How to Invent the Future II - Stanford CS183F: Startup School

It also has a lot to do with "being born into context" [0] of money. I can imagine kids observing good skills (like money management or business communication) of their parents will develop these skills for themselves rather easily. [0] Quote from Alan Kay's talk for YC this video

. Internet was still relatively new. I mean, if your approach is "find problem, add Internet, equals solution" then yeah, you're probably going to find it a tough row to hoe these days. But I'd challenge you to broaden your thinking and be more imaginative. There's a lot more to creating solutions that "mix in some Internet". Think about the staggering array of things you can do today, with almost no up-front investment at all, using AWS, GCE, Azure, etc., that would have cost millions 20 years ago. You can deploy a virtual super-computer running in AWS and throw it at a problem for crying out loud. Consider too the range of awesome open-source / free software packages that are out there, and all the capabilities they enable. Consider cheap, small, embeddable single-board computers, inexpensive software-defined-radio, cheap webcams, accelerometers, gps chips, and other sensors. Consider all the Open Data that's out there already, and everything streaming in minute-by-minute (see, SDR and receiving satellite data right off the air in real-time). Consider the 8+ billion people in the world who are mostly all potential customers given how interconnected we are with the internet and global payment systems. Look at how much easier it is now to get content in front of potential customers with Facebook, Reddit, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, etc. Consider that you can prototype a physical item with a cheap 3D printer, using Open Source OpenSCAD software, ship a prototype off to an injec

I don't think there's one simple, straight-forward, cookie-cutter answer to this. There are a lot of different ways you could approach this, depending on ... stuff. But to start... I would say you should begin not by thinking in terms of identifying a problem, but by thinking in terms of identifying a candidate problem. That is, some hypothesis that you can then turn around and try to validate. (I won't get all Popperian here and point out that you can really only invalidate hypotheses, but instead will just lean on our intuitive notion of what it means to validate a hypotheses). Once you have a candidate hypotheses (or two, or three, whatever) there is a somewhat straight-forward process for how to validate it and (potentially) turn it into a business. That process is laid out and explained in The Four Steps to the Epiphany and The Startup Owner's Manual . Anyway, back to our "candidate hypotheses". The most obvious way to generate one is from personal experience. Eg, if you have worked as, say, a surgeon, you will probably already know a lot about what problems surgeons face. OTOH, if you think you want to sell to a certain domain, but you don't have actual experience in that domain, you could make it a point to cultivate personal relationships with people who are in that domain, as well as doing a deep-drive into "the literature" of that domain, taking classes, watching videos, etc. But at the end of the day, if you're going to try to build a business selling something to,

Alan Kay had an interesting talk about designing for the future. One part was on building a company to appeal to basic instincts vs creating tools and systems to benefit people. this video There are universal human traits that have negative impacts on people over the long-term but are craved during the short-term. These are like legal drugs. If you can use a few of these traits and tie them to an addictive feedback loop, then you probably have a product that's successful (and totally evil). It's concerning that some of the bestselling books in the startup bubble are about how to create these addictions in people. It would be nice if there were more tools and systems companies for helping humanity grow. I guess most modern day big companies are like a mix of the two. For every major social network there are usually some awesome engineering tools that get open sourced. It's harder to create a tools only or systems only kind of company but they're definitely nice since they expand the way we all think.

Location: Europe, Brazil Remote: preferred Technologies: Custom Supercomputers (always cheaper than existing hardware, especially Wafer Scale Integration running on solar, starting at $100K), P4/openflow proframmable terabit linespeed routers, custom chip design and IP, custom terabit optical internet and solar battery energy providers, EV chargers and datacenters, Smalltalk and other late bound encapsulating object languages, massively parallel distributed message passing VM's, compilation and load balancing adaptive JIT compiling to bare metal, FPGA, ASIC and wafer scale integration, million core reconfigurable processors. Single app program bit-identical VM software, deploy on most platforms with native GUI. Cheap independent scientist and inventor, can do research on demand and publish papers Resumé/CV: link link and papers on request link email: morphle at ziggo dot nl +31 6 1742 8596 Whatsapp, Signal, Facetime, Skype I built the first internet provider, built chips, built the next generation Enernet (decentralized peer-to-peer internet for Energy). Its faster to have an interactive chat than for me to write about our methodologies, list all my skills and predict what our community of scientist and programmers can do for your startup or company. We built entire software and hardware systems from scratch because that is faster, cheaper and quicker time-to-market than using legacy operating systems, as described by Alan Kay in the YCombinator Startupschool lectures a

Kay himself does regularly describe the Arpanet as one of the inspurations for OO, and the modern interbet browser as an incomplete implementation of the same ideas: this video

>Please elaborate I'd love to but what do you want me to elaborate on? We started making EDA tools and simulators (CAD, SYM FAB as Alan Kay says) and designing a wafer scale integration to run parallel Squeak Smalltalk (David Ungar's ROARVM) in 2007 and we are still working on it in 2024 so I estimate 30,000 hours now. I call that very ambitious too. >Also, have you checked out the OpenROAD[1] project? It’s a pretty impressive No it is not pretty impressive EDA software, OpenROAD software quality is like Linux, " a budget of bad ideas" as Alan Kay typifies it. Openroad is decades old sequential program code, millions of lines of ancient C, C++ and bits of Python programs written in the very low level C language, riddled with bugs and pathes. The tools are bolted together with primitive scripts and very finicky configurations and parametric rules. Not that the commercial proprietary EDA software is any better, that usually is even worse but because you don't see the source code you can't see the underlying mess. Good EDA tools should be written by just a few expert programmers and scientists in just a few thousand lines of code and run on a supercomputer. So the first ambitous goal is to learn how to write better software (than the current dozens of millions of lines of EDA software code). Alan Kay explains how [1-3]: [1] link [2] link [3] this video The second ambitous goal is to (learn to) design ultra low power transistor and free space optics. Learn from the best quantum