"They say, timing is everything. I had thought, at first, that he was as unique as the phoenix of rhetorical praise; after spending a little time with him, I felt I could recognize his voice, or his habits, in the texts of various literatures and various agesIf I am not mistaken, the heterogeneous pieces I have listed resemble Kafka; if I am not mistaken, not all of them resemble each other. You dont have to be bipolar to be an entrepreneur, but it might help. Look after a pet. Reflection-in-action "Thinking about what you are doing, while you are doing it." (Schn, 1983) Reflection-in-action happens in what Schn (1983) describes as 'the midst of activity' - in coaching terms this is likely to be during a coaching session or game. Yet, it took until the mid-00s for the promise of smartphones to materialize overnight, as it were, a success which went primarily to latecomers Apple and Google, cutting out the previously highly-successful Nokia, never mind visionaries like General Magic. While we would recommend that managers are setting aside dedicated time to reflect with their teams - even if only on a monthly or quarterly basis - they may also want to consider making time for reflection in existing team meetings. Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg was not the first and only Zuckerberg, he was the last Zuckerberg; many people made social networking fortunes before himmaybe Orkut didnt make its Google inventor a fortune, but you can bet that MySpaces DeWolfe and Anderson did well. He had to publicize the companys successesa necessity for what was ultimately a commercial enterpriseand act as liaison between company laboratories and the academic and medical communities. 1. He saw a need for government support of appropriate institutions, especially research institutes in universities. Youve invented taxis & buses. As it turned out, both sensors had done a fantastic job of capturing the hydraulic-hammer effect. What made them a success was that they happened to give the pinata a whack at the exact moment where some S-curves or events hit the right point. You cant foresee what will be successful based on what has been successful; you cant even foresee what wont be successful based on what was already unsuccessful; and you cant ask researchers because they are incentivized to not know the timing any better than anyone else. A lot more is being invented with time. What does this analogy suggest? She has also worked in industry for Schlumberger. When minimum and maximum score are included in the same model, the coefficient on minimum score disappears. Its not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. and simple to express: You cant imitate a successful entrepreneur, the time is past. Michael Wolfe offers some examples of this: How about Netflix? Great scientists have thought through, in a careful way, a number of important problems in their field, and they keep an eye on wondering how to attack them. One of the most notorious tech business failures of the 1990s was the Iridium satellite constellation, but that was brought down by bizarrely self-sabotaging decisions on the part of Motorola, and when Motorola was finally removed from the equation, Iridium found its market, and 2017 saw the launch of the second Iridium satellite constellation, Iridium NEXT, with competition from other since-launched satellite constellations, including SpaceXs own nascent Starlink (aiming at global broadband Internet) which launched no less than 60 satellites in May2019. I think most people are aware of fads/stampedes in investing, but the latter error is not so commonly discussed. One of the simplest & most efficient MAB solutions, which maximizes the total long-term reward and minimizes regret (opportunity cost), is Thompson sampling & its generalization PSRL28: randomly select each option with a probability equal to the current estimated probability that it is the most profitable option. Yet the principle of unripe time, distilled by F. M. Cornford [15] more than half a century ago from the changeless stream of Cambridge academic life, has provided the epitaph of more than one premature technology. A portion of the output pulse of the microchip laser was incident into the fiber delay line, and then, the backward reflection light induced the formation of the pulse. Was the technological power just not sufficient 30 years ago?, [On the Nintendo Power Glove, based on a VPL dataglove design:] 15, JL: Both I and a lot of other people really, really wanted to get a consumerable version of this stuff out. I think we see this a lot. Learn more with Olympus. I was still commuting to Connecticut on the weekends and really did not know what was going to transpire on my return. : Theoretical Analysis of Pressure Phenomena Associated With the Wireline Formation Tester,. This overall problem falls under the reinforcement learning paradigm, and successful approaches are analogous to Thompson sampling/posterior sampling: even an informed strategy cant reliably beat random exploration which gradually shifts towards successful areas while continuing to take occasional long shots. It wont have cut and paste. We can draw lines on a graph but we dont know the constraints. The only time my timing was bad was when I requested a transfer to Venezuela to start up a reservoir-modeling consulting group in time to see the oil price plummet in 1997. At Rice U.s Baker Inst., we find the Shell Center for Sustainability. Summary by one VC of a16z investment strategy. Origins of Innovation: Bakewell & Breeding, Build something people want is not enough, The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases16, Resistant protocols: How decentralization evolves, Technological convergence in drug discovery and other endeavors, Quantifying the evolution of individual scientific impact, Large teams develop and small teams disrupt science and technology, How DFS, poker, basketball, Starcraft and strong opinions, weakly held (SOWH) can help your startup, An Attempt at