“Making the world a better place.” This popular mantra of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs is regularly ridiculed by HBO’s popular series, Silicon Valley. For sure, the valley is full of hyperbole and idealistic exuberance, and to many outsiders that may seem completely irrational, insane even, but perhaps it’s a necessary mindset for this innovative region? Are there some entrepreneurs who genuinely want to make the world a better place, not for PR reasons, or to boost their social media following; but just for the sake of it? I attended the 19th annual SVForum Visionary Awards to explore the question.
Listen at the BBC Click podcast (Silicon Valley segment starts at @13:33)
Here’s a transcript of the segment, edited for length and clarity:
Click Radio host, Gareth Mitchell: This is Click from the BBC in London. We talk about technology every week and Silicon Valley is often on the agenda. It’s the kind of place where if you’re a company CEO, and you clock up, say a billion users, most people would say, ‘well that’s incredible,’ but in Silicon Valley, people are likely to say, ‘Oh really?’ It’s almost like a billion seems like a small number, such is the ambition about that place. But Silicon Valley likes to tell us it does have a beating heart through its Visionary Awards and this is where the valley recognizes CEOs and developers who really do want to make the world a better place. From the awards, we have this report from Alison van Diggelen.
Alison van Diggelen: Talk of revolution was in the air in Silicon Valley last week at SVForum’s Visionary Awards. With past recipients like Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Esther Dyson, these awards have earned a reputation as the Oscars of Silicon Valley. Sam Liccardo, the mayor of San Jose, welcomed guests…
Liccardo: In Silicon Valley we do a great job of innovating; we do a terrible job of celebrating. And it’s important that we stop every once in a while and recognize those who’ve been leading the way and perhaps allow them to inspire us.
van Diggelen:Jennifer Palka is one of this year’s visionary award winners and wants to inspire a revolution by transforming the relationship of the American people with their government. She’s founder of Code for America, a nonprofit that leverages the innovative power of SV technology to help make government work more efficiently, cheaply and openly.
Pahlka: We’ve been trying to make the guts of government… as sexy as making Facebook. People are buying it… by coming into government, they can change the world.
van Diggelen: Remarkably, Code for America has managed to attract many top techies from companies like Apple, Adobe and Google who apply the SV playbook to government.
Pahlka: We believe that government can work better “for the people and by the people” in the 21st Century…the thing we are doing is bringing the practices of SV – user centered, iterative and data-driven approaches to solving problems – into government…by asking people to come and do a year of service.
van Diggelen: Code for America “fellows” make open source apps to address local issues. These are being scaled from local to national level. It’s now easier to apply for food stamps, connect with city hall via text, and get access to public records online. In San Jose, it helped inspire a (waste no food) app that helps hotels and restaurants redirect excess food to feed SV’s homeless. Pahlka’s innovative model has even been adopted by governments around the world. There’s a Code for Japan, Germany, South Africa, and Pakistan. But what really animates Pahlka is how it’s helping redefine SV’s role in the world.
Pahlka:Silicon Valley gets bad rap – we’ve transformed the world, but increased the inequality in our country.
Silicon Valley isn’t just about wealth creation; it’s about bringing people into our institutions in a profoundly valuable way that connects to the history of our country.
van Diggelen: The history of the United States and the need for an open Internet was also top of visionary award winner Tom Wheeler’s mind. A former tech entrepreneur and VC, Wheeler is now Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, the FCC, which regulates US phone and cable companies; and fights for net neutrality on behalf of consumers and innovators. Wheeler describes broadband as a major driver of economic growth and likens it to coal during the industrial revolution.
Wheeler: Broadband, high speed Internet is the essential “commodity” of the 21st Century… You can’t be in a situation where you’ve got gatekeepers deciding which innovators get on…
van Diggelen: The European Union is in the process of following a similar model.
But like many tech innovators, Wheeler has a long list of ambitions, including the fight for consumer privacy.
