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Design of the Perfect Trade Mission

In my role at Highview Power, an innovative cleantech company, I was part of British trade missions around the world: specifically to Poland, India, Brazil, and the USA. I also won a spot on a Singapore/Taiwan mission organised by the EU, but attending was later vetoed by management.

Trade missions, when done correctly, can be a valuable way to meet potential clients and partners in a totally new geography. The quality (and therefore usefulness) of these missions varied wildly.

Allow spare time in the schedule

The worst I remember was the trip to India. It was organised by a local partner entity that arranged for us to fly from London for a 4 night stop, speaking at panel events in Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bangalore.

This was far too much travelling as we were required to wake up, attend a conference, then immediately head to the airport to fly to the next city. After the final conference, we immediately headed to the airport to fly straight back to London.

As well as being exhausting, this was not a good idea because there always needs to be sufficient time allocated for side meetings and dinners between delegates. In order to build relationships to close future deals (or even to close a deal on the mission), these side events are essential.

Pre-introduce or screen high-quality delegates

This trade mission, and others I have been on, suffer from the scattergun delusion: the idea that if you get enough people from a certain industry or profession to attend, sooner or later one of them will be useful.

In an ideal world, delegates will be personally invited to attend the trade mission by the organisers based on a list of target prospects given by the trade mission attendees.

Even better, they could be pre-screened for interest/relevance based on a few criteria given to the organisers by the attendees, so that poor quality or low relevance delegates can be filtered out of the event.

The perfect scenario would be to actually introduce the relevant delegate to the attendee before the event so there could be the opportunity to engage in whatever initial due diligence discussions could make a meeting more valuable.

Essentially, anything the trade mission can do to get the prospect further down the Marketing Funnel, the better.

Invite high-ranking dignitaries relevant to the topic

The presence of high-ranking dignitaries, both local and visiting, can help to attract high-ranking members of potential customers and partners to the trade mission event.

They should be highly relevant to the field of the trade mission, for example the Minister of Energy that is responsible for a newly-launched policy on an Energy Mission.

This creates a great opportunity for public-private as well as international dialogue that senior attendees relish. The trade mission I attended in Poland was an excellent example of this.

Product Demonstrations and/or booths

As well as panel debates, allowing the trade mission visitors a short slot to demonstrate or present their offering to the whole event can be a phenomenally useful addition.

A good backup for this is allotting each company a small booth around the venue so they can present to delegates 1-on-1 during breakout sessions.

WaterAlert: Plant Moisture Sensor

Back when I was 15 years old, I won a Design Technology – Systems & Control prize at my school for my work on the design process around this little product I came up with called Water Alert (see photo, left).

It was a moisture detection probe that was designed to be inserted into the soil of a pot plant and provide feedback to the gardener about when it needed to be watered.

The end result that I manufactured wasn’t high quality as you can see (!), but I remember really enjoying the design process and that enthusiasm, combined with my corresponding diligence preparing the documentation, won me the prize.

Nowadays, you can buy something virtually identical as a toy kit for kids to build themselves. It’s called the Thirsty Plant Kit (see photo, right).

This got me thinking about how I could win a school prize >15 years ago with something so simple as the design for a toy with a circuit that only has 2 transistors.

What sort of amazing school projects can kids build in the age of 3D printing, Arduino, littleBits, Raspberry Pi, and the multitude of online resources and guides?

Elon Musk’s Superpower: Urgency

I believe Elon Musk’s superpower is urgency.

His dreams, such as landing on Mars and having a civilisation powered by renewable energy, are arguably shared by many other people, but the difference is that he is deeply committed to making it happen NOW.

That’s why he thinks he can get man to Mars and can do it in a time frame that allows him to blow away the competition.

His urgency creates a creative edge and causes his famously mad work ethic.

Tony Robbins says urgency is a result of creating the vision of a compelling future. Elon Musk has this technique nailed.

