Diane von Furstenberg says that the greatest gift she’s ever been given was the lesson that fear is not an option.
With 2015 off to a fearful start in Paris and its impact reverberating globally, especially within Jewish communities, it’s a lesson worth exploring.
I sat down with von Furstenberg, Queen of the Wrap Dress and the DVF brand, and found a down-to-earth woman with a powerful story that resonates far beyond the world of fashion.
As a small child, von Furstenberg learned her lesson in a rather brutal way from her mother, a Holocaust survivor.
“She’d lock me in a closet and wait til I stopped being afraid,” says von Furstenberg.
Her mother experienced atrocities at Auschwitz and her challenging life shaped von Furstenberg’s to this day.
“Fear is not an option is everything: fear of flying, living, confronting the truth…fear of anything,” says von Furstenberg, who has made some courageous choices in her personal and business life, as chronicled in her new book “The Woman I Wanted To Be.”
She recounts the many periods of self doubt and challenges she faced as her career soared then flopped, rose again from the ashes, battled to stay relevant and then triumphed in China and globally, ensuring DVF a place in the design history books. She’s done it all: married (and divorced) a prince, been painted by Andy Warhol, made front page of Newsweek, survived cancer, faced bankruptcy and become a doting grandmother.
In a conversation with Maria Shriver the day before our interview, she urged women to be hard on themselves. I asked her what she meant by that. Although some journalists claim she’s impossible to interview, DVF answered my question directly.
“The most important relationship is the one you have with yourself,” says von Furstenberg. “See yourself for what you really are…for the good and the bad, whatever. Once you have accepted that, then you can also begin to like yourself.”
Along with Tina Brown and Sally Field, von Furstenberg is part of Vital Voices, a network that supports female community and business leaders around the world, both politically and financially.
This week, UC Santa Barbara’s Professor Nakamura (and two colleagues in Japan) received the Nobel Prize for Physics. Their big breakthrough? The Holy Grail of material science for many years: Blue LED technology. It not only enables high efficiency lighting (goodbye Edison’s incandescent bulbs, hello backlit smartphones, and 2300 feet headlights); but one day soon will help double the range of hybrid cars (thanks to its power switching applications).
A version of this story aired on BBC’s Tech Tent on Dec. 12, 2014. Listen to the podcast below:
To give you a sense of just how energy efficient these LED lightbulbs are, Prof DenBaars claims that if everyone in the United States replaced their old bulbs with LEDs, it would reduce the country’s electric light bill from $100 Billion to $20 Billion. Impressive.
Sweden’s Per Delsing gives it a global perspective: “A quarter of all energy consumption goes to illumination,” he said at the Nobel Prize press conference. As a result, any increase in efficiency and consequent saving of energy “is really going to have a big impact on modern civilization.”
While reporting for the BBC, I got a fascinating tour of UCSB’s Solid State Lighting and Energy Center and a chemistry lesson from Steven Griffiths, a grad student researcher. His colleagues Sang Ho Oh and Daniel Becerra also contributed valuable background information (see below for more photos).
Here’s a transcript of my conversation with Prof Denbaars (aka: all you ever wanted to know about LEDs but were afraid to ask):
Alison van D: I’m here at the Uni of California Santa Barbara with the research team led by Prof Nakamura, the winner of this year’s Nobel prize for Physics. He earned the Nobel Prize for his blue LED breakthrough. I want to talk with Dr Steven Denbaars who is a research partner of the professor and start with the basics. What is an LED?
Prof DenBaars: An LED stands for a light emitting diode, it’s basically a semiconductor crystal which glows bright light, in this case, bright blue light when you apply electrical current to it.
van D: Can you explain how they’re used in smartphones, computer screens and in lighting?
Prof D: OK in smartphones the LED is used in combination with a phosphor on top of it to generate white light. That is, the blue is converted with a red and a green phosphor to produce a full spectrum of white light. That is the white light in your flashlight, you know when you take a picture, but it’s also the white light in back of your LCD screen. So it’s called the backlight. So all smart phones today use LED backlighting to do energy efficient displays.
van D: And tell me about the lighting aspect. Is it just the LED bulbs you find at the supermarket, is that the only application for LEDs in the lighting sphere?
