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Fabrice Grinda

Internet entrepreneurs and investors

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Fabrice Grinda

Internet entrepreneurs and investors

Month: December 2013

The Case for Optimism

The Case for Optimism

We live in difficult times. Financial crisis, sovereign debt crisis, euro crisis, Syrian conflict, global warming. We are bombarded nonstop with despairing news. In Europe, the mood is morose and the prospects seem dire. The general consensus is that things are going to be bad, the only conversation is around how bad things will get.

Well, I have good news for you for the consensus is dead wrong! We are in fact facing a wonderful future and I want to explain to you why. Let me take you back in time to the late 1970s for they seemed to mark the beginning of the end of Western Civilization. OECD countries were suffering from stagflation with inflation and unemployment above 10%. We had suffered from 2 oil shocks. The US had lost Vietnam. The Shah had fallen in Iran. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. Dictatorships were the norm in Eastern Europe, South East Asia, Latin America and even Southern Europe. The Club of Rome had made dire predictions that the world would run out of oil, coal and many natural resources within 40 years.

No one predicted that over the next 40 years there would be democracies across Latin America, Eastern Europe and Southern Europe; that inflation and unemployment would fall dramatically; that we would see the greatest creation of wealth in the history of humanity as 1 billion people came out of poverty. 650 million came out of poverty in China alone, completely changing urban landscapes across the country as a whole. Despite 40 years of record consumption of oil and natural gas we now have more reserves than we did then. The way we work and live has been profoundly transformed by computers, the Internet and mobile phones.

If we take a further step back, we can see that over the last 100 years economic downturns, be they recessions that occur every few years or bigger crisis such as the great depression, as painful as they are while we live them, barely register in a background of unabated economic growth. In fact over the last 100 years human lifespans have doubled from 40 to 80, average per capita income has tripled and childhood mortality has divided by 10. The cost of food, electricity, transportation and communications have dropped 10 to a 1,000 fold. Global literacy has gone from 25% to over 80% in the last 130 years.

We have redefined what poverty means. Today 99% of Americans in poverty have electricity, water, toilet and refrigerator. 95% have a television. 88% have a mobile phone. 70% have a car and air conditioning. The richest people 100 years ago could only dream of such luxuries.

We are also living in the most peaceful time in human history; not just of recent history, but in the history of humanity. We are truly living in extraordinary times.

Improvements of this magnitude are continuing today.

When historians look back at these past 10 years I suspect that what they will find most remarkable is not the financial crisis, the euro crisis or the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, but the remarkable growth of Africa. Over the past 10 years 6 of the top 10 fastest growing economies have been African. Africa is rapidly becoming integrated in the global economy.

The current environment of austerity has been leading states to want to do less with less, but there is a real opportunity for states to do more with less. Countries like Estonia are showing the world how the application of existing technology can revolutionize areas of the economy that have yet to be touched by the technology revolution, especially in healthcare, medicine and public services which account for more than 50% of GDP in OECD countries. Over 24% of people voted online in the 2011 elections. 93% of Estonians fill personal tax returns online. Estonians can setup a company online in minutes. Parents can check their children’s homework, grades and attendance records online. All medical records are online.

New technologies are emerging that are going to revolutionize almost every sector of our economy. 3D printing is not only revolutionizing prototyping, but is increasingly being combined with traditional manufacturing to make end products. 25% of 3D printer output is production-ready items. It also has the potential to revolutionize medicine as the printing of a mini kidney demonstrated. 3D printed organs based on our personal genetic make-up will eliminate the organ shortage and rejection issues in the next 10 years.

Medicine is on the verge of a transformation. IBM’s Watson is already better at diagnosing certain types of cancers that doctors are. This makes sense as computers have the patience and eye for detail to go through every millimeter of an MRI scan or x-ray. Granted Watson cost $21 million to build and develop, but with Moore’s law today’s expensive supercomputer is tomorrow’s $100 cell phone. In fact, we are less than 5 years away from having a functioning Star Trek-like medical tricorder: a cell phone sized device that can diagnose most illness better than most doctors.

