If you’re stuck at home and thinking: what can I do to help my community? I hope today’s podcast will inspire you.
Last week, my colleagues at The BBC World Service invited me to join the show Business Matters and share news from Silicon Valley. Even though the valley is one of America’s COVID-19 hotspots, I was determined to report something positive.
For inspiration, I thought of Mr. Rogers, America’s beloved TV personality and puppeteer. He famously said, “When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.’”
During this unsettling time, when it’s easy to get scared and give in to despair, I find his advice reassuring. But I think he meant more than one thing. I think, if Mr. Rogers was alive today, he’d say:
Find people who are helping…
Find opportunities to help, and encourage others to help in their communities.
So I scoured the news for uplifting stories about people who’re helping in my community. A tweet from California Governor Gavin Newsom caught my eye. He praised the rapid response of a Silicon Valley company that’s stepping up to meet the urgent need for ventilators to keep COVID-19 patients alive. I immediately got in touch with Bloom Energy and interviewed its chief operating officer, Susan Brennan that afternoon. She told me she challenged her team by saying, “We’re going to solve this thing!” I wanted to know: was the solution the brainchild of one person, or a team effort? You’ll find out below.
My interview aired on the BBC World Service on April 2, 2020.
Here are highlights of my conversation with the BBC’s Jamie Robertson and Enda Curran, chief Asia economics correspondent at Bloomberg in Hong Kong. The transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
We began by discussing the record 10 million people in the United States who’re unemployed, many almost overnight. Jamie Robertson: Alison, you must know people who’ve been made unemployed. Are they just lying down and taking it or are they getting up and doing something else, finding other opportunities? Alison van Diggelen: In California, Governor Newsom has set up a job matching site. The state has partnered with private companies so you can go online and find jobs that fit your skills. Other people are doing coding classes, or online training, to become yoga teachers for example.
This week, I interviewed Susan Brennan of Bloom Energy and heard about an engineer called Joe Tavi. He hasn’t lost his job, but has found a new job. He was on the production team for fuel cell making, but is now on the “Tiger Team” to refurbish ventilators for the cause. People are really seeing opportunities within this devastation. Robertson: We’re going to be hearing from him in the last piece on this program. You’ve got a fascinating report….
Over in Silicon Valley, a fuel cell company called Bloom Energy has stepped up to refurbish non-functioning ventilators for hospitals in record speed by repurposing their warehouses. Here’s the company’s COO, Susan Brennan. Susan Brennan: Valves, pumps, airflow, batteries: If you look at the pieces, there’s so much commonality between a ventilator and a fuel cell. Completely different function and process, but at its base level: very common inputs.
I spoke to the head of health and human services on March 17th, St Patrick’s day. That’s when I built the Tiger Team. I said: this is a mission, either you’re in or you’re not in. But if you’re in, we’re going to solve this thing!
My engineer, Joe Tavi, went home on a Wednesday. He downloaded the manual, taught himself overnight, developed processes the next day, Thursday. On Friday we convinced the state that we were capable of doing this. Everybody’s asking: what they can do right now? Where is that niche that you have, that you can go fill?
Susan asks a very good question: where’s the niche that you have, that you can go fill?
Find out more
Bloom Energy is refurbishing between 1000 and 2000 ventilators a week. To date, it has delivered over 1000 ventilators in California and Delaware. If you have ventilators in need of refurbishment, please contact Bloom Energy today. You could save a life.
If you’d like to share what you or your company is doing to help fight the pandemic or support people in your community, join the conversation at Facebook
This week, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager, stole the show at the United Nations General Assembly. Thanks to her, climate change is on the minds of the world. I was invited to discuss climate change action on the BBC World Service this month and we explored the role of activists like Thunberg, indigenous people, and technology pioneers like Elon Musk.
With visible rage, Thunberg described the urgency of action in stark terms on Monday.
