9/04/2018
By Peter High. Published on Forbes
Index Ventures General Partner, Mike Volpi, has an unusual distinction in the world of venture capital: he sits on the board of one of the oldest and largest automotive companies in the world, Fiat Chrysler Automobiles (the company was actually formed in 2014, but the parts that came together are each quite old), and on the board of companies like Aurora, which provides self-driving car technology. As such, he understands and is helping to shape autonomous driving from the supply and demand sides deeper than most.
Born in Italy, raised in Japan, and educated in the United States, Volpi spent time at Cisco during times of extraordinary growth. As Chief Strategy Officer for the company he led corporate strategy, strategic alliances, and business development. During the seven years in which he held that role (spanning from 1994 through 2000), Volpi oversaw the acquisition of over 70 companies.
He started Index’s San Francisco office in 2009, ahead of the curve on tech’s move up the peninsula of Silicon Valley and into the city. Since then, he has led investments Arista Networks, Cloud.com, Hortonworks, Pure Storage, Sonos, and Zuora, among many other companies. We discuss the future of self driving cars, and several other topics in this far reaching interview.
(To listen to a podcast version of this interview, click this link. To read future articles like this one, follow me on Twitter @PeterAHigh.)
Peter High: You have been a General Partner with Index Ventures since you joined the firm in 2009. One of the most prominent technologies you are involved in is the technology that powers autonomous vehicles. As you are an investor in that space, you have sat on the board of startups, such as Aurora, as well as the board of Fiat Chrysler. Could you elaborate on the different perspectives you gain from these diverse experiences with both digital native and digital immigrant organizations? Furthermore, can you talk about the progress that has been made in this industry now that the innovation that has been hyped up for years is becoming a reality?
Mike Volpi: There are two important messages to take away. The first is that the use of technology is enormously transformative and important to the business world, various segments of the industry, and society in general. There are 38,000 deaths in traffic accidents in the United States per year while places such as India see close to half a million deaths a year. This technology is built to change that and to create a safer environment for people to drive in. Additionally, this technology has a wide variety of ancillary benefits, such as the reduction of parking lots, the creation of urban driving environments, commute patterns, reduction of traffic, among others.
To read the full interview, please visit Forbes
6/18/2018
Randy Mott is used to big challenges. Prior to joining General Motors as Senior Vice President of Global Information Technology and Chief Information Officer of General Motors in 2012, he served as CIO of Walmart, Dell, and HP. One might argue that the current transformation is the largest of his career, however. When he joined GM, 90 percent of the IT staff were outsourced. He elected to bring those jobs back into GM, insourcing 10,000 new roles in the company and hiring 3,000 recent college graduates.
You might think that hiring into a Fortune 10 company in an industry that has been replete with bankruptcies across the decades would be a challenge. Mott makes the point that great IT staff want big challenges, and the scale of the opportunities he looks to seize are remarkable.
He set up innovation centers at the company’s headquarters, in downtown Detroit, in Austin, outside of Atlanta, and just outside of Phoenix. As Mott notes, this means that these centers are “within hiring distance of about 75 percent of the talent in the United States from an IT standpoint based on the locations of those centers and the geographic radiuses that they represent.”
Now, that team is focused on everything from helping facilitate self-driving car technology to better data analytics for and from the vehicles, to identifying ways to better tapping partners as sources of inspiration and innovation.
Not so surprisingly, Mott has joined the ranks of board-level CIOs, as he has been on the board of Dun & Bradstreet since 2015. He reflects on his career, his current post, and advice for others who would wish to follow in his footstep in this far reaching interview.
(To read an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link.
2/19/18
By Peter High, published on Forbes
Larry Sanger founded Wikipedia with Jimmy Wales in January 2001. He set many of the early policies of Wikipedia. He ended up leaving the organization the following year, and has been a critic of it for, among other reasons, its narrow definitions of credible sources, and the fact that so few people ultimately are responsible for the creation and editing of content on Wikipedia.
In the years since, Sanger has been involved in a number of encyclopedia projects, including Citizendium, which he founded in 2006.
Roughly two years ago, Sanger began to informally advise a new startup called Everipedia, a for-profit wiki-based encyclopedia. Theodor Forselius is a co-founder of the company and its chief executive officer. The core of its content is that of Wikipedia, but it has built more content on top of that base, making it the largest English language encyclopedia. Sanger officially joined the company as chief information officer in December of 2017, lured in part due to the company’s commitment to blockchain technology, which was announced on December 6. They indicated it would convert to using blockchain and a cryptocurrency token called IQ to encourage content creation. The IQ tokens are intended to be exchangeable for Bitcoin. Forselius believes this model will create incentives for broader content creation while also fostering access in countries that currently block Wikipedia such as Iran and Turkey.