Robots have already invaded factories and now set to percolate in and dramatically improve our everyday life. Darpa has built the Atlas robot, a 6-foot tall robot designed to save lives in disaster zones. The Da Vinci Robot has already performed minimally invasive surgeries on over 200,000 patients. In a few years, drones will deliver over 80% of Amazon’s products in less than one hour, while self-driving cars deliver most of the rest. Google announced last week that robots are its next big project and has acquired 7 robotic companies in the last few years.

The “Internet of Things” is taking our everyday appliances to a new level. Connected coffee makers, vacuum cleaners, microwaves and lamps learn our habits to serve us better, more cost efficiently. To give you a few examples, the Quirky made Egg-minder reminds people when eggs are going bad. As simple as this sound, improvements like this can have tremendous impact. Imagine if we all reduced our food waste by 50%. One of the most popular objects of the Internet of Thing today is the Nest thermostat. It learns our behavior, routines and the temperature we like, helping us live in a more pleasant environment while saving on our heating bills! The Internet of things is not about things, but about improving our lives.

Education is also on the cusp of a revolution. If we transported Socrates forward in time 2,500 years the way we teach our kids is one of the few things he would recognize: a teacher, of varying quality, spewing facts to students, of varying quality. Some schools are now experimenting with using gamified learning software to create challenging personalized curriculum for each of their students with continuous testing. The students are more engaged because they have challenging material at their level. Teachers are freed from being mere fact-spewing machines and start playing the role of personal coach. A few schools have tried this with extremely promising early results. Education is also in the process of becoming scalable with the best professors reaching hundreds of thousands of students as many classes on the top MOOCs, Udacity and Coursera, have shown. Education is being democratized and transforming itself in a lifelong endeavor as people from everywhere in the world, of every age, at every stage in life can take classes on the likes of Khan Academy or Code Academy.

Transportation is also on the verge of a revolution. Every year, in the US, 5.5 billion hours and 2.9 billion gallons of fuel representing $121 billion in economic value are lost to congestion. Over 1.2 million lives are lost to accidents each year globally on top of the injuries and economic costs imposed by 50 million accidents. We originally thought we would have to rebuild our entire infrastructure to support self-driving cars, but Google has demonstrated that we already have the technology to make autonomous self-driving vehicles. They currently are cost-prohibitive but the technology that they use is already being deployed in the mass-market with self-parking systems and automatic braking when traffic slows. In fact Tesla expects to have a car that can drive itself in 90% of situations in the next 3 years! It might take a few more years for self-driving cars to reach the mass market, but it looks like they will be mainstream within 10 years.

Communications are also rapidly evolving. It makes perfect sense for Google to be working on glasses given that cell phones seem bound to disappear. We are making great progress in brain reading. We now have low resolution scanners than can scan images from people’s brains. We can project our thoughts and make them appear on screen. This currently requires expensive and unwieldy hardware but that is also set to shrink and become cheaper because of Moore’s law. Google Glasses will probably evolved to use lasers to print on our retina taking orders from our mind control rather than by voice. This technology will also give us the potential for telepathy as we will be able to send our thoughts directly to others if they want to receive them. Ultimately the glasses or intelligent contact lenses will probably disappear altogether as we will find a way to send images and thoughts directly to our brain. All this may sound sci-fie but it’s already in the labs and will be part of our reality within 15 years. Remember than 15 years ago few could conceive that we would all have smart phones which we would use as general computing devices. This is merely the next step of this evolution.