”People are suffering, people are dying, entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction and all you can talk about is money and fairytales of eternal economic growth.”
Then Thunberg made a passionate plea to each one of us, especially political leaders, to examine our consciences.
“How dare you continue to look away? The eyes of all future generations are upon you. And if you choose to fail us, I say: We will never forgive you.”
Greta Thunberg’s fury was evident to everyone who watched her, but she ended on a positive note:
“Right here, right now is where we draw the line. The world is waking up. And change is coming, whether you like it or not.”
BBC host, Jamie Robertson led a lively discussion exploring the urgency of climate change action and we were joined by ABC Australia’s Clare Negus. I took the opportunity to praise Thunberg’s tenacity.
The program started with a soulful report by the BBC’s Frey Lindsay. He reported on a gathering of indigenous community leaders from around the world who met at University College London to listen, exchange ideas and build solidarity in the fight against environmental degradation and climate change.
Listen to the podcast at the BBC World Service (environmental discussion starts at 10:40)
Here’s a transcript of conversation highlights (edited for length and clarity):
Jamie Robertson: In California, you’re very much on the front line, we think of the wildfires…do indigenous people have a role to play here?
Alison van Diggelen: It’s important for us in California, and around the world, to listen to the indigenous people. What we do over the next ten to twenty years is going to determine the fate of humanity. We need to remember environmentalist, John Muir, who said:
“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
Technology plays a role in this by increasing transparency. Almost everyone has a mobile phone (and can take photos of environmental abuses), so multinationals can’t get away with what they used to.
Jamie Robertson: How high up the news agenda are questions about environmental problems and climate change?
Alison van Diggelen: Greta Thunberg, bless her heart, is keeping it on our agenda, but I wish it were higher. Looking at the Democratic Party Presidential debates, climate change was there, but I wish we could raise the issue more. People are concerned about what’s impacting them on a daily basis. There’s not enough of a long term view. We need more people like David Attenborough (and Greta Thunberg and Bill McKibben) speaking up for the environment.
Jamie Robertson: Clare ?
Clare Negas: It’s a major criticism of ABC Australia that we do too much on climate change and not enough on cost of living stories!
Jamie Robertson: I want to take the conversation on to the Frankfurt Motor Show and the extraordinary confrontation between the “Lords” of the auto industry and ordinary citizens worried about climate change, worried about cars and what they’re doing to the environment.
Alison, you’re in California at the forefront in the development of electric vehicles and things which could actually make a difference. Is there a sense of optimism that these things will work?
Alison van Diggelen: Absolutely. California is where Elon Musk jumpstarted this electric vehicle revolution. Tesla is doing phenomenally well. They’re due to sell about half a million electric cars this year. California is a state that is doing all it can to boost the sales of electric vehicles (EVs). It accounts for half of all U.S. sales of EVs thanks to rebates and state government policies. It has a goal of getting 5 million EVs on the road by 2030 and it does things like fast tracking permissions for charging infrastructure; that’s a key part of making EVs the number one form of transport.
Elon Musk has predicted that within 10 years, the majority of cars produced will be electric. Others like Morgan Stanley say it’s more like 20 years. It may be somewhere in the middle.
Jamie Robertson: Clare, do you have such faith?
Clare Negas: I do! I think globally electric cars will be the future. In Australia it’ll be a bigger battle because there is such a cultural identity around petrol and diesel fueled engines. We’re a strong car culture and that will continue. A few years ago, we drove a Tesla hundreds of kms to prove it wouldn’t run out of energy. There were no problems. Check out Clare’s fascinating report here.
End of Transcript
Extra: The program included a discussion about the college admissions scandal and I made a shout out to the hard working team and students at Breakthrough Silicon Valley who arguably have the most to lose. Their leader John Hiester recently wrote a moving oped about his outrage at cheaters like Felicity Huffman.
Find out more about clean tech and technology’s role in climate action at Fresh Dialogues.