Prof D: Well that was the initial implementation, a bulb replacement or retrofit. But what we’re seeing is: now you can use the LED to add additional features to lighting, such as communications. That is, you can have your cell phone control the color of the light bulb or even communicate information between the light bulb and your cell phone or maybe even your Internet server to distribute information into the house. That’s just starting. We call that smart LED lighting.
van D: So can you explain how that works? You get an app on your phone and you can change the mood lighting of your home?
Prof D: Yes, you can change the color temperature from a sunset to a cold day in Sweden, maybe, I guess. 6500 Kelvin would look very bluish white…That is using the Bluetooth feature on your iPhone that communicates with the chip in the light bulb, which then changes the mix of the colors in the LED.
van D: Can you talk about the particular breakthrough?
Prof D: Both Akasaki, Amano and Nakamura basically developed the P-type Gallium Nitride which was the missing link in the quest for the Holy Grail of LEDs at the time. We had red and green, we didn’t have blue.
van D: And why was that the Holy Grail?
Prof D: The blue was the Holy Grail because…if you have a paint brush and you only have red and green, then you can’t make a painting, correctly replicate the visible spectrum. So we were missing a huge chunk of the visible spectrum. People have been looking for 40 years for the right blue illuminating semi conductor …
van D: So do you see in the future, is this LED technology going to completely replace Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulb?
Prof D: Well I think it will definitely become the dominant light source. The quality of the light is winning over the consumer, it’s very close to an incandescent as you can see from this demo here…we have a bulb from a US manufacturer which looks almost exactly like a normal light bulb. I think there will still be some uses where people still really like incandescent lighting but that’ll be more for design or decorative reasons. Basically, if you want to have a long life light bulb…that’s the other advantage, these things last for 20 to 50 years. An incandescent light bulb lasts 6 months. So you’re really throwing your money away when you buy an incandescent light bulb. The US spends about $100 B for electricity for lighting and LEDs could take that down to about $20 B, so we could save the US $80 B in electrical costs if we switched over to LEDs, if everybody switched over today.
van D: Tell me about the LED laser headlights
Prof D: The laser headlight…you can see 700 meters in front of the car. Normal headlight is 150 meters. So you may think that this is going to scare the other driver, be bright, but it’s not any brighter to the other driver…it can be more tightly focused and columnated, projected on to the road. So this is a big safety advantage and it’s actually been released by BMW and Audi in Germany. Several thousand dollars per headlight but it’s a safety feature, because on the autobahn you drive about 240 K an hour, so you want to see 700 meters….
van D: So do you see that trickling through to all new cars within 5 years?
Prof D: Wow. The automobile industry is usually very slow to adapt. The LED headlight took about 5 to 7 years. Now you can see LED day-running lights everywhere, all newer cars. But the laser, which is the next generation of this lighting, will take 5 to 10 years.
van D: And what are you personally most excited about for the future of LEDs?
Prof D: Wow. I think it’s just to now be able to make a light bulb that’s smart enough to communicate, turn on and off when you need it. That’s very exciting. But also I think the real promise is: we can take lighting off grid. That is, you can make the LED, when you combine it with a solar cell completely renewable. That is, you just generate the electricity you want with a solar cell like this little solar powered LED lamp I have here, and therefore you don’t need electricity any more. Your light source, you just carry around with you. During the day time it charges up with a solar cell and at night it comes on. That would be the Holy Grail. We can become completely sustainable lighting without having to use electricity. This has the potential to save the world a couple hundred power plants of energy. More than a hundred nuclear power plants.
van D: Finally Professor Denbaars, is there anything else that you would like to share with the BBC listening audience?
Prof D: In electric cars it turns out you can use this as the power switching device (the thing that switches from the battery to the electric drive). Professor Nakamura and myself are also looking at it for power electronics. So Shuji’s (Nakamura) fundamental breakthrough of an LED is now impacting three major areas: not just lighting but it’s impacting displays, but now even electric cars.
van D: And how does that work? If you’re driving a Tesla or a Nissan Leaf, how is this LED technology going to make things better?
