Movies: Money Ball

When I started Continuations I was planning to write a fair bit about movies as well … I love movies!  It hasn’t turned out that way largely because I haven’t had the time to watch any.  And when I have gone it has mostly been with the kids to something like Toy Story 3 (which I thought was OK) that didn’t inspire me to write.  But I am happy to report that the kids are getting old enough to appreciate movies that do make the cut.

Last weekend I took my older son to see Money Ball and he loved it.  Neither one of us is into baseball (he stopped playing Little League several years ago) but we both enjoy math and he has become interested in investing.  The scenes about the trading of players provided the perfect hook for him and a good counter balance to the drier parts about the role of statistics. 

Brad Pitt was quite good in the role of Billy Beane.  His make up (or actual looks these days) were the perfect combination of remnants of beauty with edged disappointment.  Pitt seems like the current version of Robert Redford.  While I liked Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, I wish his role had been flushed out a bit more although that might have added even more length and maybe taken away from the dramatic centrality of Beane.

After the movie my son and I had a great conversation about science, which is exactly what I had hoped for.  The contrast between the superstitious beliefs of the old guard and the scientific approach came out clearly and entertainingly.  We also talked about how seemingly weird it is that players can be traded like that and why that doesn’t exist for say employees of companies (this is more like divisions of a large company).  Strongly recommend seeing Money Ball even if you don’t care about baseball!

I look forward to seeing Margin Call (maybe this weekend).  It has a terrific cast and I am a big fan of taking a drama approach to big topics.  While I enjoyed Too Big to Fail on HBO, it was covering so much ground that it was hard to develop the choices of individuals.  Hoping Margin Call will deliver on that.

The B Corporation

I attended an interesting lunch yesterday on something called the B Corporation.  It is an effort to formally write the idea of triple bottom line businesses into corporate law and provide the standards to go along with that.  Today’s common form of organization is the C Corporation which has as its objectives to maximize shareholder value.  The key measurement standard that goes along with that is GAAP accounting.  B Corporations by contrast have a broader set of objectives that includes positive external impact and employee well-being.

What I love about this initiative is that it is an example of the kind of values based re-design that I believe we need. It is not an add-on or single product standard (eg fair trade coffee) but rather a comprehensive approach down to the legal foundations.  You can already formally become a B Corporation in six states, including California as of a week ago.  In New York the bill has been passed in both houses and awaits the signature of Governor Cuomo (if you happen to know him, please ask him to sign this!).

For venture backed companies it would be ideal to have Delaware also write the B Corporation into the law.  That will likely take some time as Delaware is not an innovator when it comest to corporate law (they were the 22nd state to provide LCC laws).  But in the meantime, you can already act like a B Corporation if that’s of interest to you and even be certified by B Labs (the non-profit behind the B Corporation). I encourage everyone to check it out.  If nothing else, it will provide some interesting ideas for areas to pay attention to as a company.  That is especially helpful for startups as it is much easier to bake sustainability, transparency, employee well-being into a company’s culture early on than add it later.

I was impressed by the people behind this effort who had successful careers in finance and became convinced that there had to be more than pure markets.  The B Corporation could be the basis for a progressive form of capitalism and just the kind of thing we need.  This might make a good subject for a teach in at Occupy Wall Street.

Tech Tuesday: Of Bits and Bytes (Binary Number System)

Before we can go on and explore the building blocks in more detail, we need to learn a little bit about the fundamental underlying language used in computers: the binary number system.  Based on my kids’ school, this appears to be a 6th grade math topic that’s apparently taught without any context.  I am hoping I can do better here.

The numbers that we use day-in day-out are based on the decimal system.  In the decimal system we use ten digits: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9.  It is *not* a coincidence that the word digit can also mean a finger or a toe.  At least one reason why we use the decimal system is because we happen to have 10 fingers (and 10 toes).  Using each finger to correspond to 1 unit of something is very intuitive.  If you go into a bar and raise one hand with all fingers extended, you are ordering 5 beers or asking for 5 seats.

Computers don’t have hands but they have switches instead (imagine tons of tiny light switches), each of which can either be on or off.  So instead of ten digits, computers only have two digits: 0 and 1.  You can think of 0 corresponding to a light switch in the off position and 1 to the light switch being in the on position.  The name binary comes from fact that the system has only two digits.  A single switch is what we refer to as a “bit.”  

A bit is the smallest unit of information.  Instead of a light switch you could also think of a bit as a Yes/No answer.  Are you understanding this? Yes = 1, and No = 0.  You might want to give a more differentiated answer and we will get to that in a second but if you want to provide any information at all you, have to be able to at least distinguish between two different possibilities: understand / don’t understand.  That’s what one bit allows you to do.

