual, you need to invest in yourself in the same manner.
Every successful life involves failure, setbacks, an experimental search for the way forward. You invest in yourself by building a unique constellation of skills, knowledge, and experiences that you must learn to put together into a value-creating package that differentiates you from the pack. Think of the way Steve Jobs was able to marry his college interest in calligraphy with computer design. (No one following a success track would take calligraphy.)
An Ingenuist explores. An Ingenuist student might spend the first week or two of the term sitting through classes they weren’t taking to see what they might want to study the next term. An Ingenuist employee would seek out new, challenging projects at work to discover and develop their talents and interests. An Ingenuist goes out of their way to meet new people.
And just as an investor is ready to adjust his portfolio when a venture isn’t paying off, you must be willing to change directions when the path you’re traveling is leading nowhere. This goes against conventional advice. We’re taught that winners never quit, and quitters never win. But is leaving a dead-end job and exploring a new career quitting? Is ending a bad relationship and starting to look for a better one quitting? Is shutting down a startup that is making limited progress and refocusing your talents, energy, and passion quitting?
No. It’s learning from failure. When you discover an effort is not developing the way you want, changing course enables you to cut your losses and to pivot toward something more rewarding. You can’t explore if you don’t give yourself the freedom to choose a different path. Neither an entrepreneur dedicating additional years of their life to nor a venture capitalist pouring further money into Pets.com would be demonstrating grit and resolve—they would just be wasting more time and money.
If you want to build the future, become the entrepreneur and venture capitalist of your own life. Be bold. Experiment. Try and learn. Fail and change directions. That is how you’ll succeed.
Quick Takes
You heard it here first, folks
Vox has an outstanding interview with Jason Crawford, who runs Roots of Progress and whom we interviewed last month. The topic? The progress movement, which Vox notes is “one of the more intriguing intellectual movements out there.” One highlight:
Kelsey Piper
Our society doesn’t value progress? Silicon Valley is very enthusiastic about “start a company and change the world.” Elon Musk is at least sometimes the richest person in the world, and nobody can argue that he hasn’t been inventing lots of stuff. In what sense are we failing to value progress in a way that we would if we still had the late-19th-century attitudes about it?
Jason Crawford
I think the modern mindset is very mixed about it and very conflicted. We see some of the value of progress, but the immediate reaction to any new development is to worry about how it could go wrong or be misused.
I do think [that skepticism] is because the late-19th-century view of progress was somewhat naive. People were oblivious to the real risks and problems of progress.
We can’t go back to the 19th-century sort of naive optimism. We have to go forward with a new synthesis that combines a fundamental optimism about progress with a more mature and wise and prudent approach to the risks and problems of technology.
Interesting throughout.
That’s not a telescope…THIS is a telescope
The Hubble telescope transformed our understanding of space. So, heck, why not take the Hubble and multiply it by 100? That’s basically what the James Webb Space Telescope will do when it launches this December.
“We’re going right up to the edge of the observable universe with Webb,” says Caitlin Casey, an assistant professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin. “And yeah, we’re excited to see what’s there.”
The Webb will surpass the Hubble in several ways. It will allow astronomers to look not only farther out in space but also further back in time: It will search for the first stars and galaxies of the universe. It will allow scientists to make careful studies of numerous exoplanets — planets that orbit stars other than our sun — and even embark on a search for signs of life there.
The Webb is a machine for answering unanswered questions about the universe, for exploring what has been unexplorable until now.
Bonus facts: whereas Hubble orbited 340 miles from Earth, Webb will orbit—get this—one million miles from Earth. And the damn thing is so big that it has to be folded up when it’s launched. As the Wall Street Journal’s Christopher Mims notes, it’s “the culmination of all we know about putting really big things really far out in space.”
CRISPR 2.0
It turns out that CRISPR isn’t the only path to gene editing.
Within the last decade, scientists have adapted CRISPR systems from microbes into gene editing technology, a precise and programmable system for modifying DNA. Now, scientists at MIT’s McGovern Institute and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard have discovered a new class of programmable DNA modifying systems called OMEGAs (Obligate Mobile Element Guided Activity), which may naturally be involved in shuffling small bits of DNA throughout bacterial genomes. . . .
The discovery, reported in the journal Science, provides evidence that natural RNA-guided enzymes are among the most abundant proteins on earth, pointing toward a vast new area of biology that is poised to drive the next revolution in genome editing technology. . . .
“We are super excited about the discovery of these widespread programmable enzymes, which have been hiding under our noses all along,” says [lead researcher Feng] Zhang. “These results suggest the tantalizing possibility that there are many more programmable systems that await discovery and development as useful technologies.”