Prof D: I saw projections…it would take the Toyota Prius – which gets about 55 mpg – now the hybrid technology it would make it over 120 mpg…because it’s so efficient.
van D: How soon might we see this?
Prof D: This is a much harder problem to solve cos we’ve got to get the cost down and the scale up of the Gallium Nitride power electronics. I’ve seen lab demos… generally from lab demos to implementation it’s 5 years in this field of solid state that I work in.
van D: Are you already talking with Tesla and Nissan…?
Prof D: I can’t comment at all which car companies. But yes, we’re talking with car companies…they’re looking at it and the US government is putting a significant amount of money into this field. It’s called power electronics.
van D: Fantastic thank you.
And the research goes on. Researcher Steven Griffiths and his colleagues are working on further improvements in the Gallium Nitride (GaN) material to produce even higher efficiency LEDs and power swtiching. Below:
A pure nitrogen-containing glovebox is used to handle chemicals which are reactive in air.
The glovebox is used for alkali metals and ammonium salts, which are added to the reactors to aid in GaN growth.
Below: Steven Griffiths shows the interior of a blast containment vessel, which when in operation contains ammonothermal reactors (not pictured) used to grow large gallium nitride (GaN) crystals. The blue vessel is the “blast containment vessel”, to “crush cans” (which dissipate projectile energy in the case of an explosion). The white cylinders are heaters, in which the “ammonothermal reactors” (not pictured) are placed when in operation. The blast containment vessels must be sealed due to the extreme temperatures (>500°C) and pressures (>2000 atm.) used for ammonothermal GaN growth. Ammonothermal growth uses large quantities of ammonia at the extreme conditions mentioned, therefore researchers in the lab space must be protected from explosion, fire, and chemical hazards.
Below: Blue light emission from an LED. Blue light is produced when a bias is applied across the LED. Blue LEDs are composed of indium gallium nitride (InGaN) active layers sandwiched between positive (p-type) and negative (n-type) GaN layers, all of which are grown on a native (GaN) or foreign (Si, silicon carbide, sapphire, or gallium arsenide) substrate.
Below: Burhan Saifaddin (background) and Dan Becerra (foreground). The performance of blue LEDs is tested after crystal growth and device processing. Dan is applying metal to make electrical contact with the positive and negative terminals of the LEDs. Burhan is energizing the LEDs and monitoring their electrical operation/emission characteristics.
Silicon Valley is well known as the global hub of innovative technology. Can four weeks immersed in its unique ecosystem help inspire a new generation of global tech leaders? That’s the hope behind a program called Tech Women, launched by former Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton and now sponsored by the State Department.
Last month, over seventy tech women from Africa and the Middle East made a month-long visit to Silicon Valley. I met with several of them to explore what they learned, and how they plan to leverage technology to tackle their countries’ challenges when they return home.
A version of this story aired on BBC’s Tech Tent on Nov. 14, 2014. Listen to the podcast below: @20.00
Here is the full length transcript:
Tech Tent Host, Rory Cellan-Jones: One interesting aspect of the tech revolution is that women are playing a bigger role in the developing world than in places like the U.S. and U.K. Over 70 women from Africa and the Middle Easter have just wrapped up a month long visit to Silicon Valley, with the aim of picking up ideas for the technology they can use to tackle their country’s challenges when they return home. Alison van Diggelen met two of them…
Alison van Diggelen: They are two women with ambitious missions. They’ve got the tech savvy and now, after a month building connections and wisdom in Silicon Valley, they’re eager to launch their dreams back home.
Meet Asal Ibrahim who wants to bring massive deployment of solar power to Jordan; and Serah Kahiu from Kenya who wants to jumpstart the science and tech economy in Africa by developing a network of science museums and labs across the entire continent.
Both have lofty goals, but they talk with such conviction and enthusiasm, it’s hard not to believe that these young women will change the world, at least their little corner of it.
I start by asking Kahiu about the current state of technology in Kenya.
Kahiu: “I use mobile technology in Kenya, it’s HUGE. It’s like magic because you can do transactions, money transactions on your mobile. You can pay someone from wherever in a country: school fees, bills. That one has revolutionized life in Kenya.”