As it turns out, we can use sequences of bits, i.e. sequences of 1s and 0s to represent all different kinds of information, including numbers, text, images, sound.  How does that work? It’s easy for numbers.  Each bit represents some power of 2 (1, 2, 4, 8 , 16, …), just like in the decimal system each position of the number represents some power of 10 (ones, tens, hundreds, thousands …).  So for instance the number 42 (decimal) would be 101010, which stands for 1*32 + 0*16 + 1*8 + 0*4 + 1*2 + 0*1 = 42.

As a fun aside, using the binary system you can use your two hands to count all the way to 1023.  Just have each finger represent one bit.  When your finger is extended, the bit is 1, when it is curled the bit is 0.  All 10 fingers extended is 1111111111 which gets you to 1*512 + 1*256 + 1*128 + 1*64 + 1*32 + 1*16 + 1*8 + 1*4 + 1*2 + 1*1 = 1023.  Now take a second and figure out what 132 would look like. You will know if you got it right as will everyone around you (note: not entirely safe for work).

On computers it has become the norm to group bits into groups of 8 bits which together are known as a “byte.”  One byte can hold the numbers from 00000000 which is of course also 0 in decimal to 11111111 which is 1*128 + 1*64 + 1*32 + 1*16 + 1*8 + 1*4 + 1*2 + 1*1 = 255.  That doesn’t seem like a lot but if you combine multiple bytes the values start to increase quite quickly.  For instance, I am writing this on a MacBook which has a processor that handles 64 bits at a time, which is 8 bytes.  If you take 64 bits and they are all set to 1, that is a gargantuan number 2 ^ 64 - 1, which you can check over a Wolfram Alpha is 18,446,744,073,709,551,615.  Yup – that’s 18 quintillion or 18 billion billions (you know what’s cool? a quintillion!).

Now that we can represent numbers it’s also easy to represent text.  All we need is to have a number for each letter of the alphabet.  Of course it would help a lot if every computer used the same set of numbers for the letters to make moving text from one computer to another easier.  One of the early and longlasting mappings from text to numbers was known as ASCII, which stands for American Standard Code for Information Interchange.  In ASCII, for instance the number 65 represents the letter A.  The number 66 represents the letter B.  You can find the full set here.

The text string “Hello World” is represented by the following ASCII number sequence

72 101 108 108 111 32 87 111 114 108 100

which is in turn represented by the following series of bits (arranged as bytes)

01001000 01100101 01101100 01101100 01101111 00100000

01010111 01101111 01110010 01101100 01100100

These days on the web we don’t really use ASCII much any more other than in ASCII art because we need to be able to represent letters/symbols from international alphabets.  That has given rise to newer standards for encoding text as numbers, such as UTF-8 (more on that some future time).

Finally, a simple example of how bits can be used to represent an image.  Think of a really old fashioned CRT display (as you would find in an old movie) where each dot on the screen is either a phosphorus green or dark.  For computer screens we call these dots “pixels."  Representing an image back then was easy.  We would use 1 bit for each pixel.  If the bit was 1 the pixel would be lit up and if it was 0 it would stay dark.  Now of course we have displays with millions of colors for each pixel and so we need many bits to represent each pixel but the basic principle remains the same (if you have ever fiddled with your display settings you may have run across the term bit depth or color depth).

Hopefully by now you have gotten the idea that having just 0s and 1s available to us at the deepest level of computers is really not meaningfully limiting in what types of information computers can process as we can use a bunch of bits to represent all sorts of different things.

Also, if you paid attention throughout all of this, you can now understand this geek humor t-shirt and figure out what the 4-dot logo of our portfolio company 10gen stands for.

For extra credit: read about hexadecimal numbers which will make an appearance in a later Tech Tuesday.

Occupy Wall Street: Some Foundational Thoughts

So I was wrong when I wrote that Occupy Wall Street would at best help draw media attention to inequality.  I had suggested that instead folks should spend their time building startups that disrupt existing institutions.  It now seems that the Occupy Together movement has the potential to disrupt one of the most important institutions altogether: the political process.

Unlike much of the media, however, I don’t think it’s important for there to be immediate concrete suggestions for what to change.  In fact, I fear that any quickly formulated demands would either be empty (“jobs for all”) or fall far short of the magnitude of change we actually need.  Instead, as I pointed out in my rant from last week, what we really need are a set of values that can form the basis for a future politics and society.  Having spent more time thinking about it, here are the values that I personally would hope to see embraced: sustainability, tolerance, transparency, individuality and enlightenment.

