From Istanbul To Sand Hill Road

Long Bets

Ever since the AlwaysOn Conference, I've been meaning to write about The Long Bets Foundation.  It's a fantastic organization that has brought together some of the brightest people on the planet to make predictions about the future.  Not only does one need to explain the basis of their prediction, they also have to put their money where their mouths are and pay to post a prediction and be prepared to take a bet if somebody decides to challenge. 

Some highly recognizable, and off the charts smart, people such as Nathan Myhrvold, Eric Schmidt, Vint Cerf, Gordon Bell, Ray Kurzweil, and Freeman Dyson are on the site with their predictions

Freeman Dyson, probably the most notable of the group, has a very interesting and creative predictions.  I humbly cut and paste it here.

Bet 30: The first discovery of extraterrestrial life will be someplace other than on a planet or on a satellite of a planet.

Here is his explanation: If extraterrestrial life exists, it might have adapted to living in vacuum and spread widely over cold regions far from the sun. If so, it must grow optical concentrators, lenses or mirrors, to focus sunlight and keep itself warm. The concentrators will reflect sunlight in a narrow beam back toward the sun. If we point our telescopes directly away from the sun, we might see life as bright reflecting points, like the eyes of animals caught in headlights. 

I finally gathered the courage to put a prediction myself.  A few months ago I wrote about how the internet would change male female relationships.  Well, now I am putting money on that prediction on Long Bets.  You can find it here, and I challenge you to bet against it.

Hagia Sophia's Web 2.0 Inspiration

While I was in Istanbul showing the fabulous Hagia Sophia to my daughters, two piece of Web 2.0 news kept colliding in mind long enough to end up resulting in two unusual conclusions.  The first piece of news is the $900M Google - Myspace deal and the second is AOL releasing user search keyword info. 

The Google Myspace deal is very interesting in two fronts.  First, it underlines another way web services can monetize.  It's basically this; get the users attention (eyeballs), and the more they see your pages, the more they will do searches off your site and searches are monetizable.  In 1999 these eyeballs could not be monetized by the searches they do.  Today they can, and that's significant.  Another interesting thing about this deal is that video is not part of it.  This is surprising because one would think it is a golden chance for Google to get their video product into Myspace as opposed to Youtube which is being blocked.  Puzzling isn't it?  It gets better.  Assuming most Youtube traffic comes from Myspace, this makes one think whether Myspace has other ideas about Youtube.  Is a big deal pending?  We will have to wait and see.

The second very interesting piece of news was AOL releasing anonymous user search keywords.  Even though AOL said it was a tiny bit of the total searches, the amount of information one can glean from them is staggering.  If you look at the data, it doesn't take long before you realize what an invaluable source of information this is.  Take user 1338 for example.  He searched for: John Cogliandro, John Cogliandro Virginia, Charles Cogliandro, Anna Cogliandro, army life insurance policy, uss san francisco, atomic bomb tehran, syria baath party 1967, fat guy, obesity... the list goes on.  There are hundreds of keywords other than these, but with only a handful, we can almost figure out who he is, where he lives what he did and who his family is.  Imagine what you can know about 1338 if you knew thousands of his keywords over time about.  One needs to pause and think what kind of a knowledge base Google, Yahoo, MSN have amassed about our society.  Can they even predict the future?

Yes they can.  Yahoo and Google said so at the AlwaysOn conference.  They can do that based on the relative frequency of search queries that relate to something that's imminent in the future.  This kind of data is way too valuable for one company to own, which brings me to my final point.  Shouldn't Google be regulated, and this information be organized and universally accessible?  It should. 

Here is the funny part.  How do you regulate a company named Google, with a  colorful logo that children love, with the motto "don't be evil" whose campus looks like a playground of happiness, with founders that look like grad students?

Wouldn't it be easier if they were named "Strategic Information Resources Inc. (SRI)", housed in a tall black shiny building with levels and levels of security to get into, run by a guy that looks like Dick Chaney.  Then you can say "this information needs to be made open to the public" more forcefully.  With a name like Google you can't. 

Who would have thought their name would be their competitive advantage (as if they don't have enough :-) ?

This is why vacations are necessary.  You come back with all sorts of crazy ideas.

$105M Gift to the Stanford Business School

Below is an email I got from the Dean of the Stanford Business School, announcing a gift of $105M from Phil Knight, an alumnus and founder of Nike.  This gift exemplifies why it is so hard to replicate silicon vally in other places.  Stanford University is the heart of silicon valley and has a virtuous cycle that's hard to beat.  Stanford attracts top notch students, they graduate and build an institution of value employing other Stanford students (Netscape, Google, Yahoo, Nike...) and then they donate back to the school, which uses it to attract more world class students and the cycle goes on.  Success for a Stanford grad is being every part of this cycle.  Here is the news.

Dear GSB alumnus/alumnae,   

Today, I have a piece of tremendous news to share. Alumnus and Nike founder Philip H. Knight, MBA '62, will make a gift of $105 million to the GSB, which will allow us to move ahead with plans for an exciting new business school campus. This magnificent gift is, to my knowledge, the largest ever to a business school.

The new campus, for which we received concept and site approval from Stanford's trustees in mid-June, is part of a larger vision designed to keep the GSB at the forefront of management education. Just two months ago, I emailed you about sweeping changes in our curriculum.  These changes will build on our comparatively small size and create a highly personalized program with student advising, more seminars and varied classes for students, more leadership and communication, more engagement with other schools at the University, and more global experience. I received hundreds of responses from alumni, which were overwhelmingly positive.

The planned new physical infrastructure will enable this academic vision to really take flight. The new campus will allow us to support new methods of teaching and learning; give us flexible space - a variety of classrooms, seminar rooms, and break-out rooms; a larger public auditorium; and state-of-the-art technology. None of this is possible in our current outdated facility. For more information on today’s announcement: See Press Release

Please join me in celebrating the momentum that our faculty's educational foresight and Phil Knight's deep commitment to the GSB's future are making possible. With this vision and your continued support, I am confident the GSB will be the most exciting school of management education for decades to come.

Robert Joss
Philip H. Knight Professor and Dean
Stanford Graduate School of Business