My Own Pirate Radio

Over on the Brightspark blog Mark Skapinker wrote something that really struck a chord with me:

“More “Bill Gateses”, not more graduates”
The press in Canada has been full of articles about how Bill Gates thinks that if Canada and the US want to stay ahead, they should “focus on improving the quality of education and expanding the number of young people who study math and science in school”. He wants us to create new computer scientists, engineers and researchers. Academics like Roger Martin answered him in the Globe and Mail by saying that North America has its lead because of our great MBA schools (like The Rotman School of Business where he is Dean) and management studies and the creation of more managers.”

Mark argues instead that what we really need is “more Bill Gateses. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to “go for it”, start new companies and create startups like Microsoft was not so long ago.”

Woot! This one speaks to me. Lessee, I studied Math and Computer Science at Waterloo, worked at Microsoft, and married a Queens University engineer who recently completed an MBA at Rotman. And now we’re both neck-deep in trying to get a startup off the ground. Must… voice… opinion.

I would love to see more entrepreneurs in Canada, especially in technology. Canada has a huge per-capita gap relative to the US on this. But what’s the cure? Check out some of the comments Mark’s post received:

• “Entrepreneurs are born, not made.”
• “[Bill Gates] was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and ruthless enough to profit from it.”
• “[one of] our biggest barriers to entrepreneurship is the negativity surrounding failure”
• “few of our graduating students have entrepreneurship as their goal beyond education”

My take:

On nature versus nurture: It’s both.

Take Gates for example: Sorry naysayers, luck and drive were necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for his achievements. I used to think wishfully that I could have done the same thing if I was just lucky enough. You know, show up at just the right time to become the driving force behind Windows and Office, grow a company from 2 to 60,000 employees, that sort of thing. But then I met Bill, and reluctantly swallowed my delusions of genius and grandeur.

While at MS I gained a good deal of respect for him. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no toady. He has his flaws, as do we all. But I assure you he is also an extremely talented technical problem-solver and business strategist, and — this is important — a big, big risk-taker. He was very, very good at being chief technology freak in a company chock-full of technology freaks. He will most likely be very, very good at running the Gates Foundation. Some of this capability derives from his nature — raw smarts, passion, drive, and guts — and some of it from nurture: family wealth and encouragement, access to great schooling, brilliant friends and colleagues, among other things. It takes both.

On schooling. Education is a huge enabler. It creates opportunities. In particular, for tech jobs, great problem-solving ability is essential. In large part, this can be taught.

Some might argue that problem-solving skill should emerge from a technical degree, or an MBA, or great community college programs, or from inspirational highschool teachers. I think debating this is a waste of time. We need ALL of these… and we should let the market decide how much of each. Entrepreneurs will emerge from all of these halls, and from the school of hard knocks too.

On funding. Entrepreneurs need financing. As Mark argues in earlier posts, we need a more concerted effort to make funding available for startups through a broad variety of non-governmental orgs.

The government tries, but can’t get it right. Case in point: $40M of government funding pumped into MARS Discovery District. It’s big. It’s beautiful. It makes for great PR. But that same money could have launched a thousand small startups instead.

The funding also has to be made available to companies from early stage up, not just startups that are mature enough for VCs to consider. And it needs to be available from a wider variety of funders, enough so that there is real competition amongst them to find and nurture the next great entrepreneur.

On risk. Innovation is fueled by risk. This single factor underlies everything else, in my opinion… the educational choices we make, the jobs we take, the inventions we create. The Canadian culture and economy needs to get much more comfortable with taking and supporting risks. And as things stand, Canada’s traditional risk-aversion is a real barrier to entrepreneurship. It makes it harder to get funding, it makes it less socially acceptable to fail, and it heaps too much emphasis on doing only “safe” things in school and in the real world thereafter.

That’s my recipe. I’d love to hear yours.

In “Buy Local—With Town Currency“, BusinessWeek’s Jeffrey Gangemi writes on a local currency called “BerkShares” used in smalltown Great Barrington, Massachusets.

The program works like this: Shoppers visit one of 10 branches of four participating local banks and convert their cash into BerkShares scrip. For every 90 cents, they receive one BerkShare note, that is accepted at some 280 participating area businesses…”

The BerkShares program aims to help keep money in the local economy rather than encouraging trade with other locales. But Gangemi claims BerkShares are “…also honored at about 250 other businesses throughout the Southern Berkshires region that aren’t officially registered.”