Last week, I was invited to join the BBC World Service program “Business Matters” to discuss business ethics and the trade war. To give a flavor of the Silicon Valley zeitgeist, I shared highlights of my interview with Scott Kupor, a prominent venture capitalist (VC), and author of the book, “Secrets of Sand Hill Road.”
On the never ending drama of the US/China trade war, I came up with an apt way of describing Trump’s strategy: “Like a bull in a China shop.” (Listen at 15:45 in the BBC podcast)
This view was bolstered, just four days later, when we saw the biggest drop in the Dow Jones all year, and experts blamed it on Trump’s escalation of trade tensions. Headlines like this one are now common: Have U.S. Tariffs backfired? I won’t be surprised if an impulsive tweet from Trump plunges the world economy into recession.
But meantime, here’s a transcript of my conversation with the BBC’s Fergus Nicoll and author Jasper Kim in Seoul. It’s been edited (and italicized) for length and clarity.
Fergus Nicoll: Silicon Valley has had its fair share of “fake it till you make it” stories, would-be billionaire entrepreneurs who talk a great game and acquire a loyal and admiring following, then they go bust and sometimes go to jail. And it’s not just the tech sector. It’s fair to say the chance of hearing unvarnished, unpartisan truth from any given politician might be lowish. Alison, who’ve you been discussing ethical behavior with?
Alison van Diggelen: I had a great discussion recently with VC Scott Kupor…We talked about Facebook’s mantra of “moving fast and breaking things” and he feels the rules are different for small startups which have limited impact. He calls them “the pirates.”
I asked him: Are you saying it’s OK to be a pirate in the early stages of a startup?
Scott Kupor: It depends on what pirate means (audience laughter).
Fraud and misleading people is clearly not right. But the idea that you might enter into a market where you’re not exactly sure what the product should look like, you might have a theory on what your regulatory structure is, but you’re not 100% sure.
[Photo credit:Sarah Gonzalez/Commonwealth Club]
I’ll give you a great example: we’re investors in Airbnb and Lyft. These companies probably couldn’t have been successful if they’d asked for permission every time they went into a new market. You could argue that was unethical: They should’ve got permission first. The reality is, they said: we’re going to go into a new market, we believe we have a defensible theory that why what we’re doing is appropriate from a regulatory perspective, but we also know we’re likely to get challenged on that. But over time, if a consumer utility is big enough, there is a way to deal with these issues. So that’s my definition of a pirate: I think that’s reasonable acceptable behavior. Fraud and misleading people is not acceptable behavior.
Alison van Diggelen: In order to create a startup that’s potentially going to change the world, you have to break some rules and the question is: which rules? You have to question the status quo. Theranos –– the blood testing company that famously imploded last year and the CEO has been charged with fraud –– is a great example of going too far, going to the dark side. One of the Theranos whistleblowers, Tyler Schulz, has started a nonprofit called Ethics in Entrepreneurship to teach ethics, get the basics down.
This is why I asked Scott Kupor about ethics. VCs work closely with startups (they often join their board of directors) and I wanted to hold his feet to the fire and say: You (and your colleagues) have a responsibility to make sure your entrepreneurs are thinking about ethics. It’s one thing to be a pirate in the early days, but at some point you have to grow up and be like the navy and play according to the rules and respect the nation’s laws.
Fergus Nicoll: Do you think these internal debates translate across Asia in terms of startups, Jasper? For example, startups in Vietnam saying: we think we’ve got a space in the market, but we’ll have to break the rules to get there, then grow…and then we’ll behave?
Jasper Kim: There are some minute cultural nuances, but similarities. If you look at Steve Jobs. His famous quote is:
“All the great ideas were stolen.”
If you look at Apple in the early days: they flew a pirate flag and were unabashed by the fact that they basically ripped off or stole ideas from here and there. The genius of it was connecting different technologies that existed before, like the touch screen, with ATM machines, like the wheel on the iPod, and use that to make genius products like the iPhone.
