Tag: innovation

Bill Gates on Disease, Teachers and Mosquitos

Bill Gates returned to TED this year to give an update on what his foundation had been doing for the last year, along with how he thinks the world can start to solve two of the biggest problems in the world today: disease and lack of good education.  Gates’ presentation can be described in one word: Optimism.

Bill Gates’ TED Talk

The first half deals with malaria.  I had not realized that malaria was a problem in the US and other rich countries up until the 1950s.  It killed over 5m people worldwide during the 1930s and was not completely eradicated in the US until the 1970s.  Now, it only affects poorer countries, which happen to be around the equator.  Gates says that “more money is spent on baldness drugs than malaria drugs” each year. 

Most people would agree that our priorities are clearly misplaced.  This situation is a clear example of a problem that the market cannot solve completely on its own.  Poor people cannot provide the profit motive necessary for big drug companies to develop the cures necessary to eliminate malaria worldwide.  The Gates foundation, other charities and some rich governments should step in to fill the void.  Tax credits, grants and other incentives should be used to stimulate innovation in areas where there are not sure economic profits, but provide real social benefits.

I would also like to see a drug company cut their ad budget by 50% and use those billions to invest in a cure for malaria or another one of the treatable mass diseases, as drug companies now spend about an equal amount on advertising as they do investing in new drugs.  Imagine a big drug company cutting half of its Viagra, Propecia or Zantac ad budget to focus on developing a new malaria drug.

Imagine the positive (free) press that a company could get by doing this.  They could craft their new image around being an altruistic drug company and even run ads in the US touting their contributions to global health care.  Even a 25% cut in advertising in the US to invest in Malaria would be substantial.  This solution is probably too controversial for conservative drug companies, but it would be interesting to see.

I would also like to see one car company stop advertising completely and pass on the savings to consumers, or just keep the savings.  Everyone knows cars and brands of cars, so why bother advertising?  But that is another post for another time.

The second half of Gates’ talk focuses on what makes a teacher a good teacher.  Through research funded by the Gates Foundation, they found that a top 25% teacher improves student performance on standardized tests by 10%.  Unfortunately, the teacher’s performance is not rewarded.  In fact, teachers who many not be very good, but want to learn cannot even learn from good teachers because of contracts.

Gates touts the KIPP academy in Houston, another branch of the KIPP School that I talked about in a previous post, as a model for the future.  He says that the combination of giving children a chance to work hard, along with analysis of teacher performance produces results.  96% of children at the KIPP academy in Houston go to college.

I would love to see some sort of reward mechanism implemented for great teachers to help compensate them for their work.  Gates says that the good teachers are more likely to leave their jobs to change profession than bad teachers, so some sort of reward system is needed.  Gates is hopeful that many of these innovations can be brought to public schools in America, which will better help us compete internationally.

Paul Graham’s 13 Sentences

Paul Graham is one of my favorite writers right now.  Here’s his bio from his website:

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple statistical spam filter that inspired a new generation of filters. He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.

Y Combinator is a great idea that I wish would be replicated in other places.  I would love to see a similar program at the University of Wisconsin or in Madison.  Y Combinator:

[M]ake[s] small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).

All venture investors supply some combination of money and help. In our case the money is by far the smaller component. In fact, many of the startups we fund don’t need the money. We think of the money we invest as more like financial aid in college: it’s so people who do need the money can pay their living expenses while Y Combinator is happening.

For the last few years, he has written essays on life, business, startups, investing, education and many other interesting topics.  Some of my favorites, which I highly recommend along with the rest of his work, are After Credentials, Revenge of the Nerds, Why Nerds are Unpopular, How to Start a Startup and Why Startups Condense in America.

His recent essay titled Thirteen Sentences is a guide to what he believes are the thirteen most important things a startup should know about as it progresses.  His list is similar to what I tried to do for the Entrepreneur Deli last year in my post about the lessons I learned running ExchangeHut, but much better.
Here are a few of my favorite and what I believe are his most important pieces of advice:

1. Pick good cofounders.

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [1] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

2. Launch fast.

The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you’re wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It’s easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it’s harder to lie to yourself. If you think you’re 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it’s not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it’s easy to know how many users you have.

8. Spend little.

I can’t emphasize how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. [4] But it’s more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.

9. Get ramen profitable.

“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses. It’s not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It’s also great for morale.

Check out his essays at PaulGraham.com.  They are worth the read if you are interested in startups, education or creativity.