I recently spoke with Forselius and Sanger about all of the above and more.
Peter High: Theodor, could you talk about the genesis of Everipedia as well as an overview of the business model and the company’s mission?
Theodor Forselius: Everipedia started a little over two years ago as a project between my co-founder Sam Kazemian and myself while he was still studying at UCLA. Originally, we wanted to build a more modern and inclusive version of Wikipedia because we were both editors and huge fans of Wikipedia. However, we felt like there was a lot that was outdated and that we could do better.
For example, their editing interface, talk pages for discussions, citations, their community guidelines and policies were all things that we liked but that we wanted to improve. That is why we started Everipedia.
We decided to implement blockchain technology because we are a for-profit startup, not a non-profit like Wikipedia, so we had to find ways to monetize. Originally, we partnered with companies and we started running adds on the site. However, it didn’t feel right saying that we were better than Wikipedia while we were running ads, so we started looking at other monetization models. Wikipedia’s model of running massive donation banners did not feel like an innovative solution either. We started looking at other venues of monetization and my co-founder Sam came up with the idea of tokenizing the entire knowledge base and decentralizing it. That way, there is no central entity that needs to run ads to be able to monetize because the whole system will be completely peer-to-peer.
High: Larry, in 2001 you co-founded Wikipedia. As of a few months ago, you joined Everipedia as the Chief Information Officer. Could you share your thoughts about the differences between the two businesses?
Larry Sanger: The co-founders of the company contacted me and told me that Everipedia was moving to blockchain, which is a major difference in its own right. This shift to the blockchain got me interested because the blockchain enables something that I have been wanting to do for a long time.
To read the full article, please visit Forbes
9/25/17
What are microservices? In the first part in this series, I interviewed Matt Miller of Sequoia Capital. In this, the second part of the series, I interview Jay Kreps, the founder and CEO of Confluent, an open-source streaming platform based on Apache Kafka. Kreps developed Kafka while he was the Principal Staff Engineer at LinkedIn. Three years ago, he left that social media giant to develop his own company to develop real-time data streams leveraging microservices.
In this interview, he describes his entrepreneurial journey, highlights the opportunity that microservices offer to large and small companies alike, and offers advice on how best to harness the power of this trend.
Peter High: Jay, you were at LinkedIn for seven years; the last three as the principal staff engineer. You came to microservices through that experience, and then developed some key technology in the evolution of the topic. Can you talk about the opportunity as you saw it from your position at a fast-growing dynamic technology company?
Jay Kreps: When I joined LinkedIn in 2007, they were starting to figure out how to effectively break up a monolithic application that everybody put their code into. There had been an earlier wave of technology called service-oriented architecture, which is pretty much the same thing as microservices, that had died off. LinkedIn was born in the space between service-oriented architecture and the advent of microservices. Generally, to scale a software engineering effort, you add software engineers. However, when you add engineers you do get more done, but each individual engineer adds less capacity than the one before. This is a fundamental problem of big projects with lots of people and big applications; as you add people, you get slower. When people talk about microservices, they discuss scaling for more web traffic, reliability, and all kinds of other things. Microservices do not help those things.
Microservices only help one thing — scaling software engineering efforts. It lets you add more money and turn it into more software at a more constant rate.
LinkedIn made a lot of mistakes when they were trying to scale because not a lot was known about best practices. As a fast-growth company, one of the most important things was creating a product that could evolve quickly. Having agility and speed was critical because the social networking space was competitive. It ended up working out in the end because everyone could deploy their part of the application and move independently. However, there were a bunch of hills and valleys in between where we made changes that were supposed to make us more effective, but had the opposite effect.
A significant evolution in technology was needed to get the promised outcome. This is where Apache Kafka came in. People starting out today benefit from the knowledge of what works and what does not, and many of the tools around deployment and the communication between services are built up. There is now a whole family of technologies that solve problems around deployment, how you monitor your applications to make sure they are all running well, how they communicate with each other, and how you can ensure reliability and security globally when you have many moving pieces.