This reminds me of Jane Jacob’s Cities and the Wealth of Nations, which I just reread. Jacobs felt strongly that if individual cities still had their own local currencies they could trade much more efficiently with other parts of the world, because the local exchange rate would automatically manage the prices of their local goods and services relative to outside prices. Instead we have national currencies, which don’t generally do a great job helping individual cities, since national exchange rates account poorly for locale-specific costs, availability of capital, supplies of jobs and labor, market demand, and so on. (Think about how Halifax, Toronto and Calgary, for instance: these three very different cities are slaved to a single currency and exchange rate governing their import/export trade. Contrast that to Hong Kong, where the coupling between local reality and exchange rates is tight.)

Perhaps someday we’ll come full circle to city currencies again. It’s fun to ponder, especially as the internet makes it possible for new currency-like instruments such as eBay’s PayPal and Second Life’s Linden Dollars to emerge.

If you’re interested in the shifting line that demarcates human and computing capabilities, check out this podcast from Jon Udell. It’s a conversation with Nathan McFarland and Benjamin Hill, both of whom are working on so-called “collective intelligence” projects that farm out tasks to ad hoc networks of people. According to Jon, “Nathan runs CastingWords, a podcast transcription service that uses Amazon’s Mechanical Turk to distribute and coordinate [transcription] work to people. Benjamin’s project, Mycroft, packages up puzzle-like tasks in ways that people can interact with on web pages.” You can find the text transcript of the interview here.

Amazon launched Mechanical Turk late in 2005. It really got me thinking about what types of tasks are undigitizable, the interplay between collective intelligence and outsourcing, and related ethics and economics issues including worker conditions and incentives. It’s interesting to see concrete examples of people working in this area and exploring all these issues in great depth. For example, here is how Benjamin Hill approaches the space:

BH: …We’ve started to think of the whole knowledge workspace as divided on one axis along people’s opinions all the way to things that are absolute. Like people’s opinions would be “tag the image”, absolute would be “OCR check this one line of text”. There’s one correct answer versus “it really matters what people thing” and then along another axis we’ve got everything from easy where it just takes a few seconds of time, all the way up to very difficult where it takes a longer amount of time. If you can imagine both Mycroft and CastingWords occupying different bubbled areas of that knowledge workspace, so actually we’re going after different targets and I think both have a lot of value at that point.

Here Jon Udell gives some examples of the types of work that can be tackled in this way:

JU: …I’ll just read through a couple of the kind of examples you give in your commerce net paper. … “is this image inappropriate for children over seventeen”, “annotate this image with descriptive text”, “what is the text in this captcha image”, “how much do you like the clip from this new pop song”, “which hairstyle makes you trust this politician more”. So actually a whole lot of market research survey kind of stuff would seem to fit really nicely into this model.

Both organizations are still experimenting with how to incent workers. In Mycroft’s case it sounds like the work is sometimes purely voluntary and sometimes in exchange for non-monetary rewards. In CastingWords’ case workers are paid small amounts per task completed:

NM: …I think almost all of our workers are people picking up a job here and there. A lot of them have indicated that they are working at the same time as they are working on our stuff at something else, some other job that doesn’t require anything more than a physical presence for whatever reason. A lot of the other ones are stay at home mothers or something like that. This is just a subsidiary income for most of these workers, and there are a lot of them which is part of the reason I think. Our workflow isn’t, we don’t have so much that we can maintain a steady flow for the huge number of workers we have.

It’s interesting stuff. Ultimately I believe technologies like these will change the nature of work, provide work opportunities to more people around the world, and even open up entirely new lines of employment by making certain kinds of tasks much more malleable, portable, and tractable.

You know your work is becoming a mainstream phenomenon when The Economist covers it. Second Life is written up here as part of a “Survey of New Media”. (The survey is a compilation of articles and audio interviews that touch on blogs, wikis, new media. Good stuff.) Here’s an excerpt from the article:

One user, Anshe Chung, pays Linden Lab the equivalent of about $200,000 a year to buy land in Second Life. Ms Chung turns a profit by developing this land into residential communities (such as “Hangzhou”, “Gotland”, “Emerald Island” and so on) and charging avatars rent. “It’s the purest way of profiting from creativity,” says Mr Rosedale.