Wheeler: A network gets to see every place you go on the Internet, everything you do. In the phone world, they couldn’t sell that information without your permission. That doesn’t exist today for networks in the high speed Internet, so we’re proposing that it should. The consumer has right to say whether that information can be productized and sold by their network provider.
van Diggelen: As the celebrations come to a close, I asked serial entrepreneur, Kevin Surace to reflect on the evening.
Surace: We’re living in a time when the innovations are coming faster than we’ve ever seen – in the history of ever – we’re now seeing inventions as powerful as the fire or the wheel every month…the pace of innovation is unbelievable.
van Diggelen: A fitting end to an exuberant Silicon Valley evening, where everyone was pumped by the same revolutionary fervor: tomake the world a better place.
Ambi –audience exuberance…fade out
Gareth Mitchell: Not that I want to bring the party down, but do they really want to make the world a better place? They might be nice people, but they’re running businesses, they’re pretty hard hearted entrepreneurs at the end of the day, aren’t they?
LJ Rich: There’s something called corporate social responsibility…it’s nice in a way that some companies would like to give back to the community, but it can’t hurt their social reputation, to be seen to be good, especially when you look at how a company’s social behavior is analyzed online and people will suffer if they’re behaving badly or in a way people aren’t impressed by. So yes, I think it’s very nice and altruistic, but there are always pluses to behaving in a responsible manner and some of these will definitely be impacting the bottom line.
Listen to the whole Click program, featuring reports on the future of the Internet; Wonderlab at London’s Science Museum; and a new virtual reality film called Valen’s Reef (about climate change’s impact on our oceans)
This week, I listened live to Tesla’s latest earnings call and was gobsmacked at Elon Musk’s audacious new goal to build half a million cars per year by 2018.
“This is based off the tremendous demand received for the Model 3, which I think is actually a fraction of the ultimate demand, when people fully understand what the car’s capable of….Tesla is going to be hell-bent on becoming the best manufacturer on earth.” Elon Musk
But how on earth is Tesla going to perform this ambitious ramp up in production? It’s a 1000% increase in Tesla’s 2015 production level (approx. 50,000 Model S and Xs). Here’s one more clue from Elon Musk, at the end of the conference call:
“We believe that there’s more potential for innovation in manufacturing, than there is in the design of the car by a long shot.” Elon Musk
Tesla’s Alexis Georgeson took me inside the Tesla factory last week to share some insights as to how this “mission impossible” just might be done.
BBC Host, Rory Cellan-Jones: This week, the entrepreneur behind the Tesla cars made an extraordinary promise to his investors. He said his company would manufacture half a million cars a year by 2018. Given the fact that Tesla has missed much smaller production targets in the past this seemed, well, brave. But as Alison van Diggelen reports from Silicon Valley, Elon Musk is confident that this time, things will be different.
Alison van Diggelen: Tesla Motors astounded the auto industry last month when it received over 400,000 reservations (325,000 in the first week) for its new Model 3, an “affordable” all-electric car. In response, CEO Elon Musk just announced a production goal of half a million cars by 2018.
Elon Musk: My desk is at the end of the production line…I have a sleeping bag in the conference room… which I use quite frequently. The whole team is super focused on achieving rate and quality at the target cost, so I feel very confident in us achieving that goal.
Alison van Diggelen: I visited the Tesla factory in Silicon Valley to find out how they can deliver on time and in such huge numbers. Though beloved by fans, Tesla is also notorious for production delays.
Last year, the company spent over 1.5 Billion dollars in capital. Its cash burn-rate looks unsustainable. With General Motors coming out with a longer range electric car later this year and other competitors hot on their wheels, Tesla is under pressure to deliver, and fast.
Alexis Georgeson: There’s already been one major reorg since Model S production started in 2012. The original end of line used to be right here… we straightened out the line so we could expand and increase production.
Alison van Diggelen: That’s Alexis Georgeson, a Tesla spokesperson who explains in great detail the 7-day process that transforms a roll of aluminium into a shiny electric car. The two-week reorg and retooling in 2014 means that Tesla now has over 1000 state of the art robots, which helped ramp-up production by over 100% last year.