She explains how Facebook is a vital tech tool for small businesses in Kenya.
Kahiu: “You can use your phone for Internet. That has really sparked business because you can advertise your product on Facebook, get someone to pay you through M-pesa and then put stuff on a public transport system and it’s transported to your client. That has made it so easy for people like farmers. You cut out the middleman. The farmer gets all the profit. This is huge, especially for women. The majority of small scale farmers in Kenya are women, so that has improved standards of living for many women in rural areas.”
We discuss her grand vision of creating a network of hands-on science and tech centers across Africa, starting in Juja, Kenya, a university town she describes as having “the same vibe as Silicon Valley.”
Kahiu:“We need to embrace more technology because 60% of Africans and youth in Kenya are under 35. We have a bulge of youth who’re not employed. Science and technology is the last frontier for job creation. We must prepare people for that. We import 80% of whatever we’re using. Why do we import? Why not make it in Kenya?
“If the governments of Africa invest in science and technology and put it on its pedestal as an accelerator of development, youth are encouraged to understand science better, and more importantly, to start companies.”
van Diggelen: “So you feel it needs an entrepreneurship spirit kick-started?”
Kahiu: “Yes, kick-started! There’s a need for that entrepreneurship. They’re learning theory, theory, theory.”
van Diggelen: “So commercializing these ideas?”
Kahiu: “It’s very hard…That’s what I want to do. I’ll sit in the gap between the education system and the industry and help people to see the possibilities that there are in science, technology, engineering and math.”
“Every Kenyan child that is being born deserves to know and understand technology. We don’t have a choice. If the world is accelerating the way it is doing, we’ll be left so far behind, we won’t even see the dust. I’m serious.”
“Science and technology should answer your problems. So, I meet people where they are and then we walk together …People care about drinking water, safer roads and availability of healthy foods for their kids. So these are their needs. So I’ll walk with my people from that point and we’ll walk towards particle physics…flying to the moon, or Mars…who knows? (laughter)”
(This interview took place at the Los Altos History Museum, which is currently featuring an interactive Silicon Valley exhibit, now through April 2015)
Asal Ibrahim is a 24 year-old student from Amman, Jordan. She’s been working at a (Vista Solar) solar company in Silicon Valley, soaking up the “can do” attitude.
Ibrahim is enthusiastic about the state of technology in Jordan today, but admits there are many opportunities for improvement.
I asked her how Silicon Valley’s tech obsessed culture compares to that of Jordan.
Ibrahim: “It’s very similar. Everyone is obsessed with technology: holding a smart phone, interacting on social media, using it in almost every aspect of life. On an infrastructure level it needs to be improved: transportation, education is employing technology a lot…we need to improve it way more.
“You can find anything from high tech schools to poor schools in Jordan. We have schools that are winning international competitions like Intel Science Fair or Microsoft Imagine Cup and compete worldwide with their Robotech, with their programming skills, website software. Some schools are more advanced than some universities in Jordan. We’re still lacking equipped labs for example, not only technological advances like IT, but also scientific labs.
“Jordanians are very into technology. They can contribute a lot if they get the chance. We have a lot of international companies that have offices in Jordan, and employ large amount of engineers, like Microsoft, Sony, Yahoo.”
Ibrahim’s goal is to encourage the massive deployment of solar power in Jordan, but she faces an uphill struggle.
“It’s not easy to push this kind of alternate power and challenge the big oil companies. We have to combine all the manpower we have, all the technology, knowledge, NGOs, advocates, to make this happen. It’s a dream that needs to be worked on at a national level.”
Ibrahim was part of a public private partnership that brought 200 Mega Watts of solar power online this year, but she’s determined to keep up the momentum.
“97% of our energy is imported, so if any of surrounding countries that provide us with oil or electricity have bad political situations, which is the case most of the times, we will be out of energy. Renewables are now 2% of energy share. It’s mostly oil now.”
So how has Ibrahim’s month in Silicon Valley inspired her?
“The most special spirit of Silicon Valley is how diverse it is. Having people from all over the world working for the state of technology, for the sake of entrepreneuring, for the sake of innovating, creating new things. How excited people are on the train in the morning – they feel happy, on a mission to accomplish…it has reached me.”