I am sure that there may be others but I picked these because I believe that they are each foundational for the kind of future politics and society that I would like to see.  Sustainability is there because we need to make the environment an integral part of decision making.  Tolerance is the basis for freedoms of speech and religion.  Transparency suggests a different approach to disclosure for governments and corporations.  Individuality is about sources of meaning.  Finally, enlightenment grounds society and politics in science and a quest for improvement.

If we don’t engage in that foundational discussion first, we will be immediately caught up in highly tactical debates, such as how to change tax rates.  That already takes the need for most money to be funneled via government as a given instead of seeing whether we can invent new systems entirely.  The success of Kickstarter suggests to me that we can.  So let’s first agree on our values and see if we can build a broad consensus around those that would cut across many of the current dividing lines.

dmr

Dennis M. Ritchie passed away yesterday.  Ritchie was the creator of the C programming language and the co-creator of the Unix operating system (together with Ken Thompson) starting in the late 60s and early 70s.  Both C and Unix have provided the underpinnings for many of the systems we still use today all the way up to iOS.

I find it impossible not to think about the pronounced differences between Ritchie’s and Jobs’ contributions to the history of computing.  Especially because in my personal case the two almost literally collided with each other.

I didn’t really encounter C and Unix until I got to college.  Before then, most of the programming I had done had been in assembly, Pascal and Lisp.  But once there, Kernighan and Ritchie’s “The C Programming Language” became a constant companion.  My first really big project in C was writing a Lisp interpreter.  This started out as a class assignment, but I got so excited that I built out all the features of Franz Lisp.  

And here is the source of my Jobs-Ritchie collision: I was using Think C on a Macintosh.  Think C was an implementation of C created by Think Technologies (later acquired by Symantec).  One of the reasons it was possible to create Think C is because neither Ritchie nor AT&T (his employer) chose to get a lot of software patents at the time. In fact, I searched the USPTO database and couldn’t find Dennis Ritchie on any patents, but I suspect that I may have done the search wrong. In my post on Jobs I already wrote last week about how much Apple came to stand for the opposite philosophy.

Two great links to look at are this tribute by Herb Sutter and maybe even better Dennis Ritchie’s own web page at Bell Labs.

P.S. I discovered yesterday that many moves later I no longer have my copy of K&R.  Bummer since it had a lot of marginalia in it.  I just went ahead and ordered another copy from Alibris. 

Edmodo is Hiring: Help Connect Teachers and Students

Do you have a passion for creating technology to better connect teachers with each other and their students?  Then you should consider working at Edmodo.  The company, which is based in San Mateo, provides a free and safe social network for K12 education.  Since we invested last year, Edmodo has grown dramatically to well over 3 million users worldwide.  Edmodo is achieving the kind of scale that presents interesting engineering challenges and exciting opportunities to assist schools and teachers.  So if you want to work at the intersection of technology and education, head on over and check out the jobs available at Edmodo.

Be Good (Not Less Bad)

Had a really inspiring conversation yesterday in an inspiring place (Monticello).  The gist is summarized by this post’s title. What does it mean though to be good, not less bad?  The difference is similar to local optimization versus global optimization.  We spend too much of our time (as individuals, companies, countries) at making small changes to systems that are fundamentally flawed or broken.  

We need to be more willing to start with values that help us rethink what good would be and then design new systems based on those values.  The Declaration of Independence does just that. It sets out values:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”

And then declares a new system of independence required to achieve the values:

“That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.”

We have reached a time when we need more of that.

Tech Tuesdays: Computing’s Building Blocks (Overview)

Welcome to Tech Tuesdays!  This is the first installment and as I had promised I am not assuming any prior knowledge other than as an enduser of computers.  Instead we are starting with the absolute basics.  Every computing system has to provide in some way for five different building blocks.  Today’s post will be an overview of these building blocks with each one visited in more detail in subsequent posts.  Why should you care about the building blocks?  Because they will let you think systematically about what goes on inside of a computer system and will provide the foundation for everything else that follows.

Processing

This is the actual doing of stuff, such as: loading data from memory (see below) or putting it back there; taking different pieces of data and combining them, such as adding two numbers; testing whether the value of some number is zero or larger and using the outcome of that test to decide what to do next.  The processing is generally carried out by one or more CPUs, which stands for Central Processing Unit (central because in the early days of computing there was only one per computer).  In modern systems there may also be specialized processing units, such as a GPU, a Graphics Processing Unit, which deals with all the number crunching that is required for graphics on the screen (e.g. a 3D world for a game).   In a person, the CPU would be the person’s brain.