A separate production line for the Model 3 is planned and hard lessons from earlier models will help speed up their manufacture, especially more in-house capabilities and more thorough supplier validation. Musk says the new Model 3 will be designed to be easy to make.
Alexis Georgeson: We’re constantly learning and innovating. The great thing about Tesla is that so much is in-house and that we are so nimble.
Alison van Diggelen: I asked about the long delays in the Model X, largely caused by the flashy Falcon Wing doors.
What’s the trade off between hubris and caution at Tesla?
Alexis Georgeson: Our mission is not just to accelerate sustainable energy and transportation …You’re creating new features that haven’t been done before in the auto industry. With that comes natural growing pains…
Georgeson: The thing that’s missed there is the capital-intensive nature of the auto industry. Especially for a company like Tesla that’s ramping production so quickly…
Alison van Diggelen: Here’s Elon Musk…
Elon Musk: Tesla is hellbent on being the best in manufacturing… We believe that there is more potential for innovation in manufacturing than in design of the car, by a long shot.
Alison van Diggelen: Musk says the first Model 3 deliveries will start in late 2017. If he can prove naysayers wrong again, the majority of Model 3 reservation holders might see their cars coming off the production line in Silicon Valley within the next two years…
Read more Fresh Dialogues reports on Tesla here (scroll down for archives back to 2012)
This week, artificial intelligence (AI) reached a significant milestone. For the first time, Google’s DeepMind unit beat the legendary champion of Go, a highly complex board game. Machines are now being built with self-learning mechanisms that simulate the neural network of the human brain. What does this mean for the future of AI and its ability to replace humans in the workplace? The future just got closer.
Sebastian Thrun is well known for being a pioneer in artificial intelligence and autonomous cars, but is now laser focused on making sure online education bridges the skills gap, via his company, Udacity. Here’s what he said recently about AI:
“Udacity is my response to the development of AI. The mission I have to educate everybody is really an attempt to delay what AI will eventually do to us, because I honestly believe people should have a chance.” Sebastian Thrun*
I sat down with Thrun at the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley to explore his grand vision and audacious promises. Last year, Udacity raised $105 million in venture funding, based on a valuation of $1 billion. Is this another overpriced Silicon Valley unicorn or is the value justified?
First, a little back story: In 2012, Thrun was astounded at the massive number of people signing up for his Stanford AI course online course: 160,000 in all, mostly from outside the United States. He quickly realized that online education has the potential to make learning affordable and reach millions globally.
“Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems,” wrote Tom Friedman in 2013. But of course, his and Thrun’s rosy predictions couldn’t happen overnight. The online learning business had some serious teething problems with high drop out rates, and dismal failure rates. But today, the future of online education is looking brighter.
There are now countless online education companies globally. The big three are: Coursera (a Stanford startup) which now boasts 15 million students; EdX (affiliated with MIT and Harvard) with over 5 million users; and Udacity, 4 million.
Since Udacity’s high profile failure at San Jose State, the company has refocused its online courses and recently partnered with Google, AT&T and Amazon to design “nanodegrees” tailored to the needs of tech companies. Thrun is so bullish about the market value of these 4-12 month nanodegrees, which offer project based learning, that he’s offering a money-back job guarantee.
“For certain Nanodegree programs we’re offering all your tuition back unless we or you find yourself a job within the first 6 months of graduation. For the student, the education is basically free. … These are jobs that pay $80,000 or more, maybe $120,000 in Silicon Valley. With the first month’s salary they can recoup all tuition or we just pay them tuition back…“ Sebastian Thrun, CEO Udacity
Here are more highlights from my conversation with Sebastian Thrun:
On Redefining Education
I think education has to shrink: We have to stop thinking of education as a four or six year investment you can only afford once in your life. We have think of education as a lifelong thing, to shrink the size of our degrees and make education a daily habit, the same way we brush our teeth every day. We have to redefine what education really means.
On Access to Education
Elite colleges like Stanford are extremely inaccessible. They’re failing in their mission to provide access. The Udacity recipe is exactly the opposite – we want to reach everyone and have no admission hurdle. We want to be able to educate people. We do this today in Ghana, in Sub Saharan Africa, in Bangladesh, in China, around the world. If we do this, we can have a substantial impact on the world’s GDP because so much talent is under utilized because of lack of education. If we give people in Syria the same chances as kids in America have, it’s going to be spectacular.