This old article calculated that Elon on average achieves in 1 year what it takes most people to do several years. In the article, it also focuses on his desire to build things that have an order of magnitude better performance (for example, increasing the speed of the Boring Company’s tunnel boring machines by 14x compared to the standard speed).

However, now some shareholders and analysts are sarcastically referring to his several delays and missed deadlines at Tesla as “Elon Time”.

Part of this is caused by his dedication to redesigning everything from first principles, even down to the details of the production line and the bespoke software tools used at Tesla.

People are speculating whether he can turn things around before Tesla runs out of the ability to continually raise capital. I think that his relentless dedication to urgency will win out.

Choosing the right problems

In order to do great work with one’s life and career, it is essential to choose the right problems: that is, problems that are the most important for humanity to solve.

One American mathematician, Richard Hamming, published two particularly helpful discussions of this topic. 

A Stroke of Genius- Striving for Greatness in All You Do

In Hamming’s A Stroke of Genius- Striving for Greatness in All You Do, he discusses the qualities needed to work on important problems with one’s life.

Here are a few highlights:

  • An important aspect of any problem is that you have a good attack, a good starting place, some reasonable idea of how to begin.
  • Knowing when to persist is not easy – if you are wrong then you are stubborn, but if you turn out to be right, then you are strong willed.
  • These traits are not all essential but tend to be present in most doers of great things in science.
    • First, successful people exhibit more activity, more energy, than most people do.
    • This trait must be coupled with emotional commitment. Deep emotional commitment seems to be necessary for success. The reason is obvious. The emotional commitment keeps you thinking about the problem morning, noon and night, and that tends to beat out mere ability.
    • Courage is another attribute of those who do great things. Without courage you are unlikely to attack important problems with any persistence, and hence not likely to do important things. Courage brings self-confidence, an essential feature of doing difficult things.
    • There is another trait that took me many years to notice, and that is the ability to tolerate ambiguity.
    • Another obvious trait of great people is that they do their work in such a fashion that others can build on top of it.
  • You need a vision of who you are and where your field is going.
  • While you are leaning things you need to think about them and examine them from many sides. By connecting them in many ways with what you already know, you can later retrieve them in unusual situations.
  • Some of the greatest work was done under unfavourable conditions.
  • The evidence is overwhelming that steps that transform a field often come from outsiders.
    • When someone’s flavor of brains does not match yours may be more reason for paying attention to them.
  • It is in the struggle and not in the success that the real gain appears. In striving to do great things, you change yourself into a better person.

You and Your Research: my key lessons

Here are some great points from You and Your Research (not all are direct quotes, some are my interpretations of his points):

  • First admit that you want to do first-class, important work.
  • “Luck favours the prepared mind” – Louis Pasteur.
  • Think original thoughts and have the courage to pursue them.
  • Work on small problems that lead you to the big ones.
  • Great scientists have tremendous drive and hard work.
  • Knowledge and productivity are like compound interest.
  • Be committed to the problem but have some tolerance of ambiguity.
    • This helps you to have a critical eye for the points about your theory that don’t add up.
  • Identify what are the important problems in your field and then how you can attack them.
  • Problems are only important if you have a reasonable attack on them.
  • When you find the right problem, drop everything else and go after it until it is solved.
  • Be open to collaboration and inspiration from your peers.
  • Get good at selling.
  • Educate your bosses.
  • Know your value and also your weaknesses.

Secret History of Silicon Valley: Steve Blank

Below is an amazing lecture from Steve Blank on the history of Silicon Valley.

As military funding was a big part of it, the majority of the talk is around the role of electronic warfare in World War II and the Cold War.

Steve’s Secret History site shares the full slide deck and more.