Everyone should read Outliers

I loved Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point, but I actually like Outliers: The Story of Success even better.  
I received Outliers from my parents as a gift and finished it in two sittings.  I found myself saying “wow” and “no way” aloud many times as I was reading the book, something that a book rarely does for me.
Gladwell makes the compelling argument that people who succeed benefit from a multitude of other factors, other than just their own hard work and smarts.
He explains why star hockey players are most likely to be born in the first few months of the year, why Asians are good at math, the importance of growing up in certain cultures or being born in a certain time period.
The part that I want to focus on here is Gladwell’s section of the book about Education in the USA.  He referenced a study about Baltimore school children starting in 1st grade and running until 5th grade.  The researchers compared standardized test scores of low, middle and upper income children and found what most people would expect: poor kids did worse than middle class or rich kids.
What was amazing to me is that when the researchers compared these same test scores from the beginning of the school year to the end of the school year to quantify how much kids learned during the school year,  they found that poor and middle class kids actually outlearned rich kids during their schooling.  This is astounding to me and has broad implications for advocates for schools who have focused most of their attention on improving facilities, teacher pay, class size and increasing school funding.
What is even more amazing was what the researchers found when they compared tests from the end of the year to tests taken right after summer vacation.  After 1st grade, poor kids and middle class kids lost over 3 points on their score, whereas rich kids gained over 15 points.  Over the course of four summers, upper class kids gained over 52 points on standardized test over summer and low and middle income kids barely gained any.  This research shows that most students learn about the same during school, but there is a huge gap between summer learning for poor and upper class kids.
If most of the achievement gap can be explained by what goes on when kids are not in school, there is an easy solution:  more schooling and shorter summer vacation.  This solution is exactly what the Bronx KIPP Academy does.  They select their students by holding a lottery for any student living in the Bronx who wants to attend.  This means that the kids are mostly from single parent households and are either Black or Hispanic.  The extra work that the kids put in allow 90% of them to earn scholarships to private high schools, 84% to score above grade level on the standardized tests and 80% go to college.
The KIPP program has already expanded to over 50 other cities in the USA, but I would love to see even more cities try to use this approach to help students succeed from the poorest neighborhoods.  It would be well worth the effort and could make the USA a much better place!

I agree with Fabrice: Outliers is Fantastic!

Innovation in the NFL

Why has there been so little innovation in both professional and college football?

New offensive and defensive schemes happen every once in awhile, like the Wildcat offense or the Tampa 2 defense, but these changes are small variations on typical offenses and defenses.  Teams still line up in similar formations, drop back in the same way, kickoff the same way, punt the same way and kick field goals the same way.
The two changes that I thought of while watching football over New Years were both special teams related, but it seems to me that coaches would be able to come up with and implement many new things on both sides of the ball.
Long FGs
Mason Crosby of the Packers attempted a 69 yard free kick at the end of the first half of the Packers last game against the Lions.  He was 1 yard short.  His run-up was only 2 extra steps (1 more back, 1 more over) compared to a normal field goal, yet he could kick it straight and 68 yards without a problem.  Why don’t teams ever experiment with trying extremely long field goals 8-9 yards behind the line, instead of the normal 7?  Kickers would be able to run up farther, and the extra yard or two would allow the line to hold.  Teams would rarely try these long FGs because they would give up field position, but it could be an important weapon near the end of the half or in close, late games.
Punting

Teams could call a punt play where they kicked it low, behind the receiving team, trying to hit the receiving team to cause a fumble.  If the kick missed anyone on the receiving team, it would roll downfield, negating any chance for a return.
So, why haven’t there been huge shifts in the NFL or NCAA football, like there has been in almost all other industries?
I think it is because coaches fear being fired for not just doing poorly, but doing poorly a different way.  If coaches go with the conventional wisdom and fail, they will not be criticized as harshly as if they experiment and find new ways to fail.  If they succeed, like Mike Martz’s high-flying pass offense for the Rams called “The Greatest Show on Turf,” they are given some credit, but when the same coach experiences a minimal decline, he is criticized more harshly than a conventional coach.  For example, when Martz decided to pass in a late game situation, just like he had during other times in the game and failed, he was roundly criticized.  If he had run and failed, the players would have been criticized for not executing.   There is no upside for innovation here.
Coaches seem to have a longer leash if they do what everyone else is doing and they are not rewarded for taking risks by innovating.  This conservative attitude and intolerance to difference stifles innovation in football.
It also stifles innovation in large companies.  Startups have the advantage of not having to worry about being wrong and second guessed by bosses and the media.  More tolerance to innovation in both football and corporate america would be good for everyone involved.