It is the thing of lore and glory to be on the stage at Techcrunch Disrupt. This year LIGHTHOUSE made the “second” stage as part of a health + wellness track – not quite the big chance at glory, but I still got a first hand look at The Show.
Big Value: I met the brain behind Amazon Voice and he’s fired up to help us solve the “what should we say” problem. He’s ex-Yahoo!, so we swapped some stories, and he’s allll-academic.
Big Insight: There might have been 200 companies in the“Startup Alley” of all the startups that weren’t picked for any of the competitions, but wanted to get a little exposure, so they bought a display table. There were a couple of “international rows”, where I assume the UAE Chamber of Commerce sponsored the presence…I can imagine that outside of the US(and even outside Silicon Valley) the whole lean startup/get funded mythos seems to remote to attain, and getting a table might give you a moment of insight. They also might think that like a 30s siren at a malt shop getting discovered by Louis Mayer and now you’reLana Turner, there might be a similar chance of fortuitous discovery. I don’t think I saw two VCs walking the floor. Here’s what I did see – of the 16 dozen startups I strolled, if 99% of them went away, I don’t think the world would be any worse off. Either they were derivative/”we’re better” than something that existed, or seemed to scratch some itch I don’t know that exists. Sidebar: I also thought that about Foursquare, which then taught me about having an itch.There were long-plays in autonomous vehicles and tech plays in quantum storage and distributed search that I didn’t really understand. My FAVORITE was AI image processing of herds of cattle. The problem is that cows get sick and die.The leading indicator is a change in average speed and distance covered in a day by a cow. “Even to us, they all look alike” said the sunburned CEO in plaid shirt with slow drawl. The tech can uniquely identify each head and track speed/distance, and save about 5% of the herd that would have died. INCREDIBLE.It was a badass solution for a real problem with incredibly authentic founders.When I asked about their funding, they every cow company on earth wanted to give them money. Strangely, there were two other cow-trackers.
The category I for which I had the biggest realization of the gap between my perceived knowledge (I would have given myself a gentlemen’s six) and what turns out to be my true knowledge (a 2!) was autonomous vehicles. I’ve followed different pilots and tracked the battle between Uber and Waymo, noodled on economic/lifestyle impacts and even visited the Phoenix site of the fatality. I sat through a couple of presentations and chatted up a handful of startup dudes to find out:
- I have been speaking of self-driving vehicles asa generic concept and block, when I should have been touching on the framework of the six-levels of autonomy, ranging from L0 (None) and L1 (Driver Assist) toL6 (Full). I was like a child talking about “sports” instead of the meaningful distinctions of baseball, football, basketball…. Now I know better.
- The technology to support the day I’m getting picked up by an autonomous car and taken to my destination is 20 years away. I thought maybe the social/infrastructure change was that far away, but not the tech. Now I know.
- Software and hardware (custom cars) are required to advance the science. And it takes a ton of money. And the time horizon for success has a very large beta. I think that investors are either reallllly in it for the long run, or they think in the next ten years someone is going to make a breakthrough and some auto group is going to have to buy them.
The brother of someone I know served up some of the most measured commentary and dropped-knowledge. Compared to five years ago when auto-driveCEOs I knew were rocking the “we’re changing the world!” style, they are now a lot more sedate with “it’s a hard problem” and “time horizon unclear”.