Memory

The data to be processed and the instructions for how to process it need to be kept somewhere so that the CPU can get to them quickly.  That is the function of memory.  Most computer memory is “volatile,” which means it retains its contents only as long as it has electric power.  When the power is lost, the contents of memory are lost, which is a source of great frustration when you were in the middle of writing a brilliant blog post that has now ceased to exist. You will often find this type of memory referred to as RAM, which is short for Random Access Memory (where the Random Access part will be explained in a future post).  In a person, memory would also be the person’s brain.  In other words, our brains serve two functions that are separated in most computer systems, something that we will come back to in a future Tech Tuesday.  

Storage

In contrast to memory, the role of storage is to keep data and instructions around for the long term.  Unlike memory, storage does not depend on a continued supply of electricity.  Putting stuff there is referred to as persistence.  In many computer systems persistence is taken care of by one or more “hard disks” - which you can think of as incredibly souped up versions of magnetic tape (if you remember such a thing).  Historically there was a big tradeoff in that storage was much much cheaper than memory (so you could afford a lot more of it) but also much much slower.  That tradeoff is being somewhat erased by so-called SSDs (which stands for Solid State Drive), but more about that in a detailed Tech Tuesday on storage.  For a person, storage would be things like diaries, books, and of course these days online documents.  Here too the same trade-off applies: stuff you have in your brain you can access (almost) instantly, but you can keep a lot less there than in your filing cabinets (at least that’s true for me).

Networking

Computers are a lot more useful when they can connect to other computers.  That’s the role of networking.  Networking lets two or more computers exchange data.  As it turns out there are a lot of different pieces involved in making that happen, ranging from cables or wireless signals to agreed upon sequences of what to send or receive when, known as protocols.  Some acronyms that you may have come across are LAN for local area network (e.g., connecting the computers in one office) and WIFI which is a series of standards for letting computers talk to each other wirelessly.  Because it is so complicated but also so central to how we use computers, networking will take up many more Tech Tuesdays.  Persons too are more useful when they can communicate with others.  And just as with computers people networking is quite complicated: in person, over the phone, online? Formal or informal? One-on-one or group event?

Input/Output

Generally we like to have ways of getting data and instructions into and out of computers through such things as keyboards, screens and printers.  In computer speak those are known as devices and connecting them is known as input/output or I/O.  As it turns out I/O plays a role even for computers that don’t have screens or keyboards, such as say the computer that controls the engine in a modern car.  That computer still needs to get information about how the engine is currently running (input) and then needs to influence such things as the amount of fuel to inject (output).  You might reasonably ask how I/O differs from networking and that’s a fair question with the boundaries becoming less clear in recent years.  But as a first cut it helps to think of networking as being between full fledged computers and I/O being between a computer and something that’s a bit dumber.  The best analogy for humans is that input are our senses and output is movement and speech.

Now throughout this I have stayed away from the terms “hardware” and “software” which seem to be used all the time.  There is a good reason for that: those terms are a lot less helpful than the distinction between the five building blocks.  You can think of hardware as the physical parts of computing: the cables, printers, disks, memory chips, and so on – the stuff that you can touch.   Software are the instructions that tell the hardware what to do.  As we start to dig deeper into each of the five building blocks you will come to understand that each of them involves both hardware and software (which is one reason why those two very broad categories are not really all that helpful).

That’s it for the first installment of Tech Tuesdays.  Looking forward to feedback, suggestions, questions, and more!  (Small caveat that I am traveling today, so may not get around to answering until late in the evening). 

Innovation: Perez vs Thiel (Optimism vs Pessimism)

Tomorrow I will be attending an “Innovation Summit” hosted by the Darden School of Business.  I just finished reading Peter Thiel’s “The End of the Future” in the National Review.  Thiel’s argument is that underlying our economic difficulties is a more profound problem: a dramatic slow-down in innovation. His examples include the fact that we now find ourselves with travel slowing down not speeding up (Concord decommissioned and no successor in sight) and the apparent lack of progress on treating cancer (Thiel’s piece was published just before Steve Jobs’ death which provided a poignant reminder of just that).

Thiel’s diagnosis appears to be that we have lost the will to progress (there is a distinctly Nietzschean bent to Thiel’s writing) when the “hippies” took over in the 1960s.  I don’t share the deep vein of pessimism that runs through all of this.  Without a doubt our current institutions are failing us by focusing on protecting the status quo and being mired in incrementalism.  That’s true for government, universities, large corporations.  But we are beginning to see new networks emerge on the edge that are the likely sources of future innovation.  