On Persuading Skeptics
The question is still open how much a nanodegree will become gold standard…this takes time. But some companies earmark jobs specifically for us, give us preferential treatment. Google even invites the top nanodegree finishers on campus in Mountain View to meet their recruiters, which they don’t do with other universities….
And others are still skeptical. People are hired on conventional credentials and many of our students are career shifters. They don’t have the 20 years of history that a seasoned person has.
Last year, Marchisio got a promoted from customer service to “web solutions” engineering at Google after completing Udacity’s nanodegree. She said of her 6-month intensive program: “It’s industry relevant, fun…maybe I’m just a nerd but I really enjoy spending my weekends working through programming materials.”
Marchisio adds, “I’d guess there are more women in a Udacity program than there would be in an academic course…an online environment feels more safe…less social pressure. You can try things on your own, make mistakes and not feel embarrassed about it.”
On Udacity’s China Expansion
China has 20 million college students. It’s huge. It has a thriving new middle class and can’t keep up with brick and mortar university buildup to meet the demands of these people.
I want to go there and tell them look: You can become a Silicon Valley trained Android iOS engineer, a data scientist, a cyber security engineer, even a self driving car engineer for almost no money in about half a year.
Note: Udacity currently has an office in China and plans to roll out its learning platform, by replicating Google tools and building its own server farm in the second quarter of 2016.
On his Moonshot, 50 Year Vision
Conventional degrees will be gone. We’ll abandon the idea of education first, and then work.
I see people starting work straight out of high school and bringing experiences, deficiencies, desires back into education. We’ll have a life where education and work is on all the time. The old fashioned – you get born, ed, work, retire and die is obsolete. We have to do all these things at the same time, with the exception of death of course!
We have to learn to play, to get educated. Wehave think of life as a process, not as an accomplishment, but have a growth mindset for our lives. That will be the case because 50 years from now, things will be moving so insanely fast that to stay current, a college education will expire faster than its course.
***
In conclusion, it looks like Udacity has found a sustainable business model by focusing on the IT job market. The company currently has about 11,000 students enrolled in its nanodegree programs, each paying approximately $200/month, producing an estimated annual revenue of over $26 million. If Thrun can continue to drive rapid growth, compete effectively against the growing competition and replicate the company’s current success as it expands in China, then perhaps that $1 billion valuation doesn’t look quite so make-believe.
*Interesting to note that although Thrun offers online education as a way to “delay” the massive job losses that AI will eventually produce, Udacity’s top listed nanodegree is…you guessed it: machine learning. Otherwise known as AI.
As any loyal Fresh Dialogues follower knows, we seldom cover politics, but given Donald Trump’s seemingly unstoppable rise in popularity, he can no longer be ignored. Trump’s racist rhetoric against Mexican immigrants compelled me to explore the reaction of the Mexican American community here in Silicon Valley. One of the leading Mexican Americans in tech, Diana Alberran Chicas, put aside her frustration and issued this invitation to Donald Trump:
“Come out to Silicon Valley and meet with a lot of these prominent Mexican Americans that are actually pushing for innovation in Silicon Valley,” Diana Alberran Chicas
BBC Host Jon Bithrey: One of the most important dates in the race to become the U.S. President is upon us. On Tuesday, Americans in a dozen states go to the polls…Now Alison, you’re in California. Talk to us about how Donald Trump is viewed there.
Alison van Diggelen: He’s burned some bridges, let’s say. Immigration has become a scalding hot issue in the United States and in California. Mexican immigrants are getting the brunt of the vitriol, despite that fact that there’s been a net migration of Mexicans out of the US since 2009. My report begins with Donald Trump speaking at a rally last year.
Donald Trump: “When Mexico sends its people…they’re not sending their best… they’re bringing drugs, they’re bringing crime…they’re rapists and some I assume are good people…”
Let’s meet some Mexican immigrants in Silicon Valley.