She’s learned an important lesson from her month in Silicon Valley:
Ibrahim: “No idea is bad. If you have a single idea, whether it’s a website, app, any innovation you think can change the face of technology, you should pursue this, because an idea dies if you don’t pursue it.
“It’s all inspiring to me. Everything is possible if you have the persistence and determination to make it happen. The Jordanian culture encourages girls and boys, men to study equally; they’re very encouraged to pursue careers in STEM, to pursue technological and scientific degrees. Being in a male dominated environment in technological companies, can be a bit frightening for girls and women…there is no challenge if you show confidence and if you have a dream to pursue, no one will stand in your way.”
Check back soon for my interview with Sierra Leone’s Fatmata Kamara who wants to bring solar power to rural areas of her country to improve the livelihood of rural communities and help in the fight against Ebola.
This summer, I was invited to share Letters from Silicon Valley with the BBC. This is the first of my letters and aired on BBC Business Daily on Friday September 26th, 2014. It was bookended by an interview with Silicon Valley’s Peter Thiel and the haunting opus, Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night, read by Dylan Thomas.
The BBC’s Manuela Saragosa hosted the show. Here’s her introduction:
Saragosa: Seeing the world from a Silicon Valley perspective where failing is essential to success…
van Diggelen: You might be thinking that encouraging employees to fail is the nuttiest thing you’ve ever heard. But here’s the thing: if you don’t create a risk taking culture, then how are you going to invent the future?
Saragosa: … that’s Silicon Valley for you. As Peter Thiel says, it’s a counter cultural kind of place and California’s ultra competitive technology industry has its own way of going about things. Take success: to get there, failure is positively encouraged. Journalist, Alison van Diggelen has this report from San Francisco.
van Diggelen: The popular cartoon character, Homer Simpson famously said, “Trying is the first step to failure.”
I imagine Homer wouldn’t survive long in the tech world of Silicon Valley, where trying and failing is vital to the region’s dominance as the global center of innovation.
In Silicon Valley, it’s a badge of honor to fail, as long as you fail fast and learn from the experience. Here in Silicon Valley, mistakes don’t define you. They refine you.
Fear of failure doesn’t hold people back.
That’s why Google is constantly putting out products “in beta.” They try them out, and if they take off, like Gmail, support goes full throttle.
We all know Gmail, but do you remember Google Desktop, Google PowerMeter and Google Health? Probably not. They were launched and then quietly discontinued. Failures, yes, but you can be sure they delivered valuable lessons for Google products. Google Glass may go the same way, but it won’t damn the company as a failure. Not in Silicon Valley, anyway.
You see, failure is viewed differently here. That’s why innovation blooms in SV.
Some of the most innovative leaders in SV have the mantra, “if you’re not failing half the time, you’re not trying hard enough.”
They create a climate of cooperation, allowing teams to make and learn from mistakes, and change “business as usual.”
For skeptics, you might think encouraging employees to fail is the nuttiest thing you’ve ever heard, but here’s the thing: If you don’t create a risk-taking culture that condones, even celebrates failure, then how are you going to invent the future?
Incremental steps just won’t cut it. True innovation needs giant leaps.
If Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak had accepted the DOS command-line-interface and didn’t ‘think different,’ we might still be stuck in the dark ages of black computer screens…
But how to overcome your fear of failure?
I recently interviewed Professor John Krumboltz at the Commonwealth Club of California. He’s the author of Fail Fast, Fail Often and is renowned for his fail fast, fail often mantra. He’s spent a lifetime at Silicon Valley’s Stanford University, exploring why successful people spend less time planning and more time acting.
“Making mistakes is important to human development,” he stresses. “Just do it!”
He cites the example of SV’s Pixar Studios, which makes computer-animated films like Wall-e and Finding Nemo. Pixar’s President, Ed Catmull says a few good ideas are often buried amid many “half-baked and outright stinkers.” By giving themselves permission to fail again and again, the team weeds out bad ideas quickly and gets to the place where real work can occur. Catmull describes the process as going from “suck” to “non-suck.”
