Innovation shifted from elite institutions to individual entrepreneurs working from home, enabled by open knowledge and cheap computing. The speaker argues consumer startups generate the best ideas, then proposes applying proven consumer tech like AR and blockchain to slower sectors like education and fintech.
Chapters
So that's the basic thesis. So let's take a step back and look at major innovations in the last 100 years, okay? Anything ranging from antibiotics to intranet or ARPANET, Walkman, CDs, lasers, all of these R&D innovations They actually came out of large research institutions. In other words, it's impossible for one of you guys to come up with, say, the fax machine, unless you were sitting inside some R&D lab in Japan with 100 PhDs who study optics, who study mechanical design. You can't, it's impossible, right? Last 100 years. So these innovations come from the core, right? And it has a certain bias to this. In other words, if you were not part of the— if you weren't part of the right high school, you can't go to the right college. You're not part of that right college, you don't get hired into the AT&T Bell Labs or even PhD, right? So if you miss one of these on-ramps, to innovation, you're not part of this. So this is what I call a core innovation, okay? Look at this. This is the last 20 years, right? None of these things came out of big labs. Most of these things, if not all, came out of people's living room. It came out of people like you guys. Someone who's smart, in that age range, taking risks, right? Have a few people like yourself challenge what is once unthinkable, not afraid of failing, aim high, you come up with something big. Obviously for every logo up there, there's probably like 10,000 that didn't work out. But at least it's possible. Each one of these you don't need 100 PhDs working with you to invent. So part of this is also democratizing education. You no longer need to be part of the right school because knowledge is a commodity. And in fact, 20 years ago if you're not part of AT&T Bell Labs, it's very difficult for you to say come up with a new optics or laser to change the way communication systems form. But today those papers are online, right? And you have open source platforms. You could collaborate with someone on another continent. Laptops are cheap. Computational powers are readily available. You need to crank on something, swipe your credit card. You could buy computation time on AWS, right? The barrier for innovation is at an all-time low. Let's also switch gear to talk about just consumerization, consumer in general. You notice all of the big venture-backed names have some sort of consumer related to it, right? You look at Google, you look at Facebook, Skype, Baidu, and the main reason is consumers generally are more startup-friendly compared to enterprise. But the challenge is consumer is also very— the space is also highly, highly competitive. In fact, that's one of the biggest pitfalls. It looks so easy, everybody wants to get in, and suddenly you have 50 copycats. I think what's really interesting is if you could take some of the consumer technology that has already been proven out and you take that technology and you apply it to one of the verticals that are somewhat stodgy, right, they're slow, regulated, and you could kind of figure out what these are. And it's really happening in front of all of us in slow motion, right? We talked about the enterprise IT, That has played out, the winners are Salesforce, Workday, Marketo, these softwares are all out. And then fintech, people are going after that. Industrial, these are all somewhat regulated, they move a little bit slower. And that's why I think education is interesting, a lot of the same philosophy, innovation is happening, And it's already been proven out in the consumer space. Let's take it to the education space. I think we already talked about this. These are the companies that became successful. But it's been pretty slow, right? So the top you have all these consumer names that have done well and some of the bottom you start seeing some companies in the education space, you know, either whether you flip the classroom or the MOOC model, right, people are making changes, okay. The other good news for all of you is that you could pick up any sort of article, you'll find there's no shortage of consumer technologies you can take to apply to these sectors. sectors, right? So if you think education is interesting and needs to be revamped, just go through this Gartner hype curve and see what can be applied. You can see AR, NFC, blockchain, everything is up there. There's no shortage of buzzwords and new technology. So what do you think about the future of education?