Some interesting highlights from the talk:

  • World War II was the first electronic war – the German air defence even had radar-guided flak guns!
  • The ground-facing radar on Allied bombers that was designed to help identify targets was used by Germany to track them (and so was the radar warning receiver on their tails)
    • This shows the cat-and-mouse game of measures and counter-measures in electronic warfare
  • Allied bomber formations would throw out a cloud of aluminium foil “chaff” to reflect German radar, which was cut to exactly half the wavelength of the signal.
  • Fred Terman of Stanford moved East during the war to run the Harvard Radio Research Lab
  • He hired 11 colleagues from the Lab to join him at Stanford when he returned. Together they made Stanford the “MIT of the West”
  • Heretically for the time, he encouraged faculty to sit on tech company boards and his graduate students to leave and start companies (for example, Hewlett and Packard)
  • The Cold War became an electronics war as well
  • The USA use the moon to pick up reflected Soviet radar signals and map out the locations of the radar bases
  • CIA and NSA would fund big radio dishes for universities like Stanford as a result
  • Shockley came back to Stanford. He was a great researcher and talent spotter but a terrible manager
  • The “Traitorous Eight” left to start Fairchild Semiconductor and a suite of companies formed in the resulting ecosystem
  • The US military “primed the pump” as the first customer for tech entrepreneurship in the Valley.
  • But in the mid-1970s, the US Government slashed capital gains tax and told pension funds they could invest up to 10% of their assets in VC firms.
    • As a result, inflows to VC firms rose by an order of magnitude and Silicon Valley became a hotbed of for-profit innovation

Comparing Google Plus Codes with what3words

Geocoding systems are essentially software address systems that assign labels to geographic locations in order to improve navigation and the processing of locational data.

Apparently, around 50% of the world’s population doesn’t have a formal physical address, which is a barrier to the access of banking, mail, and emergency services. This is clearly, therefore, an extremely important problem to be solved.

There are lots of different types of these systems, but two notable examples are Google Plus Codes and what3words.

Google Plus Codes

Google Plus Codes, also known as Open Location Code (OLC), was designed by Google’s Zurich Engineering office.

The system assigns each location a short code that is used alongside the name of the settlement or prefixes it with another short string of characters. For example, Nelson’s Column on Trafalgar Square is either GV5C+4R Central London, UK or 9C3XGV5C+4R).

There is a great post by the creators of Plus Codes that evaluates the different “location encoding systems” and explains the rationale behind Plus Codes here.

The main benefit of OLC is that it is a free, open source system. However, a big negative for me is that it is extremely hard to memorise that many characters (see graph below to illustrate the point). I also find it confusing that there is both a long version and a short version of each address point.

what3words

what3words (w3w) is a system developed by a London-based startup of the same name that divides the world into 3×3 meter squares and assigns each one a unique 3-word identifier. In this system, Nelson’s Column is life.swung.pounds.

To use what3words requires paying to get access, so I do wonder whether this will limit the adoption rate compared to Plus Codes which has been opened up to the developer community.

However, the beauty of w3w is that the use of only three words makes it super-user friendly and memorable (see graph below).

There are some minor challenges: for example, two locations next to each other will have totally different codes, so you can’t look at two codes and understand if they are close or not. However, they are vastly outweighed by the user-friendly nature of having only 3 words to remember.

Conclusion

I think that the what3word system is a phenomenal tool and usage will grow exponentially over the next 10 years due to its simplicity.

I personally think that Google Plus codes, although a great invention and one with potential uses, will struggle to get adopted by everyday users in the same way.

One thing that intrigues me though. Could what3words make more money by making the entire address system available for free to everyone and then charging for services around it? It would be fascinating to play with the financial model there!

Roman Roads as a Tube map

I’m a big fan of maps and I’m currently enjoying a spell of learning about Roman history (The History of Rome podcast by Mike Duncan is a particular treat).

You can imagine my excitement when I saw these maps of road networks in the Roman world made in the style of the London Underground or “Tube” map.