In the business world, fear of failure can prevent you sticking your neck out, being innovative, trying something new. Perhaps you’re paralyzed by the Homer Simpson’s defeatist: “if I don’t try, then I won’t fail.”
Instead, remember that no one sets out to fail: failure isn’t your friend, but fear of failure is definitely your enemy.
Alison van Diggelen, of Fresh Dialogues, for the BBC World Service in Silicon Valley
Since 2009 he’s served as the Chairman of the Board on the Nature Conservancy’s China program and says, “Our challenge is to help more people to make healthy money, “sustainable money,” money that is not only good for themselves but also good for the society.”
So what’s behind Jack Ma’s environmental conscience? With vast wealth comes the ability to take a longer term view of the world:
“Most companies, when they’re doing good, they enjoy today’s wonderful life. They don’t worry about five years later—but I worry about five years later,” says Jack Ma. “I think one thing’s for sure — China’s environment will get better in 10 or 20 years. Business people like myself are beginning to pay attention to social issues including the environment and taking action and really treating this issue very seriously. And we’re doing it not for P.R. reasons, but because we know it is important. We know it is serious and that if we don’t take action, it will hurt ourselves, our children and our families.”
McDowall: Our guest is Business Matters regular, Alison van Diggelen. Among her many talents, Alison is an acclaimed interviewer and is host of the Fresh Dialogues series, which you can find online, and which features experts on green technology, sustainable enterprise, celebrities and inspirational women… Alison, good afternoon to you in the Golden State. Can we talk for a minute about Alibaba? What do you make of this chap Jack Ma?
van Diggelen: Well I’m quite impressed by Jack Ma.
Of course, I’m always looking for the environmental, green angle as you mentioned earlier Mike. And he’s probably made enough money for a small country to live on, so he’s really turning his attention to the environment. He’s actually a major player in putting the attention on China’s environment. Its really bad: air pollution, water pollution. So I understand he’s putting 0.3% of the revenues from Alibaba into environmental causes, which I say: three cheers to that! (Reuters reports Alibaba’s revenues were $2.4Bn in the last quarter).
McDowall: Point three percent? Mind you, the revenues are enormous.
van Diggelen: Yes, absolutely. That’s probably a good tranche of money there.
McDowall: So he’s obviously someone we’re going to be seeing a lot more of in the future. He appears to be keen to raise his profile internationally. He’s obviously very well known in China and you know, ringing the bell on Wall Street…Yahoo was a big investor. We’re going to be seeing a lot more of this guy.
van Diggelen: I think a lot of people…the froth and the excitement…part of the reason for that is that it’s an opportunity for global investors to buy into China’s growth and as everyone knows that is just poised to keep growing. I think only half of the Chinese population is online, so there’s a lot of growth potential there.
McDowall: Sure. We’ll keep watching….
Keep listening to our conversation as we discuss: The Scottish referendum, Larry Ellison’s retirement and why the Ig Nobel Prizes will make you laugh, then make you think.
You can listen to other Fresh Dialogues BBC Conversations here where we discuss: the future of driverless cars, Apple’s green credentials, Tesla’s new gigafactory and many more topics.
Prof D: Well that was the initial implementation, a bulb replacement or retrofit. But what we’re seeing is: now you can use the LED to add additional features to lighting, such as communications. That is, you can have your cell phone control the color of the light bulb or even communicate information between the light bulb and your cell phone or maybe even your Internet server to distribute information into the house. That’s just starting. We call that smart LED lighting. 
Prof D: The laser headlight…you can see 700 meters in front of the car. Normal headlight is 150 meters. So you may think that this is going to scare the other driver, be bright, but it’s not any brighter to the other driver…it can be more tightly focused and columnated, projected on to the road. So this is a big safety advantage and it’s actually been released by BMW and Audi in Germany. Several thousand dollars per headlight but it’s a safety feature, because on the autobahn you drive about 240 K an hour, so you want to see 700 meters….
We discuss her grand vision of creating a network of hands-on science and tech centers across Africa, starting in Juja, Kenya, a university town she describes as having “the same vibe as Silicon Valley.”
You see, failure is viewed differently here. That’s why innovation blooms in SV.