What is ethical? That’s a big question. Kupor’s defense is that it’s all for consumer utilitarianism, but there’s also the other side of what’s ethical and that’s Immanuel Kant, and his theory of Categorical Imperative. You have to have certain values as inputs, you shouldn’t just deal with outcomes to justify your behavior.
Of course, the trade war and piracy (of IP) are connected at the core, but that’s a discussion for another day…
The BBC program aired live on August 1, 2019 and my conversation with Scott Kupor took place in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley on June 10, 2019.
Have you ever wondered how venture capitalists in Silicon Valley decide what startups to fund and what ones to skip? I had the opportunity to sit down with one of these “masters of the universe” and explore the secrets of venture capital. Scott Kupor is managing partner at Andreessen Horowitz (AH) – one of the most successful VC firms in the world – and we had a candid and lively discussion about the do’s and don’ts of pitching; lessons from Elon Musk’s entrepreneurial journey; diversity, bias and ethics; future trends; and when it’s OK to move fast and break things. Scott teaches at Stanford and Berkeley and has a new book out – Secrets of Sand Hill Road – that aims to demystify the VC mindset. The conversation took place in front of a live audience at the Commonwealth Club in Silicon Valley on June 10, 2019.
Listen to the Fresh Dialogues podcast:
Here are some highlights of our conversation (edited for length and clarity):
Re. Women in business, diversity and bias
Alison van Diggelen: Let’s talk about diversity: Julian Guthrie’s new book is just out – called Alpha Girls – it’s about four women who took on the Venture Capital “bad boys” and succeeded, despite the odds. There are some good lessons in there. It’s a very tough place to thrive as a woman. Less than 10% of decision makers in the venture capital world are women.
Scott Kupor: The number is about 10 or 12 %, depending how you cut the numbers, and about 2% of the funding going to female founders. It’s a real problem.
There are two types of bias: explicit bias, which clearly the #MeToo Movement exposed in a very horrible way. We have to root that stuff out. We need to shine the light on what was underground for many years. The more challenging problem is implicit bias…Whether I like it or not, I’m implicitly biased by the networks I came from. When I want to hire for a job, it’s more likely I go to people I know from Stanford. What we have to do is reach out to (other) networks. So we proactively send out job recs to MLT a group that works with African Americans who’re trying to get into business and financials; and we also have a Cultural Leadership Fund (at AH).
It’s a network connectivity problem. It’s going to take time, it’s a deep rooted problem.
Alison van Diggelen: How many general partners at Andreessen Horowitz are women?
Scott Kupor: 20%. Three out of fifteen are women. That’s only in the last two years. For the first eight years we did not have any female partners…We changed our criteria and opened up the funnel to have a more diverse talent pool.
Re: Ethics and moving fast and breaking things
Alison van Diggelen: Let’s talk about ethics: lessons learned from Theranos (the blood testing company that imploded). And Facebook: they used to have a mantra: Move fast and break things. They have been cavalier about sharing our personal data. How do you train your entrepreneurs to have ethics front and center?
Scott Kupor: I think there’s a difference between outright fraud – we can’t have behavior like that in this industry – and there is this idea that sometimes you have to push faster than sometimes is comfortable and you do break things sometimes and ask for forgiveness second. I think there are elements of that that are fine in this business. There’s a difference between committing crimes and defrauding people and are you just trying to move the ball quickly? You recognize there’s going to be iteration of products and sometimes you’re going to put stuff out that may not be perfect.
The big difference is: as companies mature it’s a bit of the Elon Musk question (we talked about earlier) – I think different standards of behavior are appropriate depending upon the size and maturity of these companies. Running fast and breaking things – and putting out half baked products – is not as unacceptable in the pure startup world where the scope of the harm potentially is smaller because you’re still dealing with small amounts of customers, but when you get to the scale of a Facebook, you have a different responsibility. Our best bet on our companies is to use our persuasive techniques to make them value these things. Over time, your level of responsibility changes, based upon your success. At some point in time you have to act like the navy – not a pirate – once you conquer the ship.