Victor Arellano is in the gardening business. But not what you might think. He runs a thriving landscape gardening business that employs about 20 people and he’s building his dream house on 7 acres in Silicon Valley. Arellano would like to see Trump apologize…
Victor: …to all the Mexicans he has offended…98% of the Mexicans that come over here…they only want to work and try to make a living. Sometimes it really makes you upset.
They come and they do the most hardest work.
I put ads in the paper…it’s just Mexicans who apply for the job. I’ve never had an American who says: hey, I wanna start working as a laborer.
Arellano was a math teacher in Guadalajara and now serves a demanding clientele, many of whom work for Silicon Valley tech companies.
Victor: There’s two kinds of Americans – the ones that see that this country was formed by immigrants and then everybody is doing their best to make the country better.
And there is people, they don’t want to work, and they blame that they are not having the best car or the best house to the immigrants. Most of the jobs that the immigrants do are jobs that Americans don’t wanna do.
Diana: I’m very proud to say I’m Mexican American and both cultures have had a big impact on who I am and that I represent both countries very proudly.
How does Albarran Chicas respond to Trump’s anti-Mexican insults?
Diana: My invitation would be to come out to Silicon Valley and meet with a lot of these prominent Mexican Americans that are actually pushing for innovation in Silicon Valley…changing the ways companies here are functioning and working…He needs to be surrounded by people that are making a difference, that are influential.
Meet Guillermo Galindo, a composer and artist from Mexico City who moved here in 1992. This month, his exhibition “Border Cantos” (a collaboration with photographer Richard Misrach) begins a national tour at the San Jose Museum of Art, in the heart of Silicon Valley. It documents the human tragedy of the US-Mexico border.
[Atmos: Sounds of percussion, strings, Guillermo composition]
Alison: Is there something you’d like visitors to your exhibition to go home with…a thought, a feeling?
Guillermo: I’d like them to resonate with it…take that home and that is a seed that is going to grow with them…that improves the conditions of people crossing the border and the treatment that immigrants have in the US and all over the world.
It’s totally a global message. It extends in the macro and in the micro, no? There are borders between us as people and there are borders that extend through nations.
Alison: What would you like to happen to those borders between people and countries?
Guillermo: I would like to build bridges instead of borders.
[Atmos: Guillermo music]
END
Find out more
The New Yorker: Is the Mexican Government Finally Fighting Back Against Donald Trump?
John Oliver responds to Donald Trump: “You are either a racist of you are pretending to be”
Fadell learned to say “no” more than “yes” while working at Apple and he found creative ways to “disappear” when Jobs was in “one of his moods.”
But in 10 years of working with Steve Jobs, the Apple cofounder often revealed his softer side. For example, when Fadell became a father for the first time, Jobs took him for a walk and advised him not to over-schedule his child.
“Make sure they’re bored sometimes,” said Jobs.
What did he mean?
Fadell explains: Kids need the time to find themselves…be creative, and solve problems.
Although critics say he micromanages his teams, Fadell sees himself as a mentor (see more below).
On Google Glass
Glass is definitely a side project for Fadell…he checks in with his Glass design team sporadically. He’s still CEO of Nest and that remains his primary focus, since, as he underlines, “it’s actually shipping product.” He’s laser focused on making sure it’s being done right (see Leadership below).
On Tech Security
Fadell reckons people today are obsessed with tech security and that in reality “nothing is secure…people in the security business are stirring up the shit.”
On Moving Meditation
Fadell starts his work day at 5:30 am and does what he calls a “moving meditation,” be that running, or yoga (one hour, three times a week). That gives him time to problem solve and prepare for his “roller coaster” day of “back-to-back” meetings.
I challenged him to demonstrate one of his favorite poses: the Vriksasana, or tree pose and as you can see…he likes a good challenge.
For non-yogis out there, it’s a great pose for increasing balance, focus, and memory. It also strengthens your feet, ankles and knees.