Yeah, we’re super excited, too.
Innovation is child’s play
I really love small, simple innovations that improve our quality of life. Like, being a parent is hard because the thing about children is they’re children. So why not use technology to make a parent’s life a little easier?
When Sari Davidson’s small children were being mischievous, she called them “booginheads.” Little did she know she would someday use that name for a startup.
In 2005, when her first son was nearly one year old, he would repeatedly toss his sippy cup on the ground during stroller rides. “To him, it was a game of catch. Throwing the cup and watching Mom pick it up,” she says.
Not finding a product that would solve the problem, Ms. Davidson taught herself to sew and created her own fix—a strap that would hold the cup to a child’s seat or stroller.
The straps—dubbed SippiGrips—were nylon webbing with ribbon sewn on top for some detail. But the material was so smooth that cups kept slipping out of the fabric.
Now if only there was an invention that made teenagers clean up their rooms.
RECOMMENDATIONS
The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner
This book is about the origins of modern communications as seen through the adventures of several men who spent their careers working at Bell Telephone Laboratories. Even more, though, this book is about innovation—about how it happens, why it happens, and who makes it happen. It is likewise about why innovation matters, not just to scientists, engineers, and corporate executives but to all of us.
And so starts John Gertner’s The Idea Factory, which tells the story of one of the most important sources of innovation during the 20th century. To oversimplify a long story: Bell Labs gave us the transistor. The transistor gave us modern computers. Modern computers have given us the Miracle of the 21st century.
How did it happen—and why? The great virtue of this book is that, although it tells the gripping human stories behind Bell Labs’ discoveries, it knows that the real story is the act of discovery and invention. How do people come together and build the future?
A few of the lessons:
Gather the best minds. The people who worked at Bell Labs were incredibly smart. “At the peak of its reputation in the late 1960s, Bell Labs employed about fifteen thousand people, including some twelve hundred PhDs. Its ranks included the world’s most brilliant (and eccentric) men and women.”
Aim at innovation. The whole point of Bell Labs was to invent. Employees “were paid for their imaginative abilities. But they were also paid for working within a culture, and within an institution, where the very point of new ideas was to make them into new things.”
Incorporate science. Invention had mainly been the province of tinkerers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Take Thomas Edison. “Edison’s genius lay in making new inventions work, or in making existing innovations work better than anyone had thought possible. But how they worked was to Edison less important.” And Edison wasn’t unique. “The advance of technology relied on the cut-and-try methods of ingenious tinkerers, unschooled save possibly for courses at mechanics institutes.” Bell Labs would pioneer “a new approach to solving an industrial problem, an approach that looked not to engineers but to scientists.”
Don’t keep genius on a leash. You cannot predict discovery and invention and so you cannot direct it. Instead, get smart, ambitious people together and leave them free to explore. “Scientific research was a leap into the unknown. . . . ‘Of its output,’ [research department head Harold] Arnold would later say of his group, ‘inventions are a valuable part, but invention is not to be scheduled nor coerced.’” Instead you must “provide a free environment for ‘the operation of genius.’ His point was that genius would undoubtedly improve the company’s operations just as ordinary engineering would. But genius was not predictable. You had to give it room to assert itself.”
Innovation is constrained by the speed at which ideas travel. Bell Labs scientists weren’t operating on their own. They were intimately connected to the cutting edge of science in their day. Science that they heard about through scientific journals sent through the mail, local universities, and study groups.
Encourage collaboration. Long before Silicon Valley started designing offices to encourage collaboration, Bell Labs was pioneering this approach. “‘[A]ll buildings have been connected so as to avoid fixed geographical delineation between departments and to encourage free interchange and close contact among them.’ The physicists and chemists and mathematicians were not meant to avoid one another, in other words, and the research people were not meant to evade the development people.”
Even scientists can have a sense of humor. Okay, not really an insight into innovation, but it’s a story too good not to share. While in college William Shockley, perhaps the greatest genius ever to work at Bell Labs, decided to prank a professor during an exam.
Shockley arranged for one copy of the exam to be taken out of the classroom, solved expertly by himself and a team of graduates who had already taken the class, signed by Helvar Skaade, and then returned in time to be handed in. Skaade, the mysterious young genius, answered all the questions brilliantly except for the last one, to which he responded, “Hell, I’m too damn drunk to write anymore.” Skaade got an A-minus, the highest grade in the class.
There is much more in the book. If you are interested in the discovery of modern discovery, it’s well worth reading.
Until next time,
Don Watkins
P.S. Want to support our efforts? Forward this email to a friend and encourage them to sign up at ingenuism.com.