Paul Graham: Brilliant and Blinkered?
Paul Graham is one of my favorite writers, and a lot that he pioneered with Y Combinator is going into our project, YET Lab. So calling him out on his perspective regarding ‘biztech’ – which I will be doing in a moment – isn’t easy. The thing I like most about Paul is that he is a boundary crosser. Where I went from directing theater to owning a business to being in high-tech management at IBM, Paul combined professional art training with a PhD in computer science, then discovered business in the form of tech startups. I may be able to write some code – even got paid for it occasionally in my career – but Paul went all the way. He is a legitimate technical leader with deep communication, art and business-innovation chops. My hero, seriously.
Every boundary crosser does his dance a little differently. Paul plays to his technical strengths and suggests that tech teams don’t need business thinkers, as he did in his now famous 2005 blog entry called “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas”. Maybe Paul’s major tech chops blind him to something that I saw at IBM’s Extreme Blue - 14 biztech labs spread around the world that run very much like Y Combinator, pumping out some of IBM’s best and brightest talent, producing great technology, and proving radical new business opportunities, all with projects that run in under 3 months. At Extreme Blue, every project had to include both technical and business people on team, working as equals.
What I saw in that process – partly because we carefully picked the business members of the teams for their excellent technical savvy – was the business thinker actually turning boring technical directions into much more interesting inventions. Yeah, that’s right…the business person creating quality technology that the technical team had missed. (By the way, many of the most technically savvy team members had undergrad majors not in computer science or microelectronics but in philosophy, literature, and political science. What they had in common was a distinct lack of fear of deep technology. They could see not only how things worked but how they could, and could not, be changed.)
I also saw the technical folks running into the lab on a Monday morning, tackling their business team member, and showing her a whole new business opportunity enabled by a new invention that nobody had noticed before. Yeah, technical people spending the weekend thinking about business models!
I think what Paul may be responding to in what I infer as disdain for business people is the fact that most teams treat their business people as “managers”, relegating them to a functional role on the boring business/commercial side of the house. We do not see them as a part of the development team. Also, 97% of business people I interview have a knack for neither technical invention nor business concept innovation. They aren’t systems thinkers. They are the business equivalent of a bench researcher that simply pours blue stuff into green stuff, watches to see if it turns yellow, and then informs his boss of the result. In both science and business, most people aren’t actually innovating.
On both the ‘biz’ and the ‘tech’ side of BizTech, what we need to look for are rule-changers, the three percenters – the ones who can take a tool like Y Combinator’s Fuzzwich animation-maker, and actually change how people organize themselves, do business and live their lives. Maybe if we find more people like this, regardless of their specific background training, we will see fewer ‘tech tool’ projects burning up venture funding with no sense of what the technology should be used for.
ZINK – Another Great Invention That Forgot To Bring The Innovation
Engadget reports that ZINK is going to ship its camera/printer device in late 2007. Zink’s claim: Print without ink.
Zink’s technology, which was shown at the 2007 Demo conference and blogged by Don Dodge as long ago as 2005, is a great invention developed by Polariod engineers. Zink apparently acquired the patents and the engineers.
The invention involves several layers of plastic impregnated with crystals that change from colorless to specific colors based on intensity and duration of applied heat – I’m guessing a laser, though the marketing geniuses at Zink decided to call it a thermal print head. Like many patents, Zink’s are a maze of obfuscation, but I think the core of the science can be seen best in US patent number 4839335. Colorless methane compounds lose carbon-nitrogen bonds when heated, which causes them to reflect light waves in specific color spectra.
So what does Zink decide to do with this? Of course! Make a digital camera (a bulky one by today’s standards) that also produces small color prints…if you remembered to refill the special paper pack.
I agree with what the Engadget commentators say, “Pictures smaller than 3″ on the go – ‘roll eyes’,” and “Might be cool if the pictures have an adhesive backing. Other than that, yeah it’s pretty pointless.” If there is a real motive for carrying extra weight and packs of special paper around so that you can make tiny prints on the go…well maybe someone will come up with one. Yeah, something like Kodak photo-stickers maybe.
Now maybe this will sell and maybe it won’t. But regardless it reminds me of what Hank Chesbrough showed in his study of Xerox PARC spin-outs. Over 30 years, nearly all spinouts that stuck with the original PARC business concept failed, whereas companies like Adobe that rethought what to do with the original PARC technology survived and thrived. My guess is that Zink is a company that is conceived and run by engineers from the photographic paper industry. Every claim in their patents (at least the ones I read) and the marketing words they choose is a telltale sign that these guys are hard wired into the world of transferring images onto mainly flat media. Win or lose – Zink is another invention with a tacked-on, default business concept. An invention, not an innovation.
In fairness, there is a glimmer here. The Zink team talks a lot about turning anything into a printer – that’s a start in the direction of business concept innovation. And the technology creates a completely dry, waste-free, super-fast, and super-high-res color print from a device that can be nearly as small as the paper you print on – I’m guessing the printer inside looks a lot like a CD player, only with the laser mounted on a horizontal slide. And as a company they appear to be focused on the OEM space, supplying the material – the special paper – from their new North Carolina facility. So presumably they get to supply paper and film to companies that think of real innovations that exploit the invention.
I have to wonder, what would a team from the biotech industry have done with the core invention? Crystals with high-precision color activation when exposed to heat. Hmmm.
It would be interesting to know what specific ranges of heat and duration cause the transformation in the crystals – and what kind of physical deformation in the substrate (and the crystals) is caused by the process. Could the heat produced by certain kinds of biochemical catalysis cause the color transformation?
At any rate, maybe these guys are more innovative than I’m giving them credit for. Maybe they are using the printer-camera as a way to show off the technology in hopes of attracting companies with ideas for more compelling uses.
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