Energy is also slowly being revolutionized and its revolution is one of the things making me most optimistic about the future of humanity. The idea that we are going to run out of energy is ludicrous. We are awash in it. Every 12 minutes we receive enough energy from the sun to meet all of our energy needs for an entire year. As Peter Diamandis, who runs the X Prize Foundation, likes to say the issue is not scarcity, it’s accessibility. It’s one we have faced time and time again. In the 19th century aluminum was the most expensive metal in the world. It was more valuable than sliver, gold or platinum. That’s why the tip of the Washington Monument is in aluminum. It’s why Napoleon III when he received the King of Siam in the late 1850s gave silver utensils to his guests, gold for him and aluminum for the king. Aluminum is very abundant. It’s 7% of earth’s core, the 3rd most abundant element in the Earth’s crust. The issue is that it does not occur in natural form which made it incredibly rare. Prices dropped dramatically in a few years after 1886 when chemists discovered electrolysis which allowed them to separate pure aluminum from its ore. A similar process is under way with solar energy. It’s following a slow Moore’s law curve with solar power improving 14% per year in terms of energy production per dollar invested. In 1977, solar cells cost upwards of $70 per Watt. In 2013, that cost dropped to $0.74 per Watt, a 100:1 improvement. In fact, the costs dropped 50% in one year in 2011 driven by competition between Chinese manufacturers. Solar is already at grid parity in remote places. Based on current trends it will be at grid parity in sunny places of the US by 2025 and most of the world by 2035. When that happens investments in its deployment will reach tens of billions of dollars. In other words even excluding disruptive innovation like fusion or radical increases in solar efficiency, without subsidies or government action, we will transition away from a carbon based economy by the middle of the 21st century.

In fact the marginal megawatt should become so cheap that we should be in a position to “waste” it – the same way we waste the computing power in our cell phone or computer. Think about it. Computing power was so expensive we had to limit access to it. Now it’s so ubiquitous we use it to play Angry Birds or check Facebook. Its very cheapness has unleashed an extraordinary wave of innovation.

The same will happen with energy. Once it’s cheap many of our other problems go away. The idea that we will face a fresh water shortage is also ludicrous. The earth is 70% covered by water. The issue is once again accessibility as only 1.3% of it is surface fresh water. However in a world of unlimited energy it’s easy to desalinate salt water. In fact we may not even need to wait that long as new innovative devices like the Slingshot are coming on stream that can generate 1,000 liters of pure water per day from any water source, even saline or polluted.

Once fresh water is abundant food also becomes abundant as you can grow crops in the dessert – and that’s not taking into consideration an agriculture productivity revolution that could come from urban vertical farms.

As people we are truly blessed to be living in this amazing time. As entrepreneurs and investors we have the privilege of helping create this better world of tomorrow, a world of equality of opportunity and of plenty.

Author FabricePosted on December 18, 2013March 12, 2024Categories Entrepreneurship, Personal MusingsLeave a comment on The Case for Optimism

Video of my LeWeb Keynote: The Case for Optimism

Video of my LeWeb Keynote: The Case for Optimism

Last year I finally resolved my internal cognitive dissonance between my profound optimism about humanity and my pessimism about the near term economic outlook in the West. It’s ultimately hard to be pessimistic given the long term secular trend of technology led productivity growth. Moreover, as I mention in The Economy: An Optimistic Thought Experiment, and as I tried to point out to Montebourg, most of the economic problems we are facing are reasonably easily solvable. We are just missing the political will to fix them.

Last June over dinner at Martin Varsavsky’s farm in Menorca we had a discussion where he presented a pessimistic vision of the future, which I vehemently challenged. Two days later, during the tech conference he organizes, he asked me to give an impromptu speech about my optimistic vision of the future.

The subject matter resonated with the audience and I realized that the world, and especially Europe, needed optimism. When Loic asked me to speak at LeWeb, by sheer coincidence the theme was “the next 10 years”, which fit perfectly. I formalized the speech to turn it into a keynote and prepared the supporting slides.

I don’t have a specific “so what” or next step post the keynote. I just wanted so share my optimistic vision with people who needed to hear it. I am also thinking of how to participate in this new wave of innovation either as an investor or entrepreneur.

Enjoy the keynote.