The main event at the salon was an excellent fireside chat between Fadell and Kevin Surace, SVForum board member and serial entrepreneur. I’ll post a link to the video here, when it’s available.
.
Here are some of the highlights of that conversation and my observations:
On Leadership
Make sure your projects don’t take over 18 months to ship, otherwise “it’s impossible to keep your team together,” says Fadell.
Although Fadell has lost several key members of Nest recently, he insists that his young team “need mentored to grow into the next leaders in Silicon Valley.” He says that those who walk out the door are examples of “the Tinder generation.”
Like Steve Jobs, Fadell has a reputation for being an intense leader, a micromanager or even a bully.
As Ben Austen so eloquently describes in Wired, “Steve Jobs has become a Rorschach test, a screen onto which entrepreneurs and executives can project a justification of their own lives: choices they would have made anyway, difficult traits they already possess.”
Perhaps Fadell needs to do a little more yoga and a little less yelling?
Larry Page vs Steve Jobs
Fadell characterizes his new Google boss, Larry Page as “an incredible scientist” who respects products and likes deep research to push the limits of technology. By contrast, he found Steve Jobs more focused on marketing, “more business, less science” and says he often took, or even “stole ownership of ideas.”
On Failure
Fadell says before joining Apple, he’d had 10 years of failure, at General Magic and other enterprises. In 1998 he was a DJ in his spare time, and founded a hardware startup for music collections. He made about 80 pitches to VCs without success. It was the intense fear of failure that helped him stay strong in negotiations with Steve Jobs. He agreed to work on what would become the iPod, only after Jobs assured him, “if you can build it, we’ll put every marketing dollar into this.” And of course, the rest is history.
Should tech companies build cars?
Fadell gives this question a resounding “YES!” He describes a recent meeting with some members of the board at Ford, “I could see fear in their eyes,” he says.
He views cars – especially self-driving cars – as “lots of computer with a little bit of car,” and says that car companies “need to do a 180 and compete with computers on wheels.”
Immigration – it’s a hot button issue in this year’s U.S. presidential race. I was delighted when my senior editor at the BBC gave me this fascinating assignment: find some African immigrants in Silicon Valley, explore the cultural chasm they’ve crossed and how they keep close ties – both economic and emotional – to their homelands. What do friends back home think of life here in the United States? Cameroonian, Marie-Ange Eyoum described it thus:
“They look at the U.S. as heaven, they believe they’ll have more opportunity, be much more successful…” Marie-Ange Eyoum
But of course, it’s not all fun and games. Gabriel Tor (who was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan) works two jobs to help support eleven family members back home. He reckons he’ll have to work through retirement to pay off his $20,000 college loan.
This week, I joined the BBC’s Roger Hearing on the World Service’s Business Matters program. Here’s a transcript of our dialogue and my report (edited for length and clarity):
Roger Hearing: Now Alison, where you are in Silicon Valley…we’ve been asking you to take a look at something quite specific – to do with the ways people from the developing world, specifically Africa, manage to find their way to work there. Now, just introduce your report for us, if you would.
Alison van Diggelen: Immigration is a very topical issue this election year in America. I focused on three Africans who’ve come here in the last 10-20 years – one from South Sudan, one from Cameroon and one from Nigeria. I wanted to explore:
How are they contributing to Silicon Valley?
How do they give back to their families in Africa?
And how do those friends and family view their lives over here?
Here’s the report: Africans in Silicon Valley
.
Africans may not be plentiful in Silicon Valley but some are making profound impacts back in their homeland. Meet Gabriel Tor. He’s one of several dozen Lost Boys of Sudan who arrived here as a refugees in the early 2000’s.
Gabriel Tor: How we live as South Sudanese…we have seen it all: how to live with something or how to live with nothing…
Tor works as a security guard and taxi driver. He has over 20,000 dollars in student debt, after completing a bachelor’s degree at San Jose State. Yet he still manages to send home about $3,000 each year to support his mother and 10 family members, exiled in Kenya (from the conflict in South Sudan.)
I ask him how long it will take to pay off his loan?