After my first foray into Second Life I’ve stayed away — it looks too addictive to me. The dynamics are increasingly fascinating, though. This is a real economy and culture in the making. Any one looking for a Ph.D. thesis topic in economics or anthropology should be teaming up with Second Life to get access to their data.

The Globe and Mail published a short piece on Tuesday about lessons learned in bootstrapping Waterloo’s successful entrepreneurial community.

…Mr. Siim surrounded himself with … Tech brains from the computer-mad University of Waterloo and business smarts from Wilfrid Laurier University … Unlike many Waterloo startups, Sandvine’s network intelligence products are not the direct result of research undertaken at the University of Waterloo. But Mr. Siim is convinced that the university, along with WLU and Conestoga College, lie at the heart of why people build companies here. He is a serial entrepreneur who has been in on the start of three companies, and will be involved in more. The educational institutions are like anchor tenants in a shopping mall of creativity, he says — they are magnets for new ideas and new ventures.

Read the article here.

At a dinner party last night I met a McGill med school grad who has worked for several years as a radiologist. He sits on a medical school admissions board, and we talked about how hard it is to calibrate applications from different universities. At University of Toronto’s med school, for instance, the top 30%* of the class gets an Honours rating. At McGill, only the top 10% earn Honours. How do you calibrate objectively? You can’t, really. That raises a debate: what do grades really mean, and how much should they matter within and outside of the school walls?

A similar problem occurs in evaluating university credentials once they’ve been granted. Some governments refuse outright to recognize medical school credentials from certain foreign countries. Others classify foreign doctors as second class citizens with restrictions on the work they can do. Some of this is warranted — medicine is certainly an area in which you ought to be conservative about credentials — but there’s also a healthy dose of protectionism at play.

International work aside, once you get out of med school marks don’t matter so much. You either graduated or you didn’t, and you are certified to practice medicine, or you’re not. When it comes to getting a job, according to my radiologist friend, hands-on experience (e.g. through locums) far outweigh the importance of marks. And that’s as it should be.

MBA students have it harder. Many MBA schools issue grades to their students, and some industry recruiters have become accustomed to using those as part of their screening process. That seems broken to me. It’s a Master’s degree, after all. The bar to get in is high. These are smart, experienced people. So why disclose grades? A simple pass/fail or honours/pass/fail should suffice. What matters more (to me, anyway) is on-the-job performance, and that’s where interviews, internships and apprenticeship periods should come in. If you’re leaning too heavily on marks as a pre-screening device you are missing potential future star hires.

There are tradeoffs within the learning environment too. If you don’t measure grades, you get more student collaboration, but also more free-riders. If you do measure, especially in a fine-grained manner, you flush out the free-riders at the risk of the environment becoming over-competitive. Students may grandstand and try to upstage each other in class, for instance, in an effort to earn participation marks. What’s worse, over time profs inflate grades and everyone loses faith in the system. The same exact effects play out in workplaces with respect to compensation measurement and employee behavior. Neither extreme is healthy.

Grades do matter and to a reasonable extent they should. A simple Pass/Fail/Honours system can add value when used with care, be it in a university or a workplace. But we must be prudent about what we measure and how much weight we place on it. Measurements are very much a double-edged sword.

* Update April 24, 4:05 PM: at U of T about 30% to 40% of the class is awarded Honours. This is anecdotal.

Last weekend Katrin and I visited with friends Saul, Kristen, Aaron and Kim in Richmond, Virginia. We’re all friends from Seattle, originally, so between the six of us we had a great west-coast-goes-east-coast reunion.

In between amazing meals (Kuba Kuba, Mama Zu’s, Cafe Gutenberg shown here, and Kristen and Saul’s home cookin’) we explored the city, and on Saturday in Carytown Saul and I stumbled across One-Eyed Jacques, a cool little gaming store. They bill themselves as “The Finest Game Store in Richmond, Virginia”, and from the vast selection of board games, miniatures and puzzles, it’s easy to see why.

I asked the manager what it’s like running her small mom-’n-pop shop, and she kindly spent a few minutes sharing with us. To wit:

* Competition has heated up radically Read the rest of this entry »