Author FabricePosted on December 16, 2013November 24, 2022Categories Entrepreneurship, Personal Musings, SpeechesLeave a comment on Video of my LeWeb Keynote: The Case for Optimism

LeWeb 2013 Interview of Arnaud Montebourg

LeWeb 2013 Interview of Arnaud Montebourg

Loic Lemeur asked Jeff Clavier and me to react to Arnaud Montebourg’s presentation at LeWeb and ask him a few questions. I suggested France might adopt some measures that would make the economy more efficient, while preserving the French progressive social model, but I fear he misunderstood the question.

It’s a pity given that France has so much potential: a talented, creative and productive labor force, a reasonably large market, good entrepreneurs and angels. There is a real opportunity for France to take a page from the Nordic countries: capitalizing the retirement system, promoting labor market flexibility by eliminating work contracts “CDI” and moving to at will employment, eliminating the regulatory requirements for companies above 50 employees that push most small companies to want to remain small, indexing the retirement age with life expectancy, and much more. All this can be done while actively helping the needy, which France actually does not do a very good job at, especially for minorities who live in “les banlieues.”

In fact given France’s centralization it’s in a better position than most to even go a step further and take a page from Estonia to introduce online medical records for everyone and online access to homework assignments, grades, attendance records, etc. for all K-12 students.

His suggestion that innovation should only be allowed if it does not disrupt existing industries shows how unaware he is of how innovation actually works. He supports passing a law requiring preventing Uber drivers from picking up passengers less than 15 minutes after they are called. Imagine how ridiculous it would be for a car to show up within 5 minutes, and having to wait another 10 minutes before being allowed to get in. All that to protect a cosseted taxi monopoly. As he made clear, he feels the incumbents have to be protected from the innovators. The worst part is that he is sincere and means well, but as I pointed out to him: the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

At least it was fun translating for him at the end. His answer had the merit of being precise and well-constructed. Next time instead of interviewing him, I think I should be given equal time to debate him, in French to avoid misunderstandings.

Author FabricePosted on December 13, 2013May 29, 2021Categories Entrepreneurship, Panels & Roundtable Discussions, The Economy10 Comments on LeWeb 2013 Interview of Arnaud Montebourg

Good karma

Good karma

I found a wallet on the floor in the Promenade des Anglais this Sunday. I was thinking of giving it to a cop, but felt the owner would not get it back in a timely and hassle-free fashion. The wallet was full: driver’s license, health insurance, credit cards, etc.

I looked the guy’s name up on Facebook but found way too many results – none of which looked like the guy. I added his city of birth, but the results did not match either. I messaged a few just in case.

I started going through his receipts, many of which were for the day of, but they did not appear all that useful. I considered calling his bank, when I realized he had a keycard for Hotel Ibis and a receipt for that hotel. I figured he might have checked out, but that they would know his contact information. I called the Hotel Ibis in Nice, but they had never heard of him. Upon further investigation, I realized there was also a Hotel Ibis at the airport. I called them and found out he was still checked in. I gave them my number and offered to drop off the wallet.

Five minutes later the guy called me and told me he was still on the Promenade. We met up, he called me his savior; and for a fleeting moment I felt like Sherlock Holmes after a successful mission 🙂

Author FabricePosted on December 4, 2013May 29, 2021Categories Personal MusingsLeave a comment on Good karma

Office 365 Home Premium is the way to go if you are in the market for Microsoft Office

Office 365 Home Premium is the way to go if you are in the market for Microsoft Office

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For $99.99 per year you get the access to the full Office suite including Outlook, Publisher and Access. You get access to the latest version. You can install the software on 5 PCs or Macs and 5 mobile devices. In case you are on the road you can use Office on Demand that allows you to run Office apps on any computer with an Internet connection without needing to install the full Office suite.

This compares to $219.99 for Office Home & Business 2013 that you can only install on 1 PC, does not include Office on Demand or Publisher and Access and that you will probably want to upgrade in a few years anyway.

If you are in the market for Microsoft Office, Office 365 Home Premium is the no brainer choice.

Author FabricePosted on December 3, 2013August 21, 2023Categories Tech GadgetsLeave a comment on Office 365 Home Premium is the way to go if you are in the market for Microsoft Office

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