Explaining, Blaming, and Being Very Slightly Sympathetic Toward Enron, How Bubbles and Megaprojects Parallelize Innovation, Market Research, Wireframing, and Design, Spend twice as much effort every time you attempt to solve a problem, Why didnt electricity immediately change manufacturing? Just knowing that single trajectory of Moores, and none other, we would have educated differently, invested differently, prepared more wisely to grasp the amazing powers it would sprout. I have learned the basics of . The most informative plan is the most polarizing one.29. Well: researchers have a slight conflict of interest in the matter, and are happy to spend arbitrary amounts of money on topics without anything to show for it. She recently became Director of the Center for Energy, Environment, and Transportation Innovation in the Crisman Inst. Fedex, early on, couldnt make payroll and the founder famously kept the planes flying only by gambling the last of their money in Las Vegas, among other near-death experiences & crimesjust one of many startups doing highly questionable things.12 Both SpaceX & Tesla have come within days (or hours) of bankruptcy, in 2008 and 2013; in the former case, Musk borrowed money from friends to pay his rent after 3 rocket failures in a row, and in the latter, Musk reportedly went as far as securing a pledge from Google to buy Tesla outright rather than let it go bankrupt (Vance2015). But the value of Pets.com stock still went to ~$0. When interviewed many years later about why, despite being a lawyer by training, he was the natural founder for an airline business, Kelleher quipped: I knew nothing about airlines, which I think made me eminently qualified to start one, because what we tried to do at Southwest was get away from the traditional way that airlines had done business.. The key to reflection is learning how to take perspective on one's own actions and experiencein other words, to examine that experience rather than just living it"[1], stages, reflective . The world economy grows at something like 2% a year, labor costs generally seem to go up, prices of computers and robotics usually falls Do industry projections expect to grow their sales by <25% a year? If you were sure of that back then, or even mostly persuaded, and if a lot of others were as well, what good fortune you could have harvested. The 3 Best Books on Self-Reflection and Introspection. Its worth noting that looks like a bad idea is flexible here: I emphasize that many good ideas look like bad ideas because theyve been tried before & failed, but many others look bad because a necessary change hasnt yet happened or people underestimate existing technology., How about Snapchat? The benefit for someone like DARPA of a forecast like Moores law is that it provides one fixed trend to gauge overall timing to within a decade or so, and look for those dots which have lagged behind and become reverse salients.25 For an entrepreneur, the advantage of exponential thinking is more fatalistic: being able to launch in the window of time between just after technical feasibility but before someone else randomly gives it a try; if wrong and it was always impossible, it doesnt matter when one launches, and if wrong because timing is wrong, ones choice is effectively random and little is lost by delay. The tremendous development in technology and the diversity in this industry have drastically changed the lifestyle of people in society. Reindex into what, another doomed firm?). X Research source. Learning can occur in many forms and situations. Reflections on Timing and Technology Christine Ehlig-Economides reflects on her career and how being in the right place at the right time has made all the difference. 2. The three outstanding problems in physics, in a certain sense, were never worked on while I was at Bell Labs. We were talking about the past: VR wasnt talked about for a long time, right? Were not sure what. Later: oh, apparently eBay sellers like us so much theyre making their own promotional materials? Theyd been known for decades. Firefox: we are going to build a better web browser, even though 90% of the worlds computers already have a free one built in. And, incidentally, offering an example of why stock markets are fine with paying executives so much: a good executive can createor destroythe entire company. I ended up moving to Japan and working there for many years. Meaning to say the development of technology should have proper timing. If people dont want to go to the ball game, how are you going to stop them? as Yogi Berra asked.) It may be relevant to note that Musk did not found Tesla; the two co-founders ultimately quit the company., As late as 20072008, Blockbuster could have still beaten Netflix, as its Total Access program demonstrated, but CEO changes scuppered its last chance. Without technology eradicated disease such as smallpox or the Spanish flu could have been still rampant since the 1800's. Getting a simple cold could be life threatening without technology. These23 bulbs (each an original in its inventors eyes) varied tremendously in how they fleshed out the abstraction of electric lightbulb. Different inventors employed various shapes for the filament, different materials for the wires, different strengths of electricity, different plans for the bases. Bible verses about God's perfect timing. Do you have the capital to start a VC fund of your own, and throw multi-million-dollar investments at every social media until finally in 2010 you knew for sure that Facebook was the winning ticket and could cash out in the IPO? Is this impossibly rare? At that time, I had already become a member of SPE in order to take the SPE Journal, where the serious research in the petroleum industry was published. Gamify self reflection by keeping a running streak using a Google Doc or an app like Streaks. Kuchuk, F.J., and Ayestaran, L.: Analysis of Simultaneously Measured Pressure and Sandface Flow Rate in Transient Well Testing, paper SPE 12177, prepared for