High: Apache Kafka is the open source data-streaming platform you co-developed during your time at LinkedIn. It is also part of the backbone of Confluent. What was the process of codifying that into open source technology?
by Peter High, published on Forbes
4-18-2016
Greg Brockman is co-founder and CTO at OpenAI, a non-profit artificial intelligence research company that also includes Elon Musk and Y-Combinator’s Sam Altman among other Silicon Valley luminaries as co-founders. OpenAI was founded to ensure that artificial intelligence benefits humanity as a whole, which has defined its non-profit status and long-term perspective. When I asked Brockman who influenced him, he listed Alan Kay of Xerox PARC among others, and highlighted the he hopes to foster a comparable idea lab to PARC. We also discussed how the organization’s bold mission and unique structure acts as a magnet for world-class talent, the trend of open sourcing AI development, how AI may impact jobs and society more broadly, and the promise versus the peril of AI, among other topics.
Prior to OpenAI, Greg was the CTO of Stipe, a FinTech company that builds tools enabling web commerce. Greg was the fourth employee at Stripe, a company that now has a valuation of over $5 billion.
(To listen to an unabridged audio version of this interview, please click this link. This is the fourth interview in my artificial intelligence series. Please visit these links to interviews with Mike Rhodin of IBM Watson, Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, Scott Phoenix of Vicarious, and Antoine Blondeau of Sentient Technologies. To read future articles in the series, including with Neil Jacobstein of Singularity University, Oren Etzioni of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, and Nick Bostrom of Oxford University, please click the “Follow” link above.)
Peter High: The stated goal of OpenAI is to advance digital intelligence in a way that is likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return. What advances in digital intelligence are most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, in your mind?
Greg Brockman: I think there is something special going on right now in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) where, for the first time, systems that are based on deep learning and statistical methods suddenly start to have extremely good performance, and you are able to start building computer vision systems, for example, that can classify objects in a certain sense much better than humans can. Rather than having humans spend time understanding “how do I write down the code to specifically solve this problem?”, you build this general architecture, and the architecture learns from the data. We are getting better at writing these algorithms that are able to learn, to understand the world, and operate within it. At the same time, I do not think the world has changed in a significant way as a result yet. It has only been a short period of time that these algorithms started to be best in class – it dates back to a 2012 paper that showed that if you scale up this neural network architecture in the right way, the system starts to perform significantly better in a wide variety of domains. I think we are going to see these techniques mature and start to be baked into a wide variety of products, both at big companies and at new companies, and in a variety of applications.
We are already starting to get a sense of this if you think about self-driving cars. They are basically here. There is a lot of engineering left to do and lot of hard work and a lot of societal questions to answer, but it is a just a question of when; it is not a question of if. I think that is the tip of the iceberg. Robotics, I think, is poised to start working. Imagine you have a robot in your house that can clean things. A couple of years ago that was not something on the horizon. Now it is not even extrapolation anymore to say that it is going to start having an impact.
Open Source- more than a business model, it is a culture driven by the CEO.
by Peter High, published on Forbes.com
12-11-2012
Jim Whitehurst, the President and CEO of Red Hat has had an interesting career to date. He was a consultant for a number of years, joined Delta Air Lines right around September 11, 2001, and played a big role in securing the future of that company as its Chief Operating Officer, and now is the President and CEO of Red Hat (NYSE: RHT), the world’s first billion dollar open source company. Whitehurst and I recently spoke as part of my Forum on World Class IT podcast series, and hearing him compare his time at Delta to his current role at Red Hat struck me as an interesting case example in how older generation businesses and newer technology firms differ in terms of culture, hierarchy, collaboration, and the like.
When Whitehurst worked at Delta, a company in an industry that has deep ties to the military, he was literally saluted at times by colleagues of his. He would help formulate the strategy for the divisions under his control, and when those plans were finalized, entire teams were mobilized to see that they were enacted effectively. Airlines require a great deal of planning, given the complexities of managing planes (both flights and maintenance), crews (pilots and flight attendants), and customers. Time is of the essence, but more important still is safety. Add to this the irregularities caused by issues of weather or planes that require unplanned maintenance, and one can understand the need for everyone to be operating together in order to make the operation work effectively.
Red Hat, by contrast, is an open source company. It operates under the assumption that the best ideas require developing a solid kernel of an idea, and then freeing employees, customers, and external partners to help make it better, to prove the value of the idea, and possibly to identify value that was not planned at the outset. Red Hat refers to itself as a “catalyst of communities.”
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To read the full article, please visit Forbes.com
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To listen to Jim Whitehurst’s Forum on World Class IT podcast interview, please click here.
(In the interest of full disclosure Red Hat is a partner of my Forum on World Class IT podcast series.)