Produced by Sasha Trubetskoy in the USA, this one of the Roman road network in the UK is an absolute beaut:

https://sashat.me/2017/07/23/roman-roads-of-britain/

He has also produced this one of the major road network across the Roman world:

https://sashat.me/2017/06/03/roman-roads/

Finally, here is his map of the Roman road network in Roman Italy:

https://sashat.me/2018/05/27/roman-roads-of-italy/

Great fun for the map nerds among us!

Radio Garden: cool map app showing global radio

Today I found an amazing little app courtesy of Mike Sutton. The app is called  Radio Garden.

Radio Garden shows a 3D model of the globe with green dots representing all the radio stations in that place, which you can then click to pick a station to listen to.

It is a project from Studio Puckey, an “experimental interactive design practice” based in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

Radio Garden main interface (source: Studio Puckey)

Why is it cool?

Radio Garden is the confluence of three of my main interests: maps, music, and travel.

I love that you can instantly learn about a place that interests you by scrolling to the location and listening to the different radio stations there. It is literally a meeting point for all of the world’s voices.

For example, today I have listened to: a Malian dance station, Gambian pop, and a Scots Gaelic talk show from Stornoway in the Hebrides. How amazing is that?

Future of the app

My biggest concern is whether Studio Puckey can they monetise it in order to keep it alive for the future.

Could they get referral revenues for driving traffic to sites? Offer merchandise or ticket sales via the app? Perhaps just some simple adverts that are shown in a way that doesn’t adversely affect the user experience?

Whatever the route forward, I hope they figure out a way to make it financially sustainable to operate in the long term.

Protecting investors against earthquake risk in Silicon Valley

I’ve often wondered what would be the impact on companies in Silicon Valley when the inevitable earthquake hits. Turns out I’m not the only one.

Earthquakes in the Bay Area: a “ticking time bomb”

The Bay Area is subject to major earthquakes roughly every 145 ± 60 years at the current rate. Given that it is 150 years since the Great San Francisco Earthquake of 1868, the next “big one” could happen any day now.

Apparently, about 2 million people live on the Hayward Fault and 7 million are in the surrounding area. A magnitude 7 quake would cause damage in the range of $95 to $190 billion, which would be a disaster for the citizens of the area.

Impact on the tech giants

However, my curiosity centers on what would be the impact on the giant tech corporations that are based in Silicon Valley and the wider Bay Area? Companies like Google, Facebook, Oracle, and Salesforce have their HQs and major footprints in the region, so they will be adversely affected by a natural disaster.

It doesn’t seem like they are particularly well-prepared for such an event, according to this report. Although most of the companies have data centers and operations distributed around the world, an earthquake could still cause potential disruption to the main office and therefore the leadership of the business.

As listed entities, this marks a real risk for their shareholders. Could their share prices or even the whole NASDAQ take a tumble if a major earthquake hits the Bay Area? After the 9/11 terror attacks, the Dow dropped by 14%, so this is not unthinkable.

However, I think the impact goes beyond just their own businesses. The services provided by these tech titans represent critical infrastructure for many European and American businesses, so any disruption could have a huge wider impact.

Early warning: a vital tool to prevent damage

Scientists are getting better at detecting earthquakes early. In Silicon Valley, there will soon be an app called QuakeAlert that can give up to 2-20 seconds of warning of an impending earthquake.

This might not sound like much, but even 2 seconds can be long enough for Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled devices to perform vital preparations such as: opening the doors of fire stations to prevent fire engines getting stuck; isolating certain parts of the electricity, water, and gas networks; slow down trains; and tell elevators to open their doors at the closest floor.

Solution: seismic sensor network to short the NASDAQ

Could it be possible to set up a network of seismic sensors to warn when an earthquake was just about to hit the Bay Area and then send an order to a trading algorithm that could short the NASDAQ?

A similar system could be used to create an early warning for tsunamis. One candidate is the mega-tsunami that geologists once predicted could be created by a volcanic eruption in the Canary Islands which would devastate the northeastern US coast (although further review of the original study showed that this is a worst-case scenario and probably will not happen for another 10,000 years at the earliest).