presentation at the 1983 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, 58 October, San Francisco. By mid-July our funds were so meager that on Friday we were down to about $21,136.3$5,000.01973 in the checking account, while we needed $101,454.2$24,000.01973 for the jet fuel payment. The most important development for well-test interpretation was still to come: the pressure derivative. The origins of many startups are highly idiosyncratic & chancy; eg. Will the founder be able to explain her vision in a way that causes others to want to join her on this mission? ], Investing in Good Ideas That Look Like Bad Ideas, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western. These are tempting, but likely cant generate outsize returns because they are simply too obvious and invite too much competition that squeezes out the economic rents. Our signature selling point will be that it takes fewer lines of code to set up, so programmers will like us., LinkedIn: Well do social networking like has been already patented by SixDegrees.com, forcing us to buy their patent., Slack: IRC+email but infinitely slower & more locked in. In a recent poll [8], thirty-five out of forty-two people engaged in this sort of research gave estimates between ten and one hundred years. Also, we have models for horizontal and hydraulically fractured wells, homogeneous and heterogeneous reservoirs, and a host of useful boundary geometries. The Journal of Petroleum Technology, the Society of Petroleum Engineers flagship magazine, presents authoritative briefs and features on technology advancements in exploration and production, oil and gas industry issues, and news about SPE and its members. One theme I notice in many systems is that they follow a multi-level optimization structure where slow blackbox methods give rise to more efficient Bayesian inference. During that time, I became interested in the notion that petroleum engineers might be better educated with a broader scope, what I would call energy engineering. Only then could the new technology claim to have drawn level with Babbages design ideas of a hundred years earlier. Why did we wait so long for the bicycle?). After that, an explosion of new models presented on log-log coordinates appeared in the mushrooming well-test literature. How should we, in the upstream petroleum industry, react to claims that carbon dioxide emissions are causing climate change? . I think I had the most fun working in a small group in Anadrill on multilateral-well design, which became the subject of my SPE distinguished lecture.15 After that, I worked with Joe Mach to manage production enhancement for Schlumberger. Through consolidation and failure, 3 emerged on top, 2 of which went bankrupt. I think they were just early. A valuable outcome is a result that has practical importance for clinical or preventive medicine and, implicitly, commercial value for industry. When they began failing in a cluster, information-wise, that was highly redundant. The third big area of team investigation for VCs focuses on the founders leadership abilities. The tempting deals are the bad ideas that look like good ideas, yet they ultimately contain some hidden flaw that reveals their true badness. One of the ideas is to have sort of a SWAT team of people who go around looking for how to connect the dots all day long in these serendipitous ways. We won't always understand God's timing, so we have to trust that it is best for us. The course The ICT course was not really difficult, as I had a very good knowledge about the different types of technologies that were presented, but the idea of adapting them to my classroom got me thinking. ARPA-E PDs tend to agree with the bulk of reviewers, and they also tend to agree with scores in the upper tail of the distribution. But say that the market is wrongly pessimistic. Ironically, I was still at the U. of AlaskaFairbanks when my graduate student, Barney Wagner,7 was working on type curves for fractured wells in elongated reservoir geometries. Use Answer Strategies. So for the most part, traders clone popular strategies, but with certain probabilities, theyll randomly explore rarer apparently-unsuccessful strategies. and less Its a universal rule. Gates, however, proved the market, and refined the Gates strategy to perfection, using up the trick; no one can get historically rich off shipping an OS plus some business productivity software because there are too many competitors and too many players interested in ensuring that no one becomes the next Gates, and so opportunity has moved on to the next area. Hrleins efforts to translate success in certain areas (vitamin deficiency disease, chemotherapy of protozoal infections) into optimism about possibilities in other areas (cancer, antibacterial chemotherapy) was characteristic. What he could not door could not do alonewas to direct the day-to-day operations of his troops, that is, to define the critical problems to be solved, to identify the terms of their solution, and to do the work that would carry the day. In2012, I watched impressed as my aunt used the iPhone application FaceTime to video chat with her daughter half a continent away. This suggests that ARPA-E PDs are more likely to select proposals that were highly-rated by at least one reviewer, but they are not deterred by the presence of a low rating. Reflection of light occurs when waves hit a surface that, instead of absorbing radiation, bounce the waves away from the surface. Those were hard binding limits, and to solve them by creating tiny high-resolution LED/LCD screens for smartphones, required the benefit of decades of Moores law and the experience curve effects of manufacturing billions of smartphones. Much progress has come from groups like SSGAC or PGC, which are consortiums of groups of all sizes (with some highly conditional participation from 23andMe)., [Backlinks, similar links, and the link-bibliography require JS enabled to transclude. 1. 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