As just one example, there is a lively and growing culture of makers.  Interestingly, many makers are both technologically sophisticated and environmentally conscious.  They are possibly the vanguard in a redirection of the thrust of innovation from purely “faster” as a metric to “sustainable."  This is not a rejection of technology (as we did see in the 60s) but rather an appropriation of technology for a different set of goals.  If that attitude becomes more widespread – as I believe it will – that will become the new social consensus.  Once it does we will unlock an amazing new innovation arc.

If you want a terrific historical perspective on this , please go and look at Carlota Perez’s presentation on ”The direction of innovation after the financial collapse“ (PDF).  Perez lays out the previous cycles of "installation” versus “deployment” for various technologies including canals and railroads.  Her perspective suggests that the financial crisis we are finding ourselves in now, may wind up being the catalyst for a transition (which would be much preferable over the previous big transition, which was World War II).  Perez’s optimistic view provides the perfect antidote to Thiel’s.

Steve Jobs

It feels a bit strange now that I wrote a post yesterday morning about “Apple’s Glory Years,” not realizing that in the evening I would see the news that Steve Jobs had passed away.  There have been many excellent tributes and I read a lot of them last night (collected here on delicious) with one of my favorites being Walt Mossberg’s piece.  Like many others, I found myself deeply moved by the passing of someone I had never met in person.  That is despite the fact that my feelings about Steve Jobs’ accomplishments are complicated.

I intensely admired Steve Jobs as an entrepreneur who managed to succeed repeatedly and spectacularly where others before him had failed or barely made a dent (music players, smart phones, tablets, animated movies).  He did so by bringing beauty to products that had previously been ugly (great tweet by Matt Galligan on this) and by understanding like few others that design is about form *and* function.  As Jobs said in a great Wired interview in 1996 “Some people think design means how it looks. But of course, if you dig deeper, it’s really how it works."  His commitment to that philosophy was singular.  On top of that Steve Jobs excelled at marketing through an amazing focus on presentation and messaging (the "reveals” were better than the best magic act). Here too Jobs was truly exceptional in his attention to detail and iconography including his personal appearance.

But there are two aspects of Steve Jobs’ legacy that I struggle with.  First is the idea that Jobs was a technology visionary.  Personally, I feel that Jobs’ real genius was recognizing the product potential in the technology vision of others *and* making those products a reality.  Jobs' visit to Xerox Parc has been much cited here but there are more recent examples also, such as multi touch which had been kicking around labs for some time and even made it into a spectacular TED presentation. But Apple under Steve Jobs was the company to deliver multi-touch as a compelling consumer experience.  So maybe the right thing here is to think of Jobs as a product visionary. 

Second, is the issue of the high degrees of control and secrecy that accompanied Jobs’ approach to the integration of form and function and the “wow-the-world” marketing.  My feelings here are considerably more personal.  For several years as a teenager I literally slept below a poster of the wiring diagram of the Apple II which had shipped with the computer!  The Apple II was the machine on which I fell in love with programming and computers.  I ran additional wires on the motherboard to some jumpers that made the Apple II “hack ready."  While I enjoyed Apple’s software, I also used CP/M a lot on my Apple II.  As it would later appear, much or all of this openness was due to Woz’s influence.  In college, I did a ton of programming on a Macintosh which was pretty much the complete opposite of the Apple II: an attractive but hermetic box with only perfunctory OS documentation.  

Winding the clock forward 25 years, the iPhone and the iPad represent the design-control dichotomy at its most extreme.  They are gorgeous and easy-to-use consumer devices.  The videos of toddlers using them are a testament to this.  And they are highly programmable, as long as you stay within the confines of Apple’s controlled walled garden.  This doesn’t represent a practical barrier for the vast majority of people using the devices and doesn’t even impact many development use cases.  But it does represent a nearly insurmountable barrier to the kind of tinkering that spurred my original interest.  It is possible that my feelings are simply nostalgia for an early period that similarly no longer exists in other areas of technology (e.g., cars), but it bothers me more here since I believe computing devices are so central to our progress.  I have not given up on the potential for having personal devices that are beautiful, functional *and* open.

None of this implies that I am any less saddened by the news of Steve Jobs passing.  We have lost someone of extraordinary influence on the history of personal and mobile computing.  We will all be well served by internalizing the importance of design, the persistence and focus required to achieve it, and the passion that powers it all.  Steve Jobs himself expressed that last part best in his inspiring 2005 Stanford commencement speech (which I will now watch annually on October 5).