Alison van Diggelen: Are you saying it’s OK to be a pirate in the early stages of a startup?
Scott Kupor: It depends on what pirate means (audience laughter).
Fraud and misleading people is clearly not right. But the idea that you might enter into a market where you’re not exactly sure what the product should look like, you might have a theory on what your regulatory structure is, but you’re not 100% sure.
I’ll give you a great example: we’re investors in Airbnb and Lyft. These companies probably couldn’t have been successful if they’d asked for permission every time they went into a new market. You could argue that was unethical: They should’ve got permission first. The reality is, they said: we’re going to go into a new market, we believe we have a defensible theory that why what we’re doing is appropriate from a regulatory perspective, but we also know we’re likely to get challenged on that. But over time, if a consumer utility is big enough, there is a way to deal with these issues. So that’s my definition of a pirate: I think that’s reasonable acceptable behavior. Fraud and misleading people is not acceptable behavior.
This month, the modern space race is really firing up. Three of the world’s most exciting entrepreneurs are vying for supremacy in space exploration: Elon Musk of SpaceX, Jeff Bezos of Blue Origin and Richard Branson of Virgin Galactic.
Last week, I joined Rob Young on the BBC World Service to explore: who’s most likely to win today’s space race; and what’s motivating them?
Richard Branson is focused on taking tourists into space. His Virgin Galactic company offers sub-orbital space flight for a cool $250,000 a ticket. He plans to be one of Virgin’s first “citizen astronauts” later this year.
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos have much more ambitious goals – to establish colonies in space. But that’s where their missions diverge: Bezos wants to create a colony on the moon and on multiple giant space stations orbiting the Earth. He just released detailed plans for Blue Origin’s “Lunar Lander.”
“We will go back to the moon,” Bezos says, “This time to stay!”
But Musk has even loftier goals. He famously told me, “I want to die on Mars, just not on impact!”
Musk envisions a thriving colony on Mars. To fund that mission, he has created a booming SpaceX business, launching private satellites into space, as well as offering rocket-courier service to the International Space Station. But Musk is also vying for a slice of the Trillion dollar internet connection business.
This month, SpaceX’s plans to launch its first 60 satellites in the Starlink mission to bring fast internet connection to billions of the world’s unserved population. Bullish as ever, Musk’s ultimate plan is for 12,000 satellites in low earth orbit.
Rival, OneWeb, backed by Richard Branson has more modest plans for a 600 satellite constellation. The race is on!
The BBC’s Rob Young started by asking my fellow guest, Liz Gwynn, Prime 7 TV Anchor (from Wagga Wagga, Australia) if she’d take up Richard Branson’s invitation to go for a ride on Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity. Her answer made me chuckle!
Here’s a transcript of some of our conversation:
Rob Young: Which of the billionaires will win this space race?
Alison van Diggelen: I’d put money on Elon Musk. He’s defied naysayers time and time again. His company – SpaceX – has pioneered reusable rockets which has driven down the cost by a factor of four.
This summer, they plan to be the first private company to launch astronauts to the International Space Station. Previously, it’s just been superpowers.
Rob Young: Is it a serious business, or just bragging rights?
Alison van Diggelen: Elon Musk has had a lifetime ambition. He’s famously said: I want to die on Mars. Just not on impact!
He’s doing it for the adventure, but also as an inspirational objective, and something that can make humans a multi-planetary species. It’s a big dream, a big vision.
***
Find out more
Our BBC conversation moved on to Clean Energy and California’s ambitious goals to decarbonize its energy sources. Listen to the BBC World Service @42:30 when we discuss Governor Gavin Newsom and his bold stance on clean energy.