Gabriel: I think it’s going to take me up to the retirement age…I don’t have the courage to calculate the years…(laughter). I know it’s going to be a long time…it’s going to take decades to pay it off.
So what keeps him going? His brow furrows as he describes his first visit back to see his family – yet another generation forced to escape the violence that’s returned to South Sudan.
Gabriel: When I first visited, almost everybody was starving. It broke my heart.
Alison: Did you explain your tears to them?
Gabriel: To them, I had to hold my tears (back)… On the bus with other strangers, I broke into tears. It’s a situation that’s been made poorer by civil war.
Marie-Ange Eyoum also feels that tug to her homeland, in Cameroon.
Marie-Ange: I can be driving somewhere and I see the waste…how much food is being wasted, and my heart just goes back home.
Eyoum is ecstatic that she “won the lottery” – the diversity visa lottery that is – while completing her PhD in engineering (at Berkeley). Eyoum now works as a product manager for a tech company.
She goes back to Cameroon regularly to give leadership talks at universities and visit her high school, where she picks “the smartest ones” she says “mostly girls” to fund their education. So what do her friends in Cameroon think of SV?
Marie-Ange: The young people: They look at the US as heaven, they believe they’ll have more opportunity, be much more successful than in Cameroon.
Eyoum once tried to create a Leadership training startup in Cameroon but it floundered.
Marie-Ange:In Cameroon, yes doesn’t usually mean yes. No doesn’t mean no…So you kind of have to read under the line what is really happening…
Would she ever return to Cameroon? For now she feels she can make a greater difference being in Silicon Valley.
Marie-Ange: Definitely you need to be on the ground to do biz in Africa. It’s difficult being in SV. We are two oceans away, 9 hours time difference, two time zones.
I dearly love Cameroon and I would love to put in place something that would make a difference for future generations…
.
Nigerian, Stephen Ozoigbo knows all about being on the ground in Africa. He went back nine times last year. In 2013 he founded an African tech foundation where he’s helping bring the Silicon Valley entrepreneurial spirit, wisdom –and funding – to Africa. We met in a busy Silicon Valley café…
Ozoigbo: Africa has the youngest people on the planet…there are so many unemployed …you throw in all of the necessary elements to an active, aspirational population and what you’ll find is a big spark, a big explosion actually…of young entrepreneurs.
Like many Africans in Silicon Valley, Ozoigbo is patient person. He knows real change takes time.
Ozoigbo: It’s a marathon, not a sprint. Silicon Valley was not built in a day… Silicon Valley had to be welcoming to this new immigrant population…
Extras (that didn’t make the final cut)
On Forgiveness
“Holding on to a painful past doesn’t help. Grudges don’t help anybody. Forgiveness can connect a lot of things and gives you peaceful living,” Gabriel Tor was one of the Lost Boys of Sudan.
On Feeling Welcome in Silicon Valley
“100% yes. I’ve never felt out of place…In Virginia…every time I speak, people would say – where are you from? I get that question in Silicon Valley but it’s an honest question (not a loaded one) – to really understand where you are from, to appreciate the culture…In Silicon Valley people say: I LOVE your accent, where are you from? They have a curiosity to see my perspective.” Marie-Ange Eyoum, Senior Product Manager at Intel.
On Africa’s Future
“Africa’s future will be reinvented on the backbone of young tech savvy entrepreneurs. The Internet has flattened a lot of things. Information is democratized. ..that will shorten the marathon race. Africa has Gatorade now, we have better running shoes and we understand our aerodynamics and can do so much better on this race and not just stick to the legacy of race running,” Stephen Ozoigbo, founder of African Technology Foundation.
Pahlka: We’ve been trying to make the guts of government… as sexy as making Facebook. People are buying it… by coming into government, they can change the world.
Wheeler: Broadband, high speed Internet is the essential “commodity” of the 21st Century… You can’t be in a situation where you’ve got gatekeepers deciding which innovators get on…
Here are more highlights from my conversation with Sebastian Thrun:
Victor Arellano is in the gardening business. But not what you might think. He runs a thriving 
Meet 
On Working with Steve Jobs
On Moving Meditation
.
